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‘Pro-Active’ After Pokhran:
A Perspective on Terrorism in J&K
Praveen Swami*

There is no Hindu or Muslim question in Kashmir. We do not use this language in Kashmir.1
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, New York, 1948.

 

Eleven months and a ‘Historic Event’ have passed since India’s Union Home Minister, Lal Krishan Advani, promised a ‘pro-active’ policy of engagement with terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir. The term was introduced into official discourse on Jammu & Kashmir on May 18, 1998, after the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]-led coalition government’s first major policy meeting on terrorism in the state. In the weeks following the Pokhran nuclear tests and after, pro-activity generated what might best be described as a proliferation of polemic. "Hot pursuit", "swift response" and "decisive steps" are some key discursive components of the BJP’s polemic on counter-terrorist strategy in Jammu & Kashmir.

That this discourse serves at least certain useful purposes is evident. It, for example, enabled the Union Home Minister to persuade the Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray that the BJP is indeed concerned about Jammu & Kashmir, and, therefore, to suspend his campaign against India-Pakistan sporting events. And, from time to time, it enables BJP politicians to tell an often gullible media the every major military success in the fight against terrorism is the result of their new, suitably muscular, policy.

But it is considerably less clear whether pro-activity reflects any new paradigm of anti-terrorist action by the state, or indeed if it even exists. I shall argue here that, in the months since Advani’s May 1998 declaration, there is no evidence to suggest that counter-terrorist strategies have changed in a meaningful way from those put in place before the BJP-led coalition came to power. Army and paramilitary strengths have altered little over the past year. Similarly, strategies for engaging with terrorists in high-altitude areas and for increasing the role of the Jammu & Kashmir Police all predate Advani’s accession to office.

What then does the BJP mean by a pro-active policy?

The answers, I shall argue, lie not in any strategic vision the BJP might have, but in its core political concerns in Jammu & Kashmir, both ideological and electoral. Within the state, the slogan of pro-activity has served, first, as an instrument to respond to the concerns of the BJP’s Hindu constituency in the Jammu region and, secondly, to secure the party’s ranks in the face of its evident failure to contain terrorism. At a broader level, the aggressive discourse on Jammu & Kashmir that originated after Pokhran was designed to reassure the far-right circle of power around the BJP’s political establishment that, even if ideological objectives like the abolition of Article 370 could not be achieved, an aggressive anti-terrorist campaign was indeed in place.

These objectives are profoundly enmeshed, in largely unanalysed ways, with a new politics of terror in Jammu & Kashmir. There is growing evidence that the Hizbul Mujaheddin, Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Lashkar-e-Taiba see their future as not confined to sustaining in- surgency within Jammu & Kashmir itself, but in expanding their theatre of operations outside the state. For these far-right chauvinist organisations, the struggle in Jammu & Kashmir is merely an instrument for a broader war against both the Indian state and unbelievers at large. They seek to derive legitimacy for these objectives from Muslim insecurities both within Jammu & Kashmir and elsewhere in India, insecurities that are fuelled by the aggressive communal politics that the BJP, and its affiliates on the Hindu right, are engaged in.

In the half-century since Sheikh Abdullah made his pronouncement at New York, Jammu & Kashmir has been transformed. Pro-activity, far from being a meaningful counter-terrorist strategy, has in fact presided over the relocation of terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir within the structures of pan-Indian communal conflict, a development that could have fateful consequences.

1· Communalising Conflict: The Jammu Region.

That the heights of the Jammu region have become the core area of expansion for terrorists in J&K has been evident since at least 1995. There has been little serious consideration, however, of the forces driving this development. Military strategists attribute the strategy variously to ease of infiltration through this region, its terrain, and the absence of effective road infrastructure. Intelligence Bureau analysis conducted after the Pokhran nuclear tests speculated that terrorist groups seek to command crucial routes of movement into the Kashmir valley. This proposition would imply that Pakistan wishes to be prepared for some form of limited conventional military engagement that would force international intervention and a final revision of the state’s borders in its favour.

All these explanations have some element of plausibility. What they lack, however, is a political understanding of developments in the Jammu region. Unlike the Kashmir valley, where bloody assertions of power by terrorist groups serve little purpose other than to further alienate a weary population, Jammu’s political landscape offers new possibilities. Sundered between Hindu and Muslim by a long pre- and post-partition history of communal politics, the Jammu region is a metaphor for India itself. Terrorist activity here intervenes in all-India discourses, legitimising itself as a defence of vulnerable Muslim communities. For Hindu communal politicians, similarly, terrorism is a platform through which their all-India concerns can be amplified and broadcast. Protecting the people from terrorism in Jammu is, for politicians of the Hindu right, an exercise in defending a besieged Hindu minority.

Communalism has been a central motif in terrorism in the Jammu province. After the killings of 14 Hindu bus passengers at Kishtwar in August 1993, riots broke out in that town, with Hindu mobs attacking Muslim businesses and homes. For four years afterwards, however, despite the increasing presence of terrorists in the region, there were few signs that the communal fissures that emerged after the Kishtwar killings had deepened. A pretext, however, did present itself in August 1997, when Manzoor Hussain, a Gujjar Muslim school teacher posted at Sewari Buddal village in the Reasi area, married a Hindu girl, Rita Kumari. The girl came from an impoverished home, and the two evidently married with the blessings of Rita Kumari’s mother.

Hindu communal reaction was prompt. Tension built up, and the couple were arrested at Reasi on false abduction charges. Released, they married again at a civil court in Jammu and returned home. This time, despite community pressure, the local police refused to intervene. Three dominant feudal Rajput Hindu families stepped in to punish the couple’s temerity. Rita Kumari was abducted, and taken to a women’s home in New Delhi run by a right-wing Hindu organisation. Both Hussain and his mother-in-law were severely beaten.

Hussain, according to police investigators, subsequently approached the Farid Khan group of the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin for vengeance. It was promptly delivered. Eight members of the three families who had organised Rita Kumari’s abduction were slaughtered. This in turn, was used by local Hindu fundamentalist organisations to provoke a communal riot. In retrospect, both Muslim and Hindu communal organisations, as well as terrorist groups, studied the event with care. Massacres, reprisals and communal polarisation were poised to become the central themes of political theatre through the Jammu region.

Events in January were to provide a platform for these themes to realise themselves further. At 10:15 AM on March 19, 1998, the Doda Police received a distress call from a an anonymous informant in the roadside village of Karara on the highway from Doda to Kishtwar. The caller, most probably a Hindu shopkeeper, said five Muslims had been beaten to death by a Hindu mob, and their bodies thrown into the Chenab. The claim seemed improbable, since Karara was guarded not only by an entire platoon of the Border Security Force’s [BSF] 75 Battalion, but also by a company of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police [ITBP] brought in for the Udhampur Lok Sabha election held a day earlier.

Until the pools of dried blood were found in the evening, neither the BSF’s 75 battalion nor the ITBP volunteered to explain just what had happened. The trail of blood, which was found to begin near the ITBP Company Commander’s forest hut, moved down to the main road, and then split into two before ending on the river, remained unexplained. That had to wait until the next morning, when villagers who stood by and watched the killing were questioned, and the truth began to emerge. The four Muslims, they said, had been battered to death by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS]-affiliated villagers in a brutal act of collective reprisal.

Karara was the location of the cremation of Suresh Kumar, who had been beaten to death by angry Muslim villagers at Panasa village for allegedly molesting a local girl on 17 April. The local BJP claimed that Kumar was a party worker. Although subsequent media investigation did not substantiate this claim, Suresh Kumar’s death in hospital the next day had generated significant tension in the Doda-Kishtwar belt. It is unlikely that the beating he received on 17 March was intended to kill, for when he was moved to hospital that evening he showed no external signs of life-threatening injury and was able to speak to police officials. Whatever the truth, Suresh Kumar died in hospital of internal haemorrhaging on March 18, due to injuries that were diagnosed too late in view of the limited medical facilities on offer.

Two facts are significant about the Karara killings. It was, for one, the inaugural act of organised terror by Hindu fundamentalists in the Jammu region. The second, and perhaps more important, was that it took place so shortly after the BJP-led coalition government’s rise to power in New Delhi. The party’s election campaign in the communally divided Jammu region had centred around promises to imposed the Disturbed Areas Act in Doda, supposedly a magical device which would suddenly unshackle an Army bound and fettered by unreasonable laws, and crush terrorism with aggressive military intervention. The Karara killings therefore signalled to Doda’s Muslims that the aggressive rhetoric of the new regime against terrorism masked a broader offensive against their community at large.

Similar acts of reprisal had taken place in the past, but did not have the same explicitly political resonance. Shortly after the January 1997 massacre of 15 Hindu villagers at Bharshalla, for example, BSF troopers allegedly shot dead nine members of a Muslim family in an act that was widely believed to have taken place at the instigation of a Hindu vigilante group. Then, on January 30, 1998, Rashtriya Rifles personnel allegedly opened indiscriminate fire on Muslim protesters at Qadrana village in Doda, an action widely read, correctly or other- wise, as reprisal for the earlier massacre of Kashmiri Pandits at Wandhama in the Kashmir valley.

The political implications of Karara, read against this background, had immense resonance in the Jammu region as a whole. The national leadership of the BJP studiously refused to condemn the incident, and Udhampur’s new Member of Parliament, Chaman Lal Gupta, defended those responsible for the violence. In Doda, both the far-right Jamaat-e-Islami, and the National Conference sought to consolidate their Muslim constituencies by initiating flagrantly communal mobilisations. Doda’s National Conference MLA Khalid Suhrawardy, whose party, with its basically secular core ideology, is engaged in something of a low level war with the Islamic right in the Kashmir valley, shared a platform with the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Sayyidullah Tantrey to protest the Karara killings. Suhrawardy stood by as Jamaat-e-Islami cadre shouted slogans promising to avenge the murders. Karara was thus to mark the transformation of terrorist violence into a focal point for both communal consolidation and confrontation.

What opportunities Karara offered were clearly understood by the leadership of terrorist groups in the Jammu region, and a succession of communal killings followed. 28 Hindu villagers were butchered at Prankote village in the Reasi area on April 19, 1998. The sheer brutality of the executions, carried out, not with automatic weapons but with cleavers, was designed to provoke a response. Mercifully, although the killing of villagers across the Line of Control nine days later was attributed to the Indian army, there was no widespread communal rioting. Then, on May 6, ten Hindus were killed in separate incidents at Deesa, Doda and at Surankote, Poonch. Shortly afterwards, 25 members of a wedding procession were killed at Chapnari, near Doda town, on June 19. These killings were widely interpreted as part of an effort to communalise Doda, but the fact that their perpetrators were seeking local legitimacy as defenders of an insecure Muslim community was little understood.

This string of massacres made at least some form of Union Home Ministry intervention imperative. Advani did indeed visit Chapnari after the June massacre, this time with a promise of additional troops for the region. The move was clearly designed to placate the BJP’s electorate in the Jammu region, incensed at the failure of their party to protect them. The promise of additional troops was, perhaps, intended also to deflect demands for the imposition of the Disturbed Areas Act in Doda, a traditional demand of the BJP which it now could not honour for a variety of reasons, political and strategic. At an all-Hindu rally near Doda town, the Union Home Minister famously asserted that a ruler who could not protect his subjects did not have the right to govern. He was, however, careful not to make explicit whether he was referring to himself, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee or his new found ally, J&K Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. Advani further ensured that he retained legitimacy as a Hindu leader by studiously avoiding references to the Karara killings, and by not inviting any local Muslim leader to share the platform with him.

Date

Army (bn)

BSF (bn)

CRPF (coy)

IRP* (coy)

JKAP* (coy)

August 1995

8

6

27

0

1

March-April 1996

8

6

33

6

0

March-April 1997

11

Withdraw

33

5

0

June '98 Chapnari massacre

9

-

23

5

2

August'98, a month after Advani's promise of further forces

9

-

23

1

6

Less commitments for ongoing religious festivals/yatras

9

-

19

1

4

bn: battalion
coy: company
IRP: Indian Reserve Police
JKAP: Jammu & Kashmir Armed Police
1 battalion = 6 companies = approx. 135 personnel, including non-combatants and leave reserves.

Table 1: Force Levels in Doda

If Advani’s political compulsions were transparent, post-Chapnari policy was not. Despite the Union Home Minister’s promises, actual numbers of security personnel in Doda fell after the massacre [Table 1]. Later increases in J&K police strength that came about were the result of funding and policy commitments made well before the killings. No effort was made to secure adequate funding to equip predominantly-Hindu Village Defence Committees [VDCs] set up from 1993 onwards, most of whom are equipped with antiquated 7.62 mm bolt-action rifles. Even the Rs. 1,500 monthly stipend due to four members of each VDC recruited as Special Police Officers was, and continues to be, paid irregularly, because of severe financial contraints on the state government. The lack of state security personnel, as well as the inevitable criminalisation and communalisation of the VDCs was left unchecked. Union Government funds meant for policing, too, have been routinely diverted to meet immediate state expenses like salaries and bills, hindering an ongoing modernisation programme. Whether by accident or design, the principal achievement of the ‘pro-active policy’ was to ensure that business continued as usual in the Jammu province.

Unsurprisingly, the massacres continued, this time with an even more explicit communal subtext. The Kishtwar villages of Thakrain-Hor and Sarwan villages witnessed the murder of 17 Hindu villagers by a joint group of the Hizbul Mujaheddin and the Harkat-ul-Ansar on June 27. This massacre is believed by some intelligence officials to have been a reprisal for the killing of four members of the family of Doda Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin commander Mohammad Qasim at their home in Machlal village eight days earlier. The killings of Qasim’s family were rumoured to have been carried out by VDC vigilantes with Army backing, a charge the security establishment denies. This second phase of killings attracted far less attention from both politicians and the media than those at Chapnari. Even state level politicians of the National Conference, for reasons they best understand, chose not to visit Kishtwar.

The summer of murder ended when 34 road construction workers were shot dead at two outposts just across Doda’s border with Chamba district, in Himachal Pradesh, on August 3. While the action served to deepen communal tension in the Jammu region, it also to extended the confrontation into Himachal Pradesh. Hindu retaliation in Chamba focused on Muslim Gujjar buffalo herdsmen, driven, in no small part, by their age-old dispute with largely Hindu bakkarwals (goat herdsmen) over pasture rights. Subsequently, there were several complaints of ITBP troopers posted in the area forcing Gujjars, a community which has broadly taken a pro-India position since 1989 in J&K, off the mountain grasslands.

On the same night as the Chamba massacre, nineteen members of the family of top Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami terrorist Imtiaz Sheikh were shot dead by unidentified gunmen. Subsequent investigations (which are still continuing) by the state Human Rights Commission encountered allegations that the killings were carried out by the 9 Para Commando Regiment as reprisal for the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami’s killing of one of their key informants earlier in the day. The source, Zakir Husain, was killed by terrorists earlier the same day, after being dragged off a passenger bus on which he was travelling home. Whatever the outcome of the Human Rights Commission inquiry, the fact remains that the killings sparked widespread fears among Muslims in the Jammu region that the Army had begun to function as a Hindu vigilante organisation.

The chain of killings was briefly broken through the autumn and winter, a traditional period of relative quiet in the state. But the violence resumed promptly with the coming of spring. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s allegedly historic crossing of the Wagah border on February 19, 1999, provided an opportunity for Islamic fundamentalist groups to renew their campaign: Lashkar-e-Taiba groups executed twenty Hindu villagers at the Rajouri and Udhampur villages of Bal Jaralan, Khorbani and Bharyana. These were not the first spring massacres; four members of a family were reportedly hacked to death on February 13 at Mohra Sukhal. The February 19 killings were followed by a succession of smaller strikes, including a grenade attack in Chana village in which two villagers died. Such random communal killing will tend to escalate in the summer.

One critical fact that the February 19 massacres made clear was that the operation of Pakistan-based fundamentalist organisations in J& has no simple or instrumental relationship with the Pakistan state. Through the murders, the Lashkar-e-Taiba was signalling that its campaign against the Indian state, which in its perception is a Hindu entity, will proceed irrespective of the Pakistani political establishment’s objectives. To this stark assertion, the pro-active policy has no answers, bar the periodic pumping in of troops, a paradigm that predates its existence. The political processes that terrorist groups of the Islamic right have been able to set in place have remained unchallenged, for the simple reason that politicians of the Hindu right, also gain more than a little if terrorism is restructured along all-India communal fault lines.

This is particularly tragic in view of the fact that, in the Jammu region, Muslims have been the principal victims of terror [Table 2 & 3]. This fact should have been an adequate basis to build a genuine political consensus against the terror inflicted on Jammu by the parties of the Islamic right. Instead, an aggressive process of communal mobilisation has enabled terrorist groups to represent themselves as defenders of a community besieged by the state. The National Conference, which in the Jammu region is both in public and self perception a Muslim party, the Jamaat-e-Islami with its explicitly chauvinist agenda, and the BJP-RSS, have all been willing collaborators in this enterprise.

 

Year

Hindus
Muslims
Total
Massacres of Hindus

1989

1
0
1
None

1990

0
3
3
None

1991

0
3
3
None

1992

4
9
13
None

1993

47
49
96
16 killed in Kishtwar on August 14.

1994

46
53
99
None

1996

58
85
143
15 villagers killed at Barshalla on the night intervening 5/6 January; 9 villagers killed at Kamlari on night of 8/9 June; 13 villagers killed at Sarodhar on 25 July.

1997

27
42
69
6 VDC members killed at Kud Dhar on night of 14/15 October.

1998
(To June)

39
21
60
9 killed at Desa on night of 5/6 April; 25 wedding procession members killed at Chapnari on 19 June.
Table 2: Hindu & Muslim Civilians killed by Terrorists in Doda


Year

Muslims killed by terrorists
Hindus killed by terrorists
Civilians killed in Crossfire
Terrorist killed

1993

1
1
0
11

1994

0
0
0
13

1995

0
0
0
4

1996

6
0
2
10

1997

13
11
2
43

1998

35
10
9
98

Upto 25.2.99

7
11
4
32
Table 3: Civilian and Terrorists Casualties in District Rajouri

 

What the sustained cycle of killings in the Jammu region demonstrates is that the pro-active policy of May 1998 has not existed in any form other than as a semantic device. This device served not to address the emerging landscape of terror in J&K, but to consolidate the party’s core Hindu constituency in and outside the state. The Union Home Ministry took credit, at the time, for the cessation of communal killings last autumn. That strategic planning has been reduced to praying for early winter snows to descend on the passes of the Pir Panjal is a sad reflection on what passes for counter-terrorist doctrine in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

2. Today Jammu, Tomorrow India

Where do terrorist groups intend to take their communal campaign from the Jammu region? And how is the Union Government’s ‘pro-active policy’ likely to impact on these plans?

In the midst of last summer’s massacre frenzy, the Jammu & Kashmir Police’s Special Operations Group [SOG] eliminated the Hizbul Mujaheddin’s top Kashmir valley commander, Ali Mohammad Dar. Better known by his nom de guerre Burhanuddin Hijazi, Dar was among the organisation’s best strategic minds. Dozens of pages of hand-written notes were recovered from Dar’s temporary Srinagar hideout, presumably ideas for communication to the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin’s Pakistan-based supreme commander and long-standing Jamaat-e-Islami member, Mohammad Yusuf Shah alias Syed Salahuddin. The diaries, written in English, are now in the possession of the Jammu & Kashmir Police.

Dar’s diary offers unique insight into the Islamic right’s new strategic objectives. On the sheet marked 68 by police officials, he pleads with Salahuddin to "please take some practical steps to sustain the movement". "The routine launching and sending of arms and ammunition on head loads", Dar argues, "would not solve our problems…. This can just be a life saving drug, but nothing else". The argument reflected the growing realisation in the Hizbul Mujaheddin that achieving its objectives was no longer possible simply by sustaining a limited terrorist campaign within the Kashmir valley or around it. Among the factors in Dar’s mind would have been calls by Amir-e-Jamaat [Supreme leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami] GM Bhatt for an end to the ‘gun culture’ in the state, and for a break with the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin.

Page 66 of the Dar diaries suggests precise new courses of action on an all-India basis. "Ways and means should be found", it records, "to launch the movement in India on [a] priority basis". This can only be achieved by "above all, a system of launching and logistics" working in a better way. To do this, he suggests a broad linkage with criminal organisations elsewhere in the country. "Kingpins of the underworld [should] be contacted", Dar advocates, " to have the weapons and ammunition launched for us through other possible ways". "A cell of three persons" would work "to develop relations with underworld beings [sic] like Dawood Ibrahim and trying to have a project of counterfeit currency". Other activities of this nexus would include the creation of "ways and means from Sialkot to Rajasthan border for infiltration and exfiltration [of Hizbul Mujaheddin operatives]".

Dar’s diary is significant not for the practicability of its suggestions. Its importance lies in making clear that public declarations of the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin and Lashkar-e-Taiba are not mere polemic. Hizbul Mujaheddin’s Mohammad Yusuf Shah had vowed in 1988 to work for the destruction of India, language new in the organisation’s official discourse. "Jammu & Kashmir would be freed from her yoke, the country [India] itself would disintegrate and its 20 crore Muslim population would win its sovereignty", he asserted. Then, the December 1998 issue of Majallah al Dawa, the in-house magazine of the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s parent religious body, the Markaz Dawa wal’Irshad, reported the organisation’s belief that its campaign in Jammu & Kashmir was "just the beginning" and described its plans to extend its activities through India. These plans were laid out by the Markaz’s head, Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, at a meeting the magazine claimed was attended by several members of the Pakistan senate, including House Committee on Defence chairman Ghulam Sarwar Cheema.

Little is known about the extent to which Dar’s ideas were transformed into operational strategy, and whether the three-member cells he mentions are operational. The Hizbul Mujaheddin commander is known to have been in regular contact with Shah through two wireless sets in Srinagar, using the call signs ‘Khurshid’, ‘Dawood’, and, most frequently, ‘Junaid’. Army Signals Intelligence may possess decrypted records of these transmissions, and of Shah’s responses, but the existence of such documentation has not so far been either established or made public. But Shah’s promise to work for the destruction of India, redolent as it was with ‘two-nation’ polemic, and the fact that the Command Council of Hizbul Mujaheddin affirmed its commitment to such struggle in December 1998, render credible the proposition that Dar’s diaries are reliable indicators of the shape of terror in coming years.

Indeed, the very circumstances surrounding Dar’s elimination show that the organisation has been able to extend its circle of operation outside its traditional bases. In July 1997, the Delhi Police’s North District began investigations of terrorist-linked hawala operators in the capital city; investigations provoked in part by a media expose of the organic links between money laundering and secessionist politics in J&K. Informants led the Delhi Police to hawala operators Jatinder Singh Raju and Mohammad Muslim Gullu, who had handled the inward transfers of Rs. 47 lakh from Lahore to Mushtaq Gilkar, a resident of Jammu’s Kishtwar region. Gilkar, father of top Doda Hizbul Mujaheddin terrorist Younus Gilkar, was once a Divisional Commander of the terrorist organisation before ill-health forced him out of an operational role. The one-time terrorist, it turned out, had agreed to ferry the cash to Dar in a truck with a false bottom. The code name of the Lahore hawala dealer who made the outward transfer, ‘Qazi Sahib’, had, along with those of ‘Tariq’, ‘Saqib’ and ‘Iqbal’, repeatedly figured in organised crime interrogations, notably those resulting from a February 1996 recovery of 361 hand guns in New Delhi.

But why would terrorist groups wish to reach outside their traditional areas of operation in the first place? Such objectives are not only driven by military reverses inflicted on the terrorists in J&K, as Ministry of Home Affairs spokespersons would have the public believe, nor driven by some ‘super-game’ of the Inter Services Intelligence [ISI]. They are underpinned by the core ideologies of the far-right groups operating in the state. For chauvinist religious groups in Pakistan, the objective of armed struggle in J & K is not its liberation, but the greater glory of Islam. Interrogation of captured Harkut-ul-Ansar and Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin. Interrogations of the captured Harkut-ul-Ansar and Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin have shown their belief that the J & K insurgency will lead to the resurrection of an imagined glorious Islamic Republic spanning from Turkey to east Asia. This fantasy, remarkably similar to the Hindu right's visions of Akhand Bharat, necessitates a broader theater of operations not for tactical considerations, but for the Islamic right’s ideological objectives.

If the Hizbul Mujaheddin’s strategic course is still unclear, the Lashkar-e-Taiba has left few in doubt of its ability to execute its objectives. The organisation already has a unit for pan-Indian terrorist activity, the Dasta Mohammad Bin Qasim. This group is run Abdul Karim ‘Tunda’, whom some media accounts reported as having been killed in Dacca in November 1998. The reports, however, turned out to have been the result of a well-planned disinformation campaign. The Dasta Mohammad Bin Qasim waged a highly effective campaign of bombings in New Delhi, Haryana and Punjab through 1997 and 1998, but had no reported operational linkages with the Lashkar-e-Taiba apparatus functioning in Jammu & Kashmir.

Evidence of less structured links, however, has long been present. One illustrative case is that of Mumbai resident Jalees Ansari, a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative responsible for bomb blasts on the New Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani Express on December 6, 1993. Ansari was sent for training to Pakistan through the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Srinagar network across the Line of Control in October 1990, on the orders of Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Azam Ghauri. He returned to India in November 1991, again using the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Line of Control route. Interestingly, Ansari’s contact with far-right Islamic groups began with the Bhiwandi communal riots. Although he continued to work with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s Public Health Department until 1990, the rise of the Ram Janambhoomi movement evidently led him to finally transform his political beliefs into armed action.

More recently, Pakistan nationals working for the Lashkar-e-Taiba have been found to be operating outside their traditional theatre in J&K. On July 1, 1998, intelligence surveillance led to the arrest of top Lashkar activist Mohammad Salim Junaid, a resident of Kala Gujran village in Pakistan’s Jhelum district. Junaid had begun his career with the Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1991, as a foot soldier for the jihad in Jammu & Kashmir, rising rapidly through the organisation’s hierarchy as a protege of Azam Cheema, in charge of transborder movements of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. In 1995, Junaid was ordered to move to Hyderabad by the Lashkar-e-Taiba Amir handling the ‘Tunda’ cell, Zaki-ur-Rahman. There, posing as a automobile spare parts smuggler, evidently a respectable occupation in the context of impoverished old-city Hyderabad, he married Momina Khatoon, the daughter of a retired soldier. Although his efforts to run an explo- sives campaign were largely frustrated, Junaid’s story holds out obvious lessons on the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s changing strategy.

Similar stories abound. On July 30, 1998, the Delhi Police arrested three other members of the ‘Tunda’ cell, led by Abdul Sattar, a resident of Islamnagar in Pakistan’s Faislabad district. With his colleagues Shoaib Alam and Mohammad Faisal Husain, Sattar had put together a base in the famous pottery town of Khurja, Uttar Pradesh. Husain possessed a legitimate Indian passport, sponsored by local residents to whom he had introduced himself as a travelling religious preacher. The group had built a bunker under a pottery kiln for the storage of explosives. It is probable that the Lashkar-e-Taiba is not the only organisation setting up operational groups outside Jammu & Kashmir. Saifullah Chitrali, a North West Frontier Province resident shot dead by the SOG on January 17, 1999, was found in possession of thousands of copies of the Raah-e-Jannat, a venomously bigoted 144 page propaganda tract. Investigation showed the tract had been published on his behalf by sympathisers living near the seminary at Deoband in Uttar Pradesh. Phone numbers of right wing organisations in Uttar Pradesh, Mumbai and Delhi were found in Chitrali’s diary.

Other efforts have in the past been made by J&K -based terrorist groups to set up pan-Indian organisations. The Jammu Kashmir Islamic Front [JKIF], founded by one-time Student Liberation Front members Hilal Baig, Bilal Baig and Sajjad Keno, focused on operations outside the state immediately after its formation in 1993, executing a series of bomb blasts in Delhi. Believed to have been set up under direct ISI patronage, since, unlike other groups, it had no parent religious or political body, the JKIF again focused its energies on securing links with the Mumbai underworld, appealing to the Dawood Ibrahim group’s supposed Islamic solidarities. Such appeals had at least some success in the communally-charged climate created by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Sajjad Keno shared a platform with the architect of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, Abdul Razzak ‘Tiger’ Memon, at a Muzaffarabad press conference in 1995, shortly before his elimination in an encounter in January the following year.

Contacts between the JKIF and Memon are believed to have been set up in June 1995, when an ISI official they knew only as ‘Colonel Farooq’ organised a meeting at the terrorist group’s offices in Rawalpindi. Keno attended the meeting shortly after his spectacular escape from Rangreth jail in Jammu. Memon’s network was to provide the JKIF with safehouses and guides in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Some officials believe they also hoped to tap a consignment of 150-odd Kalashnikov rifles floating around the region, brought into India as part of a larger delivery before the Mumbai serial bombings of 1993. But the organisation’s start was far from auspicious. Keno, the organisation’s most committed leader, was shot dead by the SOG in Srinagar’s Natipora suburb on January 8, 1996, just six months after his jailbreak.

Despite Keno’s death, and that of Hilal Baig six months later, the JKIF’s core plans to operate throughout India remained in place. It avenged Keno’s killing with the massive blast at New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar shopping complex at the time of the 1996 Lok Sabha elections in Kashmir. The explosives for this operation were later discovered to have been smuggled into India by ‘Chhota’ Javed Khan, who was arrested at Ahmedabad on June 2, 1996, along with Ayub Ahmad Bhatt, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK)-resident Abdul Rashid ‘Jalaluddin’. The group’s leader, Kishtwar-resident Abdul Ghani Ghoni, told Intelligence Bureau interrogators that the organisation of their safe-houses and weapons at Ahmedabad had been made by the city’s key underworld baron, Dawood Ibrahim’s associate Abdul Latif Abdul Wahab Sheikh. Arrangements in Kathmandu, Ghoni claimed, had been directly supervised by intelligence operatives attached to the Pakistan mission in the city.

Interestingly, recent interrogations of alleged ISI operatives picked up in Mumbai have also thrown up Bilal Baig’s name. Samshad Haider, operating under the alias of Raj Kumar, and Javed Ghulam Hussain were recently arrested in Mumbai for carrying out a series of six bomb blasts in Mumbai between August 28, 1997 and February 27, 1998. They were aided by three Pakistan nationals, who have yet to be identified. Under interrogation by the Mumbai Police, Haider and Hussain said they had been tasked for the operation by "Bilal", an obvious reference to Bilal Baig. Interrogators, ignorant of the existence and activities of the JKIF, erroneously recorded Baig’s organisation as the JKLF [Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front], a now largely defunct group in Kashmir. The affair illustrates the dismal levels of intelligence sharing within the Indian security apparatus, as well as the lack of area specialists available to police forces outside the immediate theatre of operations of a given terrorist group.

Why did the underworld collaborate with a venture that had nothing to do with its core interests? It is perhaps relevant to note that the Muslim component of the Mumbai underworld showed little interest in early ISI efforts to involve them in terrorism. Dawood Ibrahim is known to have resisted overtures made through Karachi-based smugglers Yusuf Godrawala and Taufiq Jallianwala in the late 1980s, even at the risk of jeopardising his shipping routes from West Asia to India’s west coast, which passed through Pakistani territorial waters. It was only after the brutal anti-Muslim violence of 1992-1993, in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition, that the underworld transfigured itself along communal lines, with fateful consequences.

That communalism breeds communalism is a self-evident proposition. The history of the Mumbai serial bombing, at its core ,is the story of how the Shiv Sena’s pogrom against Muslims in the city during the riots of 1992-1993, and the deep scars left by the demolition of the Babri Masjid, led until-then-secular criminal groups to participate in a terrorist campaign on purely communal lines. Al- though that narrative is too long to be recounted here, the fact that Memon and Kashmir terrorist groups were able to create some forms of affiliation in the troubled political climate of the early and mid-1990s holds out obvious lessons in the context of the heightened communal offensive in J&K and elsewhere in India. Pakistan’s strategic objectives are facilitated, not by incompetent counter-insurgency operations, or even by low absolute force strength, but by absurd state policy and chauvinist politics.

If the JKIF’s efforts failed in 1996, with the elimination of most of its field apparatus, there is no guarantee that future efforts will go the same way. Though empirical evidence is hard to come by, the transformation of Muslim identity in Kashmir offers a rich terrain for exploration. For one, the systematic displacement from the school education system of the state’s languages by Urdu, a project ironically sponsored by the state apparatus itself, has led to the creations of two generations of Kashmiri Muslims who cannot read their own language. Jammu & Kashmir has no newspapers in Kashmiri, and a declining body of new literature. Even though the Jamaat-e-Islami has limited political influence, its broad project of reconverting the state’s Muslims afresh, from a syncretic folk Islam to a new orthodoxy, has met substantial success, despite little political support and an often underrated cultural and intellectual influence.

3. A New Politics in Jammu & Kashmir.

If terrorism has sought to reform itself along all-India communal fault lines, politics within J&K shows intriguing signs of being driven by the same forces. Prime Minister Vajpayee’s bus ride across the Wagah border has had one major consequence for J&K. If the Pokhran nuclear tests opened the way for a de facto internationalisation of the debate on the state’s future, what BJP propagandists describe as ‘The Historic Event’ has signaled that the Indian state, for the first time in fifty years, might actually be willing to engage in such a discussion. Shorn of obfuscation, the visit has necessitated the opening up of the question: what could constitute a final settlement of the J&K question?

Three sets of developments have been particularly significant. The first has been the circulation of a paper by the Washington-based Kashmir Study Group, an influential policy institution, advocating that "a portion of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir be reconstituted as a sovereign entity enjoying free access to and from both India and Pakistan". Widely circulated among politicians in the state, the paper, entitled Kashmir: A Way Forward, suggests the new entity would have its own legislature, citizenship and internal law and order force. Just what the Kashmir Study Group meant by "a portion" of the state is not spelt out, but the obvious candidate would be the bitterly contested Valley. This, in essence, would is little more than an updated version of the 1950 plan of United Nations mediator Owen Dixon, who advocated a division of J&K on communal lines, handing Muslim majority areas north of the Chenab to Pakistan, and Hindu dominated areas to India.

Kashmir: A Way Forward intervened in an ongoing debate in state-level politics on the future of areas north of the Chenab. Three influential National Conference figures from the Jammu region constituencies from this belt, Rajouri MLA and School Education Minister Mohammad Sharief Tariq, Mendhar MLA and Agriculture Minister Nisar Ahmad Khan, and Surankote MLA Mushtaq Ahmad Bukhari, had thrown their weight behind proposals for a new Pahari province as early as 1996. The three had the backing of Uri MLA and Finance Minister Mohammad Shafi, who represents a hill constituency in the Kashmir province, but wished his area to be integrated in the new province. This political formation argued before the state’s recently, and controversially, disbanded Regional Autonomy Commission that they shared no linkages of language or culture with Jammu at large. Similar demands emerged from the National Con- ference in Doda.

The MLAs somewhat thin arguments are not as interesting as the obvious implications of the idea. While the group cited the poverty of their areas as a reason for their proposals, the fact remains that predominantly Hindu hill areas south of the Chenab, for example the Bani belt, are no better off. Nor can it plausibly be argued that differences of dialect or culture are in themselves adequate reason for a partitioning or provinces. The real result of the National Conference campaign would be to replace the culturally and communally diverse unity of the Jammu province with a number of provinces divided along essentially communal lines. That, in turn, would result in the sharpening of communal identities within the state, displacing other more secular identities which have evolved over time. Regional Autonomy Chairman Balraj Puri’s unceremonious sacking is attributed by his backers to his refusal to go along with such flagrantly divisive plans.

But even more curious than the National Conference’s plans are signs that elements of Jammu’s Hindu right might not be disinterested in similar outcomes. Several influential Jammu figures have, at various times in the recent past, thrown their weight behind a reformation of the Jammu province into a separate state. Jammu Chamber of Commerce head Ramesh Gupta, who is the brother of Udhampur MP Chaman Lal Gupta, has backed the idea. Recent reports have also suggested that Karan Singh, scion of the Dogra monarchy which once ruled J&K, has similarly suggested that the Jammu and Kashmir provinces have too little in common to constitute a single unit. J&K, significantly, is the only state of consequence not to have been reorganised on linguistic lines. Finally, intellectuals with positions that have in the past been sympathetic to the Hindu right, including Jammu academic Hari Om, have over the last months been backing the idea of a referendum to settle the state’s future.

Whether these diverse voices, with their disparate objectives and motives, speak for anyone other than themselves is not as yet clear. It is, however, well known that the idea of the sundering of the state has been discussed within the Indian establishment for several years. Former Union Minister of State for Home in the PV Narasimha Rao ministry, Rajesh Pilot, had convened a meeting of now Prime Minister Vajpayee, Finance Minister Yashwant Singh, and former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar to discuss ideas for a division of the state along lines that originated in documents from the US. None of the four, predictably, backed the idea. But its persistence in official discourse was illustrated when, in 1997, former Union Home Minister Indrajit Gupta announced plans for the creation of new states – a proclamation he, characteristically and hastily withdrew.

These multiple currents in the politics of J&K suggest that communal themes are shaping the directions of discourse in the state, as indeed they are for terrorist groups. The consequences of this discourse, however subterranean it presently is, could be calamitous. Hindu communal mobilisation, experiences ranging from those of Jalees Ansari to that of the JKIF show, has had a deep relationship with the shape and form of terrorism in J&K. Although very little research exists to suggest that both have a causal interaction outside the state itself, the fact remains that the rise of Hindu communal forces could be argued to have made Kashmir’s Muslims more sensitive to developments in the rest of India than at any time in the past. If terrorists in the Kashmir valley have taken to shooting girls clad in jeans, or in banning cable-television broadcasts, it is not because of some mindless opposition to modernity, but because the far right believe such actions, carried out in the context of the current all-India Hindu chauvinist mobilisation, will give them legitimacy among their core constituency.

Strategic discussions, carried out both by Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri authors, invariably begin with expositions on the uniqueness of J&K, a narrative which verges on the suggestion that the state’s people have arrived only recently from another planet. Such claims of uniqueness are little other than tautology. J&K’s historical processes are as unique as any other part of the country, but the fact remains that the conflict in the state is best understood not as a purely local conflict, but as part of a larger communal conflagration. Pro-activity, as a doctrine, has emerged from this larger battle, but it also singularly fails to either understand or engage with it.

A serious rethinking of policy on the state must begin with the understanding that the grand themes of recent Indian history have constructed events in J&K as well. It is perhaps not coincidental that the rise of terror in the state came in the wake of the pan-Indian wave of anti-Muslim riots, engineered by the Hindu right , in the 1980s. The inability of the state to propel its middle class from its traditional base in trading, into modern entrepreneurship and industry; the lack of a genuinely secular and democratic political culture; and above all the exclusion of J&K’s nascent pan-Indian middle class from the apparatus of state power and economic opportunity were both cause and cumulative consequence of the current crises. Any meaningful counter-terrorist policy will have to address these issues.

Sadly, the Union Home Minister’s vapid polemic taxes bureaucrats less than the arduous task of understanding and engaging with terrorism.

Notes & References

 
*

Mr. Praveen Swami is Chief of Bureau, Mumbai, for Frontline magazine and has extensively reported on terrorism in Punjab and J&K.

1. Cited in Akbar, MJ: India: The Siege Within, p. 241. New Delhi: 1985.

2. For an account of this and other recent massacres, see Swami, Praveen: Another Season of Massacres in Frontline magazine, March 26, 1998.

3. Swami, Praveen: Blood on the Chenab in Frontline, April 11, 1998.

4. Swami, Praveen: A Season of Massacres in Frontline, July 4, 1998.

5. Swami, Praveen: A Beleaguered Force in Frontline, February 12, 1999.

6. For an account of issues related in this section of the article, see Swami, Praveen: Ext- ending Terror in Frontline, March 26, 1999, on which the section is based.

7. For details of the split in the Jamaat-e-Islami, see Swami, Praveen: A Break With The Past in Frontline, December 18, 1998 .

8. Swami, Praveen: Tales of a Bloody November in Frontline, December 18, 1998.

9. Swami, Praveen: Kashmir’s Hawala Scandal in Frontline, September 5, 1997.

10. Swami, Praveen: Mumbai’s Mafia Wars in Frontline, April 9, 1999.

11. For a comprehensive discussion of the issues in this section, see Swami, Praveen: Trouble Ahead in Kashmir in Frontline, December 18, 1998.

12. For details see Swami, Praveen: The Revival of Communalism in Frontline, December 18, 1998.

 

 

 

 

 
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