The Kashmir Tangle

Issues And Options

Rajesh Kadian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367293390
• eBook ISBN: 9781000302813
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

With rare objectivity, Rajesh Kadian assesses past and present conflicts in Kashmir, one of the world's most long-standing trouble spots. He traces the regions controversial history from the 1947 partition to the surging tide of militancy now building in the Kashmir Valley, which has further strained relations between India and Pakistan. Kadians si

1
A Parting of Illusions

In November 1989 India was in the throes of a general election. The ruling Congress(I) Party was widely viewed as slipping out of power. In its wake the Janata Dal coalition was faying to pick up enough pieces to offer a viable alternative government. On the other hand the rejuvenated right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party also sensed a historic opportunity for growth. With the stakes being so high, the tempo of political activity was frantic all over India. In stark contrast lay the breathtakingly beautiful vale of Kashmir. No garish posters, colourful banners or raucous party rallies disturbed the enchantment of the near-deserted valley on the threshold of winter. Neither the end of the tourist season nor sublime considerations to preserve the natural beauty of the place accounted for the stillness in Kashmir. Instead, the reason was simply a clear call by shadowy militant organisations asking for the boycott of the elections. Unmindful of these calls, the largest regional party, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, put up a candidate each for the three Lok Sabha seats from the valley. Not unexpectedly all three won uncontested.

Elsewhere, the elections accompanied by unprecedented violence, saw the Congress(I) lose its majority in the Lok Sabha but retain its standing as the largest single parliamentary party with 194 seats. The Janata Dal with 142 MPs constituted the second largest party and formed a minority government with majority outside support from the Bhartiya Janata Party and the two Communist parties.

In the new government a lightweight politician, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed was unexpectedly nominated as the nation's first Muslim Home Minister. Though a Kashmiri, he was elected from Muzaffarnagar in U.P. Though he failed to represent his home state in the Indian parliament, an event there was soon to engulf him. For while the Mufti was holding his first meeting with the officials of his new ministry on the afternoon of 8 December 1989, a more dramatic event was taking place in Srinagar. On that fateful afternoon, the Mufti's daughter, Dr. Rubaiya, was on her way home after a busy morning at the Lalded Memorial Women's Hospital where she was an intern. Rubaiya boarded the local transit van, a green Matador. The vehicle was waylaid by four armed men, who at gunpoint bundled Rubaiya into a Maruti car and sped away. Two hours later the kidnappers telephoned the local newspaper, The Kashmir Times, and communicated their demands: the release of five Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) militants in government custody.

By that evening the machinery of state had swung into action under Arun Nehru. This portly cousin of the former Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, had briefly served as the Minister of State for National Security under the previous government. After the 1989 election he became the Tourism and Commerce Minister in the new administration but found himself once again handling national security matters because of this abduction. Two days later two senior Ministers from the Central Government, Arif Mohammed Khan and Inder Kumar Gujral flew to Srinagar to make an assessment of the situation. Neither the agency charged with domestic surveillance, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), nor the organisation in charge of overseas operations, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) could provide any leads; not even the names of possible mediators with a clout with the militants. No hard information was available about either the kidnappers or their possible hideouts. Also, little data was obtainable from the intelligence wing of the Border Security Force (BSF) or from Military Intelligence (MI). Likewise, similar agencies of the State Government were of little help. In New Delhi the elite National Security Guards (NSG) volunteered to go into action with such minimal information as the broad geographical area where Rubaiya might be held hostage. But the Mufti refused this help with alacrity. Instead he prodded the State Government to meet the demands of the militants.

The Indian Government, however, got some unexpected succour. Muslim organisations and political parties strongly denounced the abduction. Even Pakistan, taken by surprise at the timing of the abduction, condemned it.^* The Muslim clergy in India, stung by such an act, roundly rebuked the perpetrators.

Despite this backlash, the Indian Government could do little to capitalise on it. After some bellicosity the Indians backed down and began negotiating with the militants through four intermediaries. The JKLF, though initially rattled by the outcry against them but buoyed by the ineffectual Indian response, regained the initiative and tried to get the maximum concessions from the government. So the list of militants to be freed was changed. Likewise the venue for such a release was altered several times; it changed from Srinagar to Azad Kashmir to Iran and finally back to Srinagar. After six hectic days, five men were set free in downtown Srinagar where thousands of others had gathered to celebrate their triumph. Shortly afterwards Rubaiya rejoined her parents. The tangled situation in Kashmir had once again captured the headlines. It seemed clear that the vast majority of the Muslim population of the valley sided with the militants.

The politics of alienation

The upsurge of militancy in Kashmir was the culmination of a process that slowly gathered steam since the mid 1970s when a deceptive calm pervaded the valley. The redoubtable champion of the Kashmiri independence, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, once again became the Chief Minister of the state in 1975 after a lapse of twenty-two years. On his return to power, eye-witnesses who heard him speak at Lai Chowk in Srinagar could see an obvious change in the man; he had visibly aged but his voice still had the spell-binding quality of the past. Most of his speech was devoted to his plans to fight against the rise of corruption in the state during his absence. He made no mention of the long- standing demand which had resulted in his recurrent imprisonment; the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir's semi-autonomous state as had existed when he was ousted from power in 1953. Ostensibly, the Sheikh did not bring up this question because he had come to a profound conclusion: that Kashmiri interests were best served by affiliating with India. More so after the atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army against their co-religionists in Bengal during the 1971 war, which led to the defeat and division of Pakistan. At the same time the Indian leadership, both political and bureaucratic, with its inordinate faith in pacts, felt self-satisfied about Kashmir; from its point of view the dispute had been diverted from the international fora to a bilateral problem between India and Pakistan by the 1972 Simla Agreement. It publicly hoped that the dividing boundary in Kashmir, now dubbed as the Line of Control (LOC), would in due course become the de jure international border between the two countries. To add to its self satisfaction was the six-point Kashmir Accord signed by the Sheikh's party and the Government of India in February 1975. For the Indians the importance of this Accord lay in its reiteration of the accession of the erstwhile Princely State to India as final. In addition the Sheikh had dropped the demand for a plebiscite to determine the final status of Kashmir. Furthermore, the accord allowed for the Government of India to impose President's Rule in the state. As a sop to the Kashmiris, Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was retained and the Residuary Powers^* were to remain with the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.

Under such circumstance few Indians paid attention to the appearance of the numerous new mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools attached to mosques) in the valley. Because this in itself was not unusual; the flow of petrodollars into the Indian Subcontinent had already spurred the development of new madrassas in the Indian plains. With this steady increase in religious training there was a rise in the number of newly ordained maulvis (religious teachers) who then moved to different parts of India. The Kashmir valley was no exception; senior Indian officials began to notice the increasing number of maulvis from U.P. and Bihar in the local mosques and madrassas. These new maulvis did not share the gentle sufism of their indigenous Kashmiri brethren, for most of them were young and educated in the Deoband region^* of western U.P. They taught of pride in militant Islam and branded Muslim children going to secular schools as Kafirs. Their teachings struck a ready chord in a population already stimulated by the Islamic revolution in neighbouring Iran. Not unexpectedly the attendance in the madrassas increased steadily. The students also benefitted from free education and free food. The Sheikh, a devout and practicing Muslim, who championed the cause of his community, was too canny a political leader not to visualise a rising centre of rival power. He tried to stem its growth by a ban on the madrassas but the process, although slowed down, went on.

The Sheikh also allowed greater movement around the Line of Control between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. However, this humanitarian gesture also made for easier infiltration of agents, arms, ammunition and equipment from Pakistan. In the meantime the Central Government in Delhi continued with its penchant for playing one political group against another. Therefore the Mirwaz (head priest) in Kashmir, Maulvi Farooq of the Awami Action Party, was quietly encouraged so as to weaken the Abdullah hold over the Kashmiri people. Likewise, New Delhi played upon the apprehensions of the Hindus around Jammu about them being overwhelmed by the Muslim majority in the state. The Sheikh countered these actions by publicly decrying Delhi's interference in Kashmir. He further tried to take the wind out of the sails of his opponents as well as the Congress Party by introducing the Resettlement Bill, thereby giving the returnees^* from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir the right to reclaim lost immovable property.

At the same time Sheikh Abdullah now with failing eyesight and heart disease, shared another concern common to most political leaders in India; how to ensure a smooth dynastic succession. A second well known trait in the political life of the subcontinent became increasingly obvious as well; blatant corruption and affluence amongst his relatives. This was not lost upon the younger generation of Kashmiris in whose eyes the political leaders of the state increasingly lost respect and credibility. However Sheikh Abdullah's fall from grace was not a relentless process. His death from a heart attack on 5 September 1982 was widely mourned. Even his son and successor, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, a comparative newcomer in politics with a reputation of being flippant, was readily accepted as the new leader.

Farooq soon took steps to strengthen his own base; he not only adopted an anti-Congress stance in Kashmir, but also aligned himself with other opposition parties on the national level. He also demanded a ban on all communal organisations whether Hindu, Muslim or any other. Not unexpectedly such a ban - vague, sweeping and ill-defined, received little support from any of the major political parties in India. Farooq then turned this lack of support into political capital by firstly establishing his own secular credentials and secondly by implying that the rest of India was chauvinistic and Hindu. However this portrayal of the rest of India was also used by the militants to their own advantage. Dr. Abdullah also allowed the return of about 2,500 displaced Kashmiris from Pakistan. But a number of them were widely believed to be trained Pakistani agents and provocateurs. These actions worried New Delhi about both his motives and his judgement.

Soon the Indian Government found tangible reasons for its rising concern. In February 1984 an Indian diplomat, Ravindra Mhatre, was kidnapped and killed in Birmingham, England. His abductors were members of the little known Kashmir Liberation Army - a group which had been issuing death threats to Indian diplomats since the mid-1970s. Their demands included the release of Maqbool Butt, a Kashmiri incarcerated in Delhi's Tihar Jail, under the sentence of death for his part in the killing of the cashier of a bank during a holdup in 1976, But Maqbool Butt was no ordinary bank robber; in 1965 he had founded the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front in Peshawar. Two years later, while in India, he stabbed an Indian CID agent to death. He was then arrested and sentenced to death. However he escaped from jail and resurfaced at the scene of the highjacking of an Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship aircraft to Lahore in 1971. His return to India in 1976 to incite a rebellion in Kashmir failed. Frustration and shortage of funds led to the bank holdup and recapture. Meanwhile another founding member of the JKNLF, Amanullah Khan, migrated to England. In 1976 he was instrumental in forming the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) by merging the Plebiscite Front and the Azad Kashmir Front in Birmingham. Though the shadowy KLA perpetrated the deed, it was JKLF that burst into the limelight; the latter being better-known and publicity hungry. In addition many felt that the KLA was in fact the terrorist arm of the JKLF, which in turn was synonymous with the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front.

In India Maqbool Butt was hanged in unseemly haste following the assassination of Mhatre. In the valley his death was not merely viewed as a vicious and petty act of vengeance but also as the martyrdom of a romanticist and a freedom fighter. The militants got an additional fillip because the largest political party in the country tried to make common cause with them. Two women, one Hindu the other Muslim, described the situation in Srinagar in a letter to the editor by writing, "The Congress(I) leadership has called Dr. Farooq Abdullah a secessionist while they are themselves anti-national. The Congress(I) workers here were, on February 17, forcing shopkeepers to down shutters, in protest against the hanging of Maqbool Butt." However none of these instances alienated the Kashmiris as much as the developments of July 1984. That month Farooq's politically ambitious brother-in-law, Ghulam Mohammed Shah, was encouraged by the Congress(I) to defect and form a government of his own. He did so by getting thirteen members of the state assembly to desert Farooq's National Conference Party.

The Jamaat-e-Islami which had seen all 35 of its candidates lose the elections in 1983 now campaigned against this blatant interference in the political process in the state. Dr. Farooq Abdullah, too, returned to the valley to mammoth cheering crowds which were far more impressive than any rallies addressed by his opponents. This hectic political activity led to educational institutions being frequently closed. Therefore even more students entered the madrassas. Other young Kashmiris were also becoming politically active following the unsettled political conditions in Punjab and Kashmir led to a decline in the tourist trade; the number of tourists fell to half from the peak of 6,50,000 in 1982. This further exacerbated the job situation because in the fifteen years after the 1971 war the unemployed in Kashmir had increased from 10,000 to 1,50,000. Therefore, jobless or under-employed young men became increasingly available to the militants.

While the Kashmiris were being alienated the new leaders of the state government busied themselves in three activities: preparing for the forthcoming parliamentary elections, highlighting the deficiencies of the Farooq Government and making money. The elections in December 1984 were held after the October assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Despite his estrangement from the Congress(I) Party, Farooq was the first opposition leader to appeal to the people to rally behind the young inexperienced new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. In Kashmir the elections dealt a sharp blow to the pretensions of legitimacy of the Shah Government; all three of its contestants were beaten by Farooq's candidates. The margins of victory were remarkably large and the degree of humiliation was further emphasized by the defeat of Muzzafar Shah, the son of the Chief Minister, Ghulam Mohammed Shah. This aspiring political leader was credited with an instrumental role in the downfall of the Farooq Government and enjoyed publicly stated support of the Congress(I) - which won an unprecedented victory across the rest of the country. But in Srinagar Shah's opponent, the sitting M.P., Abdul Rashid Kabuli, increased his margin of victory by 20% as compared to the previous election.

The Shah Government was still allowed to continue in office by New Delhi. In fact in Srinagar, a panel headed by the Deputy Chief Minister of the state, produced a white paper indicting the Farooq Government for compromising the security of the country by various acts of omission and commission and financial irregularities. But after the election debacle such hackneyed charges carried little weight with the people of Kashmir who were beginning to seek other means of redressal.

At the same time the effects of increased corruption built up further resentment among the common people because most jobs could only be obtained or safeguarded by buying the new ministers with cold cash. But the political leaders were too busy to care; one minister released money to an agriculture marketing society which consisted of eleven members - all belonging to his own family. Another used a front organisation to purchase coal from the State Mineral Corporation and then sold it at a higher price in the black market. In 1985, in a particularly brazen act, the Shah Government bypassed the elected local bodies like panchayats and municipal committees; instead political appointees took over, thereby getting control over large sums of public funds. It was widely perceived that much of this money was either pocketed or misspent. Of course the traditional sources of corruption in the handling of timber and other forest resources like extraction of pine resin continued unabated. However, India as a whole continued to remain indifferent and unconcerned about these developments in Kashmir.

In hindsight some astute Kashmiris believe that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and increased infiltration from Pakistan fueled increasing Hindu-Muslim tension in the valley though public outbursts and organised violence remained minimal. This finally changed in the winter of 1985-86. That year the State Government completed its annual move from the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Parting of Illusions
• 2. The Chequered Past
• 3. 1947
• 4. War and the Fractured Peace
• 5. The Storms and the Lull
• 6. Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliographical Note
• Index