|
J
& K after 9 /11
More
of the same
Praveen
Swami
The
wrong questions are being asked about events
to come in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The wrong answers are
starting to form the core of official received wisdom.
Of themselves, the questions circulating in New Delhi are both
unexceptional and unsurprising. How serious is General Pervez
Musharraf about fighting groups of religious fundamentalists in
Pakistan? Does he intend to contain their activities in J&K? Can
the General, assuming that he is earnest, achieve this objective?
Will the coming summer see a de-escalation of levels of violence, or
will an outbreak of war become inevitable? Or what, in future
political dialogue, will Musharraf seek in return for his rejection
of Jehad as an instrument
of state policy? Underlying all these questions is the assumption
that the world has changed in fundamental ways since September 11,
2001, and that Pakistan, as a consequence, can no longer sustain its
war in J&K in quite the way it has in the past.
Left
to himself, there can be little doubt about what direction Musharraf
would like Pakistan’s J&K policy to take. The Kargil War, for
one, was premised on the assumption that an escalation of
hostilities by Pakistan would ensure international intervention in
the dispute, ending Indian insistence on bilateral conflict
resolution. Pakistan’s actions in recent months have, rather, been
driven by pressure from the United States of America. As Pakistani
commentator Ayaz Amir pointed out, in President George W. Bush’s
recent State of the Union Address, “only two foreign leaders came
in for mention and praise: Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan
and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.” “In a
different era”, Amir adds, “say in the 1950s and ’60s when the
fires of national liberation burnt bright, such American endorsement
would have been seen as a kiss of death, a confirmation of the
client status of the leader concerned”.
Pakistan, Amir balefully continued, had turned
“ingratiating behaviour into an art form.”
To
understand where Musharraf might be headed, then, one has to answer
a more fundamental question, which is this: has
the United States of America’s three-decade romance with the
armies of Jehad, in fact, come to an end?
Romancing
the Right
Indian
official doctrine has it that the United States wishes to eliminate
the Islamist Right, seeing them as a threat to its interests. If
this is indeed the case, some larger ideological meaning could well
be read into Musharraf’s actions in the wake of his January 12,
2002 speech. Leaving aside evidence that groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed
(JeM) or Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) continue to be active throughout
India, Musharraf’s efforts to curtail his domestic opponents on
the religious right could then plausibly be read as part of a
continuum of action that would eventually extend to terminating the
state-sponsored Jehad in
Jammu and Kashmir.
But,
events that are still unfolding, suggest this proposition does not
describe the real world accurately. Several figures involved in the
proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which led to the
birth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, have now again obtained central
positions in the US policy establishment. Key among them is Bush’s
special envoy on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who, one commentator
has described as a “colourful figure with a formidable track
record of justifying the unjustifiable.” Khalilzad made his
reputation as a junior official in the Ronald Regan years as an
enthusiastic champion of armed insurgencies. He was one of the early
supporters of Bosnia’s Muslim insurgents and later supported the
arming of Afghan mujahideen,
including Osama bin Laden, against the Red Army. This was despite
the then Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s warning to US
President Regan that he was “creating a Frankenstein.” By the
mid-1990s, he had become a lobbyist for the oil company UNOCAL,
arguing the merits of the Taliban. It was only after the bombing of
Afghanistan in 1998 that Khalilzad changed his position.
Remarkable
continuities can also be seen between the ideological postures of
the Taliban and the new Karzai administration, the United States has
installed. In a recent interview, the new Chief Justice, Fazal Hadi
Shinwari, told the Afghan Islamic Press that, in accordance with
Karzai’s wishes, Islamic laws were to remain in force in
Afghanistan. All cases in the district, provincial and Supreme Court
would implement Hudood
after guilt was proven. On what this would mean in practice,
Shinwari was frank:
For
instance, adulterers would be stoned to death when either of them or
both were married. A
murderer would have to pay blood money or be executed in the manner
in which the murder victim was killed, depending on the wishes of
the victim’s relatives, he said.
“A thief’s hand would be cut off, and alcoholics and
others would be punished under Islamic laws, but the condition would
be that the crime is proved”, he said.
No
howls of outrage from Washington; and no surprise either, for all of
this is at par with the past. Recall that, hours after the Taliban
moved into Kabul, acting State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies
said his country could see “nothing objectionable” about the
Taliban’s version of Islamic law. By 1997, the United
States–Saudi conglomerate UNOCAL was firmly entrenched in
Afghanistan, flying Taliban leaders to the United States, and even
arranging multi-million dollar investments in the training of
technical personnel through the University of Nebraska. Underpinning
the project to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan
was a single strategic passion: the isolation of Iran. As Richard
Mackenzie has argued:
Pipelines
through Afghanistan would exclude the possibility of direct supply
by Iran of resources to meet Pakistan’s energy needs [and those of
India], and the consequent flow of foreign exchange earnings into
Iran’s coffers. The isolation of Iran is not especially an
obsession of the State Department, but there are such strongly
anti-Iranian attitudes in sections of Congress, reinforced by the
lobbying of pressure groups such as the American-Israeli Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that a president has little incentive to
take his political life in his hands by exploring the possibility of
a less antagonistic relationship with Iran.
Recent
United States fulmination about Iran’s alleged arms sales to
Palestine and its interference in the affairs of the Karzai
government show this perspective is still alive.The US continues to
believe, it would seem, in allies on the Islamic Right to combat its
perceived competitors for influence in West Asia. While the current
regime in Afghanistan may not contain Taliban and Al Qaeda elements
explicitly hostile to the United States, Shinwari’s interview
makes explicit the lack of ideological distance between the Taliban
and the new government. While the United States pushed for action
against terrorist groups hostile to its presence in Pakistan, there
has been no real effort to terminate the activities of these groups
in so far as they do not impinge on American interests there.
Indeed, the word democracy has been conspicuously absent from US
rhetoric on Afghanistan and Pakistan. No one seems to have even
noticed that, as part of his alleged movement towards
democratisation, Musharraf has stripped 90 per cent of Pakistan’s
population, who do not possess university degrees, of the right to
contest elections.Neither have there been protests about his
appointment of soldiers as judges in special anti-terrorism courts.
Efforts
like these can be, and have been, seen as creating an apparatus with
which – Kemal Ataturk style – to push Pakistan towards
modernisation. But it is self-delusion to believe that this would
mean an end to Pakistan’s support of terrorist groups. Musharraf
has, as his more perceptive critics have pointed out, always sought
covert tactical alliances with the armies of Jehad,
while seeking to exclude them from the sphere of legitimate
political activity. This is because he understands the damage such
groups have inflicted on Pakistan, yet needs them to sustain the war
in J&K. Without this pistol to hold to India’s head, the
General knows, there would be no prospect of securing even the
minimum gains on J&K that are necessary to give him the
legitimacy he needs to push his domestic agenda. As Pakistani
analyst Najam Sethi has argued:
The
Musharraf model seeks to covertly ally with the jihadi
groups while overtly keeping the mainstream religious parties out of
the power loop. This is to enhance and sustain its covert
external agenda, while internally maintaining an overtly moderate
anti-fundamentalist stance for the comfort of the international
community whose economic support is critical to Pakistan's financial
viability.
The
US tolerance of the remnants of the Taliban in Pakistan, and of
allied terrorist groups operating in J&K, is similarly, one of
necessity. September 11 or no September 11, it needs tactical
friends and ideological allies on the Islamist Right to negate
challenges not just from Iran, but Iraq, Palestine, and the welter
of anti-American Islamists scattered across West Asia. We now know,
through the medium of National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra, that
India sent diplomatic notes to the United States and the United
Kingdom warning of the airlifting of some 5000 Pakistan and Afghan
members of the Taliban after the fall of Kunduz.
Mishra appeared surprised that neither responded.
Only
the truly gullible should actually have been surprised. The US has
not, as some Indian officials have suggested, suddenly awoken from
some kind of Rip Van Winkle haze to discover that Indian charges
against Pakistan must be taken seriously “because they had been
backed by proof.” The United States has always known of the
Pakistani state’s role in terrorist acts directed against India,
but chose to maintain a discreet silence so as not to jeopardise
relations with its closest ally in South Asia. On occasion, the
United States did use its influence to reign in the Pakistan
intelligence establishment. Such intervention has, however, been
sporadic, and of only limited effect.
For example:
After
a series of five hijackings by Sikh terrorists between 1981 and
1984, India managed to get clinching evidence of ISI involvement in
1984 in the form of a West German Government report that the pistol
given to the hijackers of August 24, 1984, at Lahore by the ISI was
part of a consignment supplied to the Pakistan Government by the
West German manufacturers. This resulted in a severe warning to
Pakistan by Washington, and a total discontinuance by the ISI of the
use of hijacking as a weapon against India for 15 years till the
latest hijacking on December 24, 1999, after General Musharraf
seized power on October 12.
Nor
has the United States ever called on Pakistan to extradite or even
prosecute the authors of the Kandahar hijacking, or of the Mumbai
serial bombings of 1992-1993, despite strong evidence of their
presence in that country. It has not even agreed to either extradite
or prosecute on its own soil twenty-one Khalistani terrorists who
India says are in the United States. More recently, after the
January 22, 2002 terrorist attack on the United States Information
Service (USIS) in Kolkata, one was treated to the spectacle of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) chief, Robert Mueller, saying
he would “like to wait and see what the investigation discloses
about the purpose of the attack.” Mueller’s
suggestion was that the attack could have been targeted at the
police, rather than the United States facility. No investigation was
needed to know this was absurd, just common sense. Had the Kolkata
Police been the intended target of the attack, large numbers of its
personnel could have been found undefended at several locations –
including the parade ground down the road from the building –
other than the USIS offices. For its own reasons, then, the United
States will tolerate the continued existence of at least some
elements of the armies of Jehad,
and their covert use, within limits, by Pakistan.
Tactics
of Terror
What
does all this mean for India? Pakistan
has made no secret of its post-January 12 intentions. Speaking to
the Associated Press, the Prime Minister of Pakistan occupied
Kashmir (PoK), Sikandar Hayat Khan, made it clear that the LeT and
JeM continue to be free to operate from the region. He also made it
clear that cross-border terrorist operations were free to continue:
I
will protest if Pakistan turns over Kashmir Mujaheddin
to India. I’ll discuss the issue with President Musharraf and urge
him not to hand over any Kashmiri to India. The United Nations
recognises Kashmir as a disputed territory and Kashmiris are waging
a legitimate struggle. We
do not recognise the Line of Control.
Talk
of ethnic Kashmiri mujahideen is
hugely disingenuous. The bulk of LeT and JeM cadre, like Premier
Khan himself, are not ethnic Kashmiri. The second-in-command of the
Hizb-ul-Mujahideen’s (HM) military operations in J&K,
Saif-ur-Rahman Bajwa, is from the Pakistani province of Punjab.
Similarly, Musharraf’s claim that he is willing in principle to
extradite Indian nationals demanded by New Delhi apparently does not
stretch to the Sopore-born commander of the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin,
Mohammad Yusuf Shah, who goes by the somewhat vain alias Syed
Salahuddin. Shah contested elections in 1987, accepting the
parameters of the Indian constitution, and has not, to anyone’s
knowledge, subsequently acquired Pakistani citizenship.
No action has been taken against any of the 15 constituents
of the United Jehad Council (UJC), which, including as it does the
HM, are responsible for the majority of terrorist crime in the State
of J&K. By Pakistan’s own official account, just 1,957 cadre
of all organisations of the Islamist Right have been arrested, most
of whom have no operational role in J&K.
Pakistan’s
compliance with international mandates to seize the funds of
terrorist groups has been consistent with this record. Between
September 11 and December 6, 2001, acting under Executive Order
13224, the United States blocked a total of 79 financial accounts
within the country, freezing US$33.7 million. This included the
blocking by the Department of Treasury of the property and interests
in property of several institutions, primarily the Osama bin Laden
affiliated Al Barakaat Trust. The
British Government followed by freezing 35 suspect bank accounts,
immobilising more than £63 million of suspected terrorist funds. France
announced the freezing of assets worth £2.7 million. One would have
expected that Pakistan’s action would have secured considerably
larger, or at least comparable, assets.
On
the contrary, the total amount was derisively low. The two
accounts of the HuM [Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin] had a total of Rs. 4,742,
the JeM had Rs. 900, the al Rashid Trust, which handled the accounts
of the Taliban and the LeT, had Rs.2.7 million and US $ 30. Ayman
al-Zawahiri, of the al-Jihad, Egypt, who operated the accounts of
the al Qaeda, had just US $ 252. Pakistani Rs. 68 are equivalent to
one US dollar. The News of
Islamabad reported as follows on January 1, 2002: “The frozen
accounts had a balance of $190,554 and close to Rs. 10 million till
December 20, 2001. The Government has sent the details of these bank
accounts, including that of the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad, to the
US authorities. Experts said the policy to freeze the accounts
in ‘pieces’ gave ample time to most of these account-holders to
withdraw their money”.
Seen
from ground up, moreover, there has been no significant
transformation in either the levels or contours of violence since
Musharraf’s decision to arrest top leaders of the LeT and JeM.
For all the recent – possibly officially inspired – media
hype about two successive ‘no-incident days’ in J&K, figures
suggest that there has been no dramatic change in levels of violence
in the wake of Musharraf’s speech. Comparison of violence levels
in the 12 days before the speech, the 12 days after it, and the
relevant periods in 2001, make for interesting reading [see Table
1]. Broadly speaking,
the Kashmir zone did indeed see a drop in levels of violence after
January 12. So did the Jammu zone, but with a key exception.
Violence for the period between January 13 and January 24, 2002,
remained considerably higher than for the same period in 2001. The
overall levels of violence from January 1 to January 24, 2002, were
also considerably higher than for the entire month of January 2001.
While the whole of January 2001 saw 56 violent incidents occur in
the Jammu zone, that figure was matched in the first 12 days of 2002
alone. As for the drop in levels of violence in Kashmir, this can
plausibly be attributed to reasons other than Musharraf’s speech.
First, the zone, as indeed the whole of the State, saw a
record numbers of killings of terrorists. That could well have
translated into a reduction in levels of attacks on civilians and
security force (SF) personnel. Second, there was considerable
snowfall in mid-January, imposing a temporary pause on crossings
along key areas of the Line of Control (LoC) from Sawjian to Kupwara,
and the prospect of onward movement through the Pir Panjal from
Jammu into Kashmir. As the data shows, similar declines in levels of
violence took place in mid-January, 2001.
One
key element of terrorist tactics in Rajouri and Poonch has been to
create communal fissures, taking advantage of the withdrawal of
pickets intended to secure Hindu-dominated villages. On New Year’s
eve, the Lashkar-e-Toiba executed six Hindu villagers at Mangnar,
approximately half an hour’s drive from Poonch. Rajouri has seen a
welter of similar killings as well. Three persons, including a
woman, were shot dead at Sadda on the night of December 29, 2001,
while two Hindus, one of them aged over 70, were executed at Sehr
Nain on January 1, 2002. If it were not for the presence of Village
Defence Committees (VDC), casualties may have been far more.
Terrorists attacked the Rajouri village of Daggal Allal, Nerojal and
Kheri, killing one villager in each assault, but withdrew after the
return of fire inflicted losses on their group. Muslims perceived as
backing India have also been hard hit, although their stories have
passed largely unreported. Nazir Hussain was killed at his home in
Kakora village on January 6, 2002, for having rented his house to
troops, while Bagh Hussain was executed along with him because he
had served as a soldier. A photograph of Hussain in uniform was
found on the body of JeM ‘commander’ Siraj Talibani, killed a
few days later, along with his associate Yasir Ahmad. Earlier, on
December 27, 2001, Mohammad Hussain and Abdul Rashid were executed
on charges of being informers, as was Mohammad Shabbir on January 1,
2002. Two other alleged informers, Mohammad Shafi and Mohammad
Bashir, were killed at Darhal on January 19, 2002. And in one
dramatic December 23, 2001 raid, terrorists looted 14 weapons from
guards at the village home of the National Conference candidate for
the February 2002 Jammu Lok Sabha (Lower House of Indian Parliament)
by-election, Choudhari Talib Hussain.
More
importantly, terrorist groups have been seeking to reassert their
influence over civil society, which had eroded as a result of the
severe attrition in their ranks through 2001. JeM cadres have
distributed leaflets in dozens of villages calling on Special Police
Officers (SPOs) and policemen in the Special Operations Group (SoG)
to resign their jobs. Other leaflets have warned villagers not to
attend the funerals of Muslims executed by terrorists. As was the
case during the ‘non-initiation of combat operations' phase that
ended in the summer of 2001, the Poonch area has witnessed the
construction of reinforced bunkers in hill areas to make eventual
army reoccupation expensive. Homes and schools used by Army posts at
Manjakote, Buddhal and Thanamandi had been torched after troops left
for forward positions. This serves two purposes. The secondary
objective is to ensure that the small numbers of Central Reserve
Police Force (CRPF) and India Reserve Police (IRP) sent in to
replace the Army do not find ready shelter, and have to spend much
of their time organising logistics. More important, the arson
attacks provide a visible signal to local communities that they
cannot rely on the Indian state for protection, and that while the
presence of security forces is impermanent, the armies of the Jehad
have come to stay.
What
long-term consequences such self-inflicted harm can cause has long
been evident in the district of Doda, where troop withdrawals during
the Kargil War of 1999, continue to have serious consequences even
today. On August 9, 2001, the Union government extended the
Disturbed Areas Act through the Jammu zone, in response to the
massacre of 22 Hindus by terrorists on the Sharhot Dhar (high-altitude pasture). While the decision to impose the
Disturbed Areas Act was in part driven by panic – more communal
massacres took place in 1998, for example, than in 2001 – it also
reflected official despair at the deteriorating situation south of
the Pir Panjal. Official data makes it clear that the problem lies,
not in the absence of special powers, but in the physical absence of
troops. In 1997, 11 Army and nearly nine paramilitary battalions
were stationed in the police district of Doda, which excludes the tehsil
of Ramban. The next year, despite a series of communal killings, two
Rashtriya Rifles battalions were withdrawn. During the Kargil War,
almost all Rashtriya Rifles battalions were pulled out, along with
the Border Security Force (BSF). Three Rashtriya Rifles battalions
and the BSF never came back
A
little time with the map makes clear why these deployment levels are
so absurd. Doda, like many of the Jammu districts, is enormous,
sprawling across 11,678 square kilometres, only a few hundred
square kilometres less than the entire Kashmir valley.
Over 60 per cent of this area is made up of the single tehsil
of Kishtwar. The Kishtwar tehsil
is cut by rivers into four major areas: the northern valley systems
of Wadwan and Marwah are protected by just one Army battalion.
Wadwan technically falls under the command of the Srinagar-based 15
Corps, but even the single company traditionally despatched there
each summer did not arrive in the summer of year 2001. During a
visit to the region in November, this author found no permanent
deployment of forces at all beyond the south Kashmir town of Verinag.
Camps built by the ITBP on the Margan Pass and the Rashtriya Rifles
in the Wadwan village of Inshan had been burned down by terrorists.
As a result, Wadwan has become home to one of the largest
concentrations of terrorists in J&K. To the south, the Dacchan
and Paddar valley systems have again been left unsecured. An ITBP
company based at Gulabgarh, a few minutes drive from Ladder, pulled
out in March 2001, a fact of some significance, given that many of
the massacres before August that year took place in the Paddar
valley.
Kishtwar
is not the only area to have suffered from this unexplained
unwillingness to commit troops. The 5 Sikh Light Infantry pulled out
of the south Doda area of Gandoh early in the summer of 2001,
leaving one of the district’s worst-hit areas open for terrorist
operations. Army officials claimed this decision was taken to shore
up defences along the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway in the
build-up to the Amarnath Yatra, but the battalion was moved out in
April, months before the pilgrimage. The thinning out of troops in
Doda, as also now in Rajouri and Poonch, came at a time when
terrorist groups had been able to assert their authority over civil
society more effectively than at any point in the recent past.
During the non-initiation of combat operations period, the Kishtwar Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
began imposing de facto taxes on the treasury at Marwah. Salaries and dues worth Rs.
2 million are estimated to have been diverted before the cease-fire
ended. Local intelligence had reported that up to 43 Kishtwaris
joined terrorist groups between March and June 2001, up from next to
nothing in the previous years.
Why
has Doda suffered from shabby security cover? One explanation is
that terrorism in its remote mountains rarely makes the front page.
But, it is also hard to ignore even more cynical considerations. The
withdrawal of formal cover has been mirrored by a massive
proliferation in the numbers of Special Police Officers (SPOs), paid
Rs. 1,500 a month to work with the Special Operations Groups and
VDCs. Doda now has approximately 7,500 SPOs, including the 1,000
additional posts authorised by Union Minister of State for Home, I D
Swami, in the wake of the Sharhot Dhar
massacre. Most of those 1000 posts, it bears mentioning, already
existed, but without a formal official allotment. But just 2,700 of
these are actually deployed in operational roles with the district
police. Although VDCs have played a valuable role in protecting
villages, as have SPOs in operational roles, there have also been
reports that the thousands posted with local politicians, mainly of
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have had not a little to do with
the otherwise inexplicable majorities the party has managed to
secure in Muslim-dominated pockets of the district in successive
elections. The SPO scheme is, moreover, mired in a surfeit of
problems. VDC members simply cannot afford to remain in their
villages year-round, and many migrate in search of jobs. Others
leave their villages and their weapons when they find casual work in
the area itself.
Political
Strategies
It
is not as if the state has given up on fighting terrorism. The year
2001 did, after all, see significant gains in the numbers of
terrorists killed – an index of real significance. The problem is
that the Union government does not appear to possess any meaningful
paradigm within which it can understand the role of coercive
measures against terrorism, and from which it can proceed to shape
tactics and wider strategies. Counter-terrorist operations are seen
as a desultory, vaguely masturbatory activity for the boys to keep
themselves occupied, while the men get down to the real
business of finding a ‘political solution’ to the J&K
imbroglio. As a direct result of this fallacy, the Union government
has found itself in the ridiculous position of defending the
Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), on the one hand, and
negotiating with self-confessed terrorists, their sympathisers and
financiers on the other.
Much
official engagement with Jammu & Kashmir rests on the twin
pillars of discourse with the Kul Jamaat Hurriyat Conference [All
Parties Hurriyat Conference: APHC], and with centrists in the HM,
grouped around its former Kashmir valley ‘commander’, Abdul
Majid Dar. No one disputes the need for such efforts. A vibrant
internal dialogue is the best means available for India to avoid
growing international pressure for third-party mediation on J&K.
There is also little doubt that, should elements of either the Hizb
or APHC join mainstream politics, the legitimacy of pro-Pakistan
forces in the State would be undermined. But, the problem is that
the dialogue process seems to have become a bureaucratic
institution, one that exists simply because it does, rather than
because its stated objectives appear to be progressing towards
imminent or eventual realisation. Official interlocutor has followed
official interlocutor – Wajahat Habibullah being the latest
addition to a cast of characters as diverse as K C Pant, Brajesh
Mishra and A S Dulat – but with Legislative Assembly elections now
less than six months away, there are still no signs of concrete
results.
First,
the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. It is now over 16 months since the Union
government first began its engagement with Dar. The mechanics of the
process, and the means through which it was brought about, have been
documented earlier. Shortly thereafter, Dar and his inner circle of
secondary commanders were ordered back to Pakistan. Little happened
for almost a year, with Dar and his associates claiming they could
not ‘abandon their cadres’ until replacements were decided upon.
The best part of a year later, the Shoura-e-Jihad
of the HM, its supreme war council, announced the appointment of new
commanders. Dar was replaced by
Ghulam Hassan Khan, who uses the aliases ‘Saif-ul-Islam’ and
‘Engineer Zamaan’. Two deputy commanders, Abdul Ahmad Bhat, a
Sopore resident who uses the nom
de guerre Umar Javed, and the Pakistan national Saif-ur-Rahman
Bajwa, made up the second rung of the new hierarchy. District-level
replacements were also made. Javed Ahmad Rather, operating under the
alias Zubair-ul-Islam, was given control of north Kashmir operations
replacing Dar’s aide, Farooq Sheikh Mirchal, code named Feroz.
While
most Hizb cadre reacted to the decision to remove Dar with disquiet,
few dissenting voices were heard in public.
That is, until November 19, 2001, when one of Dar’s closest
aides shattered the silence. Khurshid Ahmad Zargar, a one- time
veterinary surgeon who operated as the south Kashmir head of the
Hizb under the alias Asad Yazdani, told a group of journalists that,
while he understood “the armed movement brought the Kashmir issue
out of cold storage, at the same time we accept the gun alone is no
solution to the problem…We want organisations like the
Jaish-e-Mohammadi, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin to work
under the local leadership. They should not have any role in policy
making.” Zargar was at pains to dispel rumours of a division
between “liberal and hard-line” elements in the Hizb. But, those
very divisions showed up in stark relief over the next few days. A
day after Zargar’s press conference, Khan issued a statement
claiming he was not authorised to speak for the Hizb. His one-time
ally replied the next morning, pointing out that the new Hizb
leadership was not in place to take charge of the organisation. Shah
himself called a meeting of the Shoura-e-Jihad
on November 23, 2001, ordering Dar and his associates to return to
Pakistan, and asking the Srinagar press not to publish statements
issued by the dissident faction. That, however, achieved nothing. On
November 24, the Srinagar Hizb issued another broadside, proclaiming
loyalty to Dar, and making it clear that the leaders would not
return to Pakistan until their replacements were in place on the
field.
If
it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, goes the old maxim,
it probably is a duck. For all practical purposes, Dar had broken
with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen central command, dividing the organisation into two. His cause was helped
not a little by a series of Intelligence Bureau (IB)-led operations
in late 2001, targeting hawala
(illegal money transfers) operators funneling funds through
legitimate overground businesses to terrorist groups in Jammu &
Kashmir. The seizures meant that the Hizb cadre did not receive
their Ramadan-time payments, which most used to send home to support
their families. There was, unsurprisingly, not a little muttering
about Khan’s incompetence, and a marked reluctance to engage in
aggressive operations. But as ducks go, Dar was unmistakably
one-legged. While he had secured the support of the Indian state -
thus protecting himself against possible elimination – he had
delivered nothing to his IB-Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW)
handlers in turn. Seen from his point of view, this course of action
was eminently sensible. There was nothing to be gained from
participating in an election, other than perhaps a seat in the
J&K Legislative Assembly – hardly adequate compensation for
risking his life. Without broader movement on the political front,
the Dar faction of the HM has no incentive to come overground.
Read
against the background of Dar’s pronouncements when the engagement
began, his current position shows remarkable consistency.
At his
meeting with journalists on July 24, 2000, when Dar first discussed
the Hizb’s decision to initiate a unilateral cease-fire, Dar made
it clear that he saw the military gesture as part of a larger
political strategy. The Union government’s then-nascent offer of
dialogue with the APHC, Dar suggested, was positive. “Let them
talk to anybody”, he said, “the aim of the exercise should be to
resolve the issue amicably, through a dialogue without
preconditions.” The Hizb, Dar continued, would encourage
politicians from India and abroad to visit the State, and
participate in a process of dialogue with its people. Conscious of
the reaction his statement was certain to provoke from
Pakistan-based far-right groups, Dar described their cadres as
“our brothers who have come to our help… Once the problem is
resolved amicably and peace is restored”, Dar asserted with
desperate optimism, “they will return peacefully.”
Such
enterprises serve only to evade the central issue before the APHC
centrists and figures like Shabbir Shah: whether or not to
participate in elections, rather than consolidate the militant
constituencies they currently preside over. To understand the
APHC’s bizarre behaviour, these developments need to be read in
the context of Pakistan’s renewed efforts to revitalise the
moribund organisation. In early January, Pakistan ensured that
hard-line Jamaat-e-Islami leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who had been
boycotting meetings of the APHC Executive since November 2001,
participated in a three-member committee set up to meet the heads of
foreign missions in New Delhi. The mechanics of this unity move were
conveyed to Geelani by Bhat during his December 26 visit to Srinagar,
which ended with his arrest two days later.
Bhat, according to insiders, made two major points. First, he
said, a divided APHC was an discredited APHC.
Second, a united APHC had to push its cause with western
nations if it was to hope to have any role in any future
India-Pakistan dialogue. Without such a role, the APHC would find
itself marginalised in any prospective peace initiative.
Geelani
left for New Delhi on December 13, along with his most bitter
detractors within the APHC, Yasin Malik and Abdul Ghani Lone. In the
event, however, their appointments with the heads of the United
Kingdom High Commission, and the United States Embassy were turned
down as a result of some discreet lobbying by the Ministry of
External Affairs. All that the APHC could secure was a meeting with
a First Secretary from the United States Embassy, who insisted on
visiting them at the Kashmir Awareness Bureau office in New Delhi,
rather than inviting them to the mission. Deeply embarrassed, the
APHC leadership issued a fresh press release, saying that they were
aborting their diplomatic foray because of the arrests of 50 of
their cadre in Srinagar. Just five APHC leaders had, in fact, been
arrested, and more embarrassment was to follow. The press release
was signed by a G M Gulfam, who turned out to be a driver employed
by the Kashmir Awareness Bureau. His signature, it turned out, was
put on the press release because Bhat’s second-in-command in New
Delhi, Abdul Majid Bandey, was too scared by his boss’ arrest to
put pen to paper. The APHC delegation chose to stay on in New Delhi
until January 18, rather than return to Srinagar and face derision.
Abdul
Ghani Lone and other moderates on the APHC seem to be considering
the prospect of abandoning their irreparably leaky ship. Both he and
Maulvi Abbas Ansari, through 2001, issued statements that they might
be willing to participate in the State Legislative Assembly
elections that must be held before September 2002. But Lone, sources
close to him say, has proved unwilling to budge on his two major
preconditions for participation in elections. The first was that the
Indian government would have to concede that the elections were
being held not just to determine who would govern J&K, but who
represented its people. New Delhi has consistently disputed the
APHC’s claim to speak for the people of the State and demanded
that it put its claims to the test. The second condition was that
the Union government guarantee that it would engage the new
government in a dialogue on the future status of J&K. Despite
months of effort by Mishra and Dulat, Lone has shown no signs of
weakening. Of the APHC leader’s wish to end violence there is
little doubt. He had, for example, backed the Union government’s
‘Ramzan cease-fire’,
arguing that “the biggest danger now is from the [Islamic]
extremists” who would “make serious efforts to undermine the
ceasefire.” He was,
however, marginalised by Geelani, and other far-Right members of the
APHC Executive, which is not dominated by centrists.
But
Lone, like others who would join elections, have a problem similar
to those of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen’s Dar faction. Should they
participate in elections and lose, they would be stripped of
whatever legitimacy and power they now possess. In the event they do
contest elections, even as part of a broad opposition front, they
might still lose to the National Conference which, all said and
done, still possesses the largest group of cadre and most effective
patronage structure of any political organisation in the State.
India, moreover, simply cannot provide the guarantees the APHC
centrists seek. The APHC knows it is running out of time, but has no
answers. “Issuing
statements and shedding crocodile tears and visiting the families of
martyrs will not solve the Kashmir problem,” a Hizb statement had
acidly proclaimed two years ago:
If
our elders [the APHC leaders] believe that only an armed struggle
will liberate Kashmir from the occupation and an honourable solution
is possible through militancy, then they should come in the
forefront and command the struggle.
If not, they should at least send their wards to join
militancy.
Today,
no APHC leader except Syed Ali Shah Geelani sees hope in armed
struggle – and even he has not sent his sons to join the Jehad.
The opening of political space that caused so much excitement in the
spring of 2000, it would seem, is inexorably heading towards an
impasse.
“If
that process had continued”, he said, “who knows?
Maybe in one or two or three years we could have found a
solution or at least defused tensions. Today, in this atmosphere of
hostility, no one is prepared to make even the slightest
concessions. But I think it is still possible to move forward on
Kashmir. This has to be done in a quiet way, away from the glare of
cameras.”
Both
sections would be demilitarised, and patrolled by either an
international peace-keeping force or a joint Indian-Pakistani peace
keeping force. Both legislative councils would continue to meet
separately, and on occasion jointly. The people on both sides of
divided Kashmir could meet and interact freely and informally. None
of this would prejudice or prejudge the position of both countries
on the disputed areas.
Interestingly,
the first ideas for partitioning J&K along ethnic-communal lines
emerged from the United States. On
March 8, 2000, Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and a group of his top
Cabinet colleagues held a secret meeting with Farooq Kathwari, a
US-based secessionist leader. The closed-door meeting, held at the
Secretariat at Jammu, appears to be just part of a larger
US-sponsored covert dialogue on J&K. Indeed, there is growing
evidence that the BJP-led coalition government in New Delhi was
complicit in this dialogue, which could lead to a violent communal
sundering of the State. Kathwari heads the Kashmir Study Group (KSG),
an influential New York-based Think Tank, which has been advocating
the creation of an independent State carved out of the
Muslim-majority areas of J&K. The owner of Ethan Allen, an
upmarket furniture concern which includes the White House among its
clients, Kathwari’s associates in the KSG have included
influential Indian establishment figures, notably former Foreign
Secretary S K Singh and retired Vice Admiral K K Nayyar. The
furniture tycoon was earlier blacklisted by successive Indian
governments, on one occasion even being denied permission to visit a
seriously ill relative. Shortly after the second BJP-led coalition
assumed power in 1998, however, he was quietly granted a visa.
Kathwari
arrived in New Delhi in March 1999, carrying a series of proposals
for the creation of an independent Kashmiri State. On this first
visit, Kathwari met what one senior intelligence official describes
as a “who’s who of the BJP establishment”. Kathwari also
appears to have visited Jammu and
Srinagar, staying at the home of a top National Conference
politician. Public disclosure of Kathwari's proposals provoked a
minor storm. Nonetheless, Kathwari seemed encouraged enough to push
ahead with a new version of his blueprint, Kashmir:
A Way Forward. In September 1999, the fresh version of the
document was finalised after, its preface records, receiving
reactions from “government officials in India and Pakistan.” The
new document outlined five proposals for the creation of either one
or two new States, which would together constitute what is described
in somewhat opaque fashion as a “sovereign entity but one without
an international personality”:
The
new entity would have its own secular, democratic constitution, as
well as its own citizenship, flag and a legislature which would
legislate on all matters other than defence and foreign affairs.
India and Pakistan would be responsible for the defence of the
Kashmiri entity, which would itself maintain police and gendarme
forces for internal law and order purposes. India and Pakistan would
be expected to work out financial arrangements for the Kashmiri
entity, which could include a currency of its own.
The
National Conference’s own proposals for J&K’s future have
some similarities with those of the KSG. The report of the Regional
Autonomy Committee [RAC], tabled in the J&K Assembly in 1999,
and now in the process of being reworked, advocates cutting away the
Muslim-majority districts of Rajouri and Poonch from the Jammu
region as a whole, and recasting them as a new Pir Panjal Province. The
single districts of Buddhist-majority Leh and Muslim-majority
Kargil, too, were to be sundered from each other and to become new
provinces. In some cases, the RAC Report and the KSG proposals
mirrored each other down to the smallest detail. For example, Kashmir:
A Way Forward refers to the inclusion of a Gool-Gulabgarh tehsil in the new State. There is, in fact, no such tehsil.
Gool and Gulabgarh were parts of the tehsil
of Mahore, the sole Muslim-majority tehsil
of Udhampur district, until 1999. Gool subsequently became a
separate tehsil. But the proposal for Mahore’s sundering from Udhampur and
inclusion in the Chenab province was first made in the RAC Report.
According to the RAC plan, as in the KSG proposals, Mahore would
form part of the Chenab province, while Udhampur would be
incorporated in the Hindu-majority Jammu province.
Significantly,
Farooq Abdullah’s maximalist demands for autonomy for J&K
dovetail with the KSG’s formulation of a quasi-sovereign State.
The report of the State Autonomy Commission (SAC), adopted by the
J&K Legislative Assembly in 2001, would leave New Delhi with no
powers other than the management of defence, external affairs and
communications. Fundamental rights in the Union Constitution, for
example, would no longer apply to J&K if the SAC had its way.
They would have to be substituted by a separate chapter on
Fundamental Rights in the J&K Constitution, which now contains
only directive principles. The BJP, too, has several enthusiastic
advocates for the sundering of Jammu from Kashmir, which would
achieve much the same results as those sought by the KSG. So too
would calls by Buddhist-chauvinist groups for Ladakh to be made a
Union Territory.
No
great imagination is needed to see how these ideas dovetail with the
realms of the possible in the United States and Pakistan. No
politician in Pakistan would be able to accept a settlement based on
granting formal status to the Line of Control.
Where a Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pleaded in the wake of the 1971
war that this would undermine his regime, so a Musharraf remains
today. The least that any Pakistan politician can accept is a
victory, however small, in the form a gain for that country beyond
the existing status quo. This aspiration, of course, seems real and
achievable to Pakistan because of the broad structure of official
United States discourse on J&K, which has changed remarkably
little over decades. That country does no accept the finality of the
accession of J&K to India; nor has it ever backed efforts for
the Line of Control to become a formal border. Many in the United
States find the notion of at least some form of independence to
Jammu and Kashmir attractive, for the reason that it would become
yet another centre in South Asia from which the world’s sole
superpower could project its power.
No
Indian government would find it easy to make concessions of this
kind, despite the existence of elements of the fanatical Hindu Right
who have long argued that Jammu must pursue its destiny
independently of the Kashmir valley. Nevertheless, the mélange of
forces working towards some kind of de
facto partition need to be watched carefully, because the
consequence of their enterprise could be unimaginably horrible. It
is also essential, with the demise of what was passed off as a peace
process, to reconsider the fundamentals of our understanding of the
decade-long conflict. Much thinking on J&K has become mired in
received wisdom, and lacks a complex and nuanced understanding of
the play of class, culture, community and ethnicity that drive
violence. The veteran Punjab Communist leader, Satyapal Dang, once
suggested to this author that the ways in which we have come to
comprehend such conflicts is grossly inadequate. For a decade, he
pointed out, what was called the Punjab problem was understood to
consist of several other problems, like the sharing of river waters,
the status of Chandigarh, the federal demands of the Anandpur Sahib
resolutions, the scars of Operation Bluestar, and so on. Yet, when
peace did come about, Dang pointed out, none of these problems had
in fact been resolved. One explanation was that pure coercion had
put an end to the violence that began in the early 1980s. Another
possibility was that the real basis of the Khalistan movement, its
ideological content and resistance to this, had not been understood
properly. This perspective is relevant in J&K today. Although
Kashmir, as ‘experts’ never cease to remind us, is not Punjab,
neither is it inhabited by Martians.
What,
then, lies ahead? Seen
from Srinagar, the world after September 11, 2001 seems much the
same as the world before it, fraught with the same uncertainties and
perils. But, in ways that no one has even begun to consider, the
world has in fact been transfigured. When Indian troops return from
the LoC, it will mark a decisive moment in the history of violence
of J&K. Pakistan’s thresholds of aggression were always
defined by the prospect of India going to war in response. Now,
having rejected India’s demands for the extradition of suspects
and an end to cross border terrorism, Pakistan knows the highest
card in India’s hand is not, in fact, worth much. A hallowed,
three-decade old bluff has been called. This summer, Pakistan will
be able to raise the stakes of its covert campaign, secure in the
knowledge that there will be no Indian military retaliation across
borders. How India will respond to this new scenario is still
unclear. For years, experts have advocated the creation of an
offensive covert capability, which could ensure that Pakistan’s
actions in J& K would provoke matching reprisals. But covert
response capabilities have rarely interested Indian politicians
because, unlike Army build-ups, they must, by definition, be secret.
A
real peace process in J&K cannot be manufactured: it needs to
emerge from real political activity, not closed-door intrigue and
diplomatic manoeuvre. It will evolve in genuinely democratic fora,
not in five-star hotel conference rooms; and issues, not deals, must
be discussed. Critically, such a revival is premised on India’s
ability to contain, if not completely crush, terrorist activity in
J&K. For this, the Union government must turn its attention from
the television-driven war it has no intention of fighting to the
bitter battle it is already engaged in.
By an exclusive arrangement with Faultlines,
published by Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi
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