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The downside to India's Kashmir
'friendlies'
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - Militants scored a major victory
last week in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with the
gunning-down of Muhammad Yussuf Parrey, aka Kuka Parrey.
A former militant who later joined hands with the Indian
security forces in their operations against the
militants, Parrey's killing has drawn attention not only
to the fate of the pro-government militants in the
Kashmir conflict but also has revived debate on the
wisdom of India using ex-militants to fight militants.
Parrey, known as the "king of
counter-insurgency" operations in the Kashmir Valley,
was credited with having broken the back of the
militancy in the Valley in the mid-1990s. A militant who
received training in Pakistan, Parrey surrendered to the
Indian security forces in 1993. Along with some other
surrendered militants, he then formed a pro-government
militia - the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen - with the blessings
of the Indian government. "Friendlies", as the Indian
soldiers called these "pro-India militants", gave the
intelligence network and the counter-insurgency
operation in the Valley a big boost.
"It was the
logic of setting a thief to catch a thief that lay
behind the Indian army's strategy of using the
surrendered militants" to fight the Hizbul Mujahideen
and other Pakistan-supported militant groups in the
Valley, a senior army officer told this correspondent
some months back. After all, these were once militants,
many of them armed and trained in Pakistan. "They knew
who was who in the various militant groups and
understood the mind of the militant far better than the
armed forces did."
The Ikhwanis are mainly
ethnic Kashmiris with a deep hatred for the Islamist
militants and their political backers, the
Jamaat-e-Islami. In the early 1990s, militant groups
such as the pro-Pakistan and Islamist Hizbul Mujahideen
had trained their guns on such groups as the Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and al-Jehad. Scores of
militants from these groups were killed not by guns held
by the Indian security forces but by weapons wielded by
fraternal militant groups. Many of the Ikhwanis were
those who had been at the receiving end of the
fratricidal fighting.
Now with backing from the
Indian forces, they went after the Hizbul Mujahideen and
the other militants. The Ikhwanis were particularly
successful in marginalizing the Hizbul in northern
Kashmir. Several surrendered militants have also been
absorbed into the police as well as units that were
specifically fighting militancy in J&K.
It
was to the credit of the Ikhwanis led by Parrey that
militancy declined in the mid-1990s, enabling India to
hold elections to the J&K state assembly in 1996.
Parrey formed a political party, the Awami League,
contested the election and won, becoming a legislator in
the state assembly.
Parrey inspired many
militants to switch sides and cooperate with the
security forces. "The power that Parrey and his boys
came to wield and the new-found legitimacy they got by
strutting around with the Indian forces and flaunting
their weapons in the open was undoubtedly a big
attraction for several militants who were fed up with
life underground and disillusioned with 'the cause'," a
Kashmiri police officer pointed out. Consequently,
hundreds of militants surrendered to the Indian forces.
The Indian forces have used the Ikhwanis for
information about the militants and their movements as
well as to carry out counter-insurgency operations. What
is more, they used them to terrorize the local
population as well. A mid-level army officer admitted to
this correspondent that he had used the Ikhwanis to
persuade "locals who had filed baseless complaints and
cases against his men to withdraw their charges". The
officer said he was "not alone in using the Ikhwanis in
this manner ... This is a dirty war. The enemy is not
fighting according to civilized rules of armed conflict.
The surrendered militants were willing and able to give
as dirtily as they got from their erstwhile comrades,"
he added.
But while the Ikhwanis proved useful
in killing hundreds of militants, their use came with a
very high price. They added a new, complicating
dimension to the militancy. They unleashed a new wave of
terror on the Kashmiri people.
Not only did they
train their guns on militants but they did so against
unarmed civilians as well. They were brutal in their
methods to elicit information from the locals. They used
their weapons to fight the militancy but gradually they
used it to settle personal scores, to extort and to
further their individual interests. "And since they were
fighting militancy, they would get away with anything,"
said the police officer. Several killings, where the
identity of the killers was not clear or where the
motive for a massacre was hard to explain, came to be
blamed on the Ikhwanis. The terror unleashed by the
Ikhwanis has been so serious that many Kashmiris say
they fear them more than they do the militants or the
security forces.
"Undermined both by public
dislike of their ruthless tactics as well as Islamist
propaganda campaigns, they found the political
establishment arrayed against them," wrote Praveen Swami
in The Hindu. They were stripped of official cover in
1998.
That led to another spate of bloodletting,
with the militants gunning Ikhwanis down for cooperating
with the Indian forces. Hundreds of Ikhwanis are said to
have been killed by militants since 1998.
The
role of the Ikhwanis in turning the tide against
militancy was substantial. But their contribution has
not been acknowledged enough by Delhi, prompting some to
accuse India of not doing enough to protect its own in
the Valley.
All the men of a village in
Ganderbal near Srinagar were pro-government militants.
Militants swooped down on that village one night and
wiped out its men. Its residents recall the contribution
of their men to fighting militancy and point out with
bitterness that India had left them unarmed to fend for
themselves. Several Ikhwanis, discontented with their
lot, told this correspondent in December 2000 that they
had ended up falling between two stools. While Kashmiris
reviled them as "renegades", the Indian armed forces had
never treated them with respect, never fully trusted
them. "Hundreds of our cadre laid down their lives for
India, but we have received only harassment and insults
in return," 26-year-old Khurshid, Parrey's son, told
Swami.
While some in the Valley describe the
pro-government militias as "misguided policy", the
strategy, notwithstanding its flaws, did contribute to
the decline of militancy. Besides, as one officer in the
Border Security Force (BSF) said, the creation of the
pro-government militias was the "best thing to do with a
militant".
"Rehabilitation of these militants
rarely works," he pointed out. "They return to militancy
soon after they are freed."
A senior army
officer in Jammu said: "If I have to put a militant
through the police or judicial process, it is a waste of
time, energy and effort. I have to put five of my men to
guard the militant, find a vehicle with armed guards to
take him to Srinagar or Jammu and, after all this, he
will either escape or walk free, only to surface again
as a militant.
"It makes more sense to put a
bullet through his neck," he said. "The [alternative] to
that is that we use them to fight the militants."
"The policy became a problem when the
surrendered militants forgot they were once fighting the
state and with considerable blood on their hands. Some
had murdered policemen. They wanted bulletproof cars and
armed guards and fancy salaries," recalled the BSF
officer, adding that these were "unreasonable demands"
that could not be met. "They were just terrorists, after
all."
The story of Kuka Parrey is perhaps the
story of several others in the Valley. They might have
switched sides, but that did not necessarily mean they
had mended their ways. At the end of the day, they were
"just terrorists after all" and ended up living and
dying by the gun.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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