Kashmiri Youth And The Idea Of Khilafat

The Kashmiri youth are increasingly getting attracted towards the Islamic States’ idea of Khilafat, says Riyaz Wani.

- Riyaz Wani

Shabir, 20, doesn’t wave the Islamic State flags. But on most Fridays he is part of a group of masked youths who throw stones at the security personnel outside Srinagar’s Grand Mosque. And he admires the youth raising the Islamic State flags and looks at them approvingly from across the road while they do it. Given a chance, Shabir would raise the flags too.

His worldview constitutes of those parts of the familiar separatist discourse that goes around in circles in Kashmir and now also makes the dominant conversation on social networks. He knows only some broad details about the Islamic State, its conspicuous battlefield successes against heavy odds and its ideological stance “that resists compromise”. But Shabir knows little about the group’s brutalities. And whatever he has come to know about it through the media, he sees it as a deliberate “wrong projection” to give a bad name to Islam.

“Those who are ready to die for their faith in God can’t be bad,” says the tall and thin built Shabir. “True Muslims don’t love the world and its material offerings”. But he won’t become a militant himself. The “resistance by stones,” he thinks, has more advantages over gun.

“Stone-throwing helps draw more attention to Kashmir. One doesn’t have to go underground to pursue it,” says Shabir an undergraduate student. “But I value gun and admire the youth who have picked it up. They are also fighting for Kashmir’s Azadi”.

Shabir’s observations are largely reflective of what you get to hear from his friends in downtown, the old densely settled part of Srinagar. Bred in the turmoil of the 1990s and its attendant discourse and witness to forms of extreme violence in the streets, these youth have grown up with a deep sense of estrangement from New Delhi.