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COMMENTARY
Kashmir: Democracy in the shadow
of terror
By Praveen Swami
In
the summer of 2001, Noor Husain Gujjar made the two
biggest mistakes of his life: he decided to stand for
election and, even worse, he won.
Terrorist
groups had warned villagers not to participate in the
village-body elections then underway in the State of
Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), but since local members of
the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin (HM) allowed a well-connected
ethnic-Kashmiri neighbor to contest, Gujjar thought he
would give it a shot as well. For his pains, he was
tried by an impromptu HM court and punished by having
his ears and nose chopped off and his hand almost
severed by a single blow from an axe.
On
Pakistan's Independence Day last week, General Pervez
Musharraf described the coming September/October
elections in J&K as "a farce". He is partly right,
but still dishonest. Dishonest, that is, because the
democratic process in J&K has long been distorted by
violence directed at all those who participate in it. In
the build-up to the 2002 elections, assassinations of
political activists who oppose terrorist formations have
reached all-time highs, with 49 political activists in
the state killed in the current year alone. Most, but by
no means all, are from the ruling National Conference
(NC). Opposition groupings such as the Congress(I), the
People's Democratic Party, the Communist Party of India
(Marxist), and a welter of political organizations
raised from the ranks of one-time terrorists themselves
have also been hit.
Given that the
J&K-ruling NC is the front-runner in the coming
elections, there is little surprise that its activists
have been singled out for special attention by
extremists. Some of these killings have been notable for
their sheer cruelty. In May this year, for example, NC
members Abdul Jabbar Bhat and Abdul Khaliq Bhat were
ordered out of their home and marched to the dense
Batpora forest. Both men were tortured and then
beheaded. Nor is the assault on the party wholly new.
Ghulam Mohammad Mir, a National Conference activist from
Chiarkut, near Magam, defied terrorist posters,
plastered on walls and lampposts through the area,
demanding that no one participate in the local elections
held in 2001. He was executed. Elsewhere, other NC
workers were forced at gunpoint into mosques and told to
proclaim their disassociation from the party over public
address systems.
Even politicians committed to
secession from India have not been safe; witness the
assassination of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference's
Abdul Gani Lone on May 21, 2002. Lone's "crimes"
included a willingness to engage in dialogue with the
Indian government, opposition to the presence of
Pakistani nationals among terrorist groups active in
J&K, and an articulation of his belief that there
was no military solution to the Kashmir problem. Lone's
killing was a clear warning to other "moderates" within
the Hurriyat not to speak out against the global jihad
that Pakistan-backed terrorists were executing in
J&K, and the chilling impact of his death on
political discourse and the possibility of electoral
participation is still intensely felt in political
meetings and discussions in the state.
Earlier,
in 2000, the senior centrist politician Aga Syed Mehdi
met a similar fate. As in the case of the NC, similar
killings have repeatedly taken place over the past
decade, notably those of Srinagar religious leader
Mirwaiz Maulvi Mohammad Farooq and his Anantnag
counterpart Qazi Nisar Ahmad.
For all of
Musharraf's supposed commitment to de-escalating levels
of violence in J&K, Pakistan has made little effort
to conceal its direct role in subverting the ongoing
election process. The HM, which has offices in Islamabad
and Muzaffarabad, has issued repeated public warnings
directed at potential candidates and voters.
So,
too, has the Pakistan-based al-Umar, led by Mushtaq
Zargar, one of the terrorists released by India in
return for the safety of passengers on an Indian
Airlines flight hijacked to Kandahar in December 1999.
Neither Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin nor al-Umar have faced any
form of administrative sanction in Pakistan for their
well-documented role in recent killings. The
Pakistan-based Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen (JuM) has, moreover,
clearly articulated this strategy to "thwart so-called
polls in Held Kashmir", stating that the "elimination of
activists of the ruling National Conference party was
the initial phase of this program". Another group, the
Islamic Front, proclaimed that the "separatist leaders"
in Kashmir were forbidden from participating in the
elections, adding ominously, "We will never forgive
those who will take part in Indian polls."
Attacks on democratic politicians date back to
1990 - the one-time National Conference general
secretary Mohammad Sayyed Masoodi was killed by
Hezbullah that December. Trend data, however, make it
clear that the pattern has intensified as mainstream
parties have again begun to assert their influence over
civil society, particularly after the 1996 elections.
Indeed, the assassination of politicians and political
activists needs to be read in the wider context of
efforts to intimidate civil society as a whole. On
November 24, 2001, for example, 57-year old
schoolteacher Gulzar Lone was shot dead in front of his
students at the Government Middle School in Alal, near
Thanamandi in Rajouri. His crime was to have taught his
own daughter, Jabeera Lone, how to ride a two-wheeler, a
scooter. In March 2001, Kashmir-based businessmen
providing supplies to the Indian army faced death
threats, forcing many to beg terrorist groups for a
reprieve through advertisements in which they pointed
out that their transactions were of a non-military
character.
Top politicians, naturally, have been
under sustained pressure. National Conference legislator
Dilawar Mir's brother, Abdul Majid Mir, was killed at
Rafiabad in January 2001, and the homes of State
Ministers Mushtaq Ahmad Lone and Ali Mohammad Sagar were
subsequently bombed. Both have faced repeated
assassination attempts, as has Chief Minister Farooq
Abdullah himself. On occasion, these tactics have had
the desired results. Days after the 2001 attacks on
Sagar and Lone, for example, the party's provincial
president, G N Shaheen, accused India of "ruling Kashmir
by its army", and of "denying the people their right to
self determination" - both assertions a stark departure
from the party's official line.
Little effort is
needed to understand why terrorist groups seek to
intimidate the democratic process and its participants.
Governments and political parties provide channels of
patronage, grievance-resolution and authority, all of
which the guns of the Islamist right had exclusive
control over until 1996. Although those elections were
relatively peaceful, it rapidly became clear to
terrorist groups that the new government posed a very
real threat to their authority and influence. In 1996 -
an election year - there were 75 political leaders and
activists killed. In 1997 there were 52 such
assassinations, and, by the end of 1997 alone, there had
been another 39 attacks directed at major and minor
political figures. The tenor and intensity of these
attacks has steadily escalated, from the bombing of an
insignificant political figure's apartment in 1997 to
the attempted mass-assassination of J&K legislators
at the State Assembly in Srinagar in October 2001.
Sadly, there is no international pressure on
Pakistan to ensure action against groups active from its
soil engaged in subverting the democratic process in
J&K. Calls from Europe and the United States of
America for international observers to be posted in
J&K suggest that the West just isn't getting it. No
election can be fair unless voters can vote, and
candidates can seek their vote, freely and without fear.
Perhaps international observers need to be looking at
what's going on in Islamabad, not Srinagar.
Praveen Swami is bureau chief, Mumbai,
Frontline
Published with permission from the
South Asia Intelligence Review of theSouth Asia
Terrorism Portal
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