Guest militants

If the current Pakistani establishment indeed wants to use violence to force India to make concessions, it appears to be having the opposite effect

David Devadas Srinagar

“General sahib, yeh kya hai? Jo aapke liye haraam, woh hamare liye halaal? (What is this, general? What is prohibited for you is sanctioned for us?)”

That, according to a senior secessionist figure, is a question that one of the leaders of the Hurriyat Conference asked Pakistan President, General Parvez Musharraf, during a meeting in Pakistan. The questioner went on to point to the fact that Musharraf has tried to root out fundamentalist jihad-oriented militant groups such as Sipah-e-Sahiba in Pakistan but groups from Pakistan continue to cause violence in Kashmir.

Ever since they first met him, Kashmir's independence movement leaders have made known to Musharraf their reservations about what they diplomatically refer to as “guest militants”.

Their first meeting was on the eve of the Agra summit five years ago, at the Pakistan High Commissioner's residence in New Delhi. Abdul Ghani Lone, who led the minority faction within the then united Hurriyat, made the point. Indeed, Lone had even added that the Kashmiri people were tired of violence, whether perpetrated by outsiders or by their own. At that meeting, Ali Shah Geelani, the mentor of Hizb-ul Mujahideen, had immediately bridled, saying to Musharraf that some people might be tired but he certainly was not. Lone was assassinated in Srinagar 10 months after that interaction with Musharraf.

No wonder the Hurriyat Conference feels frustrated as violence reaches a new peak this summer. For the first time since militancy erupted in Kashmir 17 years ago, tourists have been deliberately targeted in a series of attacks.

Theories abound regarding the extent to which the Pakistani establishment is involved in organising these attacks and those in Mumbai. There is no evidence yet of links between the perpetrators of the terror attacks in the two places but there is an unsettling parallel in the involvement of local boys in the execution of the attacks.

According to police officers and some well-informed Kashmiris, the trend this year appears to be that foreign militants pay large amounts of money to teenaged Kashmiri boys to hurl grenades at targets. These boys are not necessarily intimately involved in militancy and are unlikely to have a police record.

Ordinary Kashmiris do not seem to approve of these tactics. Bystanders chased and caught one of those who threw a grenade on July 11 and handed him to the police. This is a contrast with the trends of much of the past decade-and-a-half, during which the large majority of Kashmiris preferred not to get involved, either out of empathy or fear.

Although there is clearly discernible dissatisfaction with the current state government, led by Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, that does not appear to have dovetailed into anti-India sentiment. This disgruntlement manifests in comparisons with former chief minister, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's stint.

Random conversations with Kashmiris indicate that they generally attribute this violence to foreign militants - who even Hurriyat leaders have told Musharraf they do not want around, whatever their public positions may be.

Indeed, whichever hand may finally throw a grenade, there is little doubt that the nerve centres of these operations are in Pakistan. And it would appear that the target is the perception across India that normalcy has returned to Kashmir.

Pakistan, specifically its army and ISI, has invested too much in promoting violence in Kashmir to allow things to settle down to status quo ante. Its options other than stepping up terror are limited. Musharraf's interviews to Indian television channels earlier this year gave ample evidence that he had virtually given up on the formal negotiations. He stated publicly what he had proposed during those negotiations and said that he was frustrated at the lack of response from India.

The stepped-up violence in Kashmir this summer – and in places like Mumbai – could be interpreted as the Pakistani establishment's tactics to force the Indian government to negotiate from a defensive position.

Musharraf's efforts to rein in terror groups may have extended to virtual war in Waziristan but have not seriously curbed the activities of jihad factories such as the Madarsa Dawat ul Irshad, the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Taiba just outside Lahore.

Signs of a coordinated strategy have become apparent in recent weeks. Interrogation of one of the Pakistani boys detained over the past few weeks indicates that such militants are now being sent across the Line of Control with instructions to execute specific operations and are given no time to find their feet in Kashmir. According to a police officer, one captured boy revealed that his team had been given two days to cross the Line of Control, another two to make contact with local liaisons and just two more to execute their operations - just six days from start to finish.

Some Kashmiris speculate that this strategy could be prompted by the tendency of some of the foreign militants to become disoriented when they discover that the situation in Kashmir is startlingly different to the picture that is painted during their indoctrination. They find that there are no restrictions on the practice of Islam, nor do Kashmiris face the sort of repression that their indoctrination leads them to expect.

The strategy to ensure quick action on the ground could also stem from the urgency in the Pakistani establishment to force India onto the back foot by the end of this summer. Musharraf must surely want to show his people some success with regard to Kashmir by next year.

Musharraf faces elections in 2007 and could face a combined alternative from Pakistan's two major political parties, Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League. On the other hand, the strength of the Islamist grouping, the Majlis Muttahida-e Amal, is likely to have been buttressed in reaction to the Pakistan Army's actions in Waziristan against Al Qaeda.

Musharraf is evidently taking seriously the upcoming battle for the public mind. He threw together a manuscript in just a few weeks to counter Nawaz Sharif's book, which exposes Musharraf's role during the Kargil war and the subsequent coup. The manuscript was doing the rounds of major international publishers last month. And there is no getting away from the fact that Kashmir is potentially the most emotionally charged issue in Pakistani politics.

If the current Pakistani establishment indeed wants to use violence to force India to make concessions, it appears to be having the opposite effect. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stated on television soon after the Mumbai commuter train blasts (July 11) that India would not kneel before this sort of violence. The meeting between the two countries' foreign secretaries that was scheduled for the second half of the month was cancelled.

That Kashmir has become a high-stakes issue in Pakistan this summer has already had a negative effect on the talks between the Government of India and secessionist political leaders. Not only did both factions of the Hurriyat Conference stay away from the Prime Minister's round table conference, even such other secessionist leaders as Sajad Lone refused to attend. Some of the Hurriyat leaders seem shaken.

Terror is a fact of daily life for even the most senior Hurriyat leaders. Several secessionist leaders have after all been assassinated by militants over the past 16 years. A rumour on the streets of Srinagar has it that each of the secessionist leaders received dire threats warning against attending the round table conference.