Secularism and the Kashmir Dispute

Martin Sökefeld

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

Accepted manuscript of an article published in:

Bubandt, Nils; Martijn van Beek (eds.): Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological
explorations of religion, politics and the spiritual. London, Routledge: 101-120.

http://www.tandfebooks.com/action/showBook?doi=10.4324/9780203808443

Introduction1
More often than not the Kashmir dispute is seen as a dispute based upon religious
difference. One popular perspective squarely regards the dispute as a conflict between
Hindus and Muslims: Pakistan is a Muslim state, India a predominately Hindu state, and
these two states fight about Kashmir2. Similarly, the insurgency within Indian administered
Kashmir is regarded as an uprising of Muslims against Hindu domination. According to
another, more sophisticated view, the Kashmir dispute is a conflict between religion and
secularism, embodied in Pakistan and India, respectively. Here, Pakistan is considered a
religious/Islamic state which, following the “Two-Nations-Theory”, was established as the
homeland of the Muslims in South Asia, while India is seen as a secular state which largely
withstood the political tugging of religion. Since 1947, India and Pakistan clash about
Kashmir because both opponents need Kashmir in order to prove their basic political
ideology right: For India as a secular state, Kashmir as a Muslim majority province is the
litmus test that, in spite of its great majority of Hindus, it is able to accommodate Muslims
within the framework of a secular state. It is the “testing ground” (Behera 2002) for the
struggle between secular and religious politics. For Pakistan the fact that more than half of
Kashmir remains under Indian (that is, from a Pakistani perspective, Hindu) control, is an
anachronism, a thorn in the side of the Two-Nations-Theory. According to this view, Pakistan
has to get hold of the whole of Kashmir in order to prove the Two-Nations-Theory right.

1
I am indebted to Wajahat Ahmad for his very valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. Research
in all parts of Kashmir was generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
2
Throughout this text, “Kashmir” is used as convenient shorthand for “Jammu and Kashmir State”. Before 1947,
Jammu and Kashmir State, ruled by a Maharaja, was the largest princely state of British India. After the
independence of the Subcontinent and the beginning of the Kashmir dispute, Kashmir became divided. The area
comprising Jammu, the Kashmir valley and Ladakh is administered by India, while two other parts, Azad
Kashmir and the Northern Areas (also called Gilgit-Baltistan) are administered by Pakistan. Further sections are
currently controlled by China. For want of space I cannot go into the depth of the Kashmir dispute. For the
history and the development of the dispute see Bose 2003, Rai 2004, Schofield 1996, and Zutshi 2004.
Kashmir is seen as the “unfinished agenda of partition” (e.g. Shawl 1994). The insurgency
that started in 1988/89 in Indian administered Kashmir is then regarded as a step in this
direction, that is, again, as an insurgency of Muslims against Hindu rule.
From both perspectives, Muslims are considered as being inherently “religious”. Religion is
regarded as the basic identification and (political) orientation for Muslims. Yet the case of
Kashmir is much more complex. It is inscribed in a complex, multiple and at times
contradictory entanglement of religion and politics and cannot be sorted out in a simple
opposition of the secular versus the religious. Both categories do not have a fixed and
transparent meaning. Talal Asad (2003) convincingly pointed out that not only religion but
also secularism has to be historicized and that the two categories, which are not necessarily
mutually exclusive, can only be understood in relation with one another.
In this chapter I will discuss the relationship between religion and “secular” politics in
relation in Kashmir. The chapter starts from events which occurred in summer 2008 in Indian
administered Kashmir but extends subsequently across the Line of Control to those parts of
erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir State which are under administration by Pakistan.

Religion and political mobilisation in the Kashmir Valley

“I am not a communalist. A Muslim can never be a communalist. A Muslim is secular by
mind!” I met the man who spoke these sentences at a newsstand in Srinagar, the summer
capital of Kashmir, in late June 2008. It was the seventh day of large scale protest and
mobilization against the state government of Jammu and Kashmir. All over the Kashmir
Valley the people had taken to the streets in masses. Shops and transport had been closed
down in complete strike. Even the shikaras (wooden boats) on Dal Lake refused their
services. Young men pelted stones and engaged in heavy street battles with the Indian army
and paramilitary troops. The troops fought back with their lathis, teargas grenades and
sometimes by firing into the crowd. Six civilians were killed and hundreds injured. For many
years the Valley had not seen such an upheaval. For many people, the events were
reminiscent of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the insurgency against Indian
domination in Kashmir started with mass mobilisation.3
The bone of contention were 100 acres of forest land which, by an order of the government
of Jammu and Kashmir State issued on 20th May, 2008, had been diverted to the Sri
Amarnath Shrine Board which organises a Hindu pilgrimage in Kashmir. Seen superficially,
then, the issue was a conflict of Muslims versus Hindus. It was seen as such by most Indian
national commentators, not only by Hindu nationalists. The Indian national press – in
contrast to local media – referred to the protesters as “Islamists”4 or an “Islamist-led mob”.5
The protestors in Kashmir, including the man I met at the newsstand, who turned out to be
the general secretary of the Action Committee Against Land Transfer that organised the
protests, insisted, however, that the issue was not about religion and that it was not a
protest against the Hindu pilgrimage. For them, it was about autonomy and freedom. “Ham
kya chahte? Azadi!” – “What do we want? Freedom!” was the most frequently heard slogan
at the demonstrations.

Land is a very sensitive issue in Jammu and Kashmir. After protests against an increasing
influx of outsiders into Jammu and Kashmir State, Maharaja Hari Singh introduced in 1927

3
For an overview over the insurgency see Joshi 1999.
4
The Hindu, June 26, 2008.
5
Praveen Swami in Frontline, no. 14, 2008.
the State Subjects Rule, according to which only certified subjects of the State were entitled
to hold land in Jammu and Kashmir.6 After 1947, when this part of Jammu and Kashmir came
under Indian control, the State Subjects Rule remained in force.7 It was safeguarded by the
special autonomy which Jammu and Kashmir State was guaranteed by the Indian
government under Nehru in article 370 of the Indian constitution of 1950. Article 370
regulated the relationship between the Indian Union and Jammu and Kashmir State.
According to this article, legislation of India in relation with J&K was restricted to the issues
mentioned in the Instrument of Accession, signed by Maharaja Hari Singh in October 1947,
that is, to defence, external affairs and communication.8 As a consequence of this special
status, Jammu and Kashmir had, unlike the other states of the Indian Union, its own
constitution as well as governmental offices like a president and a prime minister. Beginning
in 1954, however, when Sheikh Abdullah was deposed as Prime Minister of Jammu and
Kashmir by the Indian government, the autonomy granted by article 370 was increasingly
eroded.9 The continuing application of the State Subjects Rule is almost the only substantial
regulation which is left over from the erstwhile autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, although
article 370 is still part of the Indian constitution. In Kashmir, article 370 has become a symbol
of what is largely considered a betrayal and encroachment of India upon the state.
Everybody I asked in Srinagar about the reasons for the mass protest quoted Article 370,
children included.

The state government had taken pains not to violate the State Subjects Regulation in its
order to divert the forest land to the Shrine Board. Thus, the order specified explicitly that
the diversion of land was only temporary and did not include a change of proprietorship. In
public perception, however, this clause of the diversion order was regarded with great
suspicion, and even if it was conceded that the order did not entail a direct and explicit
violation of State Subject Regulation, it was alleged that this order was only a first step and
that the next step might be the full transfer of the land to the Shrine Board. The protest
against the order was in the first instance an expression of mistrust towards the state
government and the whole formal political setup of the Jammu and Kashmir. This mistrust
was nurtured by the fact that the diversion of the land, which had been considered by
various government departments since the year 2001, was kept secret until it leaked to the
press. Further, it turned out that the Shrine Board had actually applied for much more land,
namely for about 450 acres. It was considered that the diversion of 100 acres was just a trial
balloon to test the reaction of the people. Rumours had it that the Indian government was
to settle Indians on the land in order to “change the demography of the state”. Palestine’s
occupation by Israel was referred to as a warning example and the protest in Kashmir was
termed as “intifada” by the local press.10 Changing the demography of the state by settling
Hindus there as well as the abrogation of article 370, including the state subjects rule, has
since long been on the Hindu nationalist agenda, voiced by the BJP, its predecessor, the Jana

6
This was the result of a protest movement known as „Kashmir for the Kashmiris“, led by Kashmiri Pandits who
demanded restrictions against foreigners, especially Punjabis, in Jammu and Kashmir State. In 1927, a restrictive
definition of state subject status was put in force and at the same time non-state subjects were barred from
acquiring land and entering public service in the state (Bazaz 1954: 145f, Rai 2004: 249ff.). For the 1927
definition of “state subject” see Anand 2004: 25.
7
Also in Azad Kashmir the state subjects rule is still mostly enforced with regard to land holdings, while it was
abolished in Gilgit-Baltistan in the early 1970s.
8
Anand 2004: 99. There is a certain controversy when precisely Hari Singh signed the document and whether he
signed it at all. See Lamb 1997, chapter 6, and Schofield 1996: 148ff.
9
Bose 2003: 68f.
10
Daily Etalaat, 25 June 2008.
Sangh, and other organisations of the “Sangh Parivar”11 (Behera 2000: 174). The Praja
Parishad, the Jammu division of the Jana Sangh, demanded the abrogation of article 370
already in 1952 (Behera 2002: 348).
Further, the Sri Amarnath Shrine Board was clearly perceived as a non-state subject body, as
an outsider institution. The Shrine Boad was created by a Jammu and Kashmir act in 2001 on
the model of the Sri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board which maintains a famous shrine in
Jammu city. According to this act, the Shrine Board is not answerable to the Government of
Jammu and Kashmir. Only two of the board’s members are Kashmiris. Its ex-officio chairman
is the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir State who is also a non-state subject, deputed by the
Government of India. From the establishment of the Shrine Board until 25 June 2008 the
governor/chairman was Srinivas Kumar Sinha, a retired army general who was said to be of
certain Hindu nationalist leanings. Under his chairmanship, the Amarnath pilgrimage was
decisively extended.

Amarnath is a cave shrine in a remote high mountain valley north-east of Srinagar which
during the summer months contains an ice stalagmite. Hindus consider this a Shiva lingam, a
symbolic embodiment of Lord Shiva. According to local history, the cave was discovered in
the mid-19th century by a Muslim shepherd.12 The cave became an important place of
pilgrimage for Kashmiri Hindus, most of which belong to the Shaivite branch of Hinduism.
For decades, the family of the cave’s discoverer took part in the organisation of the
pilgrimage and received a share of the donations made to the shrine. Up to the late 1980s,
the Amarnath yatra (pilgrimage) was mainly a Kashmiri affair with a few thousand yatris
(pilgrims) every year. After the beginning of the insurgency in the Kashmir valley in 1989, the
shrine attracted the attention of Indian Hindu nationalists. For the Hindutva vision, Kashmir
is an inalienable part of the sacred geography of India (Chaturvedi 2005). In 1991, the BJP
staged the Ekta Yatra (pilgrimage of unity) that was to criss-cross India from Kanyakumari in
the south to Kashmir in the north in order to mark it as Hindu territory. Due to the
insurgency in the Jammu and Kashmir, the yatra was stopped by the army before entering
Jammu and only a nominal detachment of the yatris under the leadership of the then BJP-
president M. M. Joshi was flown into Srinagar for a hurried flag hoisting ceremony on the
city’s Lal Chowk (Jaffrelot 1996: 450, Behera 2002: 356f). After this “humiliation” of Hindu
nationalism in Kashmir, its propagators focused on the Amarnath yatra which was
considered an instrument to claim Kashmir as a Hindu space. Hindus from all over India were
called to go to Amarnath. In 1999, when the Indian government was headed by the BJP, the
government’s press information bureau wrote about the yatra: “The yearning for Moksha
(salvation) can move the devotees to the challenging heights of Kashmir. This will also be a
befitting gesture of solidarity with our valiant soldiers who have been fighting the enemy to
defend our borders.”13 On their way to the cave, some yatris shouted slogans like
„Hindustan me rahna hoga, Hindu bankar rahna hoga“ – “You (i.e. the Muslims of Kashmir)
will have to remain within India, you will have to become Hindus.”14 After the mid 1990s,
when the Amarnath yatra was disrupted by the insurgency, the numbers of pilgrims rose
manifold. In summer 2008, 500,000 pilgrims were expected to go to the cave. Gautam
Navlakha (2008) comes to the conclusion that the yatra has been “cultivated by the state”.

11
Sang Parivar is a collective term for Hindu nationalist organisations like BJP, VHP and RSS.
12
Meanwhile, however, Hindus claim that the cave has been a place of worship for more than 5000 years. See
the shrine’s website at: http://www.amarnathyatra.org/legend.htm (accessed 12 July 08).
13
See http://pib.nic.in/feature/fe0799/f1507992.html (accessed 11 July 2008).
14
On such slogans in the context of communalism see also Pandey 2006: 36.
The shrine board not only increased the numbers of pilgrims but extended also the period of
pilgrimage from two weeks to two months. The protestors pointed out that the number of
pilgrims was a serious threat to the fragile high mountain environment in which the yatra
takes place. The stream of pilgrims pollutes the Lidder river which is the only source of fresh
water for the local publication. Newspapers reported how much litter the yatris produced
everyday while facilities for collecting the waste are lacking. Further, the Shrine Board largely
sidelined Kashmiris in the yatra business as the Shrine Board organised transport, food and
accommodation for the pilgrims. Local servicemen like the ponywalas who transport elderly
yatris to the cave have to pay a commission to the Shrine board. All this contributed to the
accusation that the Shrine Board acted as a “State within the State”.

The land that was diverted to the Shrine Board was reserved forest land which is generally
exempt from all kind of use. The Action Committee Against the Land Transfer alleged that
the strict legal and administrative procedures that have to be followed in order to divert
such land and which involve a number of controlling bodies and mechanisms had been
violated. The state government emphasised that that the diversion of land was temporary
and that only prefabricated, temporary structures were allowed on the diverted land. But
the CEO of the Shrine Board, Arun Kumar, who was also the principal secretary of Governor
Sinha made a statement that the land had been transferred permanently to the Board and
that permanent constructions were being erected. Further, the Action Committee published
photographs of concrete structures and foundations that had been built on the land even
before it had been diverted to the Shrine board.15

The protestors, including political leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Omar
Farooq of two rivalling Hurriyat Conference factions, as well as Yasin Malik of the Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), emphasised that the protest was not directed against the
yatra and the yatris as such, but against the diversion of land and against the politics of the
Shrine Board. In fact, the yatra remained largely unaffected by the protests and the strike
because most of the yatris were transported by busses organised by the Shrine Board. When
the yatra was suspended for some days during the period of protest it was due to hazardous
weather conditions, not due to the political movement. The leaders of the movement called
the protestors not to target yatris or other Indian tourists in the Valley. In fact, attacks on
pilgrims were limited to a very few incidents.16 When tourists and yatris faced the problem
of getting food because all restaurants in Srinagar were closed, Geelani asked the local
population to offer food to the stranded Indians.17 Yasin Malik later went to Baltal, one of
the starting points for the trek to Amarnath cave, and distributed food among the yatris,
which was amply highlighted in the local press.18 Thus, the organisers of the movement took
pains to avoid any appearance of a communalist, anti-Hindu movement.

The pressure of the protest movement was so strong that it could not be simply repressed.
On the contrary, violent repression of the protests by troops and police added to the anger
of the people and escalated mobilisation. Thus, the response to the first casualty was the

15
Greater Kashmir, 30 June, 2008
16
On 24th June, the yatra route was blocked at Ganderbal (Rising Kashmir, 25th June 08) and stones were pelted
at one bus of yatris at Nishat Bagh near Srinagar.
17
Greater Kashmir, 28th June 08.
18
Greater Kashmir, 4th July 08.
total shutdown of all shops in Srinagar and whenever news and rumours of casualties and
injuries circulated, new demonstration were taken out. The government had to respond
politically to the movement. The first response came from the People’s Democratic Party
(PDP), the party that ruled Jammu and Kashmir State together with the Congress Party since
the elections of 2002. During the first three years of rule, the coalition had been headed by
Mufti Mohammad Sayeed of the PDP as Chief Minister and after that the office of the Chief
Minister was taken over by Ghulam Nabi Azad of Congress. The coalition’s forest minister
was a PDP man, who insisted that the controversial land issue had never come to his desk.
The PDP demanded that Azad revoked the order and threatened to pull out of the coalition.
On June 29, 2008, chairperson Mehbooba Mufti declared the end of the coalition.

On 25 June, Governor Sinha’s term expired and he was replaced by N. N. Vohra. Vohra was
not an ex-army man and he was well acquainted with the situation in Jammu and Kashmir as
he had acted as an interlocutor of the Government of India with the Hurriyat Conference
and the JKLF in Kashmir. Being the new governor, he also became the chairman of the Sri
Amarnath Shrine Board. As the Board’s chairman, he issued a statement that the Shrine
Board could do without the diverted land if the government would provide facilities to the
Amarnath yatris. On 1st July, Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad declared that the government
revoked the land order. The strike was called off and the people of Srinagar again came out
in the streets again, this time for a joyful celebration of their victory. In fact, this was the first
time in Kashmir for decades, that a protest movement had forced the government to revoke
a controversial decision. A few days later Chief Minister G. N. Azad resigned for lack of
support in the state’s Legislative Assembly.

Yet this was not the end of the story. Already before the revocation of the land order, Hindu
nationalist activists and organisations in Jammu and in India had pressurized the government
not to cancel the transfer. On 24th June, activists of the Hindu nationalist Bharatyia Janata
Party (BJP) blocked the Jammu-Srinagar highway and threatened to stop all supplies to the
Kashmir Valley. A day later, the state president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) called for
the army to take over in Jammu and Kashmir.19 After the revocation of the land diversion,
violent protest of Hindu nationalists escalated in Jammu. Curfew was declared in the city,
but that did not stop violence and agitation for days. In contrast with the protestors in the
Kashmir Valley who had fought with the army and the police, Hindu nationalist activists in
Jammu directly attacked Muslims. Houses and mosques were attacked, Muslims were
beaten in the streets and their vehicles set on fire. The highway to Srinagar was blocked and
supply to the valley cut off. The Hindu nationalists called for a bandh (strike) all over India.
Further, they called for disrupting haj and other Muslim pilgrimages in retaliation for the
abrogation of the land transfer. Agitation and Hindu nationalist violence in Jammu went on
for weeks. Kashmir’s lifeline, the Jammu-Srinagar highway, was blocked, causing a great
damage especially to the valley’s fruit growers who were unable to transport their produce
to the markets in India. A shortage of certain food items and medicine ensued in the valley.
In order to voice their protest against the blockade, people in Srinagar took to the streets
again. On August 12, large protest marches started towards the Line of Control, threatening
to cross over to Muzaffarabad if the Jammu-Srinagar Highway remained blocked. Police,
army and paramilitaries violently stopped the crowds, killing several demonstrators. On
August 22, about one million people gathered at Srinagar’s Eidgah to protest against Indian
domination. The organisers considered this large demonstration as a plebiscite against
19
Rising Kashmir, 26 June 2008.
Indian rule. Subsequently, Srinagar and other cities in the Kashmir valley were put under
strict curfew which lasted until the beginning of Ramadan in early September.

According to the general secretary of the Action Committee Against Land Transfer the
protest movement in Kashmir – in contrast to the protest in Jammu – was a secular
movement. It did not have a religious cause and it did not target adherents of other
religions. Yet the Indian public – outside of Kashmir – perceived the movement as simply
being communalist. The Muslim activists of Kashmir were put on a level with the Hindu
nationalists of Jammu. In an article in the news magazine Frontline, journalist Praveen Swami
equated VHP-leader Praveen Togadia with Jamaat Islami chairman and Hurriyat Conference-
leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, writing that “while Geelani and Togadia may be enemies, the
fact is that they are enemies with the same cause” (Swami 2008). This is a quite distorted
view, it seems, given that Togadia called for cutting off supplies to the Valley while Geelani
called for feeding Hindu pilgrims and tourists in Kashmir.

Politics, Religion and the Secular

Religion and politics are deeply entangled in all parts of Kashmir, as in South Asia in general.
The spectrum of this entanglement is very broad. Political activities, symbols and ideologies
may draw directly on religious practices, symbols and ideas. Politics may be used to further
particular religious ideologies, communities or organisations. Or politics may intend to
counter the “intrusion” of the religious into politics. If there is anything in South Asian
politics that could be termed “secular” or “secularist”, it is these efforts to develop a sphere
of politics beyond the reach of religion. Yet also this endeavour testifies for the deep
enmeshment of politics and religion on the Subcontinent. This kind of secularism is as much
contesting the concatenation of religion and politics as it is itself contested by ideologies and
perspectives that are based upon the close connection between the two. Thus, there is no
autonomous secular political sphere. India is perhaps the most obvious example for this:
Although India is largely still dubbed a “secular state”, “secularism” has become but one
disputed political perspective. In India, secularism has come under heavy pressure of Hindu
nationalism that rather successfully endeavours to inscribe the Hindu-Muslim dichotomy
into the Indian body politic and to exclude Muslims from the Indian nation.

In relation with Kashmir and Kashmiris also the secular perspective in India subscribes to this
dichotomy. In spite of all emphases by the Action Committee Against Land Transfer in
Kashmir that its protest and resistance did not have a religious but a “genuinely” political
cause, the Indian national mainstream English press, which can be considered a stronghold
of South Asian secularism, could not but regard the protest as “Islamist” and put it at a par
with the Hindu nationalism of BJP, VHP and RSS. The larger Indian public was mostly unable
to see that a political and nationalist movement took place in Kashmir which could not
simply be equated with a religious, Islamic or Islamist movement. What could be regarded as
secular politics in the valley is not recognized as such by the Indian centre and public. That
“Muslims are secular by mind”, as the general secretary of the protest movement insisted, is
simply unimaginable from this point of view. The emphasis that “Muslims are secular by
mind” may seem oxymoronic to an outside observer but it is a necessary emphasis in a
discursive environment which is dominated by the conviction that Muslims are inherently
religious and that the Kashmir dispute is a rebellion of Muslims against Hindus or against
secularism. Given that those who protested were all Muslims and that the target of the
protests was a Hindu pilgrimage, one could argue that the secular commitment of the
protestors as well as the distribution of food by Muslims to Hindus was only staged
strategically in order to pose as secularists and to mask a basically communalist, Islamic
commitment. Probably, this is true for a certain number of the protestors who, for instance,
did not hesitate to shout “Allahu akbar!” at a “secular” demonstration. Yet such a
perspective would essentialize secularism as essentially non- or even anti-religious and
contradict Talal Asad’s (2003) argument that religion and secularism are intimately
interconnected. The interesting point is that none of the Indian media voices saw it
necessary to “unmask” the “secular pose” of the Muslim demonstrators but took for granted
that, to paraphrase the general secretary, Muslims are religious by mind. Thus, secularism
turns out to be highly specific to particular contexts and religions. While from the Indian
point of view it is not a contradiction in itself to be Hindu and secularist at the same time,
the Indian perspective as it becomes apparent in the discourse about Kashmir rather
precludes the idea that Muslims who are protesting against the government in Kashmir can
be secular at all.

Secular politics in Azad Kashmir and the British Kashmiri Diaspora

While in India the touchstone for the relation between politics and religion is the situation of
religious minorities, particularly Muslims, in a Hindu majority country, the issue in Pakistan is
the relation between politics and Islam. The founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah
postulated a Muslim nation but he did not propose an Islamic state. On the contrary, his
ideas about the state were quite “secular”.20 Islam, Muslims were important as a category by
default of the nation, without having a particular significance for political norms, values,
procedures and institutions. Yet from its inception, Pakistan drifted towards an increasing
Islamisation of the political. Parties that are considered as being “secular” in Pakistan today
– most importantly the Pakistan People’s Party, but also the various current embodiments of
the Muslim League – are not secular because they disregard Islam and propose a complete
separation of the political and the religious spheres, but because they continue to regard
Islam as a category by default of the nation and oppose those (“Islamist”) forces that
consider Islam as a pervasive norm and model for the political.

Islam as a category by default is the basis of Pakistani nationhood as well as of Pakistan’s

claims on Kashmir. Yet there are groups in the Pakistani controlled parts of Kashmir, in Azad
Kashmir as well as in the Northern Areas, which deny that being Muslim is sufficient for
Pakistan’s claims on Kashmir. According to them, religion is an insufficient basis of
nationhood. They propose a nationhood independent from Pakistan. Rejecting the Two-
Nations-Theory, such groups exhibit a different model of being secular than the secular
parties of Pakistan. Within Azad Kashmir, Pakistan’s control over the area was never totally
undisputed. Followers of Sheikh Abdullah, the leader of the pre-1947 political mobilisation
and the first Prime Minister of post-partition Kashmir, organized in the 1950s in Azad
Kashmir a small party called Awami Conference. In 1965, activists of the Awami Conference
established the Plebiscite Front in Azad Kashmir. The party took its name from the Plebiscite
Front that had been established ten years earlier in Indian Administered Kashmir by
followers of Sheikh Abdullah, when the Sheikh had been imprisoned by the Nehru
government (Bose 2003: 73). Both groups raised the demand that the future of the State

20
In his speech on the occasion of the inauguration of Pakistan’s constituent assembly on August 11, 1947,
Jinnah endorsed the separation of religion and the state. See the quotation in Haqqani 2005: 12f.
should be decided through a referendum as envisaged by the UN resolutions on Kashmir to
which both India and Pakistan had agreed. The two Plebiscite Fronts were organizationally
totally separate (Khaliq Ansari 1989: 8). The Plebiscite Front of Azad Kashmir emphatically
demanded a third option for the referendum beside accession with either India or Pakistan:
the independence of Jammu and Kashmir State. Also a students’ organisation, the Jammu
and Kashmir National Students’ Federation (NSF) that was formally established in 1967,
joined in the demand for independence.21

From the Plebiscite Front derives a line of secular-nationalist commitment in Azad Kashmir
which extended beyond the Subcontinent. Already in the late 1960s the Plebiscite Front had
sympathisers among the quickly growing diasporic Kashmiri community in Britain which
originated from the southern part of Azad Kashmir, especially from the district of Mirpur. In
1977, two leaders of the Plebiscite Front who had come to Britain, Abdul Khaliq Ansari and
Amanullah Khan established the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in Birmingham.
The JKLF was meant to be an overseas support for the Plebiscite Front, but later Amanullah
Khan, the chairman of the JKLF, brought the organisation to Azad Kashmir and made it a rival
of the Plebiscite Front. Like the Plebiscite Front, the JKLF portrayed the Kashmir issue as a
national issue and Kashmir as a multi-religious nation to which Muslims, Hindus and
members of other religions belonged. While Pakistan was considered as a “friend” of the
Kashmiri nation, the purpose of the JKLF was not accession with the state but the
independence of Kashmir from both India and Pakistan. In the mid-1980s, the JKLF became a
significant force among (Azad) Kashmiris in Britain. Towards the end of the decade, with the
support of Pakistani intelligence agencies, the JKLF extended into Indian administered
Kashmir and initiated the uprising there.

Beside this secular nationalist line of mobilization originating from Azad Kashmir, there is a
second string of secular politics that can be termed leftist. Leftist Kashmiri activists who were
related with the Communist Party of Pakistan had since the late 1960s some influence within
the National Students Federation. Much later, in the 1990s, a number of leftist parties were
established in Azad Kashmir. In the British Kashmiri diaspora leftist Kashmiri mobilization
started in the early 1970s. Its main embodiment became the Kashmiri Workers’ Association
(KWA). The KWA always remained a small group which nevertheless introduced a number of
significant and influential changes in Kashmiri politics in the UK. For instance, activists of the
KWA started to call Azad Kashmir “Pakistani Occupied Kashmir” (POK) in analogy with the
term “Indian Occupied Kashmir” (IOK) which is generally used in Pakistan to refer to the
territories administered by India.22 Further, the KWA started to use Pahari, the regional
language of Mirpur, in its public meetings instead of Urdu, Pakistan’s national language.

In Britain, secular nationalist and leftist politics merged to a certain extent in the Kashmiri
National Identity Campaign (KNIC), established in 1998. For administrative purposes,
Kashmiris were categorised as Pakistanis in the UK. Yet the KNIC demanded the recognition
of Kashmiris as a separate ethnic community in Britain, different from Pakistanis. According
to estimates, the great majority of the approximately one million Pakistanis in Britain are
Kashmiris. British Pakistanis understood the demand for the recognition of Kashmiris as a
kind of independence claim within the diaspora, and indeed the KNIC consisted to a great

21
The pro-independence perspective goes generally unmentioned in the very scant academic literature on Azad
Kashmir (e.g. Rose 1992, Hussain 2005)
22
“POK” is also the designation which is officially used in India to refer to Azad Kashmir.
extent of independence-oriented activists. The campaign was strictly opposed by the Urdu-
press in Britain and by pro-Pakistani Kashmiri parties like the Muslim Conference in the UK.
While the KNIC was very successful at the municipal level – by now most cities with a
substantial Kashmiri population have recognise the group – it failed until today to achieve
recognition at the British national level.

The strength of secular, independence-oriented groups in Azad Kashmir cannot be

ascertained in any reliable way as they are not allowed to take part in the elections of the
Legislative Assembly. The Interim Constitution Act of Azad Kashmir stipulates that “no person
or political party in Azad Jammu and Kashmir shall be permitted to propagate against, or
take part in activities prejudicial or detrimental to, the ideology of the State’s accession to
Pakistan.”23 All candidates for the Legislative Assembly are required to sign a paper that
declares their allegiance to Pakistan. Before the last two elections, pro-independence
candidates of various parties filed nomination papers, leaving the declaration of loyalty
towards Pakistan blank. Their papers were always rejected. The number of parties as well as
the rallies and meetings they organise in quite adverse conditions, however, testify that
there is a lively scene of independence oriented politics in Azad Kashmir.

The other part of Pakistani controlled Kashmir: Secular politics in Gilgit-Baltistan

Beside Azad Kashmir, there is a second and much larger part of erstwhile Jammu and
Kashmir State which is controlled by Pakistan: the territories which since 1972 are officially
called Northern Areas of Pakistan, also known as Gilgit-Baltistan. While Azad Kashmir is
formally a separate state, Gilgit-Baltistan is directly administered by Pakistan. In many
respects, the administration of the Northern Areas resembles a continuation of colonial rule
(see Sökefeld 2005). In November 1947, local paramilitary troops, the Gilgit Scouts, revolted
against the rule of the Maharaja of Kashmir, established a provisional government and
demanded the accession to Pakistan (Sökefeld 1997a). Two weeks later, Pakistan took over
the administration. Until today, however, Gilgit-Baltistan has not become a de jure part of
Pakistan but remained in limbo of being a “disputed territory”. The people of the Northern
Areas have no political representation in Pakistan. Since the 1950s, political groups and
activists have struggled in vain for turning the area into a regular part of Pakistan (Sökefeld
1997b). The history of Gilgit-Baltistan from 1947 can be written as the story of increasing
alienation from Pakistan. After the mid 1960s, when young people from the area started to
go to Pakistan for the purpose of higher education, it became obvious that Gilgit-Baltistan
was only rhetorically a part of Pakistan but not politically in the sense of political
participation.

Gilgit-Baltistan is different from Azad Kashmir also in its religious composition. While the
great majority of the population of Azad Kashmir is Sunni, there are three religious
communities in the Northern Areas: Shias form the majority, Sunnis come next, and Ismailis
third. Since the mid-1970s, Gilgit town suffers heavily from periodically occurring violent
“sectarian tensions” (Sökefeld 1997b: 203ff). Popular discourse in the region links religious
violence with Pakistani domination. According to this view, the conflict was instigated by the
Government of Pakistan, by sending radical ulema to the town, as a divide and rule-strategy.
Discord between Shias and Sunnis increased with General Zia-ul Haq’s policy of Islamisation.

23
Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution Act, 1974, section 7(2) (Azad Government of the State of
Jammu and Kashmir 2006: 6).
This policy was limited to Islamisation according to Sunni tenets only and deliberately
disregarded Shia perspectives. For Shias in Gilgit-Baltistan, Sunni Islam became an
embodiment of Pakistani domination. In the 1980s, especially Shias raised the voice to
demand a change in the political status of the Northern Areas. In May 1988, in a particularly
violent event, more than hundred Shias were killed by Sunnis in villages around Gilgit
without police or army attempting to stop the violence. After this massacre, an anti-
Pakistani nationalist discourse emerged portraying Gilgit-Baltistan as a nation that is
different from both Pakistan and Kashmir and that is entitled to national self-
determination.24 The demand for independence was first raised by the Balawaristan
National Front (BNF), a group which also coined a new name for the area, “Balawaristan”,
i.e. the “country of heights”. Other groups followed suit (see Sökefeld 1997b: 297ff, Sökefeld
1999). The experience of violent sectarianism in Gilgit undermined the idea that a nation
could be established on the fundament of Islam. The new nationalism rejected the Two
Nations-Theory, as in the following quotation from the BNF:

“Religion and nation are two different things. Two brothers can adopt two different
religions but their nationality and race cannot be changed. (…) [The] creation of
Pakistan is noting but an illusion. Pakistan is based on a false two nation [sic] theory
could not survive for 25 years” (Abdul Hamid Khan 2001: 67).

In Gilgit-Baltistan, the relationship between Islam and the nation has been inverted by now:
Islam is no longer considered the fundament of a Pakistani, Muslim nation. Instead, a not
religiously constituted nation distinct from Pakistan, based on shared culture, history and
language25, is constructed in order to enable unity among the adherents of different Islamic
sects in the area. Nationalism in Gilgit-Baltistan refers to and accommodates religious
pluralism as does secular nationalism in Azad Kashmir. Nationalism in Gilgit-Baltistan can be
considered secular in that it rejects religion as basis of nation-building and of political
affiliation in general. It demands that different religious affiliation should not be a source of
division and emphasises the unity of the nation across the religious divide.

Secular Kashmiri activism against the orthodoxy of the Kashmir dispute

The orthodoxy which is upheld by the state and the media in Pakistan is that Islam is the
natural fundament of the Pakistani nation. This orthodoxy has almost become doxa in
Pakistan – especially when it comes to the country’s claim on Kashmir. Yet this orthodoxy is
questioned by the secular nationalist or leftist groups in Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.
These groups and parties differ in many points (including the question of whether Gilgit-

24
While secular-nationalist groups in Azad Kashmir and the Kashmiri diaspora challenge the Karachi
Agreement of 1949 which handed over the Northern Areas to the government of Pakistan and demand that the
area comes under the administration of Azad Kashmir, the great majority of political activists in the Northern
Areas reject this claim and insist that in 1947 the Gilgit Scouts and the people of the place revolted against
Kashmir, severing thereby the political relationship with Jammu and Kashmir State. Only a minority of Sunni
activists agree to the claims of Azad Kashmiris. On the relationship between Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Kashmir
see Sökefeld 2008.
25
It might seem contradictory that the nation of an extremely multi-lingual area should be established on the
basis of “shared” language. Yet the nationalist discourse emphasises simply that the nationals of Balawaristan
“share” a linguistic condition in that their language is neither Urdu, which stands for Pakistan, nor Kashmiri,
which stands for Kashmir (Sökefeld 1999). In fact, however, Urdu is the lingua franca that enables
communication across the many linguistic boundaries in Gilgit-Baltistan.
Baltistan is or should be a part of Kashmir or not) but they are unanimous in the conviction
that religion and politics should be kept separate and that putting politics under the
imperative of religion results in oppression and violence. They reject the idea that shared
religious affiliation could be the basis of the body politic. According to their understanding,
putting politics under the imperative of Islam as a category by default is in the first place a
power strategy employed by Pakistan. Yet secular Kashmiri activist reject not only the
Pakistani position but also the Indian perspective. According to their view, India has in the
last instance joined hands with Pakistan in emphasising the role of religion and in defining
the insurgency in Indian administered Kashmir as a religious – Muslim or Islamist – rebellion.
They accuse India of fanning conflict among religious communities in Kashmir. Shams
Rehman, a Kashmiri activist in Britain who was member of the JKLF and the KWA and who
took a leading role in the KNIC wrote:

“Today if given the choice, the majority of the Kashmiri people would want an
independent country and it is this for which they are struggling. In some parts of
Kashmir the struggle is more advanced then [sic] in others. (…) In northern Pakistani
occupied Kashmir (Gilgit & Baltistan) and Southern Kashmir (“Azad Kashmir”) a whole
new generation of young men and women (…) struggle for the unification of their
country. This struggle has not received the whole hearted support of the people living
under Indian occupation of Jammu and Ladakh. The reason for this is that the rulers of
India and Pakistan have succeeded in polarising this struggle along religious lines. One
of the main lines of propaganda is that this is a Muslim struggle – one that is being
fought for accession to Pakistan. There is an element within Kashmir which does not
understand the true position of the people of Indian and Pakistan. Furthermore, these
people do not understand that in Kashmir, apart from Islam, there are other religions
and minorities. Just like Muslims, surely all Kashmiris have the same rights over their
own country. The main beneficiaries of the sectarian and communal divide are the
governments of India and Pakistan. India can trumpeted [sic] across the world that
there is no national struggle in Kashmir and that is merely religious unrest which
threatens Hindus and Buddhists. Pakistan on the other hand is similarly trying to divide
Kashmir along religious lines” (Rehman 1997/98, no pagination).

The goal of independent Kashmir and the idea of a Kashmiri nation are derived from the
conviction that a nation cannot be based on religion. This idea, in fact, even predates the
Kashmir dispute and had its most visible expression in the reorganization of Sheikh
Abdullah’s party All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference as All Jammu and Kashmir
National Conference in 1939.26 This means conversely that a nation can and must
accommodate people adhering to different religions. The Kashmiri nation is conceived by
leftists and secular-nationalists as a multi-religious nation. It is a political nation, in the first
place. Accordingly, secularism in the context of Kashmir means the constitution of a political
sphere which is independent of the sphere of religion to the extent of enabling the equal
participation and representation of people belonging to different religious communities.

This Kashmiri nationalism does not generally and necessarily reject religion. While many of
the leftists in Azad Kashmir and in the British Kashmiri diaspora introduce themselves as

26
Other activists pursued an even more determined secularist agenda. The Kashmiri pandit Prem Nath Bazaz, for
instance, left the National Conference because he felt that the party was not secular enough. See Bazaz 1954 and
Zutshi 2004: 280f.
“non-believers”, there are also very devout Muslims among secular-nationalists. In secular
nationalist discourse religion is generally restricted to the private life of individuals, but there
are also Islamic elements in public political practice. Again, “the secular” is not actually an
autonomous sphere. As a kind of micro ritual, the Islamic invocation Bismillah-i rahman-i
rahim (“In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate”) is often recited at the
beginning of speeches held at public meetings. Secular nationalism also has to create a space
for religion. A transnational TV channel which was established by secular nationalist activists
in Britain with the intention of giving Kashmiri identity a voice, recently adopted a number of
Islamic programmes. This was also regarded as a requirement of the economic viability of
the channel. All different segments of Kashmiri viewers have to be targeted in order to
achieve sufficient revenue.

In Indian administered Kashmir, the overlapping and perhaps interlocking of secular and
religious political commitments is even more obvious. In spite of being proposed as a non-
religious, political movement, the protests against the land transfer made frequent use of
Islamic symbolism. Beside “azadi!”, “Allah-u akbar!” was a very frequently raised slogan at
the demonstrations. One day, demonstrators hoisted green flags, symbolising Islam, on the
clock tower at Lal Chowk in Srinagar.27 And Srinagar’s stupendous Jamia Masjid (main
mosque) was a very important meeting point for the protest. Sayyid Ali Shah Geelani played
a crucial role in the movement. In fact those lawyers and journalists who knew about the
land diversion and who considered it a grave issue that required public protest, took efforts
to convince Geelani first of its significance. Geelani was then instrumental in mobilising the
general public. Geelani, who is invariably dubbed a “hardliner” by Indian sources, is a
veteran of the Kashmiri struggle. He is the leader of Kashmir’s Jamaat-i Islami,28 and that
one of the two rivalling Hurriyat Conferences in the Valley which is generally considered as
being pro-Pakistani. Even those Kashmiris who do not concur with Geelani’s general political
ideas respect him as an uncompromising leader. Geelani can hardly be called a “secularist”.
For him, Islam certainly plays a very important political role. But this does not mean that the
whole protest movement was only a secular pose over an Islamist core. Instead, it signifies
that there are issues which unite very different factions and perspectives of Kashmiri politics.
In fact, the conflict on the land transfer brought for the first time after four years the two
Hurriyat Conferences and their leaders, the “hardliner” Geelani and the “moderate” Mirwaiz
Omar Farooq, together on a shared platform.29

Conclusion
In writings about the Kashmir dispute, secular political mobilisation of Muslim Kashmiris is
frequently disregarded. Even when it is mentioned it is often not taken seriously. In a paper
that discusses different forms of nationalism in Kashmir, Ashutosh Varshney distinguishes
religious, secular and ethnic nationalism. He flatly identifies religious nationalism with
Pakistan, secular nationalism with India and ethnic nationalism with insurgent Muslims in

27
Interestingly, these flags were identified as Pakistani flags by the Indian press. They were, however, not
Pakistani flags as they lacked the white field of the Pakistani flag which symbolises non-Muslim religious
minorities in Pakistan. This misrecognition again speaks volumes about the distorted view of the Indian media.
See for example Times of India online, 28th June 2008:
http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/File_Amarnath_land_row_turns_ugly/articleshow/3174004.cms
(accessed 16th July, 2008).
28
On the Jamaat-I Islami in Kashmir see Sikand 2002.
29
See Greater Kashmir, 20th June 2008.
the Kashmir valley. In a footnote he concedes that Kashmiri nationalism in the valley is
secular, too. Still, he labels the movement as “ethnic nationalist” because it aims at
separation from “secular” India (Varshney 1991: 1003, note 5) and because he regards it as
being limited to Muslim valley Kashmiris and as excluding both other religious communities
and Muslims from other parts of Kashmir like Jammu or Azad Kashmir.30 This is a too limited
view, as we have seen. There are “secular” movements in other parts of Kashmir, too, and at
least some of them project a Kashmiri nation that cuts across and transcends ethnic and
religious boundaries within erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir State.31

The Kashmir issue is much more complex than the orthodox view on the problem concedes.
It is neither simply a conflict between India and Pakistan nor an issue between religion/Islam
on one hand and secularism on the other. Yet to portray it as such serves the purposes of
both states as it effectively silences those Kashmiri perspectives which challenge both Indian
and Pakistani claims. In the 1980s and early 1990s Kashmiri nationalists, especially those of
the JKLF, considered Pakistan as a kind of natural ally for their purposes. But when Pakistani
agencies shifted their support to Islamist militants (“jihadis”) in Kashmir, most nationalists
were alienated from Pakistan.32 “Secular” Kashmiri nationalists reject the claims of both
India and Pakistan on Kashmir. It is perhaps questionable to apply the label “secular” or
“secularist” to the Kashmiri context because these labels are only very rarely used by the
actors to which I have referred in this text as a self-designation. To dub them as “secular”
might be regarded as an imposition. Yet I think it is significant to point out that there are
political movements, ideas and practices in Kashmir which cannot be reduced to religious
motives and affiliations. Further, it is significant that many of the actors involved emphasise
themselves that their activities are not bound by religion, and that some of them explicitly
reject the entanglement of religion and politics. As emphasised before, I do not claim that
their movements, ideas and practices are autonomous and totally separate from religion
but, I would like to repeat, they cannot be reduced to religion.
In recent years, secularism has come under pressure. From European perspectives, the
accomplishments of secularism in the modern world are seen as being threatened by
politico-religious movements like Islamism but also US-American Evangelicalism. The world
that according to Max Weber was gradually disenchanted in the process of modernization
appears to undergo a powerful re-enchantment. Historicizing “the secular”, Talal Asad
(2003) has argued that secularism has roots in religion and that secularism and religion
continue to be intertwined. He challenges the view that the secularisation thesis is being
proven wrong by a strong upsurge of politico-religious movement in the contemporary
world by pointing out that religion had always played a significant role in politics, secular
politics included. Conversely, many examples in Europe show that “secular” states are not as
secular, that is, as separate from a religious domain, as they claim and appear to be. In
Germany, for instance, the two biggest Christian churches enjoy particular recognition and

30
The greater section of Azad Kashmir was part of Jammu province before 1947. Varshney’s paper was written
before Pakistan started to strongly support Jihadi/Islamist mobilisation in Indian controlled Kashmir.
31
This does certainly not mean that this projection of a Kashmiri nation is generally accepted by different groups
in Kashmir. Many groups that are claimed as part of the nation by the position that is examined here, entertain
their own political (and national) projects. These include Buddhist Ladakhis who struggle for the separation of
Ladakh from Jammu and Kashmir state, Kashmiri Pandits in the valley who envisage their own territory called
Panun Kashmir, yet also, as I have shown in this paper, groups in Gilgit-Baltistan.
32
On this shift see Sikand 2001. Today, most sections of the JKLF are equally critical of Pakistan as of India.
Only one faction, the one which is still headed by Amanullah Khan, maintains closer ties with Pakistan. In
Britain, Amanullah’s JKLF is part of the pro-Pakistani Rabita Committee, a combination of different groups
which propagate the accession of Kashmir with Pakistan.
protection by the state, and in Denmark the Folkekirken is literally a state church that
assumes certain tasks like the registration of births that are elsewhere undertaken by state
institutions. The prevalent alarmism about the upsurge of political religions needs to be put
into perspective. The examples of Germany and Denmark show that secularism is not always
as secular as it appears to be. The example of Kashmir, perhaps, shows conversely that
religion, Islam included, is not as powerful and all-pervasive as it is frequently assumed to be
and that even in spaces in which religion(s) do play a significant role in politics, “secular” – or
at least non-religious – political mobilisation is not totally erased. However, it shows also
that nation states and their dominant agents may have certain interests to portray particular
political movements as movements that are essentially driven by religious motives.
Following Asad’s argument that secularism and politics are intertwined, we need to
contextualise and position secularism in Kashmir. Far from being the essential “other” of an
equally essentialised religion, secularism is always specific; it is related to a particular
religious environment. Particular secularisms have their particular significant others.
Different kinds of secularism could then be distinguished according the specific dominant
religious other against which they need to assert themselves in a particular political context.
Muslim secularism – not a contradiction in terms – in Indian administered Kashmir needs to
be asserted against Hindu nationalism as well as against the “orthodox” Indian secularism
that is strongly tinged by unacknowledged Hinduism. Similarly, secularisms in Azad Kashmir
and in the Northern Areas need to hold their ground against the “orthodoxy” of a religiously
defined nation, as well as against Muslim sectarianism and diverse forms of political Islam.

Among South Asian authors most importantly Ashis Nandy (1998) has argued that secularism
is a kind of cultural imperialist idea, a European concept that was imposed on subcontinental
politics. I do not think that this is an argument against secularism because, after all, also
religion is (or was) a “Western” concept.33 It may be the case that at some point in time
secularism was an imperialist idea. Yet although ideas, like people, are hardly “free” in the
fullest sense of the world, they cannot generally be restricted to particular localities and
contexts. They travel, they are exchanged, and they certainly change thereby. I think it
would be difficult to argue today that among the political activists to whom I referred in this
paper “secularism” is simply a “Western import”. “Secular” politics in the Kashmiri context is
significant not as a kind of mimicking the West but as a reaction against the political uses to
which religions are put in South Asia.

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