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'The Intersection of Islam and Nationalism in Kashmir' - a talk by Dr Khalid W. Hassan

1/20/2018

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Happy to post this note from the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London
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We are delighted to invite you to our upcoming event The Intersection of Islam and Nationalism in Kashmir: A Contemporary Self-Determination Movement in Kashmir at the Aga Khan University-Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations on Thursday 8 February 2018.

Abstract
One of the main conflicts that prevail in South Asia today is that of Kashmir, which has become a bone of contention between India and Pakistan. The homogenous parameters of ideology and identity applied in analysing the conflict stand at variance with the plural realities and diverse political demands of the region’s multiple communities.

Kashmir is composed not only of several distinct geographical regions but also a population made up of many religious, ethnic and linguistic groups whose diverse political aspirations have led to the formation of different political identities. In addition, in the post-1988 period, the region saw the re-emergence of a Self-Determination Movement with different militant and political groups challenging the Indian State’s sovereignty over Kashmir.

Within the seemingly monolithic facade of this movement, there are serious contestations and debates over the guiding ideologies; secular nationalism or Islamic nationalism. This paper will examine the religio-cultural dimensions of contemporary Self-Determination Movement(s) by looking at the articulation of secular nationalism by Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and its confrontation with the Islamist ideology of Jama’at-i-Islami Jammu Kashmir (JIJK) – two ideologies fuelled by two different world views, lifestyles and goals, thus making them two different discourses within Kashmiri Self-determination Movement.
Dr Khalid W. Hassan

Speaker
Dr Khalid W. Hassan is presently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Cambridge. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and Governance of Central University of Kashmir, India. Khalid was a Charles Wallace Fellow at South Asia Institute, SOAS in 2017.

He completed his PhD at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), India in which he worked on the Islamist and secular discourses in post-1988 Self-Determination Movement in Kashmir. He has also been working on the emergence of Multiple Public Spheres among Muslims in Kashmir.
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His research area includes: Post-Colonial Theory, ethnic and nationalist movements in South Asia and human rights. He has been teaching courses on Political Theory, Comparative Politics and Peace and Conflict Studies at graduate and post-graduate level.

Time and Venue
Thursday 8 February 2018, 18.00 - 19.30
The Aga Khan University-Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations
210 Euston Rd, London, NW1 2DA (Room 2.3)
Booking
This event is free but booking is essential: 
To attend in person, please click here.
To attend online, please click here.
We look forward to meeting you.
Regards,
ISMC Team
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Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation

12/22/2017

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Chitralekha Zutshi, perhaps the leading scholar of Kashmir, has edited a collection of essays about the Valley which has been published by Cambridge University Press. 

The book has been reviewed in the Pakistani weekly, the Friday Times, by Shujaat Bukhari, the editor of Rising Kashmir. We are posting the full review below.

And full disclosure ... Chitralekha Zutshi is a regular contributor to KashmirConnected.com and other contributors to the book also have a close association to this website.
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EXPLAINING KASHMIR - by Shujaat Bukhari

Discussing Jammu and Kashmir in the current environment of diametrically opposed narratives and counter-narratives is a most challenging task. Since ‘Kashmir valley’ generally denotes the historical State of Jammu and Kashmir to the outside world the other, less dominant areas of the region are less focused on – especially in academic and scholarly works. This latest book Kashmir: History, Politics and Representation edited by historian Chitralekha Zutshi and published by Cambridge University Press comes with a collection of scholarly essays on all parts of the erstwhile state, as it existed before the 14th of August, 1947. However, even here, it would appear a miss has been given to the strategically important region of Ladakh, bordering China.

With 14 chapters, the books starts with a long introduction by Zutshi who herself has two important works on Kashmir to her credit. She beautifully weaves the history of Kashmir from early times and connects it with present-day politics. She states that Kashmir is just not a geographical entity but an idea. Looking at various chronicles to define Kashmir, she analyses them and shows how Kashmiris have long been fretting about their losses at the hands of foreigners. For example, she notes “At the same time, the jeremiad that characterised Persian narratives such as Bagh-i-Sulaiman, written in 1778, captured [Kashmiris’] frustration at their inability to protect their mulk from the depredations of outsiders, as Kashmir was incorporated into the Afghan empire.” This struggle, in fact, started in 1586 when Kashmir’s last sovereign ruler Yusuf Shah Chak lost power to the Mughal emperor Akbar and was subsequently banished. What followed was tyranny shaped by autocratic rulers such as Afghans, Sikhs and Dogras. They, however, could not reposition Kashmir as a polity until the late 1940s when Kashmiri nationalism got its modern roots and the unique identity was articulated with the expression ‘Kashmiriyat’. Zutshi, however, is worried by the fact that Kashmiriyat is under fierce attack now, according to her, “in the context of the contemporary conflict, especially between India and Kashmir, as Kashmiris seek to distance themselves from India and claim greater identification with the Islamic world, defined increasingly in West Asian rather than South Asian terms”. But that may not be a fully correct interpretation of the threat to Kashmiriyat. While religion plays an important role in today’s political struggle, the problem with Kashmiriyat is also about how the Government of India has owned it and the conflict between Srinagar and Delhi plays out prominently there.

While the colonial state endorsed Dogra rule, it did not shy from correcting its archaeological excesses, to demand protection for Muslim subjects and their sites. Mridu Rai’s essay on Kashmir and archaeology unravels how the British Empire forced the Dogra rulers to create the Department of Archaeology in 1904. Sadly, it was used by them to protect the monuments and temples of Hindus and the discrimination against Muslim heritage continued. She quotes the British Resident in Kashmir, Francis Younghusband, who reported that the durbar plainly did not “care to throw money on Muhammadans” or the restoration of their mosques or tombs. Pathar Masjid build by Mughal empress Nur Jehan in the seventeenth century became the rallying point for agitation by Muslims for their rights when Pratap Singh ordered it to be made an orphanage dedicated to the Hindu deity Hanuman. This was a blatant display of partisanship. However, she argues that while the colonial state endorsed Dogra rule, it did not shy from correcting its archaeological excesses, to demand protection for Muslim subjects and their sites.

“Contesting Urban Space” is an important essay by Zutshi herself that brings out the discord within the Muslim community as rivals fought for space in shrines. Divided into two groups led by Hamadanis and Mirwaizs. The clash even led to Governor of Kashmir passing an order in 1888 banning the Mirwaizs (the family now represented by Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq) from preaching at 22 shrines. Though the political narrative around these shrines has changed now and “we want freedom” reverberates from all of them alike, the tension continued for a long time and the traditional rivalry between Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and the Mirwaizs was well known – with Sheikh Abdullah extending official patronage to the Hamadanis. Dogra rulers’ reaffirmation that they would not interfere in religious matters was not based on reality as the government officialised the differences.

Andrew Whitehead’s fascinating essay is about the “Rise and Fall of New Kashmir”, the ambitious concept that Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah had put on paper to make Jammu and Kashmir a different – rather, independent – identity, that could nevertheless fit into the larger realm of Indian nationalism. Almost borrowed from the communists, “New Kashmir” was a progressive idea of partnership in political and economic uplift of a people who had suffered immensely. Whitehead believes that Nehru wanted to maintain an element of hierarchy in the relationship whilst Abdullah stood for equality and that is where the friction began. An enduring settlement between Kashmir and Indian nationalism, he says, has remained elusive because of New Delhi’s interference in Kashmir.

“Azad Kashmir” and Gilgit-Baltistan are two areas which are discussed very little in the context of Kashmir’s protracted conflict. However, two essays by Christopher Snedden give a complete background to the ups and downs of this region in terms of their political relationship with Pakistan and the rest of the state. Maintaining that both “Azad Kashmir” and GB are not de jure part of Pakistan, Snedden, who has written two critically acclaimed books on the subject, states that this region has suffered in economic development despite having three major assets: people, water and forests. He believes this is because of the heavily militarised Line of Control to the east which comprises a restricted zone. His piece speaks about the intense influence Islamabad has, despite the territory being called “Azad Kashmir” and having a President, Prime Minister and judiciary of its own. Martin Sokefeld gives an interesting account of how GB is not part of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. He traces the history of how Gulab Singh annexed it, but it always remained at a distance and that is why it declared its own “independence” in November 1947 and became part of Pakistan. Most of the people support full integration into Pakistan but for various reasons its status remains unresolved:“The overall perception in GB is that it has been held hostage by the Kashmir dispute.”

Women and children are believed to have borne the brunt of conflict in Kashmir. So, the essay “Law, Gender and Governance in Kashmir” by Seema Kazi makes a significant contribution to the picture. She discusses in detail how the security forces have in an “institutionalised” manner committed atrocities against women. She provides two horrible examples of mass rape in Kunan Poshopra in 1991 by Indian forces and the horrific case of Asiya and Neelofar in Shopian, from 2009. She takes a detailed look at Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Public Safety Act and how these laws have mauled civil liberties. “Rape of Kashmiri women by security forces is representative of the extra-legal nature of the Indian counter-offensive in Kashmir: it is equally representative of the state’s resort to extra legal means to inscribe political dominance on a recalcitrant ethnic minority through the sexual humiliation of ethnic minority women” she writes. She criticises the judiciary, too, for exacerbating the lack of accountability. She does not discuss, however, atrocities against women committed by non-state actors.

Haley Duschinski has made a significant contribution by discussing the plight of Kashmiri Pandits and brings to the fore how they made the issue of survival their politics after 1990. He discusses the politics within the community in detail but misses out on how the migration took place. The essay brings out how hatred against Muslims became the “thumb rule” for the demand to return. Caste politics in Jammu has hardly been discussed and discrimination on the basis of caste has remained an untouched subject. But Mohita Bhatia exposes the unimaginable level of discrimination with Dalits and Balmikis in Jammu region in a well-researched essay. Rita Chowdhari Tremblay’s essay on politics in Jammu and Kashmir is worth a read, as it asks whether governance can help counter the clashes in political ideology.
Vanessa Chishti focuses on a less political issue: Kashmir’s shawl economy. She tries to place it in the context of how it fitted into the European and British imperial imagination.
In the representation section, Dean Accardi’s essay focuses on exploring two important mystics of Kashmir, Lal Ded and Sheikh-ul-Alam Sheikh Nooruddin, and how they became a representation of Kashmiri identity. Kashmir’s spiritual landscape is heavily identified with them.

Ananya Jehanara Kabir looks at Kashmir in popular cinema since the 1960s. That representation, also, is unfortunately linked with conflict and not beauty. Suvir Kaul in his essay “Witness of Poetry—Political Feeling in Kashmiri poetry” looks at how poets found a medium for political expression. In fact, poetry has become a powerful means of resistance – to talk about dispossession, discord and a sense of loss.
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Overall, the compilation brings much scholastic and academic rigour to subjects that have not been brought together in such a fashion before. For any student who works on Kashmir, this is simply a must-read.
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70 Years On

11/19/2017

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The seventieth anniversary of Kashmir's accession to India - and of the invasion of the then princely state by armed tribesmen from Pakistan - saw a range of reflective pieces about the events of the late autumn of 1947, sometimes drawing on the memories of eye-witnesses and participants. This blog includes links to some of those pieces.

The BBC's Ilyas Khan put together a particularly effective piece from Pakistan on the tribal army that entered Kashmir in late October 1947 - providing compelling evidence of the looting and abduction of women by the armed tribesmen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41662588

Kashmir Watch posted a piece on the National Conference militia raised by Sheikh Abdullah   http://kashmirwatch.com/sma-formed-kashmirs-national-fouj/ while History Workshop Online hosted an article about the women's wing of that militia: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/kashmirs-womens-militia-at-the-end-of-empire/

The BBC's Aamir Peerzada went to Mahura, the site of the power station attacked by the invading force which led to the loss of power to most of the Valley: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-india-41799628/the-man-who-witnessed-the-tribal-invasion-of-kashmir

Scroll's Ipsita Charavarty looked at the reputation today of Maqbool Sherwani  https://scroll.in/article/854826/the-contested-legacies-of-maqbool-sherwani-the-kashmiri-who-stalled-invaders-in-1947 and also revisited the Catholic mission in Baramulla which the raiders ransacked killing six people https://scroll.in/article/854235/they-sprang-from-the-earth-its-been-70-years-since-tribal-forces-poured-into-kashmir 

Andrew Whitehead travelled to St Joseph's convent and mission hospital in Baramulla in the company of Doug and James Dykes, whose parents were killed there seventy years earlier: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-41996612  
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The graves in the grounds of St Joseph's, Baramulla, of five of those killed there on 27 October 1947 - the sixth, a nun, is buried in a separate plot
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The Kashmiri Muslims of Lhasa

7/14/2017

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Anisa Bhutia, a doctoral researcher, has recently written about the status and identity of the Kashmiri Muslims of Lhasa - most of whom now live in Srinagar where they are regarded as, and indeed describe themselves as, Tibetan. Her article has been posted on the University of Nottingham's IAPS blog - here's the link: ​https://iapsdialogue.org/2017/07/06/belonging-through-documents-kashmiri-muslims-of-lhasa/ 

​Bhutia looks at the conflicting claims of India and China about the history and status of this small community, who were largely traders in Lhasa until they left in 1961. In Kashmir, they are Indian nationals - but not state subjects. That's limits their opportunities for employment or owning land and it perpetuates an ambiguity about who they are.

By coincidence, the same community was earlier this year the subject of a blog post by Andrew Whitehead ... http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/a-week-in-kashmir-the-tibetan-colony ... the image below, taken in the Tibetan colony in Srinagar, is from that post.
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The Bedis, 'Naya Kashmir' and Stalin's constitution

3/31/2017

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The 1944 'Naya Kashmir' or 'New Kashmir' manifesto - or at least the opening pages which propose a draft constitution for the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir - was based in large part on the constitution Stalin introduced in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. B.P.L. Bedi and his English wife Freda Bedi are often credited as the main forces behind the drafting of 'Naya Kashmir' - not least in Sheikh Abdullah's own autobiography. But much of the detail was lifted from the Soviet constitution, which the Bedis' had published in full in the quarterly Contemporary India which they edited in Lahore from 1935 to 1937.

This was explained in a talk that Andrew Whitehead gave this week at the University of Kashmir, with more than a hundred faculty and students present. The talk focussed on 'Freda Bedi in Kashmir' - the Bedis  lived in Srinagar from 1947 to 1952 and had an association with the state, and particularly with Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference, from the late 1930s.  

The talk has been reported on the Outlook website - here's the link: http://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/sheikh-abdullahs-new-kashmir-manifesto-was-a-cut-and-paste-of-stalins-constituti/298388
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Lost Kashmiri History

3/20/2017

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Lost Kashmiri History is a relatively new website which reflects the growing interest in Kashmir and its past. The site bears the strapline: 'the struggle of memory against forgetting'.

The site hosts an impressive array of articles, most relating to aspects of the separatist insurgency. 'Lost Kashmiri History is an initiative to memorise the saga of occupation and oppression', the site declares in explaining its mission. '... And to move closer to our dream of a Just Society.'

This is history from an activist perspective - and that's reflected too in the way Lost Kashmiri History uses social media.

One of the most valuable aspects of the site: the texts of seventy or so books about Kashmir which are available in full ... a really useful resource!

http://lostkashmirihistory.com/books-on-kashmir/ 
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'A new nation is ready' - what Farooq Abdullah meant

3/3/2017

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A few days ago, Farooq Abdullah - from chief minister, former Indian government minister and still a figure of influence in the National Conference - made a typically maverick, but clearly significant, comment in which he described Kashmir as a nation, a nation which seeks Azaadi and spoke positively of those who were fighting for that goal.

“Our youth are not sacrificing their lives for becoming legislators or ministers but for their rights. This is our land. These youth have chosen a path and they have promised to God. You are the sole giver and taker of lives but we will sacrifice our life for the freedom of this nation… Today, a new nation (Jammu Kashmir) is ready, the nation that does not fear guns, and the nation which is out for Azadi. They are taking up guns for something concrete. We need to look into it and the guns need to fall silent. They (Kashmiri gun-yielding youth) are not enemy of any one, neither them (India) nor they (Pakistan).”

What did he mean, why did he say it, and what is the broader context of these remarks? One of Kashmir's wisest journalists, Shuja'at Bukhari, editor of Rising Kashmir, addresses those issues in this important article:

http://www.risingkashmir.com/article/message-from-farooqs-statement
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Farooq Abdullah
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Shuja'at Bukhari
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'Witness to Paradise'

3/2/2017

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At Oxford today, Sanjay Kak and Mirza Waheed lead a seminar on Witness to Paradise, a project which tracks photojournalism in Kashmir over the last thirty years.

​More details here: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/witness-paradise-photojournalism-kashmirs-present-1986-2016

The organisers say about this project: 'Photography in Kashmir has emerged as a powerful witness to its troubled present. Rooted in the everyday of photojournalism, and stretching away from those limits when they can, a remarkable new generation of photographers have steadily illuminated a little understood period of Kashmir’s contemporary life. Over the last three decades their work has also demonstrated the radical part that can be played by photographs in subverting the established views – of Kashmir as a beautiful landscape sans people; or as an innocent paradise; and more recently, of a paradise beset by mindless violence. Witness to Paradise is a curated book project that brings together images by nine photographers from Kashmir, the oldest already a working professional in 1986, and the youngest not yet twenty in 2016. The images are by Meraj Uddin, Javeed Shah, Dar Yasin, Javed Dar, Altaf Qadri, Sumit Dayal, Showkat Nanda, Syed Shahriyar and Azaan Shah. The text has emerged from conversations with documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and brings out the varied relationships that each one bears to photography, and their commitment to Kashmir, raising quietly profound questions about the place of artistic practice in zones of conflict.'
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'The Last Great Silk Route Trader'

2/14/2017

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The Indian Memory Project website has just posted a piece about Munshi Aziz Bhat of Kargil, described by his great-grandson as the last Great Silk Route trader. It's a great piece, including a photograph of Bhat taken in Kargil in 1945 with his two sons. Here's the link. 
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The Chinese Uyghur exodus to Kashmir

10/30/2016

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In the late 1940s, about 11,500 Chinese Uyghurs trekked across the mountains to Kashmir. The story is told in an article on the Uyghur diaspora by Radio Free Asia - here's the link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/special/pathtofreedom/

Most of these refugees, the article explains, moved on to Turkey, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and the United States ... but a few chose to stay in Kashmir.

Here's a brief extract:

Speaking from his home in New York, 86-year-old Ghulamiddin Pahta told RFA’s Uyghur Service that thousands of ethnic Uyghur and Kazakh minorities were forced to leave their homeland when soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) arrived in Xinjiang at the end of 1949, following the communist takeover of China.

Pahta said that the refugees braved severe conditions during the winter months as they trekked through the Himalaya Mountains on their way to India’s Kashmir region.

“I joined thousands of Uyghurs from [the Xinjiang capital] Urumqi, Kashgar, Hotan and other regions of the Uyghur homeland in crossing the Himalaya Mountains during the hardest winter months, enduring tremendous difficulties before arriving in Kashmir’s Srinagar city in India,” Pahta said.

“Kashmir was full of Uyghur and Kazakh refugees at the time. Large numbers of individuals traveling with us died in the Himalayas because of the cold,” he said. “When I arrived in Kashmir, I heard from my uncle Ebeydullah, who was president of the East Turkestan Refugee Association, that 11,500 refugees had traveled to the region and more than 400 had died on the way.”


The article includes the photo below - I wonder if it was take at Nedou's Hotel? - which carries the caption: 'A group of Uyghurs who succeeded in escaping at the time of the communist Chinese invasion and who took refuge in Kashmir, India. (Summer, 1950)' And underneath, taken at the same time is a photo of Uughur leaders meeting Sheikh Abdullah.
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