یوں قتل اولاد سے ہوتا نہ وہ بدنام
افسوس کہ فرعون کو کالج کی نہ سوجی
(He would not have earned such infamy through the slaughter of children. Alas, that Pharaoh never thought of building a college instead.)
I. Ahmad Wani
A piece doing the rounds this past week, written by someone clearly looking at the Valley from a comfortable distance, made an argument that deserves to be answered directly rather than ignored. The claim was that the schools run under the Falah-e-Aam Trust were simply the best-performing schools in Kashmir, that their board results spoke for themselves, and that the rest of the system, government schools included, was effectively inflating its achievements by comparison.
It is a neat argument. It is also the wrong question, asked in precisely the place where the wrong question does the most damage.
Is the goal of education to produce doctors and engineers, or is it to produce good citizens for the nation? Put that way, the question answers itself for most people. Yet it remains worth asking because the “results” argument quietly assumes that the two are identical. It assumes that strong board examination results are, by themselves, evidence of a school’s value to the nation.
If that were true, events such as the Delhi Red Fort bombing of 10 November 2025 would be difficult to explain. That evening, a vehicle carrying explosives detonated near a traffic signal close to the Red Fort, killing thirteen people and injuring dozens. According to investigators, the driver was Dr Umar Un Nabi, a doctor and assistant professor of medicine at Al Falah University in Faridabad who had studied at Government Medical College, Srinagar.
The investigation later widened into what police described as a “white-collar terror module”. Additional doctors were arrested. Ammonium nitrate and explosive material were recovered from a property linked to the network. An AK-47 rifle was discovered in a personal locker inside a government medical college, a weapon stored only a short distance from where doctors were treating patients.
That network has been linked in reporting to Jaish-e-Mohammed and its local affiliate, Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, not to Jamaat-e-Islami, and the two should not be conflated. Yet the lesson remains relevant to the “results” argument. If examination scores, medical degrees, and professional success were reliable indicators of loyalty to the nation, such a case should never have occurred. A degree proves competence. It does not prove conviction.
Follow the logic of “results” to its conclusion and it becomes even stranger. If producing doctors and engineers is the sole objective, then any institution that teaches effectively should be left untouched regardless of who runs it or what larger ideological ecosystem surrounds it.
But if the unstated objective is the cultivation of committed cadre, and the historical record of FAT under a banned organisation provides reason to ask that question, then the conclusion changes completely. In that case, such institutions cannot simply be judged by their examination statistics. An educational system capable of producing both academic toppers and intense ideological certainty is not demonstrating a harmless contradiction. It may be revealing the very danger policymakers seek to address.
At its core, this debate is not really about board results. It is about the ideology that a banned organisation carried into classrooms over several decades, and about what emerged at the far end of that process. The discussion is ultimately about encounters, funerals, bloodshed, and blast sites, stretching from Kashmir’s villages to the heart of the national capital.
Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir traced its organisational lineage to the broader Jamaat-e-Islami movement whose all-India structure was headquartered in Delhi. It functioned as a legal, overground political and social organisation and was never itself the group holding the rifle. Yet it was precisely this overground respectability that allowed it to operate for decades as an ideological nursery from which an underground insurgency drew recruits, particularly after 1989 when sections of its Kashmir networks moved toward patronage and support linked to Pakistan.
Hizbul Mujahideen did not emerge in isolation. It grew from Jamaat’s own networks in the Valley. Ordinary Kashmiri youth, many of whom began as neither hardened ideologues nor trained militants, became foot soldiers in a conflict whose planners often remained far removed from the battlefield itself.
For that reason, banning only the underground militant organisation was never likely to be sufficient while the overground structure that nurtured and sustained its ecosystem remained intact. That is the central argument behind both the ban and the subsequent decision to remove the FAT schools from the organisation’s control.
For those who have not lived through Kashmir’s decades of conflict, this discussion can appear abstract, a debate about trusts, tribunals, and provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. It ceases to be abstract the moment one visits villages such as Arwani in Bijbehara or Rampora in the Qaimoh belt of Kulgam.
In Arwani, members of one extended family alone account for more than thirty graves of men killed as militants or in militancy-related circumstances over three decades. In Rampora, one household has buried more than fifteen young men to the same cause across generations.
These are not figures extracted from a security briefing. They are villages where everyone knows whose son lies buried where, and why.
No combination of poverty or political grievance alone adequately explains why militancy repeatedly drew recruits from the same families and the same localities. The persistence of such patterns points many residents toward a different explanation, the slow cultivation of ideological commitment over many years.
That belief explains why so many people within the Valley itself, not merely policymakers or commentators elsewhere, argue that ideology was the most durable weapon of the terror industry. Rifles can be seized. Networks can be dismantled. Ideas, once embedded across generations, are far more difficult to remove.
It is only fair, however, to acknowledge that this argument remains contested.
Civil liberties advocates and several education researchers have warned that taking over an entire school network risks imposing collective punishment on teachers, staff, and students who may have had no connection to militancy. They argue that action based on a trust’s organisational lineage should not substitute for evidence against specific institutions operating today.
Jamaat-e-Islami and its supporters reject the claim that FAT schools functioned as ideological pipelines. They describe both the ban and the takeover as political measures directed against a conservative religious and social movement rather than as counter-terrorism necessities.
Researchers who have studied villages such as Arwani and Rampora also caution against simplistic explanations. They point to decades of conflict, contested governance, repeated encounters, security operations, social trauma, and the radicalising effect of funerals themselves. In their view, ideology alone rarely explains the entire story.
These objections are serious and deserve consideration. Any honest account of this debate must present them alongside the argument for stronger oversight.
There is a further point worth making, not about the argument itself but about where it was made and by whom.
The original piece was written by a Kashmiri, and it appeared in the Indian Express, one of the most widely trusted national dailies in the country. That combination matters. A Kashmiri byline lends the piece an insider’s credibility; a national masthead lends it reach and the presumption of rigour. Readers in Delhi, Mumbai, or Bengaluru who have never set foot in Bijbehara or Kulgam will tend to absorb the argument as settled, partly because of where it appeared and who appeared to be making it.
That is precisely why getting the question wrong in such a venue carries a cost that an obscure blog post would not. When a trusted national paper treats “best results” as a sufficient answer, it does more than offer one columnist’s opinion. It performs a kind of intellectual whitewashing of a question that policymakers, courts, and tribunals are still working through, and it does so with the authority of a masthead most readers will not think to interrogate.
It is also worth asking who actually lives with the consequences of that whitewashing. Commentators writing for national dailies are rarely the people deciding, school by school, whether to enrol their own children in an FAT institution or one like it. Families with means have other options: schools elsewhere, smaller private alternatives, the simple ability to choose. For most writers shaping how Kashmir is understood by readers outside it, this remains an academic argument, not a parenting decision.
For a poorer family in Arwani or Rampora, it is rarely either. A nearby school with strong results, affordable and within reach, is often the only realistic option, chosen out of necessity rather than ideology. It is that family, not the columnist, who lives with whatever ecosystem the school turns out to be part of. When the right question goes unasked in a venue with the reach of a national daily, the cost of that omission does not land on the writer. It lands on the poor man who never really had a choice of school to begin with, and whose child sits in that classroom regardless of what gets decided in Delhi’s newsrooms or its courts.
Even so, the historical record that informed the ban continues to support one central conclusion: education, however successful in producing examination results, cannot be evaluated solely through marksheets. When a school network is linked to a banned organisation, the question before the state is larger than academic performance. It is about the long-term social and ideological environment in which future generations are shaped.
That, ultimately, is why “best results” was never the right question.
