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Through the valley of the shadow of
death
By Praveen Swami
Beloved brothers of Hasiyot:
We have left
our country to fight for your freedom. But still you
people feel no sense of gratitude. We urge you to stop
helping the Kafirs [unbelievers]. After this, no one who
does so will be spared. He who helps a Kafir is also a
Kafir. If you still do not pay heed, Allah has given his
soldiers enough strength to finish you as well as the
Kafirs.
-
Posted by the al-Badr Mujahideen, Hasiyot Mosque,
Rajouri, December 17, 2002
In late November 2002, the Harkat-ul-Jihad
Islami put up posters in the village of Darhal, in
Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir state, demanding
that women students and teachers start wearing
all-enveloping burkhas (veils). Those who defied
the ban, the posters warned, would have their noses cut
off.
While most in the village were terrified,
local tailor Mohammad Rafiq believed that he had been
granted a God-given opportunity to prosper. Demand
pushed up prices for basic versions of the five-meter
dress from Rs 175 (US$3.60) to almost Rs 1,000, while
better-quality "imports" from Jammu sold for twice as
much. Then, the local army unit stepped in, and told
Rafiq to stop black-marketing burkhas. Today,
Rafiq's business has collapsed: his customers, mostly
poor farmers who have to work in their fields and find
the burkha enormously cumbersome at work, just
aren't sure on which choice of uniform to spend their
meagre resources.
Darhal's encounter with
Taliban-style terror began with a local spat. When
troops were first deployed in the area they occupied
part of the main higher secondary school building. To
compensate students for the space, the army put up
tented accommodation, as well as a tin building. The
school's laboratory facilities remained available to
students, but soldiers used the other half of the main
building. Parents lobbied hard to get the whole building
back, scared mainly of the consequences of a terrorist
assault on the troops. Then, in early November, an
unrelated fracas broke out. A group of women students,
out on a picnic near Kotranka, were - depending on whom
one chooses to believe - either harassed by teenage boys
from Darhal, or seen dancing to film music with them.
The conservative rural community was scandalized, but
sorted out the problem quietly by calling in the boys
concerned for a telling-off.
A window of
opportunity had, however, opened for the soldiers of the
Islamic right. They now claimed that the picnic was the
result of the "corrupting influence of immoral dress",
combined with the close proximity of young army
soldiers. After the first posters appeared in Darhal,
the army also dug in its heels. While they could not
stop anyone from wearing a burkha if they chose,
officers told the community that those who exercised the
option would be stopped at the school gates and
searched. Many villagers found the idea of such searches
humiliating. Meanwhile, a second and third set of
posters were put up starting December 2, each imposing a
fresh deadline for adoption of the burkha, and
warning of a variety of punishments ranging from
mutilation to death.
"Several families who
continued to send their daughters to school," says
village headman Hadi Noor, "received beatings from the
terrorists. Their girls' uniforms and books were burned,
and the terrorists warned that their noses and ears
would be cut off if they continued to offend." For the
most part, Darhal parents solved their dilemma by simply
pulling 11th and 12th grade girls students out of the
local government higher secondary school. The 80-odd
girls who study there weren't able sit for the recent
examinations because of the threats, and no alternative
arrangements have been made by the state government.
No one in Darhal doubts that the Harkat's
threats are credible. On December 17, al-Badr terrorists
shot dead three teenage women at the tiny hamlet of
Hasiyot, near Thanamandi in Rajouri. An al-Badr
hit-squad walked into the home of 12th-standard student
Tahira Parveen, who was then busy with her cousin's
pre-wedding mehndi (henna) ritual, singled her
out from among a group of women, and slit her throat
with a hunting knife. Her friend Naureen Kaunser, who
lived next door, died faster: shot dead at point-blank
range. Sixteen-year-old Shehnaz Akhtar, already married
though just a 10th-standard student, faced a more brutal
end: she was marched out and decapitated. A note found
in the Hasiyot mosque makes it clear that the al-Badr
believed the three were informants.
On past
occasions, the army had raided Hasiyot shortly after
terrorist groups passed through the hamlet. This,
coupled with the fact that Parveen's father had been
killed on suspicion of being an army informer in 1997,
and that Kaunser's father is a serving Border Security
Force trooper, were evidently considered adequate
grounds for the executions. "The girls' real fault,"
says Kaunser's father Mohammad Sadiq, "is that they were
educated and did not treat the terrorists with the
respect that they thought they deserved."
Contrary to media speculation, the killings at
Hasiyot had little to do with the burkha issue.
They were, however, part of a string of killings of
civilians, intended to make clear the terrorists'
domination of civil society. Four days after the Hasiyot
killings, four-year-old Arfaz Ahmed, seven-year-old Asid
Mohammad and 12-year-old Nazarat Hussain were shot dead
at Surankote. Their father, Munshi Khan, who was
seriously injured in the attack on his home along with a
tenant - school teacher, Gurmeet Kaur - was believed by
terrorists to be passing on information to the state
police's Special Operations Group. Such killings are of
a piece with similar assaults on anyone resisting
far-right fiat. Available data indicates that the
overwhelming majority of civilian victims of terrorist
violence are not Hindus but ordinary Muslims who are
believed to be inadequately servile to the religious
right.
Incredibly, despite the killings and the
menacing notices, few women have actually started
wearing the burkha in Rajouri: a tribute both to
their courage and to the ground realities of their lives
in this poor mountain region. Women in Rajouri, as in
Poonch, Doda or Udhampur, work hard in the fields and
are also responsible for taking cattle to nearby
pastures. Carrying water up the hills takes up a major
part of the day, as does foraging for firewood and
fodder.
The burkha simply doesn't allow
for this kind of work. What the new ban has already
achieved, however, is to strip rural women of any real
shot at a higher education. "I know of one schoolmaster
from a nearby hamlet," says Darhal zonal educational
officer M A Malik, "who was ordered to withdraw his
daughter from the government degree college in Rajouri
because they did not observe the burkha there."
This, in turn, is part of a long-running campaign by the
Islamic right against women. In November 2001,
57-year-old schoolteacher Gulzar Lone was shot dead in
front of his students at the government middle school in
Alal, near Thanamandi, for the "crime" of having taught
his daughter Jabeera Lone how to drive a two-wheeler.
At a rally after the Surankote killings, Chief
Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed said, "The time has come
when the people should also use their influence,
whatever little they have, on the militants and make
them leave the gun." The chief minister, however, said
nothing about what he intended to do to secure justice
for those who, quite clearly, have no influence with
terrorists.
Praveen Swami, special
correspondent, Frontline magazine.
Published
with permission from the South Asia Intelligence Review
of the South Asia
Terrorism Portal
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