Abstract
Was the 1982 anti-liquor movement in Anantnag (South Kashmir) a secular citizens' movement or a fundamentalist violence against Hindu minorities? Kashmir's local Urdu press and all-India English press had framed the incident differently, but both claimed one's viewpoint as secular. Now contentious was the hidden, majoritarian agenda beneath the professed ‘secular’ stand: all-India papers represented the Hindu majority of India, while Kashmir's local paper did the Muslim majority of Kashmir. This paper examines how the majoritarian agenda of each worked in reporting the anti-liquor movement.
In sum, all-India papers reported that the ‘communal’ attack on liquor shops in Anantnag, which were incidentally all owned by Hindus (Kashmiri Pandits), was the handiwork of Jama ‘at-e Islami, which actually played only a secondary role in the incident. The consequence of this tendentious reporting was the indiscriminate arrest and alienation of Muslim separatists in Kashmir. On the other hand, Kashmir's local papers reported that the anti-liquor movement in Anantnag was a non-communal citizens' movement, representing the conscience of majority of the townsfolk. As a result of such reporting, the sufferings of minority Hindus tended to be ignored by the town's Muslim majority.
By the early 1980s, the structure of discourse in Indian press had become increasingly complex: now the self-claimed ‘secular’ discourse could contain covertly majoritarian and communal stance. When ‘secular for all’ neutrality is difficult to attain even in media discourse, and ‘secular for India’ and ‘secular for Kashmir’ remain far from each other, the discord called Kashmir conflict is to linger on.
