Modis Kashmir Policy Is Playing Right Into the Hands
of Pakistan's ISI, Prem Shankar Jha 22/JUL/2018
Shujaat Bukhari’s killing was the most
cold-blooded and meticulously planned assassination in recent years and was,
beyond a shadow of doubt, instigated by Pakistan’s ISI.
Since the fateful evening when I heard that Shujaat
Bukhari, my friend and colleague for the past 26 years, had been assassinated in Srinagar while going
home to break his Ramzan fast with his family, I have often wondered who
his assassins could have been, and what could have been going through their minds as
they sat on their motorcycle waiting for him to emerge from his office. Were they
simply semi-educated youth with no future in civilian life, brainwashed
into believing that Shujaat was a traitor to Kashmir who was taking money from
the state and Central governments to undermine the fight for freedom? Or
were they mercenaries who were lining their pockets and soothing their
consciences by pretending that they were doing Allah’s work?
Till today, more than a month after his death,
there is no answer. Speculation still is rife. The majority view is that
Shujaat’s murder was the outcome of the radicalisation and Islamisation that
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unleashed upon the Valley. Writing in Firstpost,
Khalid Shah concluded that “the situation in the
state has slipped from contemporary timelines and is back to the 1990s now”. In
the Washington Post, Barkha Dutt echoed this: “Kashmir is sliding into
a black hole of possibly no return.”
But Shujaat’s assassination was not a by-product of
the tidal wave of anger created by the Modi government’s relentless use of
brute force to crush Kashmiri separatism. It was the most cold-blooded and
meticulously planned assassination in recent years, on par with those of
Mirwaiz Maulvi Farouq in 1990 and Abdul Ghani Lone in 2002.
And it was, beyond a shadow of doubt, instigated by
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Four video cameras caught the assassins riding on
their motorbike before and after the assassination. But not one caught
them loitering for 45 minutes as they waited for Shujaat to emerge from his
office because they had chosen the only ten-metre stretch of road
that was not covered by any of the CCTV cameras scanning this high
security area. Only inside information, possibly from within the police,
could have made them choose that precise spot.
Weapon of choice
For the ISI, assassination has been a weapon of
choice not only in Kashmir, but much more so in Pakistan itself. According
to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, nearly 10,000 people have gone
missing in the country since 2001, with nearly 3,000 still unaccounted for. In
2016 alone, there were 728 disappearances.
Journalists have figured prominently on the ISI’s
hit list, two of the most celebrated being Hamid Mir, the host of Geo TV’s
‘Capital Talk’, and Shahzad Saleem, the former bureau chief of Asia
Times(online). Mir miraculously survived six bullets in his stomach
because, knowing that an ISI car was following him, he drove straight to a
hospital to seek shelter there, and was shot at its doorstep. Saleem was
tortured and killed ten days after the publication of his book detailing links
between the ISI, various rogue officers of the Pakistan army and terrorist
organisations like the Tehrik-e-Taliban-i-Pakistan (TTP). In the same year, 12
other Pakistani journalists met a similar fate, though perhaps not all at
the hands of the ISI.
In Kashmir, the ISI has a 28-year record of killing
any leader who has shown willingness to negotiate peace with the Indian
government. The list of its victims begins with Mirwaiz Maulvi Farouq, the
father of Mirwaiz Umar Farouq, on May 21, 1990, and the elimination
of all the six other Kashmiri leaders with whom George
Fernandes had held secret talks in the first few months of that year.
It stretches through Qazi Nissar, the leader of the Muslim United Front,
in 1993; professor Abdul Ghani Butt’s brother in 1996; Abdul Majid Dar, the
area commander of the Lashkar-e-Tayabba, who declared a unilateral ceasefire,
in July 2,000; Abdul Ghani Lone, who had decided to take the Hurriyat into
the 2002 elections, on May 21, 2002; Mir Mushtaq, the uncle of Mirwaiz
Umar Farouq, in 2006; and the failed assassination of Fazal Qureshi, the
senior most member of the Hurriyat (M)’s executive council in 2007 only weeks
after he formally announced its acceptance of the Manmohan Singh-Pervez Musharraf
four-point formula for settling the Kashmir dispute.
ISI’s ambition to wrest Kashmir from India had
dwindled during the years of peace and reconciliation that had followed Atal
Bihari Vajpayee’s historic 2004 meeting with Musharraf. They dwindled further
when, in 2012, the Pakistan army command officially revised its threat
perception and stated that this lay mainly to its west and not its east .
Its ambitions were revived when the surreptitious
hanging of Afzal Guru by Delhi in February 2013 caused a spike in
the number of young men joining the armed militancy, just as the hanging
of Maqbool Butt had done in 1986.
But it was Modi’s policies, of humiliating the
Hurriyat, spurning Nawaz Sharif’s overtures for peace, destroying the Peoples
Democratic Party by entering into an alliance with it that it had no intention
of respecting, ignoring and trivialising the remaining mainstream parties
in the Valley, putting ever moderate nationalist leader in Kashmir – from
Mirwaiz Umar Farouq, Yasin Malik and Ali Shah Geelani, to Shabbir Shah, Naeem
Khan and Shahid-ul-slam – into jail or under house arrest, and
adopting a “ten for one” policy of retaliation for firing across the Line of
Control that claimed the better part of 832 civilian lives in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir that
sent the ISI and the Pakistan army onto a full offensive in Kashmir.
The ISI concluded that its chance had finally come
when his government began to gun down Kashmiri youth, branding
them all as “terrorists”, often without giving them a chance to
surrender and then boasting about its ‘kills’ to the national press.
This had the opposite of the desired effect because
from a mere 16 in 2013, the number of young men who joined the militancy in
south Kashmir rose to 126 in 2017. More disturbing still, data collected
by the Kashmir police showed that most of new recruits are coming
from the villages where “encounters” had taken place, and that the maximum
recruitment was taking place after the funerals of slain
‘terrorists’.
From the ISI’s point of view, therefore, the Modi
government was a gift from heaven. The very last thing it wanted was for
anything to impede India’s accelerating descent into self-destruction in
Kashmir. Asad Durrani, a former director general of the ISI and convinced
“peacenik”, summed this up at a recent book launch in Delhi. When asked
what the ISI would do next, he said, “Nothing. You have done everything it
wanted.”
The one obstacle that remained was the ordinary Kashmiris’
aversion to Pakistan and the overwhelming desire for peace. A Chatham House survey carried out as
recently as in 2009 had shown that even in the four most estranged districts
of Kashmir valley, only 2.5 to 7.5% of the respondents had said that they
wished to be a part of Pakistan. This was changing thanks to Modi, but the
last thing the ISI wanted was the sudden emergence of a civil society movement
in Kashmir that would give a voice and direction to this inchoate desire for
peace.
That emergence took place in 2015 and Shujaat was
one of its principal architects. That year, he and Ershad Masood, an
academic and journalist based in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, set up a
Kashmir Initiative Group, whose stated purpose was to take the now
stalled dialogue on peace to civil society. The group started working in a
small way by organising a tour of PoK by ten journalists from Jammu and
Kashmir, and held meetings in the two parts of Kashmir. It gained strength when
it obtained the financial backing of Conciliation Resources, an
international NGO with impeccable credentials.
The group’s work gained importance, however, when
even after Burhan Wani’s death had shut down the Valley for four months, Delhi
refused to change its one track policy of repression by even a jot. But it
became a threat to the ISI’s plans only after it organised a large
conference in Dubai on July 31 last year. The two-day meeting was attended by
28 people belonging to political parties in both parts of Kashmir and national
parties in India and Pakistan, including the BJP, and a number of eminent
observers who included two former director generals of the ISI – Durrani and
Ehsan-ul Haq – and Air Vice-Marshal Kapil Kak.
The Dubai meeting turned out to be a roaring
success. Despite disagreements on many issues, the conference arrived at a
strong consensus on several key points. These were: the need for both
the Indian and Pakistani governments to make human security their paramount
concern and therefore declare an immediate and complete ceasefire on the
LoC and take strong measures against extremism in all its forms in both
parts of Kashmir; to encourage their respective governments to re-engage
in a political dialogue, in consultation with Kashmiri groups; and for
these groups to keep talking to each other despite their differences, to
explore creative proposals that did not involve an immediate shift in their
stated positions. Lastly, the conference was unanimous that civil society in
Kashmir, as well as in India and Pakistan, had an important role to
play in creating an atmosphere conducive to dialogue.
Had this conference taken place during former prime
minister Manmohan Singh’s rule, both governments might have welcomed
the initiative. But in August 2017, the quality and eminence of the
participants, and the sheer breadth of consensus, came as a rude shock to the
Pakistan army and the ISI because it threatened not only to derail its plans in
Kashmir but perhaps more importantly its use of the threat from Modi’s India to
restore a creeping military rule within Pakistan.
The attempt to do so began with the leaking of an
open quarrel at a national security meeting in October 2016 between Nawaz
Sharif and key members of his cabinet and the army chief, over the latter’s
refusal to reign in the Lashkar-e-Tayabba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Haqqani
network, to Pakistan’s premier newspaper Dawn. Since then, with the
help of a quiescent judiciary, the army has succeeded in ousting, charging
and now jailing Nawaz Sharif and members of his family, placing an exit ban
on the journalist who wrote the story for Dawn, and now
placing a similar ban on General Asad Durrani for having taken part in the book
launch in Delhi. Modi’s continuing his policy of killing Kashmiri militants has
therefore become a necessity for the Pakistan army’s continued
seizure of power in the country.
This is what turned the Kashmir Initiative Group
into a target for the ISI. Shujaat Bukhari had always been an outspoken
champion of peace. His entire career in journalism had been built on the
conviction that negotiations based upon misconceptions were doomed to fail.
Only truth and honesty in reporting what was happening on the ground could
create the essential bedrock upon which the edifice of peace could be
constructed. When the Modi government abruptly closed all doors to dialogue
with Hurriyat in Kashmir, by force of circumstance, he and his newspaper became
the ISI’s targets.
The ISI might even then have done nothing
if it had believed that Modi would return to power in 2019. But the growing
unity of the opposition, the succession of bye-election defeats suffered
by the BJP, and the coming together of the Congress and JD(s) in Karnataka
have made its return less and less likely. This may have been the final
straw that made it take the decision to crush any possible revival of dialogue
in Kashmir, by killing its current principal icon of peace.
Shujaat is not, however, the only ‘peacenik’ that
the ISI might attack in coming months. In the months after the Dubai
conference, two Kashmiris who head NGOs that had not been invited to the
conference – Nazir Gilani and Athar Masood Wani, a former adviser to the prime
minister of PoK – condemned the conference as a “sell out” for not insisting on
the right to self-determination on the basis of UN resolutions. Pakistan based
Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin also described the participants in the
conference as being on the payroll of India. In Pakistan, the attack upon it
became so shrill that one paper headlined it as “Kashmir Blood Was Sold in the
Air Conditioned Halls of Dubai”.
In Srinagar, this theme was picked up by the Kashmir
Reader, and Hurriyat (Gilani) general secretary general Ghulam Nabi Sumji,
but later rejected by Gilani. Shujaat began to receive warnings that he and two
other participants in the conference were on the hit list of the ISI.
The campaign ended abruptly in October after Ershad
Masood and a colleague met Salahuddin in Islamabad. Salahuddin denied
playing any part in the campaign against the conference, said that he had
initially been misinformed about its proceedings, and assured Masood that he
was not so mean as to order the killing of a journalist.
However it revived again, abruptly in April, two
months before his assassination, with virulent attacks on the participants in
the conference and specific threats to the lives of Shujaat and two or three
others who attended it. Shujaat took these threats very seriously, went to the
Kashmir police and gave them the names of the principal attackers. For the
record, they were Nazir Gilani in London, Sheikh Tajamul Islam, Abdullah
Geelani, Raees Mir, Aslam Mir, and Athar Masood Wani in Islamabad and
Muzaffarabad, and Iftikhar Rajput in Brussels.
It is difficult not to link this revival of threats
to the declining fortune of the BJP in India. Suffice it so say that Shujaat
took the attack on the internet very seriously and lived in fear of
his life. Two days before he was killed he had confided to a friend in his
office, “I have young children, I don’t want to die”.
Hours after Shujaat died, one of his young
reporters told me in a voice choked with grief, “Sir, we have lost everything,
everything!”
But he and his colleagues had not lost everything.
On the contrary, they had kept the one thing Shujaat had given them – raw
courage. So, after accompanying Shujaat’s body to the hospital and
giving their accounts to the police, his staff came back to
the office not only to bring out the paper, but fill the front page
with his picture and words that will be graven on every Kashmiri heart: “We
won’t be cowed down by the cowards who snatched you from us. We will uphold
your principle of telling the truth howsoever unpleasant it may be…” And in
a magnificent act of defiance, they carried links on the editorial page to
every recent article Shujaat had written.
The message they sent was unambiguous: terrorists,
and their puppet masters, could kill a man but not the ideals he embodied. The
next day, between 60,000 and 200,000 mourners who attended his funeral at
Kreeri, his home village 23 km from Srinagar, drove the same message home to
their fellow Kashmiris, to Pakistan, and the world. Burhan Wani and Sabzar
Bhatt were not the only people who could make lakhs of Kashmiris grieve for
them. Those who fought and gave their lives for peace, for a future in which
ordinary Kashmiris could plan and dream without fear, could do so
too.
Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of
several books.
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