Citing the massive arrangements for the Hindu Amarnath Yatra as an example of the government’s double standards on religious freedom, the marchers called upon the Shia Muslims of Kashmir to defy the ban and take out united processions in the city center on the traditional occasions.
The ban on the mid-city processions of 8th and 10th Muharram (Ashoora), in force since militancy broke out in Kashmir nearly 20 years ago, has been challenged in the High Court by the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen led by prominent Shia cleric and Hurriyat Conference leader Maulana Abbas Ansari, and Friday’s Shia marchers, under the banner of the Kashmir Shia Youth Forum, fully backed the petition, asking the High Court how long the community would be deprived of its right to observe religious obligations in the twenty-first century.
Chanting slogans against what it described as the unwarranted interference of the government and the bureaucracy, and demanding the right to religious freedom, the Forum said that the “anti-Muslim” ban on the city’s major Muharram processions was communally motivated and aimed at systematically eroding the significance of Muharram commemoration.
The government presses every conceivable resource into action to facilitate the Amarnath pilgrimage, and spends massive amounts on the security of the lakhs of yatris on a route of hundreds of miles, but has banned the traditional Muharram processions in Srinagar under an anti-Muslim policy sometimes under the pretext of the situation, and sometimes under the excuse of threats to law and order and fear of communal riots, The Forum said.
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