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 theKafirs.
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, 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 school-uniform tailor Mohammad Rafiq believed he had been granted a god-given opportunity to prosper. Demand pushed up prices for basic versions of the five-metre dress from Rs. 175 to almost Rs. 1000, 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 which choice of uniform to spend their meagre resources on.
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 who one chooses to believe - either harassed by teenage boys from Darhal, or seen dancing to film music with them. The conservative rural community was scandalised, but sorted out the problem quietly by calling the boys concerned in for a telling-off.
A window of opportunity had, however, opened for the soldiers of the Islamic Right. They now claimed 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 its heels in. While they could not stop anyone from wearing a burkha if they chose, officers told the community, 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 alternate 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 facts 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, 4-year old Arfaz Ahmed, 7-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 [Table], 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.
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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.
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Praveen Swami is Special Correspondent, Frontline. This article appears courtesy the South AsiaIntelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
