Pragaash: A dream turned into a nightmare

On December 26, 2012, during a competition known as the “Battle of Bands”, an unusual thing happened in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir. After several performances by boy bands, the audience was stunned to see girls taking the stage. Are they really locals? Can they sing?, they wondered. But once the band started playing, apprehensions were gone. People loved it. The cheers and applause grew with every beat. The girls felt their dream had come true.

Pragaash (first light) came third and took home a cash prize of Rs6,000 (Dh404) — a huge achievement for three teenage girls which included guitarist Aneeqa Khalid, 15, singer Noma Nazir, 16, and drummer Farah Deeba, 15, all high-school students. It was just a few months earlier that the three had met at a local music academy and decided to form a band. This was their debut.

But the dream turned into a nightmare when the social media kicked in. Once the video of the performance and the news hit Facebook and YouTube, it generated a barrage of comments. Some applauded the girls whereas others denounced them.

The trigger

One of the comments read, “Personally, I consider them as shameless and spoiled brats.” Some went too far: “Post this status in advance. The three band girls raped Jammu. And [were] thrown in [the] river.” Some were enraged because the competition was organised by the Central Reserve Police Force, paramilitaries accused of killing more than 100 youths during 2008-2010 protests. Thousands of comments were generated and the extreme ones had threats and abuses, all under the cloud of internet anonymity.

Owner of the Band Inn, Adnan Mattoo, who is also the manager of Pragaash, termed the responses as part of a wicked campaign against the girls. “Some people who were not happy over the progress of the youth in the [Kashmir] Valley are behind such campaign,” Mattoo said, adding that the girls would not be cowed down by the threats and “they will continue to pursue their dream in music”.

A local news portal carried the story about the girls getting online threats, which in turn was picked up by TRP-hungry national media.

The combination of music, Muslim girls, glamour, threats and Kashmir seemed too appetising for them. The news channels competed with each other to play the story again and again. Politicians, leaders, activists, moral brigade — everybody was asked to comment. Even the chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, took time off his busy schedule to tweet about the band and assured security to them. Everybody was eager to talk about what seemed to be the only issue left with Kashmir.

The upper-middle-class girls were hounded by media and had to repeatedly deny the interview requests. Their parents had to shove away the OB vans from their neighbourhoods.

The controversial government-backed mufti, Bashiruddin, added fuel to the fire by issuing a fatwa against the girls by terming their music un-Islamic. “Music is not good for society and bad things happening in Indian society are because of music,” he said. He further asked them to inculcate “better values” among themselves and sing inside their homes.

The mufti’s comments were enough to generate more media frenzy.

The mufti, whose only traditional job has been to sight the moon and declare Eid days, has lately tried to storm into the political arena by evicting Christian missionaries for converting Muslims in Kashmir, and giving shutdown and protest calls over various issues. He is the darling of the Delhi-based news channels.

Seeing the heightened passions, the girls vowed never to sing again. One of them fled to the anonymity of Bengaluru and rest to the confines of their homes. “We give up music, because according to mufti it is haram,” said Nazir, the lead singer. “The mufti is more aware of our religion, so we respect him and we are doing it for the people of Kashmir.”

With the main characters going into hiding, the field was open to say and prove anything.

It was for the first time in the recent months that the national media had given so much airtime to news from Kashmir. Some anchors went on to compare the girls to Pakistan’s recuperating Malala Yousufzai and Russia’s jailed Pussy Riot punk group. Freedom of speech, Salman Rushdie, clash of cultures, extremism — everything was invoked over this issue.

With media pressure piling up, the chief minister directed police to investigate the online threats and arrest the culprits. The police have arrested three teenagers for posting abusive comments and are trying to track down 26 others. Relatives of the arrested youth accused government of implicating them falsely. They asked the government to arrest the mufti, on whose fatwa the girls quit singing, rather than young boys who might have commented a bit too harshly but never meant any harm.

“You are not taking any action against the mufti who issued the fatwa but have arrested our son. This is unfair,” said Ghulam Mohammad, an uncle of Irshad Ahmad Chara, one of the three arrested youths. With some separatist leaders also jumping into the fray, the situation became murkier. Now the girls were merely tools in the hands of people who wanted to settle a score.

In addition to the debate on modernity versus cultural values, Kashmiri nationalists and mainstream India began shadow-boxing in the news studios and online world. The former asked the latter to stop meddling in this issue and take up human rights violations such as rapes by security forces, while the latter accused the former of “talibanisation”. Surprisingly, inside Kashmir, the case was not much of a talking point. The people were only perturbed that it had been unnecessarily turned into a big issue.

“Remove some offensive comments, and everything is fine,” said Shahid Ahmad, a music lover from Srinagar. “There is no artiste in this world who has not been hurled abuses or threatened at some stage. This is part of the game and one has to be prepared for it. But here it has gone far and become politicised.”

Silent killings

In Kashmir, music has been part and parcel of society. From the beautiful chorus of girls working at the rice fields to the spiritual music of Sufiyana Kalam, Kashmir has music for every occasion. Even militants had their songs and martyrs too were paid tribute in beautiful rhythms. Rock music by girls was a just new addition that unfortunately got marred by the murky cocktail of media, politics and morality.

The only thing these girls got was their 15 minutes of fame, which is unusual for a place where singers die unheard. The last two decades of insurgency in Kashmir have been dangerous for the music industry too. Musicians here have suffered like anybody, with little or no media attention. People are enraged that the media has let them down on other similar issues of music and freedom of expression. For them, the girl band was a trivial issue and the real story remains untold.

One of the earliest casualties from the music industry was singer Mohammad Yousuf. He was killed by soldiers on July 13, 1992, when they barged into his house at Nasarullahpora and shot him multiple times. His last song was a heart-wrenching, pleading cry, which unfortunately got no audience. The Human Rights Watch report for 1993 mentioned him as just a singer who was killed. “Then other soldiers grabbed Mohammad Yousuf, a singer, and as they pushed him into the room, a soldier shot him in the back. Then the soldiers shot all around the room. When they left, they dragged the bodies into the yard,” the report said.

More recently a fledgling singer, Inayatullah Bhat, 30, of Nowpora Srinagar, was killed by soldiers stationed in his neighbourhood. The soldiers knew him as they used to buy bread from his family shop. But on the evening of June 30, 2006, Bhat was no neighbour, no shopkeeper, not even not a civilian — just a suspicious shadow to be neutralised. His family, ducking the fire inside their house, realised moments later that Bhat was missing.

Bhat’s killing was followed by a big protest, which was met with equal force — even his corpse was thrown on the street. Still, there was no media follow-up. On March 30, 2006, unidentified gunmen kidnapped and later killed local folk singer Ghulam Hassan Shah alias Baccha in district Kulgam. A mystery still shrouds his killing.

Popular Kashmiri singer Ghulam Nabi Shaikh was on a train to Delhi when, on July 13, 2003, he was allegedly arrested and later killed by the Punjab police. Even his body was not given back as it is believed to have been hurriedly cremated by the perpetrators to destroy the evidence. His daughter who was accompanying him on that fateful night is still fighting for justice, and the media has never cared to give her any coverage.

In all these cases, the hope of the families that justice will be done is fading by the day, and the media is nowhere to be seen. During the last couple of years, Kashmir has experienced a surge of bands (almost 38) and has famous rappers such as Haze Kay and MC Kash.

Their songs are often critical of government policies and denounce custodial killings, enforced disappearances and other human rights violations. The songs made them popular among youths but also earned them adversaries. MC Kash was threatened a number of times. Police raided his studio and advised other studios in Kashmir against offering him space. But he never relented: “I have to fight for my voice,” he says.

Even at the height of militancy, Kashmir never lost touch with music, despite these killings and some religious opposition. Among its success stories are Shameema Dev, singer wife of Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mehmeet Syed, Jameela Khan, Shazia Bashir and others. They perform regularly and their records are often sought after.

Tasleema, a young singer from Srinagar, sings shabads from the Guru Granth Sahib at gurudwaras. In 2007 she became the only Muslim Kashmiri girl to have sung at the Golden Temple. The feat could have easily earned her a dangerous tag, but Kashmir is too liberal to mind these issues. It is only when politics is involved that white turns black.

Haroon Mirani is a writer based in Srinagar.