Hamid's Message To The World:
A Kashmiri Cry For SanityBy Yoginder Sikand
17 March, 2004
countercurrents.org
Some months ago I received a long email message from someone whom I shall call Hamid. He had come across an article I had written on Kashmiri Sufism that was posted on a website, from which he had obtained my email address.
'Dear Brother', the letter began, 'Allow me to introduce myself'. Hamid then went on to explain who he was and why he was writing to me. He hailed, he said, from a town in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, and was the only son of his parents. More than ten years ago, at the height of the militant movement in Kashmir, he had been contacted by a certain militant outfit, and had been lured across the border into Pakistan for military training. He was told that India would soon be forced out of Kashmir by dint of so-called 'jihad'. An 'Islamic' state would be established, which would bring all the Muslims of the world under its ambit. The 'unbelieving' 'enemies of Islam' would be trampled upon, and Muslims would finally regain their lost glory. He was inspired to believe that if he were to sacrifice his life in 'jihad' against India he would inherit a vast mansion in paradise and be tended upon by a train of virgin houris.
Hamid was then an impressionable youth in his late teens. He had seen several of his fellow Kashmiris being killed by Indian soldiers. He had himself been once beaten by an Indian soldier for no reason whatsoever when Indian troops launched a crackdown in his locality searching for a militant. Crossing over to Pakistan to receive armed training and then going back to India to wage 'jihad' against India appeared to him as the only way to extract revenge for the humiliation that his people had suffered. Accordingly, he willingly signed up to join a band of youth from his town heading across the treacherous mountain passes of Kupwara into Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
Hamid spent three months at a training camp located in a remote area near the North-West Frontier Province run by a particularly hardline Islamist group. There, he was taught to handle various weapons and was also fed with a steady diet of fiery jihadist rhetoric. Every evening the trainees would gather at the mosque, where a maulvi owing allegiance to the ultra fanatic Lashkar-i Tayyeba ('The Army of the Pure') would deliver impassioned speeches railing against India, branding all Hindus as 'enemies of Islam'. 'Islam has come to rule the world, and not to be ruled', the maulvi asserted. All non-Muslims, he claimed, were engaged in a sinister plot to wipe out Islam from off the face of the earth.
Somewhere towards the end of his training period, serious doubts began haunting Hamid. Although he had been vehemently opposed to the Indian army, he never had any hatred for Hindus as such. Several of his closest friends at school back in Kashmir had been Hindus. His favourite teacher was a Pundit, who had treated him as his own son. Often, his Hindu friends would accompany him to the shrine of Kashmir's patron saint, the Sufi Hazrat Nuruddin Nurani or Nund Rishi, who, although a devout Muslim, was widely revered by Kashmiri Hindus as well. He could, therefore, hardly believe that all Hindus were all involved in a grand conspiracy against Islam. Every evening his mother would read the Quran to him and then recite some verses of Nund Rishi. They spoke of love and concern for all, irrespective of caste and creed. Nund Rishi's Islam, Hamid began to realise, seemed to have nothing in common with the doctrine of hatred and terror that the maulvi was so passionately peddling.
Not only did the maulvi insist that all non-Muslims were 'enemies of God' and 'friends of the Devil', but he also declared that Muslims who did not subscribe to his own hardline version of Islam were Muslims in name alone, and, for all practical purposes, infidels. Much of the maulvi's ire was directed at Sufism, which he branded as a 'conspiracy' allegedly hatched by the 'enemies' of the faith to dampen Muslims' fervour of armed jihad and thereby destroy Islam from within. He equated Sufism with 'wrongful' innovation (bid'at) and polytheism (shirk), insisting that Muslims who followed the Sufis were doomed to eternal perdition in hell. He made it amply clear that after the mujahidin had managed to 'liberate' Kashmir from India they would launch a second jihad, this time to cleanse Kashmir of all vestiges of Sufism.
The maulvi's bitter harangue against the Sufis struck Hamid as particularly obnoxious. Most Kashmiri Muslims held the Sufis in deep reverence, and Hamid could not imagine that God would ever send his own people to hell for their love of the gentle mystics of Islam. After all, he knew, it was the Sufis who had brought Islam to Kashmir. It was they, and not people like the maulvi, who had spread Islam in the region, by winning the hearts of the Kashmiris with their message of love, justice and equality. He shuddered at the thought of the likes of the maulvi taking over Kashmir and violently destroying the hallowed shrines of the Sufis, as the Wahhabis had done in Saudi Arabia a century ago.
After the three month training course got over, Hamid was instructed to slip across the Line of Control and return to Indian-administered Kashmir to carry out 'operations' against the Indian armed forces. However, he refused, and one day he slipped out of the camp and travelled to a distant town. By this time, he was firmly convinced that the Pakistani jihadists had actually little or no concern for the plight of the Kashmiri Muslims. He had heard numerous stories of self-styled jihadists raping women and murdering innocent people, Hindus as well as Muslims, back home in Kashmir. He had seen several jihadist leaders in Pakistan who had accumulated vast amounts of money from the public in the name of jihad, with which they had built fancy bungalows for themselves. Many of them sent their own children to posh schools, while at the same time exhorting poor families to send their children to die in the killing fields of Kashmir. Many jihadists were in reality nothing more than brutal mercenaries who were paid to work for various groups and the Pakistani intelligence agencies. He had even heard of some militants, mainly Punjabi and Pathan, who believed that Muslim women belonging to non-Wahhabi families could be enslaved as virtual sex objects. Moreover, the widespread corruption that he saw all around him in Pakistan, what he called the hypocrisy of its religious and political elites, the pathetic state of education in the country and the lack of many basic freedoms, convinced him that joining Pakistan would spell doom for his own people. Pakistan was certainly not the 'land of the pure' that he was earlier given to believe.
Hamid now manages to survive on a meagre two thousand rupees a month that some kind soul provides him with. He desperately wants to leave Pakistan, he says. He has not seen his parents ever since he slipped out of his house one night ten years ago and crossed over to Pakistan. Memories of home and of his land continue to haunt him, and the very thought that he might never see his family again is terrifying, he says. Ideally, he would like to return to his home to 'serve' his parents, as he says, and to lead a quiet life. But then that might mean death for him, whether at the hands of the ISI, or militant outfits or even the Indian armed forces. He has thought of migrating to a third country, in the hope that he might arrange to meet his parents some day. But he has no passport or legal travel documents, and even if he did, which country would accept a refugee from Pakistan, he asks, given the notoriety that the country has earned as a breeding ground for terrorists?
Hamid today has no illusions about Pakistan. Militancy is not the way out, he insists, and says that violence can only be counterproductive for the Kashmiris themselves. 'If only our youth back in the Valley could see the reality of Pakistan for themselves they would realise the criminal folly of supporting the militants', he writes. Yet, he does not absolve India of its share of the blame either. He cannot forget, he says, the scores of innocent people who have lost their lives in Kashmir, many at the hands of the Indian army. Hindu militancy is only making the problem more intractable, he says. The recent anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat has further hardened anti-Indian feelings in Kashmir, and he shudders to imagine what would happen in the future. 'Hindutvawadis', he argues, 'are, along with Islamist radicals, the greatest enemies of Indian unity and Hindu-Muslim amity'. I could hardly disagree. 'How can the Hindutva-walas expect to win the hearts of the Kashmiris if they carry on with their anti-Muslim crusade?', he very rightly asks. Yet, he also adds that the best realistic option for the Kashmiris is to remain with India-not a Hindutva-ruled India but an India that is genuinely secular and accepting of people of all faiths and ethnicities.
Hamid ends his letter with the following lines:
'My dear brother. The reason that I am writing to you is to tell you that for the sake of all people in our part of the world, and particularly for the Kashmiris, we have to struggle against all forms of fascism parading in the guise of religion, Hindu as well as Muslim. Terrorism in a religious garb is the grossest insult to God and true religion imaginable, as I have myself learnt the hard way. I hope you will reflect on what I have said, and will convey this message to your friends and to the world at large.
Khuda Hafiz and Namastey. May God bless and guide us all.
Your brother-in-humanity
Hamid K.'
I wonder if he will read this article, but if he does I must tell him, 'Yes, brother Hamid, I am doing your bidding in my own small way'.
Yoginder Sikand is the editor Qalandar.