Piety and Politics: Religious Leadership and the Conflict in Kashmir

Abstract

In 1912 the revivalist poet Maqbool Shah Kraalwari published Greeznama, an extended lament about the subversive syncretism of the Kashmiri peasantry: They regard the mosque and the temple as equal, seeing no difference between muddy puddles and the ocean, They know not the sacred, honourable or the respectable (Kraalwari 1912, 5). Less than a century ago, the landscape Kraalwari described has disappeared: as the ugly shrine-land conflagration that set the state ablaze in 2008 demonstrated, mass politics in Jammu and Kashmir appears to be driven almost exclusively by questions of religious identity. Yet the fact remains that clerics and religious authority have had only a peripheral role in this political mobilization—and, as our survey of some religion-linked crises in Jammu and Kashmir will show, in earlier ones, too. We are confronted by the apparent paradox of a religion-driven politics that has almost no space for religious leaders. It is all the more intriguing if one considers the central place of religion in the making of the Kashmir conflict itself. In this chapter, we examine three contrasting crises in an effort to find an answer to this question. Much of the work on religion and politics in Jammu and Kashmir has focused on the two-decade-long insurgency that began in 1988.