Jammu And Kashmir - 2

[acharya]

A Taliban-coloured dawn in Kashmir

Praveen Swami

Resurgent Islamists have used the prostitution scandal to subvert democratic institutions and processes.

LAST MONDAY, the Lashkar-e-Taiba tried terrorist-turned-informer Tanzim Ahmad for treason. No accounts of the proceedings, which took place in the forests above the frontier town of Mendhar, are available. Medical examiners, however, later recorded the gruesome punishment. Ahmad was severely tortured before someone did him the kindness of slitting his throat.

Ahmad's story illuminates just where the slow implosion of democratic institutions in Jammu and Kashmir could end. Since April, media audiences across India have been transfixed by the unfolding of a prostitution racket in Srinagar. Two former Ministers, senior bureaucrats, and decorated police officials are among the 15 persons so far arrested on charges that range from rape to peddling official favours for sex.

Few, though, have paused to examine the prospect that what has been hailed as a triumph for justice might also mark the dawn of the Lashkar's civilisational vision in Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir's High Court Bar Association has passed a resolution prohibiting its members from defending those arrested on charges of having had a role in the prostitution racket — an action almost without precedent in Indian legal history.

As a consequence of the controversial — and in the view of several legal experts, illegal — resolution, several of the accused have had no legal representation at successive bail hearings. On July 8, nine of the accused were brought to a Srinagar court in handcuffs, in violation of Supreme Court orders on the treatment of prisoners. It transpired that none had even been presented with copies of the charges against them.

Advocates who have chosen to defy the KBA resolution have faced unsubtle coercion. Maulvi Aijaz, a Srinagar advocate who represented one of the accused at the June 23 bail hearing, withdrew after facing abuse and insults from an Islamist women's group, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat. Sunil Sethi, a Jammu-based lawyer who travelled to Srinagar to defend former Additional Advocate General Anil Sethi, was threatened at gunpoint.

Since June 29, the Jammu Bar Association has been on strike, arguing that the accused cannot receive a fair trial in Srinagar. Lawyers in other parts of Jammu province, including Mendhar and Samba, have joined them. Given the sometimes fraught state of relations between the State's major regions, the lawyers' action holds out the possibility of driving a wider communal conflagration.

Islamist resurgence

What is it about the Srinagar prostitution case that has brought about this extraordinary situation? And just why is it that we ought to be concerned about the rights of people charged with trafficking in women and rape? For answers, we must examine the ways in which the prostitution scandal has enabled Islamists to gain ground in Jammu and Kashmir — and the ugly world they hope to construct with their new power.

From as early as 2002, the Jammu and Kashmir Police began investigating Srinagar-based madam Sabina Bulla, concerned at the prospect that her high-profile clients might become vulnerable to blackmail. Later, in 2004, Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed received warnings that a television channel had been approached to conduct a sting targeting Ministers who were among Ms. Bulla's patrons.

Ms. Bulla was arrested along with several of her associates, but the prosecution went nowhere. With the aid of her influential clients — and the lack of real evidence — Ms. Bulla was soon back in business. However, this March, a pornographic video clip involving a minor who worked at Ms. Bulla's brothel began to circulate from cellphone to cellphone in Srinagar. Outraged city residents complained to the police.

Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad sensed an opportunity to demonstrate the credentials of the new government — and, his detractors charge, to rid himself of potential rivals like former Minister Ghulam Ahmad Mir. The case was referred to the Central Bureau of Investigations. Meanwhile, in response to a KBA petition alleging that a cover-up was under way, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court began direct supervision of the case.

If nothing else, the arrests that have followed demonstrate that the system does indeed work — at least sometimes. After all, an elected Chief Minister turned over investigations to an organisation that demonstrated its professional resolve by arresting high-profile suspects. But Islamist groups in Srinagar's old city — a longstanding stronghold of the religious Right — sensed that the scandal could be leveraged on the street.

Under the patronage of Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat leader Asiya Andrabi unleashed protests across Srinagar. KBA president Abdul Qayoom, who is affiliated to Mr. Geelani's hardline Tehreek-i-Hurriyat, led a parallel battle in the courts. Political Islamists and terrorist groups were able to reclaim centre stage by representing themselves as the sole guardians of religious-cultural order.

Politicians like Ms. Andrabi and Mr. Geelani contend that the prostitution scandal is intimately enmeshed with the secular state's larger agenda in Jammu and Kashmir — the obliteration, they contend, of Islam. According to a June 25 press release issued by the KBA, "the sexual exploitation of Kashmiri girls is a conspiracy hatched by India and its collaborators in Kashmir to harm our moral values and ethos."

Writing in the Srinagar-based Greater Kashmir, the commentator Z.G. Muhammad placed this proposition in a historical context, arguing that "the Kashmir women has [long] been a victim of lust and lasciviousness of the evil eyes of marauders." "History is replete with instances from the days of Mongol desperado Zulju," wrote Mr. Muhammad approvingly, "about [sic.] women drowning themselves in Jhelum to save their chastity and honour."

For Islamists, the prostitution scandal is opportunity to recover this culture of "honour." In a recent article, columnist Nisar Patigaroo argued that prostitution was facilitated by the "leniency that the parents have given to their children, particularly females." This had, he claimed, led to "waywardness amongst boys and girls who throng the public parks, [use] the modern gadgets viz. mobile telephones, Internet and [watch] obscene scenes."

Terrorist groups have long shared the same sentiments. Since 1990, there have been dozens of attacks on cable television operators, bars, movie theatres, beauty parlours, women who rejected the veil or wore trousers, and even Internet facilities. Now, Islamist political groups have succeeded in vesting their longstanding rejection of modernity with moral legitimacy, without a single shot having to be fired.

A culture of silence

Part of the reason for the religious Right's triumph lies in the culture of silence that has enveloped secular mainstream parties. At least two prominent politicians — Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Beig and National Conference president Omar Abdullah — have expressed concern at the scandal's fallout. No party, though, has proved willing to mobilise people around an ethical platform distinct from that of the Islamists.

It isn't as if opportunities to critique the Islamists are wanting. Ms. Andrabi's concern for women's honour does not, for example, extend to condemning the July 8 grenade attack on Noorabad MLA Sakeena Itoo, in which she was injured and five National Conference cadre killed. Nor was Mr. Geelani exercised by the murder of 26-year-old Tasleen Akhtar in February, after she refused to marry a Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander.

Jammu and Kashmir's Muslims, indeed, continue to be the principal victims of the jihad Islamists are fighting in their name. On June 16, a Lashkar squad targeted the village of Nehoch-Dunga, in the district of Udhampur, to punish villagers it believed were hostile. 65-year-old Abdul Ahad was beheaded; the noses and ears of Roshan Din and Ghulam Rasool were cut off. Six others, including Ahad's elderly wife, received a brutal beating.

But politicians who had competed to express outrage after the killings of 13 Hindus in the same area in April remained silent on this hideous violence, as did civil rights groups and the media. Chief Minister Azad, who like all politicians of State-level significance had chosen not to attend the last rites of the nine Nepali labourers killed by terrorists at Kulgam in June, displayed an identical unwillingness to travel to Nehoch-Dunga.

Other silences, though, also need to be interrogated — most notably those of the KBA itself. None of its members, notably, has ever called for the investigation of the killings of thousands of victims of terror to be fast-tracked. Nor has there been a single voice from its ranks that has expressed outrage at the well-documented killing, maiming, and rape of several hundred women by Islamist terror groups since 1990.

Experts say the KBA's enthusiastic demolition of judicial due process could compel appellate courts to conduct the trials outside the State. Legal representation, after all, cannot be the privilege of only those defendants who can afford to fly in counsel from New Delhi or elsewhere. But transferring the cases will delight Islamists, who will claim that an outcome they precipitated is in fact a plot intended to protect the accused.

Judicial authorities must intervene to put the law in order. Politicians, too, should wake up. Bharatiya Janata Party State president Nirmal Singh's public support of Ms. Andrabi's crusade demonstrates the organic unities of all fundamentalisms. Lawyers in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, have denied alleged terrorists legal counsel — a mirror image of events in Srinagar which demonstrates the nationwide threat to judicial process.

Finally, someone needs to speak out for the woman in whose name the Islamist campaign is being fought. Held in protective custody to prevent her testimony from being influenced, the minor girl has had no access to either professional psychological support or legal counsel — an appalling violation of her rights. Her life, like that of Tanzim Ahmad, has been reduced to a means to serve other people's ends.