Kashmir girl band quits over fatwa
2013-02-05 16:26
Srinagar - An all-girl teenage rock band from
Indian-administered Kashmir has decided to quit after the region's top Muslim
cleric declared their music to be "un-Islamic", their manager said on
Tuesday.
Pragaash, a three-piece group whose members are still in
high school, had been the target of an online hate campaign ever since winning
a "Battle of the Bands" contest in December.
But after initially insisting they would continue making
music, they have now called it a day after the Grand Mufti of Jammu and
Kashmir, Bashiruddin Ahmad, branded them as "indecent" and issued a
fatwa calling for them to quit.
"After the fatwa the girls decided to quit and
disband," Adnan Mattoo, the band's manager, said in brief comments to AFP.
The mother of one of the girls confirmed her daughter had
decided to leave the band, saying she was staying with relatives outside
Kashmir until the fuss died down.
Pragaash consisted of base guitarist Aneeqa Khalid,
singer Noma Nazir and drummer Farah Deeba.
"My daughter had been depressed and irritable so we
decided to send her away to another city for some time," said the mother,
who did not want to give her name.
The comments by the grand mufti have been widely
criticised with the state's Chief Minister Omar Abdullah among those calling on
the band not to be intimidated into giving up on music.
The attacks against Pragaash have heightened concerns
about artistic freedom in India following a series of campaigns waged by
cultural conservatives.
The author Salman Rushdie had to cancel a promotional
event in Kolkata for the film version of his book "Midnight's
Children" last week while Bollywood actor Kamal Haasan threatened to go
into exile after Muslim groups protested his work.
On Monday members of Durga Vahini, the women's wing of a
Hindu nationalist group, protested against the display of nude paintings in the
Delhi Art Gallery.
Moral policing
In a front-page editorial on Tuesday, The Times of India
urged authorities to stand up for tolerance.
"The government must send out this message loud and
clear to those who indulge in moral policing," the paper said.
"The law must act swiftly and sternly against such
people because they are guilty of criminal intimidation. Each time the
government fails to do so, it encourages others to take the same path."
While pledging to track down those behind the online hate
campaign against Pragaash, Abdullah ruled out criminal action against the
mufti.
"We can take action against those who act on his fatwas
but I don't think we can [take] action against him," he told the NDTV news
channel. "He has not issued any threats that I see that are actionable.
"We have every intention of tracking down all these
people who have made online threats against these girls whether on Facebook or
Twitter."
Several messages posted on Facebook threatened violence
against the teenagers, even evoking the fate of a young medical student who
died after being gang-raped in New Delhi in December.
Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state, has a long
tradition of women singers.
One of the most famous is Shamima Azad, wife of India's
federal health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad.
Cultural observers say the growth of social media has
given an outlet to extremists to vent their opinions but say it is not
necessarily reflective of a growth of intolerance in the region.
The number of posts in support of the band has far
surpassed the number of critical comments.
Waseem Bhat, a Srinagar-based sociologist, said the
"portrayal of a Kashmir crammed with zealots and fanatics" was wide
of the mark.
Siddiq Wahid, a former vice chancellor at the Islamic
University of Science and Technology in Indian Kashmir, said the anonymity
offered by social media had allowed a minority of extremists to dominate the
debate.
"Anyone who has an extremist opinion now has a
platform," Wahid said.
