Jammu in Flames and Kashmir Blockaded: And All About a Block of Ice
Yoginder Sikand
The on-going agitation in Jammu over the rescinding of orders allocating of stretch of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) in Kashmir now threatens to descend into full-scale communal violence. Several people have lost their lives in police firing on irate mobs. Government-owned property worth millions has been destroyed. Hindu and Muslim mobs have clashed in Doda, Poonch and Rajouri, which are now reeling under curfew. Dozens of houses belonging to Muslim Gujjars, one of the most poor communities in the state, have been set on fire in the Jammu region. BJP supporters have imposed an almost complete economic blockade of the Kashmir valley, blocking the only motorable road connecting Kashmir with the outside world. All about a piece of land and a block of ice high up in the uninhabited wastes in the mountains of Kashmir.
Amarnath, the block of ice in question, is a natural formation wedged in the corner of a cave, which, over the last few decades, has emerged as a popular pilgrimage site for some Hindus, who regard it as a holy lingam, a phallus-shaped object associated with the cult of Shiva. Interestingly, it is a relatively recently adopted object of devotion, discovered by a Muslim shepherd lad a little more than a century ago. A plethora of such relatively new pilgrimage centres have come up in Jammu and Kashmir in recent years on pieces of land where people claim to have discovered an ancient buried idol or to have witnessed the miraculous presence of some deity or the other. Some of them begin as centres of local pilgrimage but gradually, as they are popularised elsewhere, often by those behind them, they begin to attract pilgrims from beyond, and even from out of the state. Last year, when travelling in the forbidding mountains beyond Kishtwar in the Jammu
division, I came across a temple built some years ago by a man who claimed to have seen a vision of a particular goddess who, so he announced, had directed him to build a shrine for her at that spot. Over time, this temple had become the focus of a new pilgrimage circuit, one of its outcomes, if not one of its purposes, being to bless the man and his family with a lucrative source of income. When in Drass, just across the Zoji La in Kargil, some years ago I met a man (a Muslim, interestingly) who confided in me that he and some friends of his had invented and then circulated a tale that a nearby mountain-top marked the place where a female character of some Hindu legend had once meditated. In the hope, thereby, he added, of attracting hordes of credulous yatris and their money.
As its popularity has grown over the years, the Amarnath pilgrimage, too, has become closely intertwined with a host of economic and political interests. For the locals, all Muslims, the pilgrimage is an important source of income—as porters, muleteers and owners of wayside food-stalls. For Hindu tour operators and the priests who officiate at the shrine, it is their source of livelihood, as it is for thousands of itinerate mendicants. And so this has remained uninterrupted ever since Amarnath emerged as a major pilgrimage centre, with the state making concerted efforts to expand its popularity. Some years ago, the administration was even accused of manufacturing a fake phallus-shaped lingam when that year, probably due to global warming, the ice block had melted before the annual pilgrimage began. This provoked a major outcry, which soon died out. But the cumulative result of recent actions of the Government have so messed up things as to provoke
massive protests, both in Muslim-majority Kashmir and in Hindu-majority Jammu, that seem to be getting more deadly with each passing day.
The SASB, established by the then National Conference government in 2001, is headed by the Governor of the state, and his principal secretary is its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Under S.K Sinha, a retired senior army officer and till recently Governor of the state, it had made certain controversial decisions. In mid-2005, the CEO's wife, a senior officer in the forest department, granted permission to the SASB to use forest land for the pilgrimage. But because this was not in accordance with the law, the state government cancelled the order. Yet, a division bench of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court stayed the government's decision, and when, recently, the state cabinet approved the granting of this land for the use of the yatra, the issue snowballed into a mass agitation, that has assumed fiercely communal overtones.
In a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Gautam Navlakha, a keen commentator on Kashmir affairs, writes that the implications of the recent actions of the state and the ensuing agitations in both Jammu and in Kashmir are 'far-reaching'. The SASB, he says, 'runs a virtually parallel administration and acts as a 'sovereign body' ostensibly promoting Hindu interests. It has been instrumental, he argues, in rapidly increasing the number of pilgrims to Amarnath, which has risen sharply from 12,000 in 1989 to over 4,00,000 in 2007. In order to facilitate this, it has extended the period of the pilgrimage from 15 days to two and half months. The Board, Navlakha comments, has 'virtually taken over the functioning of the Pahalgam Development Authority, laying claims to
forest lands and constructing shelters and structures even on the Pahalgam Golf Course.' It has
has also staked claims to set up an 'independent' Amarnath Development Authority.
Already reeling under a sense of siege and fearful of their cultural, religious and ethnic identity being under grave threat, many Kashmiri Muslims saw the SASB as an instrument of the Indian or 'Hindu' state. In such a context, the state's decision to hand over the land to the Board (the SASB is said to have actually asked for a chunk of land four times the size of what it was allotted) to facilitate the government's patronage of a Hindu pilgrimage in the heart of Kashmir, in a portion of the Valley inhabited almost wholly by Muslims, was seen as further evidence of what many Kashmiris feared—the gradual, state-sponsored Hinduisation of their homeland. On the other hand, however, that might be an unwarranted over-reaction. Surely, one might argue, the granting a patch of land for a Hindu pilgrimage might have no such consequences. On the contrary, it could have been projected as an important symbolic gesture on the part of Kashmiri Muslims to
Hindus in an effort to improve the severely strained inter-community relations in the war-torn state. By reacting in the violent way that they did to the granting of the land to the SASB, Kashmiri Muslim leaders have only helped further exacerbate the already tense relations between Muslims and Hindus and are, like their Hindu counterparts, cynically using the issue to whip up support for themselves.
But the threats to Kashmiri identity, whether real or imagined and blown out of proportion, are not the only reason why the government's decision to transfer the land to the Board provoked such protests. Another issue was the enormous environmental destruction wrought by the pilgrims on the fragile surrounding environment. Human faeces—of almost half a million pilgrims each year—and many tons of non-degradable refuse have reduced the Lidder river below the cave into something like a sewer. The river, fed by pure glacial streams from towering, snow-capped mountains, now contains hazardous chemicals far above the acceptable level. Navlakha points out that the same BJP, which is spearheading the ongoing agitation in Jammu, had this year imposed a strict limit of 150 pilgrims per day to the Hindu shrines of Gangotri and Gaumukh in the state of Uttarakhand, which it rules, in order to protect the environment. Yet, in the case of Amarnath, where the
environmental threat is equally, if not more, severe, no such caution has been suggested. On the contrary, the state, as well as Hindutva forces, Navlakha points out, are ardently advocating a massive extension and expansion of the pilgrimage. Surely, this discrepancy has nothing to do with any difference in the particular religious significance of Amarnath. Compared to the centuries'-old and well-established pilgrimage sites of Gangotri and Gaumukh, Amarnath is much less well-known. Might not this difference owe, as many Kashmiris believe, to the possibility that Amarnath is now being used as a potent tool by the state and Hindutva forces to pursue a particular agenda in Kashmir, one which has now rapidly escalated into what appears to be an uncontrollable situation?
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