Excelsior Special Correspondent
JAMMU, Sept 7: “Gentlemen, I have spoken on this subject at length before. Therefore, I will knock out the details. As you know due to our pre-occupation in Afghanistan, in the service of Islam, I have not been able to put these plans before you earlier. Let there be no mistake, however, that our aim remains quite clear and firm—the liberation of Kashmir valley. Our Muslim Kashmiri brethren in the Valley cannot be allowed to stay on with India for any length of time now. In the past we had opted for ham-handed military options and, therefore, failed. So, as I have mentioned before, we now keep our military option for the last moment as a coup de grace, if and when necessary”, Pakistan’s President and military ruler Gen Zia-u-Haq said in his presentation on Operation Topac at a meeting of ISI officials in April, 1988.
Gen Zia added: “Our Kashmiri brethren in the Valley, though with us in their hearts and minds, are simple-minded folks and do not easily take to the type of warfare to which, say a Punjabi or an Afghan, takes to naturally, against foreign domination. The Kashmiri, however, has a few qualities which we can exploit. First, his shrewdness and intelligence; second, his power to persevere under pressure; and the third, if I may say so, he is a master of political intrigue. If we provide him means through which he can best utilize these qualities, he will deliver the goods. Sheer brute force is in any case not needed in every type of warfare, especially so in the situation obtaining in the Kashmir valley, as I have explained earlier”.
He went on to explain: “Here we must adopt those methods of combat which Kashmiri mind can grasp and cope with in other words, a coordinated use of moral and physical means other than military operations, which will destroy the will of the enemy, damage his political capacity and expose him to the world as an oppressor. This aim, Gentlemen, shall be achieved in the initial phases”.
“In the first phase, which may, if necessary, last a couple of years, we will assist our Kashmiri brethren in getting hold of the power apparatus of the State by political subversion and intrigue….We must, therefore, ensure that certain ‘favored politicians’ from the ruling elite be selected who would collaborate with us in subverting all effective organs of the State”, Gen Zia said while illustrating his three-phase formula to “liberate” Kashmir by hook or by crook.
Months before the volcanic eruption of guerrilla warfare in December 1989, officials of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference-Congress Government claimed to have “wiped out” insurgency with the seizure of hundred-odd AK-47 rifles in Kupwara and Pulwama districts of Kashmir valley. JKLF militant Abdul Ahad Waza’s arrest was celebrated as a major achievement. Doordarshan showed Waza admitting that the task given to him by his Operation Topac handlers in Pakistan was to assassinate the Chief Minister.
Waza’s disclosures, a guerrilla attack on then DIG Kashmir Ali Mohammad Watali’s house at Rajbagh, a grenade attack on Central Telegraph Office, coupled with broad daylight killing of NC activist Mohammad Yousuf Halwai and Jan Sangh leader Tika Lal Taploo, failed to force strategists in Srinagar and Delhi to formulate a comprehensive counter-insurgency policy that could tackle all the arms in Gen Zia’s arsenal. By the time, JKLF kidnapped then union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed, and the next six weeks witnessed progressive breakdown of the elected Government and a resultant political vacuum, nobody did tend to look off the military prism.
The number game followed. Dozens of times, Government agencies wrote epitaph on the tombstone of insurgency. “You are passing through a militancy free zone”, read the milestones put up by Army in Kulgam area of south Kashmir in 1996. Sixteen years later, when politicians from the mainstream to the separatist camp are outsmarting one another to assert that four districts each in Valley and Jammu are “militancy-free” and thus qualify to be “AFSPA-free”, a militant in the garb of a constable finds it easy to pass off as an SSP’s PSO for years and guns down targets— from a retired DySP to an Inspector in his own neighbourhood in Srinagar— in broad daylight. So, the counter-question: How many Omar Mukhtars in J&K Police? AFSPA or no AFSPA becomes all irrelevant to the “infiltration” Zia had conceived 24 years ago.
“We have neutralized this number of militants this year….This number of ultras is waiting for infiltration at their training camps in Pakistan…..arms and ammunition seized in 20 years are enough to suffice a full battalion of soldiers”. This continual refrain of statistics and official claims has failed to provoke India’s internal security strategists into formulating a calibrated policy to match all the lethal sectors of Gen Zia’s “white collar terrorism”.
Admittedly, the level of terrorist violence and subversive activity has gone down—courtesy thick paramilitary, military and Police concentration and extraordinary powers given to the armed forces. But who of the officials, bureaucrats and the privileged mainstream politicians has come to the forefront to take on the “militant mind” or contest the no-holds-barred tantrums of separatist leaders politically. Shielding and hobnobbing with the “white collar infiltrator”, all of them have confined their politics to just a one-liner: “Kashmir is a political problem and needs a political resolution”. What’s the ‘political problem’ in booking and prosecuting a retired IGP who reinstated Abdul Rashid Shigan alias Omar Mukhtar after forcing him to dispose off earrings and bangles of his wife and thus extorting an amount of Rs 25,000 from him?
This is now openly a full-grown governance cancer that has assumed alarming proportions: Many of the State politicians, bureaucrats and Police officers are widely believed to be sleeping partners of the nouveau riche businessmen who have been audaciously funneling Hawala money and are now raising multi-crore commercial malls and other businesses in violation of all laws of land. An official survey, in possession of Excelsior, puts the number of illegal and unauthorized commercial centers at an incredible 2700 in Srinagar alone.
Gun, on both sides, they invariably say, has done its job. Militants of varied hues have killed more than 30,000 civilians for different reasons and under different labels. They have succeeded in silencing all voices of dissent and getting the Kashmir issue out of the oblivion and thus forced the world attention towards the long drawn political dispute. Once they needed guns and grenades to spread fear among those not toeing their line of ideology. In 2008 and 2010, they needed just stones to cause a systemic breakdown and focus the world attention towards Kashmir.
In 2012, militants and secessionists have more different means and vehicles of perpetuating fear and crippling the system of governance and politics. With almost all the mainstream politicians, bureaucrats and civil officials, including many Police officers, being publicly apologetic and building their individual fortunes, rank secessionists seem to be enjoying a field day in today’s Kashmir. Taking all possible benefits of the ‘open field’, they seem to be running a parallel regime. They move around under Police and CRPF protection in bullet-proof cars, raise shopping malls to bribe certain mainstream politicians and officers, influence admissions in professional colleges and faculty recruitment in universities, grab slots in civil service inductions and examinations, make documentaries for foreign television channels, file RTI applications, PILs and writ petitions to harass their ‘enemies’ and other potential threats, operate under the garb of ‘civil society’ and environmental activists and threaten “social boycott” to the Kashmiri Police officers involved in counterinsurgency to break their resolve, morale and confidence. It appears to be working.
On the other hand, Sarkari gun too has exhausted its efficacy and utility. Police and armed forces have killed nearly 30,000 militants. This does not include over 5,000 non-combatant civilians. There is no divergence of opinion on the fact that armed insurgency has plummeted to its nadir and there is no need of maintaining the trappings of an embattled war zone in a Valley that now receives 600,000 tourists a year in addition to over 600,000 Amarnath pilgrims. Once deserted Srinagar Airport is now handling as many as 30 flights daily. Over 90% of the population has developed strong stakes in peace and normality. More soldiers die in fratricide than in gunbattles with militants and far more people die in road accidents than in all militancy related incidents.
With everybody from Srinagar to New Delhi being ensconced in the shell of military and counterinsurgency prism, there has been no exercise to identify and deal with the “certain favored politicians from the ruling elite” Gen Zia wanted to rope in as be believed that they would “collaborate with us in subverting all effective organs of the State”.
In his April 1988 meeting on the Operation Topac with ISI officials, Gen Zia had made it abundantly clear that non-military, non-guerrilla operations would be the key features in Phase-II. “We plant our chosen men in all the key positions. They will subvert the police force, financial institutions, the communication network and other important organizations. We whip up anti-India feelings amongst the students and peasants, preferably on some religious issues, so that we can enlist their active support for rioting and anti-Government demonstrations”, he had said in bullets in his presentation.
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