Kashmir braces for Burhan Wani anniversary, Islamic State claims his legacy

Checking civilian movement in Srinagar on Friday

By Ajai Shukla

Loragam, Tral, J&K

Business Standard, 8th July 17

On Saturday, the spotlight on the civil uprising roiling Southern Kashmir will shift temporarily to the improbably beautiful Loragam village, nestling in the foothills of the snow-clad Pir Panjal mountain range.

This was the home of Burhan Wani, the young Hizbul Mujahideen commander whose videotaped exhortations to fight India made him a star amongst the social media-savvy Kashmiri youth, and a prime target for Indian security forces. Wani met his end exactly a year ago, on July 8, 2016, cornered by the Jammu & Kashmir Police (JKP) in a cordon in nearby Kokernag.

File photograph of former Hizb commander, Burhan Wani 

His funeral the next day was attended by tens of thousands of inflamed locals, even by the most conservative JKP estimates. It triggered an outpouring of public violence in which JKP outposts were razed to the ground, 90-100 civilians shot dead by security forces and thousands injured, many of them blinded by shotgun pellets.

It has also set the pattern for civilian confrontation of armed policemen and soldiers. Today unarmed villagers routinely gather at gunfights between security forces and militants, pelting rocks at soldiers to allow the militants to escape.

Driving to Loragam through the sylvan Pulwama district, it is evident the security apparatus will not allow Wani’s death anniversary to become occasion for a public rally that inflames the situation further. At regular intervals we are stopped at check-posts manned by the JKP, or the army’s Rashtriya Rifles, and allowed to proceed only after proving we are journalists.

The roads are near-empty anyway, after three local militants were killed on Tuesday in an encounter near Pulwama. One of them, Jehangir, was reportedly buried by thousands of mourners at his village, Keller. This is now routine for every militant killed, with his life celebrated in YouTube videos that are watched feverishly on Facebook and WhatsApp.

“Slain militants become living legends on social media. And the celebration of their sacrifice attracts more youngsters to take up the gun”, explains a local youngster who is guiding us to Loragam.

Reaching the village, we make our way to the local secondary school, where the principal is Burhan’s father, Muzaffar Ahmed Wani, a courteous, grey-haired man who has just returned from the police station.

“They asked me what I was planning for Burhan’s death anniversary. I said ‘Nothing, I plan to stay at home. But what can I do if people come to condole? I can’t tell them to go away.’

A knot of people gathers around us. There will be no crowds on Saturday, one predicts, given the security preparations. “There will effectively be a curfew that day across South Kashmir”, he says.

Going around Pulwama district, it becomes clear that, notwithstanding the “azaadi” (freedom) slogan that echoes through rallies, local allegiance is overwhelmingly towards Pakistan, rather than to Kashmir independence, as is widely believed in New Delhi.

“‘Azaadi’ is a concept confined to the seminar circuit in India”, scoffed a local youngster who sought anonymity. “Take a look at any political rally and you will see only Pakistani flags. When a militant is killed, his coffin is wrapped in the Pakistani flag. Kashmiris have a deep sense of gratitude towards Pakistan.”

Today, Pakistan’s hold over the Kashmiri youth faces a new challenge. A short drive from Loragam is Noorpura, the village of Zakir Rashid Bhat, popularly known as Zakir Musa. Breaking from the secessionist movement’s traditional leadership – the Hurriyat Conference – Musa has advocated Kashmiri allegiance to an Islamic State.

Diverging from the pro-Pakistan Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba, Zakir Musa’s video messages advocate allegiance to a Khilafat (Caliphate), where the Nizam-e-Mustafa (the Prophet Mohammed’s law, or Islamic law) prevails.

This week, apparently piggy-backing on Burhan Wani’s death anniversary, a new Musa video claims that Wani too had advocated the same message. However, while Wani had indeed issued pro-Khilafat and Nizam-e-Mustafa calls, he had remained, till the last, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander.

The threat of a new Islamic State has galvanized other constituencies. New Delhi cites this as evidence that Kashmiri separatism is not a “nationalist” movement, but rather linked with global terrorism movements like Daesh.

“How long will we remain in denial? When the first Islamic State flags appeared, it was called an aberration. When videos appeared, they were termed exceptions! It is high time we accepted that the global jihad is here”, says a senior J&K policeman.

After an encounter in Pulwama on June 22, security forces released an audio recording in which a trapped terrorist, Majid Mir, was prompted by Zakir Musa to express his last wish as – only Islamic State flags at his funeral, not Pakistani flags.

Musa is also a threat to the established secessionist leadership like the Hurriyat Conference and the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir-based United Jihad Council, led by Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, for whom a trans-national Islamic State is anathema.

“The Hurriyat has never made Kashmir a Hindu-Muslim issue; and we have taken an official stance against turning Kashmir into a Khilafat. But Kashmiris cannot ignore the shrill anti-Muslim sentiment from New Delhi, including from the electronic media – beef ban lynching, love jihad, anti-Muslim statements by the ruling party. All this garners support for Zakir Musa and others like him”, says Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, a top Hurriyat leader who is the Valley’s most respected cleric.

Presiding over this disarray is Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, whose People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has lost popular goodwill by entering into a political alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the 2014 elections.

“In 2002, the PDP had effectively snatched political ground from the separatists through its quasi-separatist agenda.  After allying with the RSS-powered BJP, it has lost that constituency to the ‘resistance’ leadership again. That is why South Kashmir, which was the PDP’s bastion, has become the epicentre of the popular agitation”, says Shabir Hussain, Editor Kashmir Newsline.