BJP’s ‘Save Doda’ Campaign: Counter-Perspectives From Doda

(June 29, 2006)

Yoginder Sikand

In the wake of the dastardly killing of almost two dozen Hindus by unidentified gunmen in Kulhand (Doda) and Gulabgarh (Udhampur) in Jammu and Kashmir in early May this year, the BJP launched what it called an India-wide ‘Save Doda’ campaign. Doda, home to a roughly even Hindu and Muslim population, BJP spokesmen claimed, had been selected by Kashmiri militants and their Pakistani backers as their latest arena for ethnic cleansing of Hindus. Just as the Pandits had been forced to flee the Kashmir Valley, they insisted, Doda’s Hindus were being driven out of their ancestral homes through a systematic campaign of mass killings and intimidation.
Soon after the massacre in Kulhand, the sixteenth such incident of selective mass killings of Hindus in Doda by terrorists since 1990, BJP leaders, including party president Rajnath Singh and L.K.Advani, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, arrived in Doda town to launch the much-touted ‘Save Doda’ campaign. Presenting themselves as saviours of the Hindus of Doda, they demanded that the district be handed over to the Army, that the Government of India’s ‘soft’ policies on militancy be stopped forthwith and that the Village Defence Committees (VDCs), consisting mainly of Hindu youth, be strengthened by furnishing them with sophisticated weapons.
The ‘Save Doda’ campaign did not remain limited to Doda or to Jammu and Kashmir, however. Instead, it was envisaged by the BJP as a countrywide movement. Through this the BJP sought to lay claim to the mantle of all the Hindus of Jammu and Kashmir, and, more than that, of the Hindus of India as a whole, presenting itself as their sole spokesman and most ardent defender. The campaign was used as a means to assert the claim that the BJP alone was concerned about the Hindus of Doda and that all other parties were, in their own ways, hand-in-glove with the militants in Kashmir. The distinct impression was sought to be carefully cultivated that Hindu-Muslim communal polarisation was complete in Doda, that the Muslims of the district were all with the militants and their agenda of emptying the district of its Hindu denizens and that it was but a matter of time that all the Hindus of Doda would flee their homes if the Government and the Army did not step in to protect them, including by adopting harsh, repressive measures against the militants and their sympathisers.
There is, of course, an element of truth in some of these claims, but, as I discovered during a recent three-week stay in Doda, like all other half-truths it does not present the complete picture and can be used, as it has been, to advocate policies that, rather than helping the peace process in Kashmir, are calculated to make the conflict even more intractable. True enough, Hindus in parts of Doda, especially in the remote hamlets in the high mountains, do feel extremely insecure, particularly after the Kulhand massacre. But the argument that Doda is about to be denuded of its Hindu population and that there is complete communal polarisation in the district is quite far-fetched, and might well turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy if the Government does precisely what the BJP demands it should.
Following the Kulhand massacre, it is said that some 150 Hindu families from Kulhand and nearby hamlets fled their homes, seeking safety in Doda, Udhampur and Jammu. However, besides these families, few other Hindus actually have done so. When I visited Kulhand, some Hindu families were planning to leave out of fear, but several others had decided to stay on. As the son of a man slain in the attack put it, ‘We were born here and we will die here. How can we leave our lands and animals? And go where? Who will look after us if we flee? The Banias of Jammu, who back the BJP? Of course not. We’ll become beggars on the streets of Jammu if we leave’.
Another Hindu of the village, a young student, tells me, ‘The BJP’s ‘Save Doda’ campaign is actually making matters more insecure for us. The BJP-walas who came to Doda after the massacre, the big netas, are almost all from outside, from Udhampur, Batote, Jammu and Delhi. They are really not bothered about us. They gave us rations for a week and that was it and now they have forgotten about us. They used our people in front of television cameras and the press to claim to the world that they are so concerned about the Hindus of Doda only to gain political mileage for themselves, but they’ve done nothing more’.
This man’s brother interrupts him and explains, ‘They come here and whip up sentiments against Muslims and demand that the Government use more draconian measures against the militants, which can, as it has on occasion, result in targetting innocent Muslim civilians. Obviously, that would result in a backlash and not just the militants but also ordinary Muslims, with whom we have enjoyed cordial ties for centuries, many of who have nothing at all to do with militancy, might turn against us.’ ‘The BJP’s campaign’, he insists, ‘can only strengthen the hands of those militant groups who want to drive Hindus out of Doda’.
Elsewhere in Doda, in the Gandoh, Bhadarwah, Thathri, Doda and Kishtwar tehsils that I visited, I heard no reports of any significant migration of Hindus in the wake of the Kulhand killings. Hindus and Muslims seemed to be leading their lives in reasonable normality, that is, to the extent possible in the situation created by the lingering conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Unlike in many other parts of India, Hindus and Muslims in most places in Doda do not live in communally segregated localities. Hindu and Muslim shops are located in the same bazaars and, for the most part, Muslim and Hindu children study in the same schools and colleges. Although many Hindus in Doda speak of a pervasive sense of fear, so, too, do the Muslims, who, unlike the Hindus, face fear from both sides: from the militants as well as from the Army. Most of the civilians killed by militants in the last fifteen years in Doda, as in the Kashmir Valley, have been Muslims, a fact easily forgotten and one that is never mentioned in Hindutva (as well as Islamist) discourse about the Kashmir conflict, which simplistically projects the conflict as a Hindu versus Muslim affair.
Almost all the Hindus I met in Doda were certainly not planning to flee their homes, unlike what the BJP appeared to insist. ‘We are Rajputs’, says an elderly Kotwal from Bhadarwah, ‘and, unlike the Kashmiri Pandits, if the situation demands we’d rather fight and die here than flee our homes if we were forced to’. Making the same point, but using quite a different argument, a young Hindu shopkeeper from Kishtwar tells me, ‘ I’ m not going to leave Kishtwar. I have many Muslim friends and they all oppose what some militants are doing—killing innocent people, both Hindus and Muslims. Not all Muslims here are sympathisers of the militants. We make a distinction between the two, but the BJP brands all Muslims as pro-militant, thereby seeking to pit Hindus against Muslims. But that is not how we have related to each other for centuries.’ ‘Advani’, he goes on, ‘comes here and spews venom and goes away but it is we Hindus living here who have to bear the disastrous consequences of the BJP’s politics, based, as it is, on setting Hindus and Muslims against each other. The BJP is not interested in peace and communal harmony. Like the Islamists, they want to widen the communal divide and play politics in our name by claming to be our saviours’.
True, some militant groups might wish to denude Doda of all its Hindus in their desperate bid to establish what they dream of as dar al-islam, the ‘Abode of Islam’. True, too, there may well be some ‘ordinary’ Muslims in Doda who would like the Hindus of the district to leave. In that, however, they are hardly different from the numerous supporters of hardcore Hindutva, who would like nothing more than have all of India’s Muslims emigrate en masse to Pakistan or to distant Arabia. However, to argue, as the BJP appears to, that all the Muslims of Doda or even most of them want the district to be emptied of its Hindu population is completely fallacious.
The majority of the Muslims of the district, as well as the Hindus, would appear to want nothing more than to simply get on with their lives and their daily struggles for existence and survival in peace, being tired of the years of ongoing conflict in the region. That explains why most Muslims I met in Doda, even those who are decidedly pro-independence or pro-Pakistan (the latter being a shrinking minority), insist that they are opposed to the Hindus leaving Doda, something which they accuse the BJP of actually seeking to engineer in the name of protecting them. Some of them liken it to what they see as Jagmohan’s Hindutva-inspired ‘plot’ to drive the Pandits out of Kashmir in order to ‘defame’ the ongoing ‘movement’ and give it a ‘communal’ colour in the eyes of the world.
‘Not all militants are necessarily anti-Hindu as such, although some, such as those associated with fundamentalist groups like the Lashkar-i Tayyeba certainly are’, says a Hindu sarpanch from a village near Doda town. Local and Kashmiri militants, he says, are more accommodative and accepting of Hindus than Pakistani or Afghan militants, many of who are fired with fierce anti-Hindu hatred, he relates. ‘Generally speaking, local militants do not harm anyone, Hindu or Muslim, unless they suspect them to be Army informers or if they refuse to give in to their demands for food and shelter’, he tells me. ‘In fact’, he adds, ‘in Kulhand and in many other such remote villages, militants often visit Hindu houses for food, and the Hindus, out of fear, give them what they want. They refuse to tell the Army about the militants’ movements or else they would be killed’.
The sarpanch’s point is not completely far-fetched, as might be imagined. In the wake of the Kulhand massacre, noted Kashmiri separatist leaders, including Shabbir Shah and Yasin Malik, rushed to Doda and openly condemned the attacks. Even the firebrand Islamist Sayyed Ali Gilani, ardent advocate of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, sought to visit Doda to denounce the killings, but was stopped by the police. The deputy leader of the Jama‘at-i Islami of Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Qadir Wani, visited Kulhand, along with the amir of the Jama’at’s Doda unit, Ghulam Nabi Naik. There he condemned the killings, called for an impartial probe into the incident (a demand voiced by all the Hindus and Muslims I met in Doda) and announced that the Jama‘at was ready to bear the expense of the education and upbringing of three children who lost their fathers in the massacre. When I met him in Doda town, Wani handed me a copy of a recent issue of the Jama‘at’s Urdu-weekly Momin, which carried a note in bold letters denouncing the killings in no uncertain terms.
Contrary to what BJP spokesmen appear to insist, Hindu-Muslim relations in Doda are not as polarised as to warrant a massive out-migration of the Hindus from the district. Indeed, inter-community relations in the area are nothing as bad as in Gujarat today, where thousands of Muslims lost their lives in state-sponsored genocidal attacks some years ago, with many more being forced out of their homes and with most Muslims in the state now being forced to live in squalid ghettos in a state of perpetual fear.
If indeed inter-communal relations in Doda were half as bad as the BJP projects them to be (or, some might even say, wishes them to be, in order to bolster its claim of championing Hindu interests), how does one explain the continued tradition of sharing and solidarity across communal boundaries, hardly remarked upon in the press, that may Hindus and Muslims in Doda today continue to uphold despite almost two decades of militancy and conflict in the region? How does one explain the fact that soon after he heard of the killings in Kulhand, Khalid Suhrawardy, National Conference leader and Imam of Doda’s Jamia Masjid, roundly condemned the attacks from the loudspeaker of the mosque, called for a Doda-wide bandh (which was observed by Hindus and Muslims almost all over the district) and led a large group of Muslims and Hindus to Kulhand, an almost two-hour trek up the mountains, to provide relief and to commiserate with the relatives of the victims of the massacre? How, indeed, does one explain the maulvi I met in Kulhand in the house of a Dalit widow, whose son was slain in the massacre before her eyes, who bust into uncontrollable sobs as the woman narrated the gory events of the fateful night? Or, for that matter, the Muslim youth I spoke to in Kulhand who helped his Hindu fellow villagers cremate their dead the morning after the massacre had taken place? Surely, these cracks in the BJP’s argument are simply too wide to ignore.
Many Muslims I met in Doda are not ready to accept, in the absence of an impartial investigation, that militants were responsible for the Kulhand massacre. It might well have been the ubiquitous ‘agencies’, Pakistani or Indian, they say, who are active in the area, each pursuing their own agendas. Yet, they are unanimous in insisting that those responsible for the killings, no matter who the are, deserve to be severely punished. ‘The Qur’an says that to kill a single human being, irrespective of his or her religion, is tantamount to killing the entire humanity’, says a madrasa student who I met on my way to Kulhand. ‘If indeed some militants have done this’, he adds, ‘they have committed a heinous, ant-Islamic act and God shall never forgive them for this’. The same reference to this Qur’anic verse crops up in conversations with numerous other Muslims I have all over Doda, who use it to condemn the killings of innocents, Hindus and Muslims, no matter by whom—the militants or the Indian armed forces.
The Kulhand massacre has certainly instilled fear and dread among Kulhand’s Hindus, but they know that most of their Muslim fellow villagers are with them in their sorrow and loss. ‘Most of the people killed at the hands of militant groups in Doda have been Muslims’, a Hindu youth from the village reminds me. ‘And when the massacre took place in our village, local Muslims helped us cremate the dead’.
‘They tell us not to leave the village because we have been living together for God knows how many generations and even at the height of the Partition violence nothing happened here’, says another Hindu lad. ‘Yes, we believe them, because they are good people’, he points out, ‘but they, too, are afraid of speaking out, so how can they protect us?’.
As these Hindus narrate their tale of terror, their Muslim neighbours gather inside the house where we are sitting. ‘We are really ashamed of what happened, but how could we help? If we had come out at night, when the killings took place, we, too, would have been killed by the gunmen’, says an elderly Muslim man. ‘The incident has created a wall between us here in this village where none had existed before. From our hearts we condemn what happened, but how do we prove our innocence?’, he goes on pathetically, tears rolling down his wrinkled cheeks.
The man’s Hindu neighbour agrees, and, taking his hand in his, says, sobbing uncontrollably, ‘These people are like my own family. They don’t need to prove their innocence since we’ve known each other since we were children. Following the killings, I cannot go to the pastures in the mountains above to graze my animals for fear of being killed or kidnapped. So I send my animals with my Muslim neighbour to graze, and another Muslim neighbour helps me plough my fields’.
As I walk back to point on the stony track from where I started my trek to Kulhand, an elderly Muslim man, who I later discover, is the disciple of a Sufi, tells me, ‘What happened in Kulhand is terrible. Allah shall never forgive the people who did it, just as He shall never forgive those who killed thousands in Gujarat and Allah alone knows where else’. A stunned silence follows and I think over and over again about what he has just said. ‘But’, he adds gravely, ‘such violence, I fear, will not stop as soon as we might want it to’.
I as him to explain why, and he tells me, ‘It’s all a result of the lingering Kashmir dispute. Unless India and Pakistan and the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and all others, come to an agreeable consensus, who can stop such things from happening?’ ‘The killings of innocents, by militants and the armed forces—all this is against Allah’s will’, he goes on.
I can hardly agree more, and I concur with him when he tells me that Hindutva fascists and radical Islamists, while apparently ‘the most inveterate foes’, actually ‘feed on each other’, both desperately seeking to, ‘turn the denizens of Doda, Hindus and Muslims, against each other’ and plunge his homeland into the throes of ‘an interminable civil war’.