ABDULLAH THE STONE PELTER!
Seven years after its birth, the Jammu & Kashmir Muslim Conference was converted into a new political party — the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference — on 11 June 1939 to, what its President, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah claimed, pursue nationalistic politics. The development caused dissention among the Muslims of Kashmir, resulting in perennial enmity, which, though, had started years earlier, between the supporters of Abdullah and Mirwaiz Mohammad Yusuf Shah, who opposed the conversion. For years, the two ideologically divergent groups fought out their differences on the streets of Srinagar city and gave each other bloody noses and broken bones.
On the basis of his mass support, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the founder President of the Muslim Conference, was able to bulldoze the dissenting voices and formalize its conversion to a ‘nationalist party’ inviting into its fold the minority communities. Eight decades down the line, analysts suggest that demolition of the Muslim Conference, not the Partition of 1947, laid the foundation of the Kashmir problem that has bitterly engaged two neighbouring countries of South Asia for the last over seven decades. That being a subject for researchers to further work on, let us now come to a different point linked with the dissolution of the Muslim Conference and birth of the National Conference.
A year after the Muslim Conference was launched, the foundation stone of a building named the Mujahid Manzil (Abode of Warriors) was laid, on 6 November 1933, on the left bank of the Jhelum opposite the famous Muslim shrine of Khanqah-e-Moulla, to serve as the party’s headquarters. Post-11 June 1939 decision, the Mujahid Manzil was taken over by the National Conference as its party headquarters. However, there were others who believed it was the property of the Muslim Conference and, therefore, of the Muslims. On 16 June, barely five days after the formation of the National Conference, some youth went to Hazratbal shrine and hoisted a green Islamic flag on the shrine building. Buoyant with their act, they now marched to the Mujahid Manzil in order to wrest the building from the National Conference and unfurl their flag on it.
When the group of youth arrived at the Mujahid Manzil, there were some workers and leaders of the National Conference present there. Prominent among them was the party President, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. As the youth attempted to take control of the building, the National Conference leaders led by Abdullah resisted them. There erupted a clash between the two sides. Abdullah and his associates pelted stones on the invading youth, injuring them and making them to retreat. It was quite an interesting scene where, both literally and figuratively, the tallest leader of Kashmir and the President of its largest political party was engaged in ‘kani jung’ or hurling stones on his opponents. The event is the first recorded incident in the turbulent history of Kashmir when a political leader of Abdullah’s stature had resorted to stone pelting. On the following day, the police arrested some workers of the National Conference in connection with the incident.
The event was recorded by Molvi Mohammad Shah Sa’dat in his daily diary, Tareekh-i-Kashmir Ki Rozana Dairy. Sa’dat, we are told, was admitted by Maharaja Hari Singh, the last Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir, to his Darbar as a historian. Noted historians, G. M. D. Sufi and Munshi Muhammad Din Fauq, authors of Kashir and Tawarikh-i-Kashmir, respectively, have drawn from his works.
A year after the stone pelting incident at the Mujahid Manzil, a group of educated youth had a meeting at Badam Waer (The Almond Alcove) on 26 March 1940 where they raised pro-Muslim Conference slogans and made speeches. After their meeting, they marched to the Mujahid Manzil and hoisted a flag atop the building. Molvi Mohammad Sayeed Masoodi, General Secretary, National Conference, who was present there, had the youth thrashed and the flag removed.
Between 1953, when Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was dismissed as the Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir and arrested, and 1975 when he returned to power after mending fences with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Mujahid Manzil served as the party office of the Jammu & Kashmir Plebiscite Front, a political party launched by Abdullah’s lieutenant, Mirza Mohammad Afzal Beg and others to launch a peaceful agitation for demand for plebiscite while the former remained incarcerated. Abdullah’s return to power also saw the return of the Mujahid Manzil as the party headquarters of his National Conference. On 27 December 1994, the historic building was reduced to rubble in an incident of fire.
In the earlier phase of rivalry between the followers of Abdullah and the Mirwaiz, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, a right hand man of Abdullah, who later staged a successful coup against him in 1953 to become the Prime Minister, was beaten to a pulp by the Mirwaiz supporters at Genz Khod in old city on 8 September 1933, as a result of which he lost consciousness. Later, in 1942, the two sides hurled stones at each other after the supporters of Abdullah tried to stop the Mirwaiz from delivering Eid sermon at the historic Eidgah. In the violent clash, hundreds of people were injured. In 1944 and 1945, respectively, public meeting of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and river procession of Jawaharlal Nehru were thrown stones at by the rival sides. In the later incident, among others, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan was injured. In 1939 and 1967, agitating Kashmiri Pandits resorted to stone pelting while protesting against the takeover of the Durganag Temple by the Dharmarth Trust and conversion of a community girl, Parmeshwari, to Islam and marriage to her Muslim colleague, respectively. On 5 November 1973, the vehicle of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who was then out of power, came under a shower of stones when he had arrived at the Government College for Women, Maulana Azad Road to attend as chief guest a function to rename the college after Jawaharlal Nehru.
Stone pelting has been a weapon of protest in Kashmir for long and those caught in the act are severely dealt with by the police. In recent times, especially since August 2019 after the revocation of the Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that guaranteed internal autonomy to Jammu & Kashmir, stone pelting youth were booked under the draconian Public Safety Act and, after amending the law, several of them were lodged in jails outside Jammu & Kashmir.
TAILPIECE: There is an interesting ritual associated with stone pelting with religious sanction observed in village Dhami, near Shimla, in the north-Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. As per tradition, on the second day of Diwali, a major Hindu festival, people of the village divide themselves into two groups and pelt stones at each other. In the process, the blood of the first injured person is used to perform tilak (coloured mark worn by Hindus on the forehead) on the deity, Bhima Kali. The legend has it that once the ruler of the area was killed in a fight and, following the then prevalent custom, his wife committed sati. Before jumping on the funeral pyre of her husband, she took a pledge from the villagers that they would stop offering human sacrifice at the Bhima Kali Temple and instead form themselves into two groups and throw stones at each other. The blood thus spilled should be offered to the deity.