As dusk fell in Karimabad on April 7, a group of masked militants arrived at the grave of Naseer Pandith, a cop turned militant, slain in an encounter last year. They gathered in a row with outstretched hands and offered fateh (prayer). Following this, they unslung their Kalashnikovs and offered a gun salute. The incident was not unusual as visiting the graves of fallen comrades is a normal practice for militants in the valley.

What made it unique was what their unidentified commander said on the occasion to a group of eye-witnesses.

“Our fight is not for any organisation or nation but for Islam. Tomorrow we have to go to India also and we will have to implement the system of Islam there. There is no Islamic system in Pakistan and we have to implement the Islamic system there also,” the commander said while urging people not to wave Pakistani flags during militant funerals.

“And, this Pakistan flag, don’t fly it. Listen carefully. This is about Sharia and martyrdom. We want Sharia. The Pakistani flag doesn’t have Kalimah (Islamic testimony of Allah’s oneness and Prophet Muhammad’s prophethood) inscribed on it.”

The commander also got the people to shout slogans in favour of Taliban “as it was fighting to establish Islamic system in Pakistan”.

However, he stayed short of invoking the Islamic State, ISIS — the terrorist outfit that wants to establish a caliphate in the Middle East.

It was the first time in the three decade-long jihad in the Valley that a group of militants spoke against Pakistan and forbade people against waving the country’s flag. What is more, there was no mention of the political struggle for azadi.

These were profoundly far-reaching statements, indicating an attempt to fundamentally shift the ideological moorings of the Kashmir movement away from its longstanding Pakistan-azadi binary and towards pan-Islamisation.  This has left many people puzzled. Three militant outfits operating in Kashmir – Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad – are all pro-Pakistan and their in-your-face Islamist orientation has hardly detracted from their focused political aim of seceding Kashmir from India.  So, none of these organisations will dissociate from Pakistan, nor declare the Kashmir struggle as essentially an Islamist project divested of its political goal.

This has raised valid questions about this new group of militants and their ideological underpinnings. Who are they? Are they allied to Taliban, if not ISIS? And, how can they ply an ideological agenda antithetical to Pakistan and India and hope to strike on their own?

Many Kashmir observers discount the possibility of an “independent militancy space” in Kashmir. In the Valley, as the conventional wisdom goes, only those political or militant actors can survive who are either supported by Pakistan or are backed by India. Who will fund and arm them otherwise, it is asked.

This observation came true the day after the Karimabad call to arms against Pakistan and the vow of allegiance to Taliban, when the United Jihad Council (UJC) warned these militants of “dire consequences” for opposing Pakistan and its flag.

“Opposing Pakistani nation and flag and supporting Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan reflects the intentions of the group of gunmen masquerading as Mujahideen at Naseer’s grave,” the UJC spokesman Syed Sadaqat Hussain said in a statement. “These gunmen are creating confusion between militants and people.”

Interestingly, Hussain said “this group of pro-Taliban gunmen” has been identified and it was found that they were not associated with any “popular group”.

But while it was expected that statement would put the controversy to rest, it did not. Days later, Hizbul Mujahideen’s Kashmir commander and Burhan Wani’s successor Zakir Musa in a new video said militants were fighting for imposition of Sharia. The 11-minute long video address was conspicuously devoid of the words “azadi” and “Pakistan”.

“When we pick up stones or guns it should not be with this intention that we are fighting for Kashmir (as a nation). The sole motive should be the supremacy of Islam so that sharia is established here,” said Musa.

However, unlike the unidentified Karimabad militants, neither the UJC nor did Hurriyat react or issue a statement regarding Musa’s video. This has created an air of profound suspense about the changing ideological direction of Kashmir militancy. As of now, however, nothing is certain.

In the given situation, only a breakaway faction can afford to ply an anti-Pakistan and pro-Taliban line. But its credibility will remain moot and there will be little political space for it to exist independently. But as the telltale signs of an apparent Islamist orientation in the militant outlook would seem to underline, the situation appears doomed to take on a more dangerous form.

We already have a situation where Hurriyat seems more or less peripheral to the situation, reduced to calling for hartal and boycott of the polls. The conglomerate has little role in the organisational management and the ideological control over the situation on the ground. At this point of time, protests are completely self-driven and Hurriyat has no choice but to react to them.

What began as massive participation in militant funerals around 2015 has since graduated to fearless attempts to disrupt encounter sites. Stone throwing has radiated out from the urban centres to the countryside, spreading even to far-flung villages. What is more, teenagers and youth in their early twenties are leading the charge in chaotic and fragmented ways. The recent Valley-wide student protests in response to police crackdown on a college in Pulwama is exemplar of the gravity of current situation.

Similarly, the militancy, which had declined to a trickle by 2014, has steadily gained heft. From an average annual figure of around 150 militants, the number is at around 300, with local youth outnumbering foreigners.

And while all this is happening, the Centre’s approach has been one of utter lack of nuance, informed more by Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideological straitjacket on the state than a policy that takes a comprehensive view of the situation and is amenable to learning and out-of-box thinking.

“What we are seeing is a cynical use of Kashmir and the toughness against its people to shore up BJP vote bank,” says Naseer Ahmad, a local columnist. “Hate against Kashmir and Kashmiris drummed up in part by rabid sections of media and rightwing groups has now an influential political constituency in the country. This constituency will hardly brook a departure from a narrow-minded policy towards the state driven by a distinct element of prejudice”.

This is an impression that is endemic in Kashmir too, and it has generated a profound sense of otherness and consequent deep alienation from the Indian mainstream. The signboards in UP asking Kashmiris to leave and attacks on students only reinforce this perception. And this, in turn, buttresses the widely held belief among people that Kashmir’s future doesn’t lie in India. There is thus a growing chorus for a shift in policy on Kashmir — away from what is believed is a security-centred approach led by national security adviser Ajit Doval.

“Three years is a long time for a policy to bear fruit. And if we go by the current situation, the Doval Doctrine has only ended up deepening the alienation in Kashmir,” states an editorial in the Kashmir Observer. “And if any policy did make a redeeming difference, it was a policy of reconciliation and engagement towards Kashmir and Pakistan pursued by New Delhi from 2002 onwards to 2007 — begun by the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and taken forward by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. We urgently need a reversal of Doval Doctrine on Kashmir”.We already have a situation where Hurriyat seems more or less peripheral to the situation, reduced to calling for hartal and boycott of the polls. The conglomerate has little role in the organisational management and the ideological control over the situation on the ground. At this point of time, protests are completely self-driven and Hurriyat has no choice but to react to them.

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