SOUTH ASIA INTELLIGENCE REVIEW
Weekly Assessments & Briefings
Volume 4, No. 31, February 13, 2006

INDIA

J&K: Veils and Daggers – The Perils of India’s Secret Search for Peace
Guest Writer: Praveen Swami
Deputy Editor and Chief of Bureau, Frontline Magazine, New Delhi

Late last year the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed held out a dark threat to India: “blood will speak,” he prophesied, “and Kashmir will be free”.

Also Read India-Pakistan: Practiced Rituals of a Tractical Peace - Kanchan Lakshman J&K: The Wrath of the Lashkar - Praveen Swami

Neither Saeed’s sentiments nor the proclamation of war were a surprise; despite the fact that the Lashkar-e-Taiba is proscribed in Pakistan, and its parent political organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, claims that it has no links with the terrorist group, the Muridke-based organisation has spewed venom – and terrorism – against India at regular intervals.

What did surprise observers was the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s choice of chief guest: the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader, Mohammad Yasin Malik. Ever since the JKLF renounced ‘armed struggle’ a decade ago, after its decimation at the hands of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), Malik has repeatedly asserted on more than one occasion that he is committed to the principles of Mahatma Gandhi.  Malik has also claimed the JKLF’s struggle is ‘secular’, despite its past involvement in attacks on the Kashmiri Pandit community, while the Lashkar-e-Taiba makes no secret of its loathing for Hindus, Jews and other ‘unbelievers’.

In recent weeks, J&K’s political life has been thrown into uproar by another surprise: news that, just three weeks after the Lashkar rally, Malik also secretly met with the man India has entrusted with making sure the jihad fails: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. At his February 1, 2006, Press Conference, the Prime Minister said that he had met with Malik as part of his ongoing dialogue with secessionist leaders in J&K.  When the JKLF leader responded with an irate denial, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) issued a clarification that Dr. Singh had in fact been referring to meetings held while he was in the Opposition.

For the most part, Indian newspapers have reported the event as an inconsequential spat over facts. Bar the entertainment drawn from the PMO’s spin-doctors tying themselves up in polemical knots, the Malik-Manmohan Singh meeting has been represented as being of no intrinsic value. In reality, though, the affair illustrates serious problems in the structure of India’s engagement with secessionist groups in J&K.  Little noticed, New Delhi’s search for peace is being reduced to a series of covert machinations which could create problems more serious than those they were intended to solve.

Just what might these problems be?  And why should policy-makers in New Delhi and Washington be thinking about them seriously?

Hidden behind veils of secrecy, India has for several months been pursuing an energetic secret dialogue on J&K, involving interlocutors from the state and US-based members of the ethnic-Kashmiri Diaspora.  On January 25, The Hindu broke news of these meetings.  Malik, who authoritative sources say had been driven to the PMO under Intelligence Bureau (IB) escort, was the most high-profile participant so far in a covert peace process being conducted by India’s National Security Advisor (NSA), the former IB chief M.K. Narayanan.

Neither the PMO nor Malik publicly responded to The Hindu’s report, although sources say the JKLF leader registered his protest with the NSA about the leak in no uncertain terms. When Prime Minister Singh was asked by a journalist about the India-Pakistan détente process at the Press Conference, though, Singh volunteered the information that Malik had been among those he had met. According to a Press Trust of India report, Singh said that, “after coming to office he had interacted with a number of separatist Kashmiri leaders such as Yasin Malik and Sajjad Lone” [emphasis added]. 

Incensed by this assertion, Malik promptly called a Press Conference in Srinagar. He accepted that he had met with Singh in 2001 and 2003, but insisted that “talk of our [secret] meeting circulating in the media is nonsense.” Asked why the Prime Minister had then said that a meeting had taken place, Malik blamed “New Delhi-based NGOs.” “When we don’t meet them,” he claimed, “they come up with such things.”  Soon after the JKLF leader’s press conference, the PMO affirmed Malik’s assertion that he had only met with Singh prior to the Prime Minister assuming office.

In the absence of a transcript, a final assessment of what the Prime Minister said is impossible. It is, after all, plausible that several reporters who filed similar accounts misunderstood what he said. What hasn’t been denied, though, is that secret meetings have in fact been taking place. In January 2006, for example,  Narayanan met with Farooq Kathwari, a US national who is a significant contributor to Islamist organisations, to the Asia Society and to mainstream political groups. Prime Minister Singh himself held a meeting with the US-based Kashmiri Pandit leader, Vijay Sazawal.

Other signs of energetic back-channel movement aren’t hard to come by. In December 2005, for example,  the Union Government reversed years of policy and issued travel documents to the hardline Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. With the foreknowledge of India’s covert services, Geelani used the cover of the Haj pilgrimage to hold extended discussions with the HM’s Pakistan-based leader, Mohammad Yusuf Shah aka Syed Salahuddin, as well as the US-based Islamist leader, Ghulam Nabi Fai. Most observers believe the HM hopes to use Geelani as its representative in future talks with India.

But why, it can reasonably be asked, are these secret meetings a problem – particularly since their aim is to bring about reconciliation between apparently implacable enemies? It is well known that covert services worldwide conduct negotiations where the political principals find it impossible. Israel’s long-running secret talks with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, or the Central Intelligence Agency’s Cold War dialogue with the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security, the KGB, are often cited as successful examples. India’s former spymaster, A.K. Verma, and the Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Hamid Gul, are also known to have held moderately-successful negotiations to restrict urban terrorism in the course of the Khalistan movement in Punjab.

In the course of the conflict in J&K, India’s covert services have maintained secret contacts with both political secessionists and members of terrorist groups. Indeed, one of the first exercises conducted by  Narayanan after he took office as N.S.A. was to audit expenditure on India’s covert contacts in J&K, and prepare an inventory of what had been achieved – a long overdue stock-taking exercise. In some senses, the ongoing dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir is the fruit of these contacts, although they have sometimes appeared a waste of both energy and hard cash.

What has now happened, though, is a conflation of political and covert processes, both of which are contained in the body of the NSA. While critics of the NSA have claimed that Narayanan’s conception of his role is overweening, this critique is misdirected. The real problem lies in India’s leadership vacuum.  Where the present Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh presided over the execution of the policy objectives in Punjab, or the late Rajesh Pilot engaged secessionists in J&K, the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has no-one who seems interested in playing a similar role today. Instead, New Delhi’s conflation of covert dialogue and political intervention holds out serious risks for policy-making on J&K.

India’s spies have thus stepped in where its politicians have failed. Malik’s case, though, provides excellent illustration of kinds of consequences this can have. The JKLF leader’s decision to share a platform with the Lashkar, a move intended to protect his person, violated Indian law on association with terrorist groups. In the interests of enabling his secret meeting, however, no action was taken. As a result, others under credible threat, like the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, have been gifted an excuse to appease Pakistan and the terror groups it chooses to patronise.  Second, and more important, these moves undermine the credibility of the legal framework against terrorism. While covert contacts with figures across the political spectrum might indeed be useful, the decision not to prosecute Malik signals that the Indian state is willing to bargain away its commitments to punish terrorism. Third, and most important, contact at the level of the PMO leaves no room for failure.  If dialogue involving the Prime Minister of India fails, New Delhi will be left with no alternative medium through which negotiations with secessionists in J&K might credibly be conducted.

Washington needs to be paying close attention to these facts, for the covert dialogue is principally intended for audiences in the US. Discussions with figures like Kathwari are intended to meet demands from the US that New Delhi help President Pervez Musharraf demonstrate that he is making progress in J&K – put bluntly, payback for the US pressure on Pakistan to de-escalate violence. As President George Bush’s visit to New Delhi draws closer, the pressure on New Delhi will, most likely, intensify.

Just why such pressures are misguided is well-illustrated by the decision to engage with Kathwari, whose organisation, the Kashmir Study Group, has advocated a communal division of J&K. Until 1999, when the intervention of then Research and Analyis Wing Chief A.S. Dulat enabled him to meet with several key politicians, Kathwari’s Islamist affiliations had even led to his being denied permission to visit India. Whatever status and influence the millionaire businessman’s wealth lends him, a meeting in the PMO – as opposed, say, in a discreet hotel room in New York – sends out the appalling signal that his ideas are open for discussion.

Put simply, Washington is ill-advised if it believes that it can sustain a distinction between ‘authorised Islamists’, and those that wage war against the US and India. Indeed, part of the reason why secessionists in J&K, as well as groups like the Hizb ul-Mujahideen are so reluctant to bring serious proposals the table is that they believe that US pressure on India will let them secure a better deal in the future. New Delhi, for its part, is equally ill-advised if it believes that secret deal-making is a substitute for real dialogue.  Either way, a process intended to help prepare the ground for peace is actually stalling it, by shifting focus away from the principals – the people of J&K and those they have chosen to represent them through the electoral process.

Is there a way out?  Yes – but only in the unlikely event that the hidebound, dissent-allergic intellectual establishment that informs policy on J&K demonstrates will and vision. Even as it allows covert processes to proceed, the Union Government could, for example, give N.N. Vohra, its chosen official interlocutor, a mandate and agenda for the consultations he has been holding in J&K. It could also ask Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz to begin a state-level dialogue on autonomy with all major groups. The US could, for its part, make clear to Pakistan that no level of support for terrorism is acceptable; that it must let go the strings that let it guide the course of the jihad in J&K.

For this to happen, though, both New Delhi and Washington D.C. will have to abandon their evident conviction that history can be manufactured behind closed doors, and at a tempo laid down by bureaucrats. Covert processes do have an invaluable and necessary role in policy execution, but cannot be a substitute for political policy-making. One of the things the troubled history of Jammu and Kashmir teaches us, after all, is that secret deals are of only so much value outside of the rooms where they are sealed.

NEPAL

The 'Clouds of Pessimism' Darken
Saji Cherian
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

Municipal Elections held on February 8, 2006, in the shadow of Maoist attacks and  a boycott by political parties, painted a dismal picture of the Royal regime, even as it further shrunk King Gyanendra’s options. The third such local election (the first and second local elections were conducted in 1992 and 1997) saw an average voter turn out of under 20 per cent. According to the Election Commission (EC), nationwide, out of 1,443,310 voters, only 284,225 cast their votes. The capital city of Kathmandu – the King’s ‘stronghold’ – witnessed a mere 14 percent voter turnout, while the surrounding municipalities, the Lalitpur sub-metropolitan city, Madhyapur Thimi Municipality and Kirtipur Municipality registered  18, 13 and 33 per cent voting, respectively. The voter turnout was the highest, at 71 per cent, in the Gaur Municipality of Rautahat District, and lowest at Lekhnath Municipality of Kaski district, at just one per cent. The previous two elections had witnessed a creditable 60 per cent turnout.

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The run-up to the elections was far from smooth, with the Maoists calling for a bandh (general shutdown) from February 5 to 11, “to actively disrupt the municipal polls”. The seven main political parties had already announced a boycott of the polls on January 17.

Doubts on the efficacy of the exercise had emerged even before the polling date, when the EC announced on January 29 that, out of the 58 municipalities scheduled to go for polls, there would be no elections in 22, as the candidates in these Municipalities had ‘won’ unopposed. For the total of 4,146 seats in the 58 municipalities, only 3,654 persons had filed their nominations. In the Kathmandu Valley alone, 50 candidates, including two mayoral and six deputy mayoral candidates, withdrew their nominations. Officials were elected unopposed in Ilam, Damak, Bhimeshwar, Bhaktapur, Banepa, Panauti, Dhulikhel, Ratnanagar, Prithvi Narayan, Byas, Waling, Tansen, Ramgram, Butwal, Kapilvastu, Baglung, Birendra Nagar, Nepalgunj, Gulariya, Dipayal, Dasharathchand and Amargadhi municipalities. Women participation in the elections was also very poor with only 310 nominations filed for the 806 posts reserved for women across the country.  Out of the 72 parties registered at the Election Commission, only 22 participated in the elections.

Even as Maoist leaders claimed that their bandh was a ‘historic success’ and had completely ‘sabotaged’ the Municipal Elections, the regime claimed a ‘victory’. Home Minister Kamal Thapa, understandably thrilled that his faction of the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party had grabbed a majority of the Mayoral seats, declared, “despite the Maoists and the Alliance call for active boycott of polls, the people have cast their votes with an enthusiastic zeal.”

Such zeal little in evidence, even though the regime used all its force to create it. February 8 was declared a holiday nationwide; traffic was banned in Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur on polling day for fear of attacks by the Maoists; all mobile telephone services were discontinued from the evening of February 7 till further notice, including the wireless phone services with limited mobility provided by Indian joint venture United Telecom Ltd.; all Government employees were ordered to cast their vote.

In contrast to the persistent silliness of the regime, the Maoists have demonstrated considerable tact, guile and ingenuity in securing the upper hand. In an interview to an Indian daily, Maoist ‘Chairman’ Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda conceded that his group had agreed to engage in “multi-party democracy” in an “anti-feudal, anti-imperialist constitutional framework”, and even offered talks with the King, though with conditions attached. At the same time, there has been a continuous military and strategic consolidation in the areas of Maoist dominance, as also a systematic escalation of activities across the country after the withdrawal of the unilateral Maoist cease fire after January 2, 2006.

With the countryside firmly in their grip, the Maoists have now increased attacks in the cities and urban centres across the country, giving reality to the Maoist slogan: “Dhand ma tekera touku ma hanne” – “Climb on the spine to strike at the head”; the ‘spine’, in this metaphor, is Nepal’s highways and supply routes; the head, Kathmandu and other city centres. To add teeth to their urban operations, the Maoists have restructured their command setup, as an International Crisis Group report notes: “The Maoists (have) also restructured their military and operational methods. Alongside the Eastern and Western Commands, they have established a Special Central Command. Formation of the latter, which covers Kathmandu and the surrounding area and consists of four regional bureaus, reflects the increased priority they are giving to the base of central state power.”

The strategy saw an operational demonstration on January 14, 2006, when Maoists drove into a Police post in the Thankot area in the capital and shot dead 11 police personnel. On the same day, they attacked another Police post in Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley, injuring seven personnel and looting 26 rifles. Interestingly, the attacks came even though the Police, in an internal report, had warned of Maoist attacks in and around the capital.

Violence across the country in the first month of 2006 had already claimed 172 fatalities (8 civilians, 56 security forces, 108 Maoists). Urban centres such as Nepalgunj, Biratnagar and Pokhara have been subjected to unrelenting Maoist pressure in the form of bomb blasts and attacks. January alone, according to the Institute for Conflict Management’s data, recorded at least 17 bomb blasts of varying intensities in these three cities. Among these, Nepalgunj has been particularly targeted, and witnessed three major attacks among a rash of lesser incidents:

·         January 5:  Three police personnel were killed and two injured in a Maoist attack on an Armed Police Force (APF) security checkpost at Ranjha chowk in Nepalgunj

·         January 20: Six police personnel were killed and four others injured when Maoists launched simultaneous attacks on the BP Chowk security check post, Jamunaha Police Post and the Customs Office in Nepalgunj.

·         January 24: Two security personnel, one Maoist and a civilian were killed when Maoists launched simultaneous attacks on the district police office, the regional police training centre, Nepal Rastra Bank, the Municipal Police office, the Royal Nepalese Army’s No. 4 Company, the District Prison, the Zonal Police Office and the District Administration office in Nepalgunj.

These developments sit ill with King Gyanendra’s claims, on the completion of one year of ‘direct rule’ on February 1, 2006, of “Arresting a situation that was slipping into anarchy and reactivating a stalled democratic process”, and that “the Nepalese people have experienced the nation grow in confidence and the self-respect of the Nepalese people (has been) restored within a short span of one year, with the cloud of pessimism dissipating.”

The King apparently presumes that Nepal continues to live in an earlier age; to the extent that its people seek to oppose his anachronistic regime, he has sought to prop up his delusions through repression and increasing isolation. Reporters Without Borders has recorded at least 273 cases of arrests of journalists and 569 cases of censorship in 2005 in Nepal, accounting for half of the total cases of censorship reported worldwide. In November 2005, the Government also issued a ‘Code of Conduct for Social Organizations’, prohibiting any activity ‘endangering social harmony’, and barring the staff of non-governmental organizations (NGO) from all political affiliations, thus excluding politically active persons from NGO work.

The King’s attempts at “arresting the situation” have, moreover, had little apparent impact on the nation’s economy. Even as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) points out that annual economic growth has dropped from a healthy annual average of 4.9 per cent in the 1990s, to an average of 1.9 per cent between 2002 and 2004, figures for the last six months reflect a widening mismatch between expenditure and revenue. Revenue collection has grown by a nominal 5.8 per cent (with inflation at 8.5 per cent) while total expenditure has soared by 15.6 percent. The ‘royal coup’ brought about a sharp dip in foreign aid mobilization (both loans and grants) and, according to Ministry of Finance sources, the foreign aid flow fell to Rs. 14.28 billion in 2005, as against Rs 23 billion in 2004. 

The King had sought to cement his power through the Municipal elections. Instead, they have left his regime even more fragile. Despite his glowing rhetoric about how “all popularly elected bodies will be active in ensuring a bright future for the Nepalese people through a dedicated exercise in democracy so as to create a welfare society”, the harsh reality is that any resolution of the conflict in Nepal will now substantially be dictated and engineered by the Maoists.