"Spring will return to the beautiful Valley
soon," then-prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promised
in Srinagar last April, quoting a passage from the poet
Ghulam Ahmed Mehjoor, "The flowers will bloom again and
the nightingales will return, singing." Just over a year
on, the nightingales have been decapitated: the All
Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), on whose "moderates"
the peace process was built, is in disarray; political
dialogue with New Delhi is stalled, and the substantial
reductions in terrorist violence Vajpayee had hoped for
have yet to materialize.
On July 6, Hurriyat
chairman Maulvi Abbas Ansari announced that he was
resigning his post in an effort to bring about the
reunification of the secessionist coalition's factions.
The organization's founder-chairman, Srinagar cleric
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was asked to work toward restoring
the Hurriyat's original executive council, which, until
last year's split, included Islamist hardliner Syed Ali
Shah Geelani. Although the Hurriyat reiterated its
willingness to "continue dialogue with India and
Pakistan", Farooq said this process would commence only
after a new chairman was elected by the pre-split
executive council.
What sense might one make of
Ansari's resignation? At one level, the effective
termination of dialogue with India could be read as the
outcome of intense terrorist pressure on the Hurriyat's
centrists. On May 29, terrorists had shot Farooq's
uncle, Maulvi Mushtaq Ahmad, who died nine days later.
Farooq's own house was subsequently attacked. Speaking
in New Delhi on June 28, Farooq candidly admitted that
"somebody within our rank and file is targeting me and
my family". The reason for this hostility among
terrorist ranks, he said, was "our stand on the
resolution of the Kashmir issue through the dialogue
process".
Discretion, it would then
seem, triumphed over valor in the week between Farooq's
visit to Delhi and Ansari's decision to step down. One
key event may have been the burning down of the
historic school run by Farooq's family in downtown Srinagar
on June 7, an act of arson intended to signal that both
his life and his ideological inheritance were under
threat. Yet the problems surfaced much earlier, as it
became clear that the United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) government at Delhi was unwilling to deliver a
dramatic face-saving gesture to the centrists, such as significant
troop withdrawals or direct one-on-one negotiations with
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Another key
factor was the efforts by the union government to draw
the Islamists into the dialogue process, thus
undermining the Hurriyat's centrist majority's claims to
represent all of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. On
June 9, lawyer-politician Ram Jethmalani held an
unscheduled 30-minute meeting with Geelani, pushing
ideas for wider internal autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir.
Jethmalani made his visit on behalf of the non-official
Kashmir Committee, set up with quiet government assent
at the start of the predecessor National Democratic
Alliance regime's engagement with the Hurriyat. Most
observers had believed the Kashmir Committee to be
defunct after the resignation of two of its three
members, senior journalists M J Akbar and Dilip
Padgaonkar.
Jethmalani's mission, sources say, was
pushed by elements in the Ministry of Home Affairs who
believed the centrists needed to be prodded into action,
and the dialogue "broad-based". The services of the
recently replaced Intelligence Bureau director, K P
Singh, were used to set up the meeting, and Geelani was
contacted through a New Delhi lawyer of ethnic-Kashmiri
origin. Although the Islamist leader was non-committal,
Jethmalani flew to Srinagar, only to be kept waiting for
several hours before he was granted a token audience.
At a later rally, Geelani claimed he
rejected Jethmalani's autonomy proposals out of hand.
"Jethmalani wanted me to give credit to the Indian
democracy," Geelani said. "I explained to him how the Indian
forces had committed massacre after massacre of Kashmiri
people in the last 15 years. He had nothing to say when
he withdrew." Geelani also charged that the "the
entire Indian leadership was biased against the
Kashmiri Muslims", and that while the Bharatiya Janata Party
was "explicitly communal", the now-governing Congress party
"was instinctively communal but it was pretending to be
secular". The bottom line was that Jethmalani had failed
to win over the Islamists - and at once alienated the
centrists.
For now, Geelani has also shown
no signs of biting the bait offered by the centrists,
and has expressly rejected dialogue with India.
Speaking after Friday prayers at a Srinagar mosque last Friday, for
example, he accused India of "massacring Kashmiris under
the camouflage of a peace process". In several earlier
speeches, Geelani rejected any forward movement other
than those founded on United Nations resolutions
mandating a plebiscite in the pre-1947 state of Jammu
and Kashmir. Common sense suggests Geelani would enter
the Hurriyat only if he had a decisive say in shaping
strategy: something the mere removal of Ansari would not
give him.
Geelani's best hope is to regain
influence within the Jamaat-e-Islami, the organization
to which he gave much of his life before being
marginalized last year. His supporters now hope to use
his majority among the 1,250-plus delegates in the
Jamaat-e-Islami's general council to secure changes in
the organization's leadership, and amend its
constitution to allow for support of the Islamist jihad
against India. He does not, however, have a majority
among the Jamaat-e-Islami's rukuns
- its rank and file
cadre - or its senior leadership.
From last December onward, moderates in the Jamaat have
run a successful campaign to remove pro-Geelani
figures from positions of power, tacitly backing
the Hurriyat moderates. Syed Nazir Ahmad Kashani, the Amir
of the Jamaat-e-Islami, fought off
Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) efforts to garner support for the hardliners.
On January 1, the Jamaat's Markazi Majlis-e-Shoora
(central consultative committee) went public with a
commitment to "democratic and constitutional struggle",
an indication of willingness to operate within the
Indian political system. Article 5 of the
Jamaat-e-Islami's constitution obliges it to use such
means, and to desist from those which "may contribute to
the strife on Earth".
Perhaps
the most important determinant of future events will be
how much influence terrorist groups are able to exercise. The
signs, on the face of it, are not good. Although violence
has been in steady decline since 2001 - the year
India threatened to go to war unless Pakistan de-escalated its
covert war in Jammu and Kashmir - official figures for
this summer do not make for happy reading. Killings
of civilians this April and June were higher than in 2003,
particularly in the Kashmir Division. So, too, were the
numbers of Indian security force personnel killed,
although the numbers of terrorists killed in retaliation
declined.
Infiltration, as chief of
army staff Nirmal Vij recently made public, has
resumed, reaching high levels in the first two weeks of June. What
Vij did not make public was the fact that
the almost-complete border fencing is not as effective as some
had hoped. Three terrorists shot dead near the Line of
Control in the Mandi-Loran area on June 9, for
example, were carrying plastic pipes, designed to
penetrate the fencing. Indian infantry troops who have
carried out tests on the fencing have taken just 10-15 minutes to
clear the barrier - suggesting that while it is indeed a
deterrent, the fence is hardly the kind of impregnable
barrier enthusiasts had claimed.
Worst of all,
the political ground on which the peace process is
premised threatens to turn into quicksand. With
terrorist groups increasingly dominating southern
Kashmir, particularly at night, large crowds of
villagers have started appearing at the last rites of
slain terrorists, a phenomenon not seen since the early
1990s. Gatherings of up to 2,000 villagers have been
recorded during the burials of terrorists of Pakistani
origin, something unheard of until early this year. In
one recent incident in Kulgam, villagers were shipped in
by bus to protest an army siege of a local mosque, in an
effort to rescue two terrorists still trapped inside.
Major political parties have been unable to
respond. The ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP),
which until recently had a none-too-covert alliance with
elements of the south Kashmir Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, has
been hemorrhaging cadres - the wages of the terrorist
group's ire at the PDP's inability to deliver on
pre-poll promises to scale back military operations. At
least five PDP workers have been killed and eight
injured since June. In one gruesome June 15 incident,
four PDP activists who had campaigned for Anantnag
member of parliament Mehbooba Mufti were taken to a
jungle hideout near Aishmuqam, beaten and then shot
through the legs.
Crippled by a bitter internal
feud, dealing with the crisis seems to be the last thing
on the ruling PDP-Congress alliance government's agenda.
The state cabinet, as a consequence of the growing feud,
has not met for four months. Both the mainstream parties
and secessionists seem bereft of leadership: a fact
which suggests that guns, not words, will once again
shape the discourse in the months to come.
Praveen Swami is New Delhi bureau
chief of Frontline magazine, and also writes for its
sister publication, The Hindu.
