Two articles by Muzamil Jaleel

With violence surging in Kashmir at levels not seen since 1990, we are posting two recent articles written by Muzamil Jaleel that gives some context to the developing story.

WHILE DIN WAS ON, LOCAL MUSLIMS SHELTERED AND FED STRANDED YATRIS

Muzamil Jaleel
Posted online: Monday, June 30, 2008 at 0023 hrs IST
SRINAGAR, JUNE 29

The smell of tear gas on the streets of Srinagar, littered with glass shards, stones and smouldering tyres, are testimony to the pitched battles over the controversial transfer of forest land to the Amarnath shrine board. But as passions ran high, stoked mostly by politicians, the local Muslim population worked quietly, organising free langars for the hundreds of pilgrims stranded because of the shutdown — a gesture which only reinforces the Hindu-Muslim bonhomie that has symbolised the Amarnath Yatra ever since the cave shrine was discovered in 1860 by a Muslim shepherd.

“How could our children eat and sleep at home while children of these stranded Yatris would stay hungry and spend the night under the open sky?” asked Mohammad Abdullah of Tangbagh. He said the neighbourhood committee of Tangbagh, Dalgate set up a community kitchen to feed more than 3,000 stranded Yatris. “After the dinner, we found there were many who had no place to stay during the night. We then requested each household to accommodate three to four Yatris,” Abdullah said.

Noor Mohammad, another member of the neighbourhood committee, delinked the Yatra from the controversial land transfer. “We too are protesting against this illegal land transfer to the shrine board. But the anger and protests have nothing to do with the Amarnath Yatra or the pilgrims,” he said. “At the end of the day, we are all human beings. Why do you forget that Kashmiri Muslims have been hosting the Yatris for more than a hundred years now?”

Yatri Dharam Pal from Delhi said: “The amity here amazes us. This mess was created by those who rule and not the people.”


HISTORY OF THE CHASM

By Muzamil Jaleel
THE INDIAN EXPRESS
Posted online: Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 1806 hrs IST

The seeds of the current turmoil can be traced to a treaty signed on March 16, 1846, between the British Government and Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jammu. Under the treaty, the British sold Kashmir to the Maharaja for seven million Nanak Shahi (the then currency of Punjab). With this began the Dogra rule in Kashmir, which came to an end in 1948 in the wake of India’s Independence. This was followed by a long struggle in the Valley against the Maharaja in which both the Kashmiri Muslims and the Pandits fought shoulder to shoulder.

The Kashmiri struggle against the last Dogra ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, started in the thirties and in 1947, it culminated in the transfer of political power from the Dogras to the Muslim majority of the state.

Though the Kashmiri movement against Maharaja Hari Singh wasn’t essentially communal in nature, the fact that it was a predominantly Muslim uprising against a Hindu ruler from Jammu gave it a religious dimension. And the loss of political power in the post-1947 democratic dispensation headed by Shiekh Abdullah only widened the divide. The Jammu Dogras harboured a deep sense of political marginalisation, which resulted in the growth of religious outfits like the Praja Parishad in 1947.
The Parishad spearheaded the opposition to Kashmiri dominance in 1949. It declared its opposition to the separate constitution and national flag for the state as also Article 370, which grants the state a special status and forbids the owning of land by non-state subjects. The Parishad was also stridently opposed to Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference, which, it thought, only represented the aspirations of Kashmiri Muslims. Sheikh was accused of “Muslimising” the state through his Kashmir-centric policies.

In fact, the Parishad was at the centre of a massive uprising in Jammu in the fifties when a National Conference flag was hoisted at a local college.

It is not that there have been no efforts to redress regional grievances. In fact, the government set up the Ganjendragadkar and Sikri Commission to inquire into complaints of regional discrimination in 1967 and 1979 respectively. One result of the Ganjendragadkar Commission was the division of J&K University into separate Kashmir and Jammu universities.

Though Kashmir has also had its share of religious parties, most prominent of them being the Jamaat-i-Islami, they usually define their politics more by a strident anti-India agenda rather than an anti-Jammu sentiment.

-Muzamil Jaleel