Jammu & Kashmir Bank’s calendars are considered the most popular in Kashmir. A household calendar, yet a prized propriety.
But this year the calendars, which usually inform the people about all kinds of state holidays, lost their significance to a new calendar – the Hurriyat (G) calendar of protests.
Started by firebrand Hurriyat (G) leader Masarat Alam, as part of what he called a Quit Kashmir Campaign, the calendars were religiously, issued every week or so, and religiously followed to by people.
The first calendar as issued on June 24, a day after Hurriyat (G) chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani was booked under Public Safety Act. Alam had been released from 21-month-long detention under repeated PSA’s only on June 8. The valley was boiling against the killing of teenager Tufail Matoo and other youth in Srinagar and Sopore. Soon after Tufail’s killing there had been frequent shutdowns in the month, some called for by Hurriyat, others enforced by street protestors.
Alam’s first calender was an innovation over the strikes. It comprised of novel methods, like protests on social networking websites (Facebook), and graffiti on roads and walls. It also contained separate days and timings for peaceful protests by students, girls, and different sections of society, like lawyers and traders.
The nine day protest programme (calender) had only two days of total shutdowns. But as the situation in the valley kept heating up, with repeated instances of killings by firing on protests, shutdowns were enforced by protestors on their own. The later calenders began to have more of shutdowns. Calls for peaceful processions, and sit in, automatically converted into a shutdown, as authorities responded with curfew like restrictions.
It was in his first calendar that Alam asked people to inscribe “Go India, Go Back” on walls, streets and internet forums. The graffiti took time to pick up. On June 27, the day Alam had listed for graffiti, very few appeared. But slowly, they became an integral part of protests in Kashmir. Walls and streets were flooded with signs of ‘Go India, Go Back’. Authorities had a tough time wiping off the signs, especially from airport road, ahead of the visit of All Party Delegation of parliamentarians.
Similarly, the protest calendars, issued back to back, became the peg of protests, so much so, that life in Kashmir revolved around the calendars. They were eagerly waited for by people as well as the authorities, who would draw their curfew calendar accordingly. Schools, universities, and examination boards, would draw their examination calendar according to the Hurriyat (G) calendar.
In later stages, the government tried to break the calendar by clamping curfews on days meant for normal business in Hurriyat calendar, but gave up after the move failed to yield the desired results.
While Masrat remained the brain behind the calendar, Chairman Geelani took charge of them after he was released by the government in an effort to calm down the protests in Valley. The calendar frenzy fizzled out after Eid-ul-Adha and Darbar Move (biannual movement of government offices between Srinagar and Jammu cities) in November. Many analysts say, the protest programme required improvisation to make these less reliant on shutdowns, as people besieged in their homes for months without business could not take it for long. In fact, some would say, nobody even expected it to last as long as it did.
