J&K: Decapitated Nightingale
Praveen
Swami
"Spring will return to the
beautiful Valley soon", the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee
had promised in Srinagar last April, quoting a somewhat trite
passage from the poet Ghulam Ahmed Mehjoor, "the flowers will bloom
again and the nightingales will return, singing." Just over a year
on, the nightingales have been decapitated: the All Parties Hurriyat
Conference (APHC), on whose 'moderates' the peace process was built,
is in disarray; political dialogue with New Delhi is stalled, and
the substantial reductions in terrorist violence Vajpayee had hoped
for have yet to materialise.
On July 6, 2004, Hurriyat chairman Maulvi Abbas Ansari announced
that he was resigning his post in an effort to bring about the
reunification of the secessionist coalition's factions. The
organisation's founder-chairman, Srinagar cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq,
was asked to work towards restoring the Hurriyat's original
Executive Council, which, until last year's split, included Islamist
hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Although the Hurriyat reiterated
its willingness to 'continue dialogue with India and Pakistan',
Farooq said this process would commence only after a new chairman
was elected by the pre-split Executive Council.
What sense might one make of Ansari's resignation? At one level, the
effective termination of dialogue with the Government of India could
be read as the outcome of intense terrorist pressure on the
Hurriyat's Centrists. On May 29, terrorists had shot the Mirwaiz's
uncle, Maulvi Mushtaq Ahmad, who died nine days later. Farooq's own
house was subsequently attacked. Speaking in New Delhi on June 28,
Farooq candidly admitted that "somebody within our rank and file is
targeting me and my family". The reason for this hostility among
terrorist ranks, he said, was "our stand on the resolution of the
Kashmir issue through the dialogue process".
Discretion, it would then seem, triumphed over valour in the week
between Farooq's visit to Delhi and Ansari's decision to step down.
One key event may have been the burning down of the historic school
run by Farooq's family in downtown Srinagar on June 7, the act of
arson intended to signal that both his life and his ideological
inheritance were under threat. Yet, the problems surfaced much
earlier, as it became clear that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
Government at Delhi was unwilling to deliver a dramatic face-saving
gesture to the Centrists, like significant troop withdrawals or
direct one-on-one negotiations with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Another key factor was the efforts by the Union Government to draw
the Islamists into the dialogue process, thus undermining the
Hurriyat's Centrist majority's claims to represent all of the people
of Jammu and Kashmir. On June 9, lawyer-politician Ram Jethmalani
held an unscheduled 30-minute meeting with Geelani, pushing ideas
for wider internal autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir. Jethmalani made
his visit on behalf of the non-official Kashmir Committee, set up
with quiet Government assent at the start of the predecessor
National Democratic Alliance regime's engagement with the Hurriyat.
Most observers had believed the Kashmir Committee to be defunct
after the resignation of two of its three members, senior
journalists M.J. Akbar and Dilip Padgaonkar.
Jethmalani's mission, sources say, was pushed by elements in the
Union Ministry of Home Affairs who believed the Centrists needed to
be prodded into action, and the dialogue 'broad-based'. The services
of the recently-replaced Intelligence Bureau Director, K.P. Singh,
were used to set up the meeting, and Geelani was contacted through a
New Delhi lawyer of ethnic-Kashmiri origin. Although the Islamist
leader was non-committal, Jethmalani flew to Srinagar, only to be
kept waiting for several hours before he was granted a token
audience.
At a later rally, Geelani claimed he rejected Jethmalani's autonomy
proposals out of hand. "Jethmalani wanted me to give credit to the
Indian democracy", Geelani said, "I explained to him how the Indian
forces had committed massacre after massacre of Kashmiri people in
the last 15 years. He had nothing to say when he withdrew". Geelani
also charged that the "the entire Indian leadership was biased
against the Kashmiri Muslims," and that while the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) was "explicitly communal", the Congress "was
instinctively communal but it was pretending to be secular." The
bottom line was that Jethmalani had failed to win over the Islamists
- and at once alienated the Centrists.
For now, Geelani has also shown no signs of biting the bait offered
by the Centrists, and has expressly rejected dialogue with India.
Speaking after Friday prayers at a Srinagar mosque on July 9, for
example, he accused India of "massacring Kashmiris under the
camouflage of a peace process." In several earlier speeches, Geelani
rejected any forward movement other than those founded on United
Nations resolutions mandating a plebiscite in the pre-1947 state of
Jammu and Kashmir. Common sense suggests Geelani would enter the
Hurriyat only if he had a decisive say in shaping strategy:
something the mere removal of Ansari would not give him.
Geelani's best hope is to regain influence within the
Jamaat-e-Islami, the organisation to which he gave much of his life
before being marginalised last year. His supporters now hope to use
his majority among the 1,250-plus delegates in the Jamaat-e-Islami's
General Council to secure changes in the organisation's leadership,
and amend its Constitution to allow for support of the Islamist
Jihad against India. He does not, however, have a majority among the
Jamaat-e-Islami's rukuns - its rank and file cadre - or its senior
leadership.
From December 2003 onwards, moderates in the Jamaat have run a
successful campaign to remove pro-Geelani figures from positions of
power, tacitly backing the Hurriyat moderates. Syed Nazir Ahmad
Kashani, the Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, fought off
Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin (HM) efforts to garner support for the
hardliners. On January 1 this year, the Jamaat's Markazi
Majlis-e-Shoora (Central Consultative Committee), went public with a
commitment to "democratic and constitutional struggle", an
indication of willingness to operate within the Indian political
system. Article 5 of the Jamaat-e-Islami's Constitution obliges it
to use such means, and to desist from those which "may contribute to
the strife on earth".
Perhaps the most important determinant of future events will be how
much influence terrorist groups are able to exercise. The signs, on
the face of it, are not good. Although violence has been in steady
decline since 2001 - the year India threatened to go to war unless
Pakistan deescalated its covert war in J&K - official figures for
this summer do not make for happy reading. Killings of civilians in
April and June this year were higher than in 2003, particularly in
the Kashmir Division. So, too, were the numbers of Indian security
force personnel killed, although the numbers of terrorists killed in
retaliation declined.
Infiltration, as Chief of Army Staff Nirmal Vij recently made
public, has resumed, reaching high levels in the first two weeks of
June. What Vij did not make public was the fact that the
almost-complete border fencing is not as effective as some had
hoped. Three terrorists shot dead near the Line of Control in the
Mandi-Loran area on June 9, for example, were carrying plastic
pipes, designed to penetrate the fencing. Indian infantry troops who
have carried out tests on the fencing have taken just 10 to 15
minutes to clear the barrier - suggesting that while it is indeed a
deterrent, the fence is hardly the kind of impregnable barrier
enthusiasts had claimed.
Worst of all, the political ground on which the peace process is
premised threatens to turn into quicksand. With terrorist groups
increasingly dominating southern Kashmir, particularly at night,
large crowds of villagers have started appearing at the last rites
of slain terrorists, a phenomenon not seen since the early 1990s.
Gatherings of up to two thousand villagers have been recorded during
the burials of terrorists of Pakistani origin, something unheard of
until early this year. In one recent incident in Kulgam, villagers
were shipped in by bus to protest an Army siege of a local mosque,
in an effort to rescue two terrorists still trapped inside.
Major political parties have been unable to respond. The ruling
People's Democratic Party (PDP), which until recently had a
none-too-covert alliance with elements of the south Kashmir
Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin, has been haemorrhaging cadres - the wages of the
terrorist group's ire at the PDP's inability to deliver on pre-poll
promises to scale back military operations. At least five PDP
workers have been killed and eight injured since June. In one
gruesome June 15 incident, four PDP activists who had campaigned for
Anantnag Member of Parliament Mehbooba Mufti were taken to a jungle
hideout near Aishmuqam, beaten and then shot through the legs.
Crippled by a bitter internal feud, dealing with the crisis seems to
be the last thing on the ruling PDP-Congress alliance government's
agenda. Last month, Congress politicians, their eyes firmly focussed
on the Hindu vote in Jammu, launched a protracted offensive against
the State Government's efforts to restrict the ongoing Amarnath
Yatra to just one month. The State Cabinet, as a consequence of the
growing feud, has not met for four months. Both the mainstream
parties and secessionists seem bereft of leadership: a fact which
suggests that guns, not words, will once again shape the discourse
in the months to come.
Praveen
Swami is the New Delhi Chief of
Bureau, Frontline magazine, and also writes for its
sister publication, The Hindu. |
