What You And I Can Do?

Few people can outshine the Kashmiris in hospitality and kindness, despite the horrendous sufferings thatthey have had to undergo in the course of more than a decade now. Fifty thousand Kashmiris are said to havelost their precious lives and scores more maimed for good, widowed, raped and orphaned.

Not a day passes without a mention in the newspapers (generally tucked away in some obscure corner) of atleast one Kashmiri having been done to death in cold blood. Yet, call it typical Indian amnesia or a totallack of concern, few Indians seem to be really perturbed by the continuing and seemingly never-ending deathsof civilians in the area.

In the past five years I have paid more than ten visits to Kashmir, and each time I go there I see the samehelplessness, the same fear, and yet the same determination writ large on the faces of its hapless people. Butthere is little that ordinary Kashmiris seem able to do as sinister, anonymous forces in Islamabad and NewDelhi dictate their fate.

A state government with little or no popular support and an unaccountable, notoriously corruptadministration have seen to it that development, welfare and relief work have come to an almost completestand-still. Widows, orphans and the injured have little recourse for help, and with economic activity beingso badly affected, craftsmen, house-boat owners and people dependent on the tourist trade have been reduced topenury.

The last time I was in Kashmir--five months ago--I was working with a friend in compiling a directory ofsocial work and non-governmental organizations in the Kashmir valley. The idea of compiling such a directoryhad struck us when, after a random search on the Internet, we discovered, much to our surprise (and horror)that not a single such organization was listed. This only confirmed what numerous Kashmiri friends andrespondents had told me on my previous visits--that few, if any, established NGOs were working in theregion.

We have, it seemed to me, a veritable NGO industry in India, raking in crores of rupees every year, and yetalmost none of the bigwigs among them had considered extending their services to Kashmir, where they wereneeded most. Was it because most Kashmiris and most victims of the violence there are Muslims, I asked myself?Was it because of any restrictions imposed by the government? Was it for fear of the wrath of the State? Ihave no answers, but it seems to me that the absence of any major initiatives from Indian NGOs in Kashmirreflects the way many Indians see the Kashmir question--as a real estate dispute, coveting the land butconveniently dispensing with its people.

In preparing our directory, we travelled to various parts of Kashmir, to small towns and little villagestucked away high in the mountains. We came across numerous local-level initiatives started by men and women,working with meager resources, helping such vulnerable groups as widows and orphans, providing them education,food and occasionally, financial help.

Most of these groups were starved for funds and barely managed to survive on the goodwill of friends andneighbours. Lacking resources, equipment and training, these local groups can reach only a small number ofpeople, a minuscule proportion of the hundreds of thousands of people who really need urgent help.

One takes it as a fact that the State and the administration are incapable, even if they wanted to, toaddress the pressing problems of relief and rehabilitation in Kashmir. Despite this, there is much that couldbe done at the local level by private individuals and groups to reach out to the victims of violence.

First and foremost, information about existing local-level relief groups needs to be widely disseminated,and that is what we intended our directory to help do. People and agencies that are in a position to helpthese groups can establish contact with them and launch various programmes. I recall meeting a director of aleading NGO in Delhi, who said that she wished to start a project in Kashmir but had no idea of any localgroups she could work with. Information on these groups, then, is the first step, through which links could beestablished with other organizations, both inside and outside Kashmir, and relief and development programmesstarted.

Such programmes must, however, have no hidden political agenda, an obvious point but one which needs to bestressed, I fear, given the widely-held, though mistaken, assumption, that economic development is analternative to a political solution to the Kashmir dispute.

During my travels in Kashmir I have met numerous young men and women actively engaged in relief work ofsome sort or the other. Typically, such work takes the form of blood donation or collecting money for a childwhose parents have been shot dead or providing a sewing machine to a woman whose husband has gone 'missing'for years and is presumed to have been killed. Clearly, such charitable works have their own place andimportance, but they cannot substitute for organized, community-level initiatives on a wider scale. There,however, seem to be almost no such organizations in Kashmir.

This is hardly surprising--Kashmir University, Srinagar, the only university in the Valley, boasts of aDepartment of Business Management which churns out tens of graduates every year trained for jobs in a modernindustrial sector that is barely existent in the region, while it has no similar Department of Social Work.Given the almost total absence of professionally-run NGOs in Kashmir, few social workers I have met there seemto know anything about how an organized NGO is to be run, how resources can be generated and how relief andrehabilitation work can be done on a wider and more effective scale.

A simple, yet immensely helpful, way in which established NGOs could assist in this regard is by invitingyoung Kashmiris engaged in some form of social work to spend some time with them in order to gain anunderstanding of fund-raising, and project formulation and implementation.

A small example would make the point clearer. A friend of mine from Srinagar recently came down toBangalore to be with me for a month. While in Kashmir, he and some of his friends would collect money fromtheir relatives and use it to buy medicines and clothes for widows and orphans.

While in Bangalore, he visited numerous local NGOs engaged in a variety of development programmes. He spenta week at a rural development project in Andhra Pradesh, three days with a Dalit activist group and afortnight at a tribal school in Kerala. He is now back in Srinagar, and is in the process of starting an NGOto work among orphan children. 'I would never have known how to go about it had I not spent all that time withgroups in the south', he writes to me in his latest letter.

Setting up new organizations may be necessary in a region where NGOs are almost non-existent (we managed tomake a list of just 34 groups for the whole Valley), but so also is the need for a revival of traditionalcharitable institutions. Kashmir's numerous Sufi shrines can play a major role in this regard.

Almost every locality and village in Kashmir has a shrine built over the grave of a Sufi preceptor.Traditionally, Sufi lodges (khanqahs) were centres of religious instruction, in addition to providing reliefand help to the poor, in the form of education and free food in community kitchens (langars). Today, they are,for the most part, mere centres of mediation, where people go to ask for the saints' intercession with God tohave their requests granted. Few, if any, run community kitchens or engage in any other form of communityservice.

Devout believers donate large sums to the shrines, but as to how these resources are used is any one'sguess. How these resources could be used to help the poor and alleviate their suffering is an issue thaturgently needs to be addressed. If the Sufis themselves dedicated their lives to the service of the poor,tragic indeed it is that the custodians of their shrines seem, by and large, concerned more about fillingtheir own purses than anything else.

Another major institution that has its command over resources extending into crores of rupees is theJammu and Kashmir Awqaf Trust. The Trust, a creation of Shaikh Abdullah, administers numerous Muslimendowments all over the state. Its functioning, I have been told, leaves much to be desired. Stories ofpolitical interference, nepotism and corruption in the Trust are too numerous to recount here.

The Trust seems to be doing precious little to help the victims of violence in the region. Granting smallstipends to widows and orphans, one of the few relief programmes actually undertaken by the Trust, may indeedbe a valuable service but such charity can hardly take the place of development initiatives, such as settingup schools, orphan homes, industrial training centres and such like. 'If the Vaishno Devi Temple Trust inJammu can start a university, why can't the Awqaf, with much more funds at its disposal, do so, too?', is apoint that I have repeatedly heard being made.

Resources for funding social work projects can also be generated locally from zakat funds. Zakat, a tithepayable by all Muslims whose wealth exceeds a basic minimum, is one of the five 'pillars' of Islam. I have noidea how many Kashmiris regularly pay their zakat, but many Muslim organizations elsewhere have experimentedwith new ways of using zakat funds, which could be adopted in Kashmir as well.

Rather than distributing the money to individuals in need, it could be paid into community-controlled locallevel zakat committees (bait-ul mals) which, in turn, could use the resources to start education and trainingschemes and income-generation projects for the needy.Self-help cannot absolve the State of its responsibilityof providing essential services to those who need them most, nor can relief or economic development take theplace of a political solution to the Kashmir dispute, but yet, in the absence of any meaningful and sincereefforts of the State, there is much, as I have stressed, that ordinary individuals, both in Kashmir as well asoutside, can do to help relieve the suffering of thousands of hapless Kashmiris. All it takes is a modicum oftime and effort and bucket-loads of enthusiasm and concern.

Yoginder Sikand is currently engaged in a post-doctoral research project on Islam and Inter-faithrelations at the University of London and has begun to edit a website.Copies of the Directory of Social Work Organizations in Kashmir, prepared by the author may be had bywriting to him at ysikand@hotmail.com