The gruesome murder on 2 November of Gowhar Bhat, a BJP youth leader in south Kashmir, has muddied the road for the Centre’s new ‘representative’ for Kashmir. The representative, Dineshwar Sharma, former Director of the Intelligence Bureau, is due to begin his outreach on Monday, 6 November.
He has announced that he is willing to meet anyone, including separatists. Just four days before Sharma’s arrival, Gowhar’s assassination brought several trends to the fore, all of which cast dark shadows over the Centre’s initiative.
Growing Militancy
The foremost of the trends it highlighted is that although the Army and police have had remarkable success in killing most of the militant commanders in south Kashmir over the past few months, militancy continues to be a huge threat.
Indeed, it is a growing threat, for the ranks of militants are expanding in south Kashmir. More young men, including teenagers, have been going underground to take up arms in recent weeks, even as some of the established ones have been killed.
Not only is there a net growth in the number of local militants, the number of militant groups active in the field too has increased, in both south and north Kashmir. Most of these are controlled from Pakistan — though, going by audio evidence available on social media, the most radically pan-Islamist militants apparently also feel threatened by Pakistan.
Grassroots Assassinations
The second trend that Gowhar’s murder underlines is that militant groups continue to target political activists. This could increase during the winter, when the state government is based in Jammu.
Over the past more than two years, there have been several warnings in public statements from leading militants, including the late Burhan Wani, that political workers and policemen would be targeted.
That began to happen in deadly earnest in spring this year.
A prominent National Conference activist and former public prosecutor, Imtiaz Ahmed, was killed (also in Shopian district) in mid-April. Two former sarpanchs were killed in Kakapora village in Pulwama, apparently after gruesome torture, in the same week.
And the Pulwama district president of the ruling PDP was killed later in April.
Dampened Mood
The trend of political assassinations is worrisome for those in charge of security affairs. For, this trend of political assassinations may make political workers who live outside the security apparatus, and even those ‘separatist leaders’ who do, balk at engaging with Sharma, even if they wish to.
This trend will also make it more difficult to conduct panchayat elections, as the government had apparently intended to do at the end of the year.
Growing Radicalisation
A third trend – which, at one level, binds and undergirds the other two trends – is the growth of inflexible pan-Islamist ideas.
One reason Gowhar was killed in such a horrifying fashion (his throat was slit), was not just because he was a political activist, but because he had joined the BJP, which has a Hindutva agenda.
Indeed, several voices on social media endorsed his killing on this ground. In the same vein, some prominent Kashmiris had held that DSP Ayoub, who was lynched outside Srinagar’s Jamia mosque at the peak of Ramzan in the summer of 2017, had brought his death upon himself.
Uproar over Liquor
Some observers have remarked on the fact that on the day Gowhar was killed, there was more of a public uproar over a proposal to open a liquor store at Srinagar airport than over his assassination.
Opposition to the liquor store was based on a decidedly Islamist worldview, since Islam prohibits the consumption of liquor by Muslims.
That led to an excise department order denying permission for the store — though some Kashmiris pointed to the ironic fact that the very few outlets for liquor purchase in Srinagar sell vast amounts of intoxicants, mainly to local consumers.
While such ironies are abound in Kashmir, there is no denying the trend of pan-Islamist rhetoric and beliefs. It has been noticeable for about a decade, and has become more radical over the past few years.
The perception that Muslims are not safe in a Hindu-dominated India, which has sharpened over the past three years, has given this radicalisation impetus.
(The writer is a Kashmir-based author and journalist. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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