Page 2 of 2 BOOK
REVIEW The longest
jihad India,
Pakistan and the Secret Jihad by
Praveen
Swami
struggles. Swami
comments that "the means of praxis of left [wing]
insurgencies were dyed with the deep-green color
of Islam" in a new outfit, al-Fatah (p 87).
In 1969, its recruits received clear
instructions during a visit to Pakistan to launch
intense attacks on government offices, banks and
treasuries in J&K. Records indicate that
al-Fatah succeeded
in
gathering 20 discrete sets of intelligence,
including restricted Indian army documents, and
passed them on to the Pakistan High Commission in
New Delhi.
A daring heist opened the trail
of the organization to Indian police, and it was
shut down in 1971 well before much damage could be
caused. In 1975, the bulk of its cadres went
"mainstream" to endorse the agreement between
Sheikh Abdullah and Indian prime minister Indira
Gandhi on limited autonomy for J&K.
Phase 4: The war of many fronts The creation of Bangladesh clogged the
military pipeline of the secret jihad because
Pakistan was racked by internal turmoil. Only in
the early 1980s did the contours of a map for
reviving the jihad become apparent.
This
coincided with the elevation of Islam in
Pakistan's military strategy and fresh confidence
that "it could do to India what it had done to the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan" (p 145). The assuring
factor for Islamabad was that it energetically
pursued a nuclear-weapons program as a "shield
behind which the jihad could be pursued without
inviting Indian retaliation" (p 141).
While J&K was still quiescent,
Pakistan opened a new front by abetting terrorism
in Indian Punjab. Swami furnishes considerable
evidence of the direct involvement of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence in training and
sheltering leaders of the Khalistan movement. The
decision to arm and infiltrate massive numbers of
mujahideen to fight in J&K was made "because
of the success of Pakistan's low-cost, low-risk,
high-return investment in Punjab" (p 153).
In 1987, the superficially secular Jammu
Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and the chauvinist
Jamaat-e-Islami received wholehearted
authorization from Pakistan for a joint offensive
in J&K. The dividing lines between Kashmiri
nationalism and religious fundamentalism were, as
always, exceedingly thin. Independence and Islam
were interchangeable slogans in the minds of
Pakistani planners. The gruesome killings,
deportations and moral policing that ensued in
J&K were "the outcome of the organic ideology
of jihad, not the aberrant actions of marginal
groups" (p 168).
Phase 5: The nuclear
jihad By 1992-93, Pakistan had thrown its
weight behind the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and decimated
the JKLF. To manage the covert war more
thoroughly, from 1994 Islamabad pumped in more of
its own nationals and those from the Middle East
into J&K. Newer Pakistani terror groups saw
Kashmir as "one battlefield in a larger war
between Islam and kufr", or unbelief (p
180).
The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, for instance,
called upon its cadres to "capture Hindu temples,
destroy the idols and then hoist the flag of Islam
on them" (p 181). Such ideological venom was not a
discontinuity but a natural advancement built on
the views of jihadis of previous decades.
As India once again began to wear the
jihad down, Pakistan planned the Kargil invasion
to revitalize it in 1999. Even when this move
boomeranged because of US fears of nuclear
escalation, jihadis mounted serious pressure on
India through a wave of terrorist attacks on
civilians. Delhi faced "better armed and trained
terrorist cadre than prior to the Kargil war, and
in greater numbers" (p 193). The scale, frequency
and geographical dispersion of fedayeen
(daredevil but non-suicidal) attacks rose
steadily, with regular bomb explosions in Indian
cities, and jihadis vowed that "all of India's
states will become Kashmir" (p 199).
As
the set pattern would predict, by 2005, another
ebb tide set in for the jihad, which lost its bite
because of centrifugal tendencies. Violence in
Kashmir reached its lowest levels since the late
1980s and infiltration across the Line of Control
fell. Swami speculates that US pressure on
President General Pervez Musharraf's regime and
realization in Islamabad that the proxy war was
bleeding Pakistan's economy may explain the lull.
What is certain, though, is that jihadis'
capabilities are untrammeled even if their
intentions have been somewhat "worked on by
Pakistan's covert services" (p 216).
The
unmistakable lesson from Swami's account is that
peace in Kashmir is chimerical unless the jihad is
permanently interred. Too often in the past, it
would lie low for a few years and then resurrect
with greater firepower and viciousness. The late
Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's
promise of waging a "thousand-year war on India",
if unbroken, forecasts Phases 6, 7, 8 and so on of
this longest jihad, well into the future.
India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad:
The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004 by
Praveen Swami. Routledge, New York, 2007. ISBN:
9780415404594. Price: US$96, 258 pages.
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