“Damn the boycott,” Shabnam Lone ( Daughter of Abdul Ghani Lone ) unveils the Farce of Kashmir poll boycott

Daughter drills Lone hole in boycott
Rebel in scarf up against brothers
- Shabnam sets out to upturn family’s rejectionist legacy
SANKARSHAN THAKUR

A woman walks past CRPF jawans on a Srinagar street on Tuesday. (AFP)
Kupwara (North Kashmir), Nov. 25: There’s a screaming hole in the heart of the boycott campaign and it goes by the name of Shabnam Lone, daughter to assassinated separatist and People’s Conference patriarch Abdul Ghani Lone, sister to Hurriyat spearheads Bilal and Sajjad.

“Damn the boycott,” Shabnam says, “Damn this politics of deadlock, people have needs and aspirations, Kashmiris must rise to meet them.”

As an Independent candidate from Kupwara, the Lones’ picture-postcard domicile at the northern edge of the Kashmir Valley, Shabnam has set out, rock-jawed, to upturn her family’s rejectionist legacy — a Lone branching off from all that the name has come to mean in these parts.

Shabnam has always been a bit of a rebel. She fought her way through conservative society mores to a law degree, became a human rights advocate of some repute, refused to marry, and then, in something that young Kashmiri women rarely achieve, moved out of the Lone household and set up a separate home. Now, she is out to conquer that inheritance and emboss it with her own credentials.

The irony is she has little to go by other than her family name she wishes to overwrite. She lives in a spartan room in the Kupwara dak bungalow, which stands in the lee of a towering pine escarpment. Her campaign office is a ramshackle log hut located in an abandoned yard on the town’s outskirts; there isn’t enough to signpost the office or furnish it — it holds little other than a table, Shabnam’s appointed election symbol.

And when she sets off, megaphone in hand, into the deeper reaches of this beautiful but pitilessly backward constituency, she is tailed by no more than what the government has afforded her — two troop carriers which also double as rides for her campaign team. “I have no money,” she tells you, breathless upon a steep haul through the woods to her next meeting in a hill hamlet called Hind, “But I think I have a chance.”

She’s greeted you with a cosmopolitan shake of the hand and a trendy “Hi, how are you?” that rings pleasantly strange in the depths of rural Kashmir. But she’s playing true and full to the conservative gallery, make no mistake about it — she’s turned out in a loose full-length cowl, her head is scarved, her hands gloved. It is inexcusably cold, true, but that’s not the only reason the gloves are there; they don’t take kindly to women flaunting themselves here, and Shabnam is taking no chances.


Shabnam Lone
She admits she is up against it even though this is her family fief — “I am new to this and I have few resources” — but her chief adversaries are not those in the contest — sitting National Conference MLA Mir Saifullah and Zafar Mir of the PDP. Her chief adversaries lie within — brothers Bilal and Sajjad, who have unleashed a bitter boycott war to spite their sister.

“There is something called a Lone vote here, the family votebank created by her father,” explains Bashir Ahmed Dar, a Shabnam votary and president of the Kupwara bar association, on the sidelines of the Hind meeting. “It is that vote which is crucial to Shabnam’s success and it is that vote her brothers are trying to keep her from grabbing. Her challenge is to lure the traditional boycotters to the polling booths, if she can do that, she’s made.”

But isn’t it too much for her to expect that a votebank fed on separatism and sustained on boycotts should suddenly somersault and line up at the polling stations? Leave that to the crafty charms of Shabnam Lone; Bashir Ahmed Dar proclaims himself a foremost and willing victim. “I was a diehard separatist and boycotter,” he says, “but then came Shabnam appealing in the name of none other than her father. He would never have wanted his people to live permanently under the curse of poverty and backwardness, he would have wanted to do something about it, she said, and I think she had a point.”

Dar says several of patriarch Lone’s People’s Conference cadres have fallen behind Shabnam. Khurshid Iqbal, a Kupwara lawyer and activist, is among them. “We do want a separate nation,” he says, “But meantime, we also want some succour for the people, that won’t come from sitting in Srinagar and proclaiming a boycott.”

The throngs she’s gathering at her megaphone meetings in these remote hills are probably a clue Shabnam has hit a pulse long awaiting attention.

Village after village, they trail her, men and women and children for whom it has become a rarity for a politician to come calling. The cluster of the curious has become a cavalcade of the willing by late afternoon; and it has pumped Shabnam’s anti-boycott call. “How long do you want to remain frozen in your backwardness? How long will you not exercise your right? Rise, demand what is due to you, come and vote, my father would not have wished such penury on you and I promise to do whatever I can… turn up, turn up and vote for me….”

She utters not a word about her estranged brothers to the people, but she does once she is off the megaphone and rushing to her car towards another meeting. “What do I care what they say,” she bursts out. “They are welcome to propagate their boycott on television, I am propagating a vote among my people.”

She’s off in a roar of raised arms and ayes — “Shabnam Lone, zindabad! Zindabad! Zindabad!” Fayaz Hamid, a local journalist who’s accompanied us, is a touch taken by what he’s seen. “Believe me, she has got something going, my guess is Kupwara will vote with a vengeance.” Who’ll win, he won’t bet, but if they turn out at the booths in this boycott stronghold, it will have been victory enough for Shabnam against her rival Lones.
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