The Telegraph
Militants impose veil on Valley girls
by Muzaffar Raina
Srinagar, Sept. 15: Most girls of a reputable Kashmir college, one of the state’s biggest, have started wearing veils after militants waylaid the principal last month and ordered him to impose an Islamic dress code.
Masked gunmen stopped Sopore Degree College principal Mohammad Ashraf’s car on August 24, whisked him away to a desolate place and threatened him.
The girls started wearing veils soon after and most now come draped in a head-to-toe black cloak called Abhaya. Many of them expose only their eyes.
Ashraf said he hadn’t received any threats since the August 24 incident, the first time in years after the decline of militancy in Kashmir that gunmen had used force to carry out moral policing.
“The girls are now observing proper purdah,” Ashraf, a respected Islamic scholar and a specialist on Sayyid Qutb, one of the stalwarts of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement, added.
Sadaf, a student of the co-ed college which is one of the biggest educational institutions in Kashmir, said not more than 15 per cent of the 3,000 girls would wear Abhaya before the threats, though three out of four would wear a headscarf at least.
“Girls in our college were properly covered even before the threats and only a handful would not cover their heads,” Sadaf, who gave only her first name, said.
“But now you have almost every single girl wearing Abhaya,” she added.
Another student said the college authorities ordered them to wear veil.
“In the first few days after the threat, some of the girls didn’t comply with the directive. They were sent back from the college gate. Next time they came properly dressed.”
Moral policing had been high on the agenda of militants in the early years of the two-decade-long insurgency in Kashmir, and groups like the Dukhtaran-e-Milat would threaten women to observe purdah.
In some cases, the outfit used coloured water to scare women into obeying its diktat.
The rebels had, however, more or less stopped using such coercive measures and last month’s threat came after a gap of many years.
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