Burhan Muzaffar Wani’s killing in an encounter on July 8 has resulted in absolute bedlam in the Kashmir Valley, with death toll rising to 39 as of yesterday evening. The 21-year-old commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen has been compared to Bhagat Singh – both to credit and discredit Wani’s struggle, depending on who’s doing the juxtaposition. But notwithstanding the often ignored evolution of the moral spectrum on the use of violence in contrasting eras, the crucial differential between the two was their ideological positions.


Wani was the offspring of the global jihadist movement that emerged in the last quarter of the previous century, hammering Muslim-majority freedom movements into Islamist struggles wherever the occupying force was ‘non-Muslim’– including Palestine, Kashmir and East Turkestan. And the problem with any Islamist ‘freedom’ movement is that it intrinsically contradicts the very idea of freedom.


Hizbul Mujahideen, whose supreme commander Syed Salahuddin had claimed responsibility for the Pathankot attack as the chairman of the United Jihad Council, is a jihadist organisation whose very vocal ambitions aren’t limited to ‘liberating’ Kashmir from India. Hizb overlaps with Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba that in turn work in tandem with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, to lay a radical Islamic network from South Asia to the Middle East, with Turkistan Islamic Movement and its Syrian branch combining with Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to fasten together this massive jihadist conglomerate. This expansionist jihadist superstructure feeds off movements like those in Kashmir and Palestine to discredit genuine struggles for self-recognition and battles for human rights.
The greatest partners in crime for Islamist terror-mongers masquerading as freedom fighters are often the left-leaning opinion-makers, the torchbearers of resistance against all kinds of colonialism, which (mis)use prevailing economic disparity and their dutiful obsession with demographical morality, to create alibis for violently imperialistic jihadism.      


It is these same liberals – who might not have offered the same courtesy to Hafiz Saeed or Masood Azhar for example – that have bought the Islamist narrative making Wani the poster boy for Kashmiris’ fight. If Wani is representative of Kashmiri Muslims, their Islamic supremacist movement shouldn’t be confused with freedom-fighting. And if the Hizb commander does not reflect the average Muslim mindset, there’s no bigger disservice to the Kashmiri cause than extolling Wani’s ‘struggle’.


Wani, like countless other youngsters, unfortunately fell prey to jihadism in a land becoming increasingly fertile for radical Islam. Losing elder brother Khalid Muzaffar Wani at the hands of the Indian Army’s brutalities last year pushed him further toward militancy. Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani has reduced the probability of his relatives being victimised by Indian forces, with both his sons living hundreds of kilometers away from Kashmir in Rawalpindi and Delhi. Meanwhile in October last year, Hurriyat Conference Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq warned Kashmiris to “beware of the expansionist plan of the Ahmadis in Kashmir” in his latest call for Ahmadis to be declared non-Muslims in India, during the Friday khutba. 


With Islamists like Geelani and Umar Farooq spearheading the Kashmir movement, and Wani becoming the face of resistance, little wonder that the struggle has continued to diminish in the recent past, mirroring the Palestinian movement being usurped by jihadism as well.


Just like Kashmiri leaders’ Islamist fantasies, the Palestinian National Authority embedded Sharia as the ‘main source of legislation’ in their Constitution framed after the Oslo Accords. In fact it is the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 – a persistent remnant of Palestine’s Islamist colonial past – which paradoxically facilitated Jewish settlements in West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights.
Hamas’ takeover of Gaza has further exacerbated the plight of Palestinian Christians that have already been reduced to around 1% of the Palestinian Arab population from 8% in 1946. This is similar to the Pandits expulsion from Kashmir, with 99% of the total Pandit population (150,000 to 160,000) believed to have left the Kashmir Valley by 1990.


Both Palestinian Christians and Kashmiri Pandits have been – and many still are – strong proponents of their respective nation’s right to self-determination from Israeli and Indian occupation. But when those nations chose – and continue to choose – to define themselves along religious lines, the movement for freedom became a paradox.


The Kurdish struggle for autonomy in Turkey – oft ignored by the Muslim world owing to the identical religious identities of the occupier and the occupied – is a classic example of modern-day freedom struggles striving on political nous more than militancy. The militant Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane’s (PKK) achievements are nonexistent compared to pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party’s (HDP). Balochistan pragmatists have long suggested that the quest for Baloch autonomy should take a similar route.


That HDP’s gains in June elections last year were undone by ISIS bombing the Turks into voting for the right-wing, security-driven Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the November reelections, perfectly outlines the discrepancy between political struggle for freedom and jihadist expansionism. A similar story can be found in the contrasting fates of the Hui and Uighur Muslims, despite the prevalence of East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Western China.


None of this is to deny the brutalities and human rights abuse of Indian and Israeli (or Turkish, Chinese and Pakistani) occupations. But the geopolitical realities of the 21st century dictate that actual battles for freedom are fought in the political chambers, and not on the ground. Any struggle claiming to be a freedom movement would need to exhibit the ideals that it demands among its own ranks. Case in point: HDP’s persistent support for secular and liberal causes and human rights – spearheaded by women and LGBTQ rights.


And so, actual well-wishers of Kashmiris and Palestinians should be vocal in their denunciation of any form of supremacism and bigotry instead of misrepresenting jihadism as fight for freedom and summoning apologia for terror-mongering. For, armed liberation attempts aided by jihadist neighbours have failed in both territories for the past 70 odd years.


Realism dictates abandoning the gun, and battling the opposition in the political arena. For, no occupier in the history of humankind has given up an inch of territory, just because it was the ‘right thing’ to do.

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Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a member of staff. He can be reached at khuldune.shahid@nation.com.pk. Follow him on Twitter


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