Backlash in Kashmir over proposal for uniform Friday sermons across mosques

A  proposed move by the Waqf Board in Indian-administered Kashmir to introduce uniform Friday sermons at mosques across the region has drawn backlash from politicians and religious leaders, who have accused the government of trying to assert control over Muslim religious spaces.

The Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board is headed by Darakshan Andrabi, a local leader associated with the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government stripped the region of its previous semi-autonomous status in 2019. Jammu and Kashmir was also partitioned into two federally governed territories, instead of functioning as a full-fledged state as it used to.

The board, which oversees Muslim religious endowments as mandated by Islamic laws, announced the controversial move last weekend, prompting a political controversy as the region’s top Muslim scholars slammed the proposal as “irresponsible interference into the religious affairs of Kashmiri Muslims”.

While defending the imposition of the uniform sermons, Andrabi told a leading Indian newspaper that a proposed committee formed under the board’s auspices “will be solely responsible for identifying the issue regarding the uniform sermon … [This step] is necessary to deal with issues in the [region], especially social evils, including drug abuse.”

Andrabi told the media that religious scholars will approve Friday sermons with no role for any government official in the decision.

‘Brushed aside our concerns’

On Sunday, the Waqf Board had summoned about 1500 top scholars and preachers from the Kashmir region. While some leaders were present at the venue, others from remote areas attended the meeting virtually.

A scholar from the mountainous Rajouri district, some 180km (110 miles) from the region’s biggest city of Srinagar, who had attended the meeting online, told Al Jazeera that Andrabi had passed instructions stating that only a pre-approved sermon drafted by a committee of senior-most scholars would be uniformly recited at the mosque pulpits on Fridays.

He said they were not told exactly who would be part of this committee.

“When we objected, saying that we won’t adhere to the directives if the sermon was found to be violative of Islamic teachings, she brushed aside our concerns and didn’t let us speak,” the scholar said on condition of anonymity as he feared reprisals by the authorities. “She [Andrabi] said that their decision was final as it had been four years in the making.”

A disputed region claimed by India and Pakistan, Kashmir has been at the centre of political turmoil for four decades. Years of peaceful demands for a referendum, to determine which country the Kashmiris would choose, transformed into an armed uprising against Indian rule in 1989 in response to allegations of election fixing.

In 2019, India scrapped the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir, imposing direct federal rule. The elections did not happen until 2024, when the local government was re-elected, albeit with a restricted mandate. De facto authority still rests with the New Delhi-appointed administrator.

The special conditions afforded under the erstwhile status had protected land and residency-related privileges while allowing Kashmiris to make their own laws.

One consequence of the 2019 decision was that Indigenous legal arrangements that governed the management of waqf, the charitable bequests that Muslims commit for the larger communal welfare, were replaced by those prevailing across India.

‘Trying to undermine religious freedom’

The new system gave broad powers to the federally controlled bureaucracy in the management of local religious boards such as waqf.

Since then, the Waqf Board has been accused multiple times by the local Kashmiri leaders of trying to undermine their religious freedoms or interfering with how the traditional religious practices have continued for generations.

“Centralised khutba or sermons used to take place in the name of a sultan or khalifa (Islamic caliph) during the medieval times. But that had sanctity because Kashmir was [then] an Islamic state. Today, we are supposed to be living in a secular state,” Nayeem Akhtar, a senior politician who served as Kashmir’s education minister during the previous elected government, when its special status was still operational, told Al Jazeera.

“As long as he has an audience, every cleric has freedom to speak about any topic of his choice. This freedom is enshrined in the very fundamentals of law,” he added.

Akhtar said the new instructions were coming from an office bearer associated with the BJP, which is why the latest move had provoked furious responses. “The board’s job is just managerial. It is exceeding its remit by trying to preach or guide the clerics on how they must do their job. Can a Muslim political party in India ever dictate how a Hindu pujari must conduct prayers or how a Christian pastor must deliver a sermon on Sunday?”

On Tuesday, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the region’s top Muslim religious leader, cautioned that such a move would amount to “direct interference”.

The Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema, a joint body of several religious organisations that he leads, said “determining sermon content was the responsibility of Islamic scholars and not of an administrative body.”

The condemnation was also shared by Omar Abdullah, the region’s elected head and member of the National Conference party that supports accession to India, albeit with the autonomous powers that New Delhi nullified seven years ago.

Following the backlash, the Waqf Board head Andrabi retracted her statement and said it had been left to the discretion of “independent scholars, preachers (and) sermonists” to talk about social issues such as rising suicides, mental trauma, substance abuse and more.

‘Exerting control on religious institutions’

This is not the first time that the BJP-led administration has been accused of trying to exert control over local religious institutions.

Earlier in January, Kashmiri Muslim scholars accused the government of discriminatory practices after the police distributed a four-page form titled “profiling of mosques” which sought intrusive details about the imams, muezzins and khatibs (preachers) of the mosques across the disputed region, including their biometric information.

For years, Muslim groups in the region have faced various restrictions on prayer, with Srinagar’s 600-year-old Jamia Masjid often being shut for important religious events such as Eid prayers or Laylat-al-Qadr, the most venerated night of the Islamic calendar, which falls in the month of Ramadan.

The administration argues these restrictions are imposed to ensure peace, but religious leaders insist that such prohibitory measures form a “systematic assault on the religious identity, dignity, and fundamental rights” of Kashmiri Muslims.

Farooq, the chief scholar, himself has been frequently subjected to such restrictions on his mobility, preventing him from giving Friday sermons on occasions when he is expected to speak on matters such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Previously, the Waqf Board has also sought to prohibit the practice of distributing yellow rice inside the compound of the major shrines in the region, a centuries-old tradition tied to the Sufi missionary councils that promoted Islam in Kashmir.

Religion has been a factor of political mobilisation

In 2022, the board also banned the age-old practice of collecting voluntary nazr-o-niyaz donations offered by devotees to the spiritual peers, mujawirs (attendants of a shrine) and khadims (caregivers). It cited the newly applicable federal laws as a reason for taking direct control over all financial collections and installing new donation boxes where all offerings went to the board.

Noor Ahmad Baba, a veteran Kashmiri political scientist and historian, said religion had always been a factor for political mobilisation in Kashmir, which is why attempts to manipulate or change the traditional religious arrangements evoke political outrage.

“The kind of political dispensation that we have and the kind of politics it has had with regard to Muslims is what makes the whole exercise suspicious,” Baba told Al Jazeera, referring to the BJP. “If the standardisation had come, for instance, from clerics with public acceptability, it wouldn’t have become an issue. No one can deny the need for religious leaders to talk about topics such as drug addiction, late marriages, climate change, social harmony and more.”

A Srinagar-based political analyst who has written about the conflict in Kashmir for four decades said such decisions reflected attempts to pre-emptively contain protests in Kashmir amid the rising wave of Hindu nationalism in India.

“A spate of recent mosque demolitions in cities such as Ujjain and Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh showed how vehemently the far-right strains within India’s ruling apparatus were resurfacing,” the analyst told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “This renewed communal posturing by the Modi regime was sufficient to provoke reactions in a place like Kashmir. The attempts to assert control over mosques must be seen in light of that.”