Jamaat-e-Islami: Why Does the BJP Want an Islamist Party To Fight the J&K Polls?

The BJP is resurrecting and redeploying techniques that the Congress party has already tried and perfected in J&K.

Former Jamaat-e-Islami leader Sayar Ahmad Reshi with supporters before filing his nomination from Kulgam ahead of J&K Assembly polls, in Kulgam.

(Photo: PTI)

The strange ways in which the politics is shaping up ahead of the much-anticipated assembly polls this month is exemplified by the participation of candidates affiliated with the banned Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI).

The group was outlawed in February 2019 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in the aftermath of the gruesome Pulwama attack that resulted in the killing of 40 CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) soldiers.

The Modi government said that JeI provided ideological backing to the militant groups in J&K. This allegation stems from its record of having a close association with the Hizbul Mujahideen (Hizb) group in the past.

That said, the speeches and public comments of senior JeI functionaries, making public entreaties for the ban to be lifted in return for which they will contest assembly polls, have hogged headlines over the past few months.

On 8 September, supporters of the JeI took out a rally in Bugam village in the South Kashmir district of Kulgam, where Sayar Reshi, the candidate who is contesting independently, spoke about fighting elections under the framework of the Indian constitution and, surprisingly, also voiced a call for the return of Kashmiri Pandits. “The Lok Sabha polls conducted in May show that free and fair elections are taking place in Kashmir. Hence, our spirits are high,” he told the media. 

Seeing it as a step towards mainstreaming what were once the separatist parties, the regional parties have welcomed the decision. On the other hand, the BJP-led Centre is likely to take heart from the fact that it has got Kashmir’s top hardline group, from whose membership separatists and militants have filled their ranks, to yield to the government in such an abject way.

The JeI leaders did vote in the Lok Sabha election held in May in anticipation that the ban would be lifted. But it wasn’t. Instead, the UAPA tribunal set up by MHA to determine the validity of the ban upheld it last month.

Yet, the reality of JeI’s long overdue comeback into the electoral fray is not as simple as it seems.

The History of the Islamist Group

Founded in 1946, the JeI in Kashmir remained on the political margins until 1969, when the group contested the regional Panchayat elections. The group is inspired by the ideology of Islamist scholar Abul A‘la Maududi, who sought to marry Islamic religious doctrines with the ideals of a representative government. The JeI’s vision entails a sustained commitment to social and religious reform as a prerequisite for the process of Islamisation.

In 1971 and 1972, the group took part in both the Lok Sabha and J&K state assembly polls. In the latter case, it secured five seats in the state legislature. This nascent electoral victory was followed by an accord between J&K’s former Chief Minister Sheikh Abdullah and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after which the Jamaat faced a ban because of its fierce opposition to the agreement.

As per the accord, the NC would abjure its demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir, and come to terms with all the erosions that Article 370 had suffered until then. The ban on the JeI, however, was later lifted in 1977.

Ten years later, the Jamaat plumbed into the electoral scene once again, as part of the coalition of local parties that was arrayed against the National Conference-Congress alliance. The elections were rigged, resulting in the eruption of the insurgency.

Allegations of Associating With Terrorists

While the initial phase of militancy was piloted by groups like the J&K Liberation Front (JKLF), later, however, Hizb became the leading outfit. The group came to be regarded as being some sort of sister organisation of the JeI because the militant group drafted Jamaat cadres in large numbers.

Accepting Jamaat recruits in bulk, scholar Iymon Majid has argued, had strategic importance for Hizb because it wanted “to bring ideological uniformity to their organisation” and preempt defections and splits over ideological issues. The issue of its links to Hizb led to another round of bans in the year of April 1990.

However, its relationship with Hizb was to change soon as “the more Jamaat members tried to dominate Hizb the more it became dangerous for the organisation to operate on the ground, especially in the rural areas as the counterinsurgency operation of the Indian Army and insurgent fratricide began to target anyone associated with Jamaat,” Majid writes. “The counterinsurgency operations against Jamaat only stopped when it publicly dissociated itself from Hizb and its activities in 1997.”

At a press conference in November 1998, the JeI’s emir or senior most head, Ghulam Muhammad Bhat, publicly disavowed militancy, asserting that the group was “essentially a constitutional democratic organisation.”

He asked during the presser, “If a picture showing (Hizbul Mujahideen chief) Syed Salahuddin shaking hands with Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed is published, the fault does not lie with us . . . We are being made scapegoats in this game of politics?”

This position led to dissensions between Bhat and the more hardline faction of the Jamaat led by hawks such as Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who later drifted away from the party and created his own separatist party, the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat (TeH). The rift between Geelani and the JeI deepened to the point that Jamaat expelled members close to him in the early 2000s.

The Adaptive Character of JeI

Majid insists that such a response should not be interpreted to be an abandonment of ideology but must be located in the “dynamism of Islamism to incorporate new changes under different and difficult contexts.”

After this period of infighting, the Jamaat put itself on the path of “recovery”, scaled up its public engagement and began actively mass printing the party’s propaganda material. This coincided with what Majid calls a “passive role” in the calls to boycott the elections.

In the elections of 2002 and 2014 that brought Mufti Muhammad Sayeed to power as CM, it is generally believed that the Jamaat cadres had thrown their weight behind his party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). But in the upcoming polls, the JeI cadre is likely to support their own independent candidates, which means that the traditional PDP vote will shrink.

Majid’s research into Jamaat drives home the point that an accommodative streak is already coded into the outfit’s DNA, and therefore, any shift in its strategy should not be construed as a capitulation but a calibrated readjustment aimed at surviving through the bad tidings.

“Ideologies work in time and space. We have to be accommodative and flexible,” said Dr Talat Majeed, who is contesting as a Jamaat-backed independent candidate from Pulwama constituency told a publication.

“Separatism worked in Kashmir but what were the reasons? The rigging of the 1987 assembly elections created a situation for separatism to thrive which prompted a mainstream leader like Abdul Gani Lone to become a separatist. Today, the geopolitical scenario has changed. The sooner we realise it, the better,” he added.

The Anatomy of the BJP's Strategy

But how does the Jamaat's reentry into electoral politics figure in the political arithmetic of BJP? The answer lies probably in the profiles of the half a dozen Jamaat-backed independent candidates that have filed their nomination papers from the constituencies of Kulgam, Pulwama, Devsar, and Zainapora — Talat Majeed, Sayar Ahmad Reshi, Nazir Ahmad Bhat and Aijaz Mir respectively.

As one Jamaat insider told The Quint, “If you look at the composition, two of them had long been expelled from Jamaat. One doesn’t even have a Jamaat background, whereas Sayar is a deputy director of Jamaat-run Falah-e-Aam Trust,” he said. “The reality is that a huge chunk of the Jamaat is unhappy over this participation.”

He said that the only person so far participating on the JeI’s behalf, who was also an active member when the group was banned in 2019, is Farooq Ganai who will be fielded from the Beerwah constituency of Central Kashmir.

The eight-member panel set up by Jamaat to hash out decisions regarding its electoral foray had held talks with the Union government over the issue of revoking the ban.

The talks, the Indian Express reported in July, were mediated by Altaf Bukhari, former J&K Minister and leader of the J&K Apni Party. Jamaat leaders like Faheem Ramzan, Fayaz Hamid and Ghulam Qadir Wani had already gone public to express their willingness to rejoin electoral politics. But the same cannot be said about the Jamaat cadre.

In August, the panel made an announcement that around seven members affiliated with the group would be fielded as independents in the assembly polls. They cannot fight under the Jamaat banner as the group continues to be declared unlawful.

A senior journalist who has been covering J&K for more than two decades told The Quint that only a handful of former Jamaat members are likely to participate in the polls. “It is by all means a well-orchestrated move to de-politicise the JeI,” the journalist, wishing anonymity, said. “The panel hasn’t taken into account its main demographic such as the student wing Jamait-ul-Tulaba’s as it currently stands dissolved.”

The journalist said that those heading the JeI panel are critics of the late Hurriyat leader Geelani who died in 2021.

Resurrecting Old Techniques 

In 1972, J&K was in the midst of a political churning like it is today. The creation of Bangladesh had knocked the wind off Pakistan’s sails and had also, somehow, led to a despondent mood in Kashmir.

Armed with a fresh sense of purpose, the government under Indira Gandhi proudly set the terms for the post-war engagement, which included redefining Kashmir as an issue that was to be resolved by these two countries alone.

In the Valley, Gandhi moved to cut Sheikh Abdullah ((who was then a pro-freedom leader demanding the settlement of Kashmir issue via referendum) to size by externing him from the State and outlawing his Plebiscite Front whose victory, Congress' Syed Mir Qasim later wrote, "would have been a foregone conclusion" had it participated.

To further squeeze Abdullah electorally, Gandhi permitted the JeI to take part in the polls. The Jamaat, writes historian Chitralekha Zutshi, “entered into a strategic understanding with the Congress and emerged victorious in five constituencies.”

In 2024, BJP’s machinations are eerily reminiscent of those of the Congress in 1972. The developments are coming at a time when all sorts of candidates are emerging across the Valley and filing nominations to fight independently in what veteran journalist Anuradha Bhasin calls an “epidemic of 'hardline' independents”.

At a certain level, it is amusing that for all the talk of ‘Naya Kashmir’, the BJP has to resurrect and redeploy the same techniques that the Congress has already tried and perfected in J&K.

“The ultimate aim is to further fracture the vote in the Valley, and consolidate it in Jammu where the BJP sits reasonably well,” concluded the journalist quoted anonymously above.

(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist. He has also written for The Wire, Article 14, Caravan Magazine, Firstpost, The Times of India and more. He tweets at @shakirmir. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)