Opinion The Valley,unveiled
Kashmir isnt rocked by polarising moral debates
The recent threat telling a Sopore college principal to enforce an Islamic dress code on his 3,000 girl students has brought the purdah debate back in focus. Especially after the threat led to the number of veil-wearing students in the college rise from a modest 29 to around 300.
Now,does this mean that purdah will soon become a Valley-wide reality? That other colleges and schools will follow the Sopore example? The answer cannot but be an emphatic No. Even in the Sopore college,300 students are a small percentage of the 3,000 girl students whore enrolled with 4,000 boys.
It has more or less been like this in the Valley over the past two decades. That may have been an exceptionally turbulent period but Kashmirs social orientation has by and large emerged unscathed. Truth is,the Valley doesnt easily fit the newfangled stereotype of an Islamic conflict zone.
Even so,talking about purdah in Kashmir requires a certain degree of caution. Appreciating the tendency of Muslim women to discard the hijab could run afoul of religious sentiment that might well,ironically,be shared by women who wouldnt normally wear the veil. So,it is essential that we have an antiseptically neutral approach in our engagement with the issue.
Neutrally,the dominant impression is that while there may not be a study on the purdah in Kashmir,it is rare to come across a burqa-clad woman in the markets. This is in spite of the fact that the place has intermittently been witness to some determined moral policing campaigns.
Kashmir defies the stereotype in another sense too. Unlike in the rest of India,moral policing here has been the preserve of the hardline separatist womens organisation Dukhtaran-i-Millat,a very small group. Its vitriolic chief,Asiya Andrabi,has earned much of her political reputation from such drives. Her fiery burqa-clad forays into busy bazaars through the 90s and even,occasionally,over the past decade to enforce purdah and religious discipline are now a part of the Valleys troubled story.
But while we say this,Andrabis morality missions have for the most part been politically-motivated forays,limited to Lal Chowk around the press enclave. She has hardly ventured outside the immediate media limits of Srinagar. Most of the time her morality brigade has been let loose over the half-kilometre of distance from Residency Road to Lal Chowk,where it could receive maximum attention. And as happens with all such coercive campaigns,their effects are momentary or at best seasonal. Kashmiri women face little dictation as to the conduct of their daily lives beyond what is the common lot of women in South Asia.
Regular militant organisations and even hawkish separatists havent generally been interested in the morality debates,seeing them as unnecessary distraction from the larger Azadi goal. Except,of course,in the early days of militancy when Allah Tigers attacked cinemas and liquor shops. And in its later years,one unprecedented example: a militant organisation enforcing an absolute ban on cigarette smoking and nearly getting away with it. And,of course,the sporadic attempt to get at cable TV,now rendered unenforceable by DTH penetration.
But through all this,the Valley has maintained its sanity. Society may have changed profoundly from within what with a two-decade cycle of murder and mayhem becoming an indelible part of collective memory but externally,life in the Valley has exhibited a remarkable continuity. Shrines continue to be the destinations of a large population of the faithful; belief remains suffused with Sufism; beards are not endemic despite the proliferation of madrassas; and,of course,the burqa not readily associated with an ordinary Kashmiri woman.
In fact,purdah here is not an issue which could cause polarising political or intellectual debates. Purdah continues to be an un-self-conscious practice,worn or withdrawn as a matter of course. Morality drives or threats might temporarily force a change generally a specific response to a specific situation,like at the Sopore college but the Valley collectively has successfully resisted efforts at a radical overhaul of its traditionally tolerant cultural and religious moorings.
One such example: the principal of the Sopore college,Muhammad Ashraf Shah an expert on Sayyid Qutb,the leading political Islamist of the 20th century,the ideological muse of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda. Despite being an Islamic scholar,Ashraf has refused to do the bidding of his abductors. The purdah decision,he says,should be left to the wisdom of his students; he will not listen to anyones dictates on the issue.
And as for the gunmen who issued the threat to him,even the Kashmir police are not keen to brand them militants. Sometimes what crawls out of the Valleys woodwork is not exactly what it professes to be.
riyaz.wani@expressindia.com
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