In the first such incident in the Valley since the decline of militancy started two years ago, masked gunmen waylaid the principal of a North Kashmir college, destroyed his car, and gave him a three-day ultimatum to ensure the 3,000 girl students in his institution began wearing the hijab.

The principal, Muhammad Ashraf, a respected Islamic scholar, told The Indian Express today that he would not be cowed by the threat and would continue to do his work at the college.

Ashraf said seven men stopped his car — in which he was riding with his son and a local acquaintance — near his village at Dangiwacha, and commandeered the vehicle over a dirt track into a thicket of bushes. “They wore masks and dark glasses and were heavily armed with Kalashnikovs, pistols and grenades,” Ashraf said.

According to the principal, the men appeared to know a lot about him: that he was a specialist on Sayyid Qutb — the Egyptian Islamist political theorist and leading intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 50s and 60s who is thought to be one of the philosophical progenitors of Al Qaeda — and that he had been trying to enforce discipline in his college.

“You have taken some really good steps in the college like banning smoking and cellphones. Now, you must do something that we want you to do. Enforce an Islamic dress code for girl students,” Ashraf said the men told him. They gave him three days to carry out their diktat, failing which they would “act”, they said.

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