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COMMENTARY
Kashmir: Forward to the
past?
By K P S Gill
Three
weeks of negotiations after the declaration of the
fractured mandate in the State Assembly elections in
Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) have finally yielded a
chief minister designate - ironically, the leader not of
the first or second, but the third largest party in the
new assembly.
People's Democratic Party (PDP)
leader Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's "victory" over Ghulam
Nabi Azad, who was projected as the Indian National
Congress' (INC) chief ministerial candidate, came after
at least a measure of the popular goodwill secured by
the alliance of the two parties had been eroded in what
was seen as a somewhat unashamed scramble for the cakes
and loaves of power.
Attempting to predict the
future is, of course, an activity fraught with danger,
but it is safe to speculate on the basis of the
historical record that Sayeed's elevation at the present
stage of the conflict in J&K bodes ill for the
counter-terrorism effort in the state.
Sayeed
was home minister in the ill-fated V P Singh regime that
came to power at Delhi in December 1989, and, to those
unfamiliar with the facts, such experience may suggest
strong qualification to deal with the problems that
plague J&K. The truth, however, is that as home
minister, Sayeed was an unmitigated disaster. On
December 11, 1989, barely five days after he was sworn
in, Sayeed's daughter - Rubaiya Sayeed - was abducted by
what was at that time an inchoate and insignificant
separatist group in Kashmir. Even as intelligence
agencies were negotiating the release of the hostage,
the center unconditionally conceded all the terrorists'
demands, and with this single act of abject
capitulation, all of Kashmir simply exploded into a
full-blown insurgency within days. The Rubaiya Sayeed
incident - and the then central government's response to
the crisis - is now widely acknowledged as the central
event that triggered the terrorism in J&K that is
now in its 13th year, and has already cost at least
33,159 lives in the state.
The Rubaiya Sayeed
incident sent out an unmistakable message to extremists
across the country: the new government - and evidently
its home minister - had neither the will nor the
understanding to define and implement a cogent and
resolute policy against terrorist violence. The impact
was pervasive, as in the case of Punjab - at that time
afflicted by India's bloodiest terrorist movement -
illustrates.
When the V P Singh regime took
over, the Sikh fundamentalist terrorist movement in the
province of Punjab had been pushed inexorably into a
corner, with over 76 percent of all incidents contained
within four police districts of the state (out of a
total of 15 police districts), along the border with
Pakistan.
Indeed, even within these districts,
the terrorists' sway was limited, with just 13 police
stations (out of 217 police stations in the state)
accounting for nearly 65 percent of all terrorist crime.
The V P Singh government implemented a policy of
conciliation and appeasement encapsulated in a phrase
that the then prime minister was inordinately fond of
using: "healing hearts".
It was assumed that
with a few sympathetic sentimental gestures, the
terrorist movement - at that time in its 10th year in
Punjab - would simply "wither away". Instead, the years
1990-91 proved to be the bloodiest in the entire course
of the terrorist movement in the state [Fatalities: 1990
- 4,263; 1991 - 5,265; as against 1988 - 2,432; 1989 -
2,072] as terrorists coordinated their activities with
increasingly powerful and disruptive overground
political movements. By the end of the brief V P Singh
regime, only four of the 15 police districts in Punjab
registered a monthly average of civilian casualties
below 10, and terrorist violence engulfed virtually the
entire state.
The evidence of the PDP's election
campaign, and Sayeed's innumerable statements before and
since his designation as chief minister of J&K,
suggest that there has been no evolution of a
counter-terrorism perspective, or any understanding of
the nature of the Pakistan-backed movements in J&K
among the leadership of this political formation.
The dominant "response" is still framed within
platitudes about "winning the hearts and minds of the
people". Sayeed has repeatedly underscored his hostility
to the ongoing anti-terrorist operations in the state.
He has declared that the only anti-terrorism law
currently available in the country, the Prevention of
Terrorism Act (POTA) 2002, would not be applied in
J&K. This is crucial, particularly in view of the
disastrous record of convictions through normal judicial
processes.
In the 13 years of terrorism in
J&K, there have been exactly 13 convictions for
terrorist offences; eight of these have been on
relatively minor offenses relating to illegal border
crossing and illegal possession of arms; five relate to
a single case in which murder was on the chargesheet;
not a single terrorist faces the death sentence; and
this is in a state where nearly 12,000 civilians have
been killed by terrorists.
The judicial process
operates a virtual turnstile system, under which
arrested terrorists are easily and repeatedly freed on
bail, and it is POTA alone that has some provisions -
under strict monitoring clauses - for the preventive
detention of terrorists for a reasonable period of time.
Sayeed had also promised the disbanding of the Special
Operations Group (SOG) of the J&K police, though
this has now been diluted - through negotiations with
the PDP's alliance partner, Congress - to a merger of
the SOG with the regular cadre of the J&K police.
Sayeed has also declared that terrorists in
custody for "minor crimes" would be released and that a
"political process" involving negotiations with all
extremist formations in J&K would be initiated.
Much, if not most, of Sayeed's rhetoric on terrorism in
the state has been directed against the security forces
and the counter-terrorism campaign, and it is evident
that, as chief minister, he will seek to dilute and
undermine these operations, and to appease volatile and
extremist groupings in the mistaken belief that he can
bribe or seduce the terrorist movement out of existence.
In some measure, the greatest of Sayeed's
intended excesses may be constrained by the imperatives
of coalition politics and the sobering effect of the INC
and of other supporting parties. There are, however,
grave dangers here as well. In the first instance, the
record of the Congress Party has not been particularly
consistent on terrorism, and it is likely that, as the
party consolidates its position at the national level,
it will consider it expedient to project a posture that
rejects the option of hard action against terrorists.
This is already evident in the actions of an irresolute
Congress regime confronting a range of terrorist
movements in Assam.
More significantly, there
are now dangers of the emergence of a new and
extra-constitutional "center", with Sonia Gandhi's
Congress now controlling a majority of state regimes in
the country either directly or through coalitions. This
raises the danger of power without responsibility, and
in the absence of extraordinary sagacity - a virtue that
has not been in great evidence in any section of India's
political leadership - partisan considerations and
political brinkmanship will tend to undermine any
surviving possibilities of a coherent counter-terrorism
perspective and strategy.
The three-year term
that has been awarded to Sayeed under the "rotation"
scheme means, moreover, that the scope of effective
political action would be no more than two years - a
timeframe that may have been sufficient for a political
dispensation with a clear mandate to crush terrorism,
but hardly enough for one that vests its entire faith in
an inchoate philosophy of winning hearts and minds and
ignores the realities of the sub-conventional war that
is being executed by Pakistan in the province of
J&K. Sayeed's pronouncements, and the common minimum
program of the PDP-Congress alliance, also reflect a
significant measure of Kashmiri parochialism, and
incline to a neglect of the Jammu and Ladakh regions,
proclivities that will deepen divisions and perceptions
of a regime that seeks to pander to the most radicalized
elements of the population.
The sentimentality
of Sayeed's perspective on terrorism is not new, and
this is a position that is common virtually across the
board in populist Indian politics. It has, moreover,
been repeatedly translated into a state policy of
vacillation and drift in various theaters of terrorism
and mass political violence, with consistently
disastrous results.
In Punjab, for instance,
after the Rajiv Gandhi-Longowal accord and the
subsequent assassination of Harchand Singh Longowal, the
Akali government headed by S S Barnala that came to
power after the elections of September 1985 pursued
precisely such a policy of appeasement, and among its
first acts was the release of over 2,000 extremists at
that time under detention. The impact on terrorist
violence was palpable and immediate, and the regime
collapsed in the chaos of its own creation within a
little over 19 months. Clearly, despite Sayeed's air of
ingenuity when he articulates his platitudes, he is, in
effect, reinventing the wheel, and it is only a question
of time before the imperatives of governance and the
maintenance of order reassert themselves. In the
interim, however, the body count can be expected to
escalate.
Clarity, consistency and continuity
are vital in any successful counter-terrorism strategy.
While a measure of continuity can be expected in
J&K, since the primary tasks of engaging the
terrorists in the field are entrusted to central forces,
there are vast areas of intervention that fall into the
purview of the state government. Moreover, a
recalcitrant state government can create virtually
insurmountable hurdles to an effective counter-terrorism
campaign. While political initiatives, developmental
programs and "good governance" (a much touted phrase
which has found little correspondence in the reality of
Indian politics) are immensely important, the dilution
of the counter-terrorism thrust in J&K will result
in the reversal of very significant gains that have been
made, particularly over the past year.
Regrettably, it appears that India will have to
relearn a lesson that it should already have learned
extraordinarily well by now: you cannot negotiate with
terror on your knees. It is not clear whether chief
minister designate Mufti Mohammad Sayeed has the courage
to get off his.
K P S Gill, president,
Institute for Conflict Management, a non-profit society
set up in 1997 in New Delhi committed to the evaluation
and resolution of problems of internal security in South
Asia.
Published with permission from the
South Asia Intelligence Review of theSouth Asia
Terrorism Portal.
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