Tag Archive for ‘Kashmir’ at Asian Window

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Forgotten victims Of great games

Published

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on March 14, 2010

in Afghanistan, Books and Travel

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Also see here and here

They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs -- infidels -- and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan. C.M. Naim in Outlook:

My Heartrendingly Tragic Story By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan ‘Azar’. Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt. Oslo: Novus Press, 2006

One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used “Kafir” to describe the boys’ ancestors, and “Kafiristan” for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion “Nuristan” (“The Land of Light”).

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two “Sahibs” fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day’s catch to the Sahibs’ camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris’s servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status. More:

See Kafiristan in Wikipedia:

Prof. Georg Morgenstierne travelled extensively throughout South Asia, but the most unique were his visits to the inaccessible areas of The Hindu Kush Mountains. Read his account here.

Mrs Malik

Published

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on February 1, 2010

in Culture, India, Pakistan, People, Religion and Society

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How Pakistan-born Mushaal Mullick fell in love with Kashmiri militant-turned-separatist leader Yasin Malik. From Open:

Mushaal is the kind of face the cameraman would pick up in a packed cricket stadium. She is the sort of girl who would keep as souvenirs the cinema tickets of her first-ever date. She is a girl in whose purse you’d find a mirror, a comb and, perhaps, lip salve. She likes Phil Collins and Shakira, and in poetry her taste varies from Rumi to Sylvia Plath. She is, you’d say if you ever met her, full of life. She has a teenage intensity, if there is any such thing. She writes the way she speaks, and like most youngsters, likes to be on Facebook, adding friends so frantically you would think she is on an undercover mission to make the Facebook server collapse. She writes ‘you’ as ‘u’ and makes careless mistakes such as referring to her school principal as ‘principle’ in emails. The 24-year-old Mushaal was in Delhi recently, with her husband, former militant and now Kashmir’s prominent separatist leader, 43-year-old Yasin Malik. “You could write that Yasin is an Aries and I am a Scorpio,” she told me. And, before I could react, she blurted, “Oh, forget it! It will look so childish.” More:

[Image: Mushaal Mullick website]

Kashmir — the ultimate skiing destination

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on February 1, 2010

in India and Travel

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Tom Robbins in The Observer:

Then suddenly we pop out, back into the sunlight on an open slope which Nick calls Snow Leopard Couloir because of the animal’s tracks he’s seen in the snow there. (We never manage to spot one, but we do encounter its more common relative, the Himalayan Leopard – two of them skinned on the walls of the Highlands Park, one alive, seen by some of our group in the lights of a taxi at night.)

The snow in the couloir is a delight, turned sugary because it has sat untouched on the hill for so long, and we whoop as we ski down it, stopping occasionally to take photos, before we eventually reach a snow-covered road in a forgotten side valley. It’s a military track off-limits to the public, used by soldiers heading for their border look-out posts. As we take off our skis to begin the hour-long walk back to town, there’s a distant rumbling and a khaki truck lumbers around the corner, the three soldiers in the cab looking bemused at the skiers standing in the road before them. It’s as if a wormhole has opened up between the frivolous slopes of Courchevel and this troubled corner of Asia, which Bill Clinton once dubbed “the most dangerous place in the world”. More:

Al Qaeda’s American mole

Published

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on December 16, 2009

in Af-Pak, India, Pakistan and Terrorism

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New court documents on the Chicagoan David Headley suspected of helping plan the Mumbai attacks show who he was working with — and suggest an alliance of some of the world’s deadliest terror groups. Bruce Riedel at The Daily Beast:

The arrest in Chicago of a Pakistani American, David Headley (originally Daoud Gilani), has rightly gotten much attention because of his alleged role in helping the terror group Lashkar-e-taiba to reconnoiter their targets for the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, a year ago. That attack killed dozens of innocent Indian, American, and Israeli citizens in the most spectacular act of international terror since the 9/11 attacks. The court documents served in Chicago, however, also show something else. Headley’s most important connection was to an individual, Ilyas Kashmiri, who is a prominent member of al Qaeda. In short, al Qaeda apparently had an American mole operating inside the United States for at least the last year and maybe longer.

The Chicago records are very clear that Headley was closer to Kashmiri than anyone else including his other contacts in Lashkar-e-taiba. When he heard that Kashmiri might have been killed in a drone attack in northern Pakistan this September, according to the court documents, he was distraught and immediately began searching the Web for any news about his handler. Headley was greatly relieved when his contacts told him Kashmiri was still alive and looking forward to seeing him on his next trip to Pakistan. He was arrested when he tried to board the flight. He was actively involved in plots for new attacks in India focusing on Israeli targets, which he had already reconnoitered, and a plot to attack the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had attracted the anger of al Qaeda. More:

The Shopian botch-up

Published

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on October 4, 2009

in India and human rights

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On May 29, 2009, two women disappeared in Shopian district of Kashmir. A day later their bodies were found. They were allegedly raped, and murdered. Muzamil Jameel looks at the shocking case in The Sunday Express:

On the evening of May 29, Neelofar, 22, and her sister-in-law Aasiya, 17, left for their apple orchard across the Rambiyar stream at Nagabal Dehgam, which their family had bought recently. Hoping to return before sundown, Neelofar didn’t take her two-year-old son Suzaine with her. But she never returned.

Neelofar’s husband Shakeel Ahangar launched a desperate search for his wife and sister but drew blank. The wife of one of the neighbours, Ghulam Qadir, had seen the girls leave the orchard but couldn’t say where they went. As the shadows grew darker, Shakeel decided to go to the local police station. A police party accompanied him and started a search across the Rambiyar stream. They looked till 2.30 in the morning before calling off the search till morning.

The following day, when the police along with Shakeel returned to the Rambiyar stream, they found Neelofar’s body. Aasiya’s body was recovered a km downstream. According to the Justice Jan Commission report-the commission was set up by the government to probe the case and was led by a retired High Court judge-the police flouted the procedure they were required to follow, right from the time the bodies were found to when they were identified.

The local police’s initial report suggested that the two women had died by drowning. They didn’t bother to collect the evidence-both circumstantial and forensic-at the spots where the bodies were found. The spots were not scanned for evidence, the clothes of the victims were not secured and, in fact, it was villagers and not the police who brought Aasiya’s body to her home in Bonpore in Shopian. More:

Network of militants is robust after Mumbai siege

Published

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on September 30, 2009

in Terrorism

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Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba has persisted, even flourished, since 10 recruits killed 163 people in a rampage through India’s financial capital. Lydia Polgreen and Souad Mekhennet in the New York Times:

Hafiz Saeed

Indian and Pakistani dossiers on the Mumbai investigations, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, offer a detailed picture of the operations of a Lashkar network that spans Pakistan. It included four houses and two training camps here in this sprawling southern port city that were used to prepare the attacks.

Among the organizers, the Pakistani document says, was Hammad Amin Sadiq, a homeopathic pharmacist, who arranged bank accounts and secured supplies. He and six others begin their formal trial on Saturday in Pakistan, though Indian authorities say the prosecution stops well short of top Lashkar leaders.

Indeed, Lashkar’s broader network endures, and can be mobilized quickly for elaborate attacks with relatively few resources, according to a dozen current and former Lashkar militants and intelligence officials from the United States, Europe, India and Pakistan.

In interviews with The Times, they presented a troubling portrait of Lashkar’s capabilities, its popularity in Pakistan and the support it has received from former officials of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment.

Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, helped create Lashkar two decades ago to challenge Indian control in Kashmir, the disputed territory that lies at the heart of the conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbors. More:

Kashmir’s girls learn how to fight back

Published

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on July 6, 2009

in India, Politics, Women and human rights

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From the National:

Humaira Saima feels a grasping hand on her shoulder and springs into action without a second’s hesitation.

Spinning around, the 18-year-old delivers a swift punch to the face of her hapless assailant, then sends him reeling with a high kick.

Luckily for her would-be attacker, Ms Saima’s self-defence manoeuvres take place in the safety of a class where she is honing her skills amid fears of a real assault.

For the teenager is one of a growing number of girls in trouble-stricken Kashmir who have decided to take drastic action to protect themselves in the face of all-too-frequent attacks on young women.

A month ago, Nelofar Jan, 22 and her 17-year-old sister-in-law, Aasiya, were allegedly gang-raped and murdered by Indian security forces.

The discovery of their bodies in a shallow stream in Shopian, 52km from Srinagar, the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir, has sparked ongoing riots and protests. Many of those who took to the streets and were subsequently arrested were women. More:

Farah Pandith, US envoy to Muslim world

Published

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on July 5, 2009

in Politics

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The Obama Administration has appointed Kashmir-born Farah Pandith to head the new Office of the United States Special Representative to Muslim Communities. Pandith, a Muslim, immigrated to the US with her parents from Srinagar, and grew up in Massachusetts. She studied at Smith College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

From the National:

“There is no one bullet that is going to fix everything; there is not one programme that is going to be the magic programme to engage with Muslims. It’s really listening. It’s really understanding what’s taking place on the ground,” Farah Pandith, who was appointed last week to be the first special representative to Muslim communities, said in a briefing with reporters. “It’s finding opportunities through our embassies to get to know what others are saying and thinking and dreaming and believing.”

In what amounted to her official introduction, Ms Pandith struck rhetorical tones similar to those favoured by her new boss, Barack Obama, who has sought to distance himself from unilateral policies of the Bush administration. The very appointment of a high-level state department official focused on communicating with Muslims, many analysts said, indicates a new commitment to dialogue.

But Ms Pandith, 41, does not represent a clean break from the Bush years. She served three years on George W Bush’s National Security Council, where she was responsible for “co-ordinating US policy on Muslim world outreach”, according to a description of her responsibilities released by the state department. More:

In Dawn, Jawed Naqvi writes an open letter to Ms Pandith:

Allow me to make a few quick observations about your road ahead. First, the syncretic culture of Kashmir to which you belong has been subjected to vile abuse in your absence. Beginning with 1990 an exclusivist and narrow-minded Islam was sought to be imposed on the people by armed groups with the alleged support of zealots within Pakistan’s intelligence and security forces. On the other hand, the demonic logic of occupation has spurred Indian security forces to brutalise the people at will, without accountability.

You must have wondered, Ms Pandith, how the tragedies of our times are getting identified with religious strife. Take the important briefs that you have held. The Palestinian question is posed as a Muslim issue. Afghanistan is described as a religious problem. Note also the sleight of hand, since the colonial era, in the orchestrated positioning of identities. Shia, Sunni and Kurds in Iraq, for example, comprise a scantly noticed absurdity: two religious groups and one ethnic community. Does that ethnic community have a religion? Wouldn’t the word ‘hydrocarbons’ explain the ethnic-religious discourse better?

In Lebanon, it is the Shia, Sunni and Druze that beg the question. I think the mischief began with colonial historiography. In India, English chroniclers divided us into Hindu, Muslim and British period. The subterfuge found an echo in Sri Lanka, where Sinhalese, Tamils and Burghers are lumped with Muslims: three ethnic groups and a religious category. Do the Muslims have an ethnicity? More:

Taliban v. Taliban

Published

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on April 13, 2009

in Afghanistan, Conflict, India and Pakistan

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Graham Usher in the London Review of Books (via 3quarksdaily):

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India.

In the Bajaur tribal area, for example, the army is fighting an insurgency led by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of one of Pakistan’s three Taliban factions, but it’s not because he is a friend of al-Qaida. What makes him a threat, in the eyes of Pakistan’s army, is that he is believed to be responsible for scores of suicide attacks inside Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto). He is also thought to have recruited hundreds of Afghan fighters, among them ‘agents’ from the Afghan and Indian intelligence services – ‘Pakistan’s enemies’, in the words of a senior officer.

How the West lost its way in the East

Published

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on March 27, 2009

in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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In The Independent, Patrick Cockburn, who has reported on the Afghanistan conflict since 2001, charts the fatal mistakes:

After seven long years in which it seemed a sideshow to the bigger conflict in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical point. The US must now choose how far it will become further embroiled in a messy conflict which affects its relations with Pakistan, India and the wider Middle East including Iran. At a moment when the world is convulsed by the worst economic disaster since 1929, Washington will have to decide if it really wants to invest time, money, military and political resources in beating back the ragged bands of Taliban who increasingly control southern Afghanistan.

At the end of last year, the White House was talking about repeating what was deemed to have been the success of the “surge” in Iraq. Some 30,000 extra US troops were sent to Iraq pursuing more aggressive tactics and the Sunni Arab insurgency seemed to wind down soon after. But the real turning point in Iraq was probably the defeat of the Sunni Arabs by the Shia. Nothing of this sort is likely to undermine the Taliban in Afghanistan just as their guerrilla attacks are inflicting more casualties than ever.

Pakistani and Afghan Taliban Unify in Face of U.S. Influx

From The New York Times:

In interviews, several Taliban fighters based in the border region said preparations for the anticipated influx of American troops were already being made. A number of new, younger commanders have been preparing to step up a campaign of roadside bombings and suicide attacks to greet the Americans, the fighters said.

The refortified alliance was forged after the reclusive Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, sent emissaries to persuade Pakistani Taliban leaders to join forces and turn their attention to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials and Taliban members said.

The Dal Lake is dying

Published

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on March 16, 2009

in India and environment

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Toufiq Rasheed from Srinagar in The Indian Express:

Photo: Prakhar / Flickr

Imagine the Dal Lake without its houseboats. If that left you with a sense of emptiness, get used to it. The future of the 1,200-odd houseboats, which have been a part of the famous water body in the heart of Srinagar for more than a century now, is under threat. With the houseboat owners not exactly cooperating, a court order has made them inoperable till they find proper ways of sewage treatment.

This icon of Kashmir tourism may vanish from travel itineraries as the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA), the nodal agency responsible for controlling pollution in the Dal Lake, has directed all houseboat owners to stop operation or face closure.

A warning to dating couples

Published

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on February 3, 2009

in India and Society

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In Srinagar, hoardings warning couples not to be seen together in public have appeared along several street corners. “If you are found with a person of the opposite gender, you will either be handed over to police or your heads will be shaven and then handed to your parents,” say the hoardings (inset). No one knows who put them up. The police is investigating and said, “we will take these down.” Click here for the story in The Indian Express. (According to islamonline website, Zina means adultery)

India’s secret war on Holbrooke

Published

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on January 25, 2009

in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan

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Laura Rozen in Foreign Policy on India’s stealth lobbying against Richard Holbrooke’s brief:

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — flanked by President Obama — introduced Richard Holbrooke as the formidable new U.S. envoy to South Asia at a State Department ceremony on Thursday, India was noticeably absent from his title.

Holbrooke, the veteran negotiator of the Dayton accords and sharp-elbowed foreign policy hand who has long advised Clinton, was officially named “special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan” in what was meant to be one of the signature foreign policy acts of Obama’s first week in office.

But the omission of India from his title, and from Clinton’s official remarks introducing the new diplomatic push in the region was no accident — not to mention a sharp departure from Obama’s own previously stated approach of engaging India, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, in a regional dialogue. Multiple sources told The Cable that India vigorously — and successfully — lobbied the Obama transition team to make sure that neither India nor Kashmir was included in Holbrooke’s official brief.

“When the Indian government learned Holbrooke was going to do [Pakistan]-India, they swung into action and lobbied to have India excluded from his purview,” relayed one source. “And they succeeded. Holbrooke’s account officially does not include India.”

And click here to read The Washington Post story.

Previously in AW:

Pakistan in peril

Published

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on January 22, 2009

in Afghanistan, Books, Pakistan and Terrorism

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William Dalrymple reviews “Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia” by Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

The tribal areas have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but they have now been radicalized as never before. The rain of armaments from US drones and Pakistani ground forces, which have caused extensive civilian casualties, daily add a steady stream of angry footsoldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-Western religious and political extremism continues to flourish.

The most alarming manifestation of this was the ease with which a highly trained jihadi group, almost certainly supplied and provisioned in Pakistan, probably by the nominally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba-an organization that aims to restore Muslim rule in Kashmir-attacked neighboring India in November. They murdered 173 innocent people in Bombay, injured over six hundred, and brought the two nuclear-armed rivals once again to the brink of war. The attackers arrived by sea, initially using boats based in the same network of fishing villages across the Makran coast through which a number of al-Qaeda suspects are known to have been spirited away from Pakistan to the Arab Gulf following the American assault on Tora Bora in 2001.

And this, foreign secretary, is your room: Miliband’s long night in ‘the other India’

Published

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on January 16, 2009

in India

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Julian Borger from Semra, a small village in north India, in the Guardian:

It was a brick shack with a thatched roof, a mud floor, a wooden door at the front, and gaping hole at the back. A cow rested in the straw outside. It was the sort of scene scarcely seen in Britain except in school nativity plays. But one day this little corner of Uttar Pradesh could emerge as a historical curiosity in its own right.

This hut was home on Wednesday night to two young politicians on their way up: David Miliband and Rahul Gandhi. They slept side by side on rudimentary wooden cots, or charpois, under thin covers in the January chill. Needless to say this was not part of the foreign secretary’s normal diplomatic round. The private secretary and the red dispatch box had been sent to a nearby town leaving only security guards behind. There was not a canape in sight.

Gandhi, on home ground, clearly weathered it better than the visiting Londoner. “I have to say it was a pretty rough night,” Miliband conceded in the morning. “The cows kept me up a bit.”

And a BBC report:

It’s late at night in the village of Semra, in rural Uttar Pradesh. David Miliband and Rahul Gandhi are sitting on mats on the floor listening by lamp light to the stories of a group of local women.

The British foreign secretary and the general secretary of India’s governing Congress party are visiting a self-help group, where the women pay 20 rupees (£0.3) into a pool each week and invest their money together. More:

In the Indian Express: Miliband says settle Kashmir to shut out terror, Delhi not amused

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s first visit to India ended on a controversial note today as New Delhi took offence to his comments seeking to link the Kashmir dispute to Lashkar-e-Toiba and terrorism in the region even as he expressed faith in Pakistan’s judicial system to try the perpetrators of 26/11 and referred to the poor status of Muslims in India.

In an article published today in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, Miliband wrote that during his visit to South Asia, he would be arguing that the “best antidote to the terrorist threat in the long term is cooperation”. “Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders,” he wrote. More:

Kashmir’s first family

Published

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on January 4, 2009

in India and Politics

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As Omar Abdullah prepares to take over as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, he will have to fall back on the history of the National Conference and that of his family. In the Sunday Express, Muzamil Jaleel traces the political journey of three generations of Abdullahs.

Farooq Abdullah with son Omar.

When Omar Abdullah takes over as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, he is likely to find himself weighed down by the burden of history. A scion of Kashmir’s first family, his biggest challenge will be the survival of his National Conference in the changing contours of Kashmir politics. Over the years, the party has drifted from its core political ideology, eroding its traditional base in Kashmir. With the People’s Democratic Party positioning itself as a representative of Kashmiri aspirations, Omar can only save his party by returning to its history and that of his family.

The story of the Abdullah family is intertwined with Kashmir’s politics. The interaction between the National Conference and the Congress too has been dominated by the 71-year-old relationship between the Abdullahs and the Nehru-Gandhi family, alternating between friendship and enmity. Now when the National Conference witnesses the second generational shift coinciding with a new alliance with the Congress, the Omar Abdullah-Rahul Gandhi friendship is creating a buzz. So, will Abdullah Jr be able to turn his party’s politics back to its original discourse, one that made its founder, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the undisputed leader of Kashmir?

End of the Kashmir Jihad

Published

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on December 30, 2008

in India and Politics

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Aakar Patel in Hindustan Times:

Having predicted that Kashmiris would boycott the election, Indian liberals are now urging the government to act to resolving the Kashmir issue with some sort of geographical solution.

They are wrong.

Elections are the solution. Secular democracy is the only goal: It is what Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted. Kashmiris already have that.

When elections were announced on October 19, Kashmir’s leaders thought they would fail, given the heat generated over the failed transfer of land to the Amarnath Shrine, and the Hurriyat Conference’s boycott.

Few believed the elections would be this successful: The highest polling at 69 per cent, the lowest at 55 per cent.

The communist Yusuf Tarigami said “elections were no solution to the Kashmir problem”.

The secular Yasin Malik said his group, the JKLF, would campaign actively “to boycott the elections (which) was every Kashmiri’s right”.

Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson Omar said his party, the National Conference, would contest, but he worried that “turnout would be low”.

Why Kashmir holds the key

Published

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on December 16, 2008

in Conflict, India and Pakistan

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Resolving the Kashmir dispute would help Pakistan to end its support for Islamist separatists implicated in the Mumbai attacks. Muzamil Jaleel in the Guardian:

So the key question is: why is it impossible for Pakistan to hand over Lashkar founder and Jamat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed to New Delhi when it did not hesitate to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other key al-Qaida operatives for the Americans?

In a word, Kashmir. The Kashmir dispute is at the core of Pakistan’s very existence. Unlike Afghanistan, Kashmir has traditionally been a major influence on Pakistan’s domestic as well as foreign policy. While Pakistan did launch a crackdown after the attack on the Indian parliament, it continued to insist that this shift did not mean abandoning its support for separatists in Kashmir.

There is another important aspect to this contradiction, which has more to do with ideological and demographic differences between the Taliban and Lashkar movement. The Taliban, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, is primarily based on the Deobandi school of thought, while Lashkar is Salafi. While Deobandis in Pakistan seek the establishment of an Islamic state and support a jihad against the establishment, Salafis do not support rebellion against the government in a Muslim country and rather advocate reform to turn the ruling elite into “Muslims at heart”.

Embers from my neighbor’s house

Published

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on December 10, 2008

in Conflict, India and Pakistan

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Aditya Dev Sood at 3quarksdaily:

The year in terror has been building and rising, but few expected it to rise to this dramatic crescendo. Boats, control rooms in key buildings, AK-47s, grenades, hostages. As I begin to write, my television continues to bleat the worn platitudes of so many blind men and women of Hindoostan panning reality with their telephoto lenses, over the muffled roar of helicopters and machine gun fire.

Terrorism is high impact and ethics-free anti-art using global media. My imagination has been leached and my insides need cleansing, like an extra travel day spent watching porn in a hotel room. Still, one must concede their mad genius, uniting a new day of mourning in India with the pilgrim feast of Thanksgiving in America, both doused in the same hot stream of media violence.

I am already getting unsolicited text-forwards from cousins and acquaintances. India is planning to bomb Pakistan, says one. My friend Usman, in London, texts me just as he has every time this year, in the wake of each terror strike: “All ok?” “We’re invading Pakistan, but otherwise all okay,” I squeeze out. I’m not sure how funny he found this, for he writes back, “Re: Invasion, ok good. I was worried in the post-Obama fervour the world was becoming too sensible.”

Lashkar-e-Taiba

Published

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on December 4, 2008

in India and Pakistan

. 0 Comments

Steve Coll in the New Yorker:

Late in 2005, I travelled for The New Yorker to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to report on the earthquake that devastated the region. To facilitate international aid, the Pakistani government opened the region to journalists, creating a very rare opportunity to travel without escort and to poke around on the border. I was particularly interested in looking up Lashkar, which I had been following for many years. I made several visits to facilities run by its charity, called “Jamat-ud-Dawa,” which is today tolerated openly by the government of Pakistan but banned as a terrorist organization by the United States on the grounds that it is merely an alias for Lashkar.

In Muzuffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, Jamat had brought in a mobile surgical unit staffed by long-bearded doctors from Karachi and Lahore-very impressive young men, fluent in English, who offered a reminder that unlike, say, the Taliban, Lashkar draws some very talented people from urban professions. (With its hospitals, universities, and social-service wings, Lashkar is akin to Hezbollah or Hamas; it is a three-dimensional political and social movement with an armed wing, not merely a terrorist or paramilitary outfit.) As part of its earthquake relief work, Lashkar ferried supplies to remote villages isolated on the far side of the churning Neelum River, one of the two snow-fed canyon rivers that traverse the area. I asked to take a ride with its volunteers, and their media officer (yes, they have media officers) agreed.

Previously in AW: Profile: Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) (a.k.a. Lashkar e-Tayyiba, Lashkar e-Toiba; Lashkar-i-Taiba)

Mumbai terror: the link to Kashmir

Published

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on November 30, 2008

in Conflict and India

. 0 Comments

William Dalrymple in the Guardian:

Three weeks ago, in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, I met a young surgeon named Dr Iqbal Saleem. Iqbal described to me how on 11 August this year, Indian security forces entered the hospital where he was fighting to save the lives of unarmed civilian protesters who had been shot earlier that day by the Indian army. The operating theatre had been tear-gassed and the wards riddled with bullets, creating panic and injuring several of the nurses. Iqbal had trained at the Apollo hospital in Delhi and said he harboured no hatred against Hindus or Indians. But the incident had profoundly disgusted him and the unrepentant actions of the security forces, combined with the indifference of the Indian media, had convinced him that Kashmir needed its independence.

I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted the city’s hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist targets of five-star hotels, Jewish centres and cafes frequented by Americans and Brits. Since then, the links between the Mumbai attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore.

Zardari at the HT Summit: Pak will not be the first to make a nuclear strike

Published

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on November 23, 2008

in Conflict, India and Pakistan

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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

I’ve been caught up at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit for the past two days where the big ticket headline news, of course, was Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari stating that he was not in favour of nuclear weapons at all and that Pakistan would certainly not use it first against India.

Zardari was speaking to the audience in New Delhi via video link in his Islamabad home with huge portraits of his slain wife, Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan’s founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah in the background. Apparently Zardari accepted HT’s invitation to its annual summit before he became president. After being sworn in, any visit now to India will have to be a state visit and the timing of his first state visit, whenever it happens, will have to be carefully planned. So, for HT a video link was the next best option.

Zardari came off warm and full of bonhomie. His opening remarks (where he repeated a quote by his wife that there was a ‘little bit of an Indian in every Pakistani and a little bit of a Pakistani in every Indian,’) was greeted with applause.

“Cold war of the previous era kept us (India and Pakistan) divided… Let’s embrace each other,” he said and expressed hope that the two countries would move and work together in the future. Zardari also spoke of more open travel between India and Pakistan.

“I don’t feel threatened by India and India should not feel threatened by us,” Zardari said. Pakistan, he stated, was for enhancing trade and economic ties with India.

“If you can trade with China, why not with Pakistan.” He also sought New Delhi’s assistance to get loan from the IMF to tide over the grim economic situation.

Throughout his address, Zardari steered clear of any mention of Kashmir. But in response to a question from the audience he said that Kashmir belonged to the Kashmiris.

For news reports on Zardari’s address click here, here and here.

For complete HT Leadership Summit coverage click here.

Ringed by foes, Pakistanis fear the US, too

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on November 23, 2008

in Conflict and Pakistan

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There is an increasing belief among some Pakistanis that what the U.S. really wants is the breakup of Pakistan. Jane Perlez from Islamabad in the New York Times:

Above are sections of maps that opriginally accompanied a speculative June 2006 article by Ralph Peters in Armed Forces Journal that has concerned pakistanis.

A controversial imaging of borders: Above are sections of maps that opriginally accompanied a speculative June 2006 article by Ralph Peters in Armed Forces Journal that has concerned pakistanis.

A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.

That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.

“One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan,” said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning, who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. “Some people feel the United States is colluding in this.”

Making peace: one trinket at a time

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on November 7, 2008

in Economy

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This autumn, an ancient trade route that crosses the disputed Kashmiri border between India and Pakistan opened for the first time in 61 years. For Kashmir’s famed artisans, at least, it’s a rare sign of hope. A photo essay in Foreign Policy

Bridging the gap: Trucks laden with apples and handicrafts became unlikely bearers of peace on Oct. 21 when an ancient trade route between India and Pakistan reopened after being closed 61 years ago, when the two countries broke free of the British Empire. Many hope the opening of the trade route, in the bitterly disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, will boost the economy on both sides of the “Line of Control” that divides the territory. Here, a truck from Pakistan-administered Kashmir crosses the newly reconstructed Aman Setu, or Peace Bridge, that leads into India-administered Kashmir.

Obama and the (bleep) K word

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on November 4, 2008

in Afghanistan, Conflict, India, Leaders and Pakistan

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Hours before the American people decide on their next President, Democrat presidential candidate (and front-runner) Barack Obama hit a raw nerve in India with his comments on Kashmir. “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants,” Obama told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC in response to a question on why he believed more American troops were needed in Afghanistan.

India, always prickly about third party intervention (its stand is that Kashmir is an ‘internal problem’ that is nobody’s business but its own) was quick to respond. Defence and security analyst C Raja Mohan warned in The Indian Express: “If Obama’s Kashmir thesis becomes the policy, many negative consequences might ensue.”

Officially, India has downplayed Obama’s Kashmir comments. But BJP party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said they were “an unwarranted interference in India’s internal affairs”.

Obama’s statement has been welcomed by Kashmiri separatists, including the Kashmiri American Council

Obama’s stand on Kashmir — and his view that the solution to Afghanistan lies in Pakistan both because al Qaeda and the Taliban are based there and also because it suits Pakistan to back Islamic militants against India — are not particularly new. Obama visited Afghanistan in July and had at the time also voiced his opinion on the need for the US to work towards improving relationships between India and Pakistan.

Read the transcript of Barack Obama’s interview here.

Against odds, a school in Kashmir offers hope

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on November 4, 2008

in India

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Krishnamurthy Ramasubbu in Mint:

DPS Srinagar principal K.K. Sharma with students. Mint

The Srinagar DPS is equipped with modern facilities, including language labs to teach phonetics, art studios, computing facilities and libraries. And it has managed to get its share of unwelcome attention. “We do get threat calls, asking us to shut down. Their (separatists) main problem is that we are a CBSE institution. They think we are propagating Central ideas through this school,” says the school’s principal, K.K. Sharma.

“During these protests (separatist leader Syed Ali Shah) Geelani called for the school to be shut down, calling it an imperialist design of India,” says Dhar referring to a recent spate of separatist protests. “The parents asked me to talk to Geelani but I refused …(but) the parents have to be appreciated for their solid support, which kept the school open.”

Musharraf’s three pluses

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on August 30, 2008

in Pakistan

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Pervez Musharraf was the victim of the success of his own liberal policies, writes Mushahid Hussain, secretary general, Pakistan Muslim League (Q), in Tehelka:

Mushahid Hussain

IT WAS September 2004. General Pervez Musharraf had made a public commitment in December 2003 that he would take off his uniform by December 2004. I was woken by my son well past midnight: “Baba, the President wants to speak to you”. General Musharraf came on the line, and quickly came to the point. I could hear a popular Lata number from the 1960s. He said, “Mushahid, tell me, what is the worst case scenario if I decide not to take off my uniform?” I said I would discuss it over lunch the next day. My meeting with him took place in the presence of Tariq Aziz, his most trusted confidant and his main back-channel negotiator with India. My thrust was two-fold: a lesson from the past and what could happen in the future. While strongly advocating that he take off his uniform – a view endorsed by Tariq Aziz as well – I told him, “Please remember what happened to your three military predecessors – Field Marshal Ayub Khan, General Yahya Khan, and General Zia ul-Haq. In the end, all three were ditched by their own colleagues in the military after the ground realities changed. The institution of the army is bigger then any individual. I do not want this to happen to you – that you outlive your welcome.”

I also told him, if you choose to renege on your commitment, then you will end up making the mother of all deals with Benazir Bhutto to stay on in power. He listened carefully and then gave a list of reasons why his uniform was necessary in the “supreme national interest”, including the peace process with India and the quest for Kashmir.

End of a Beginning

Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in Time magazine:

Pervez Musharraf

As a Pakistani, pleased though I am by Pervez Musharraf’s resignation as President, I cannot but fear that this week’s celebrations could prove to be short-lived. Yes, his departure will make Pakistan more democratic and was long overdue. But it will not in itself cure the myriad ills facing the country.

Musharraf’s legacy is a mixed one. Like many Pakistanis, I was appalled when he seized control of Pakistan in 1999. Pakistan had stagnated in the 1990s under the bickering and incompetent elected governments of Benazir Bhutto and her rival Nawaz Sharif. But I recalled the damage done by the oppressive dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s and had no desire to see Pakistan revert to military rule.

[via 3quarksdaily]

“They threatened to kill us…”

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on August 29, 2008

in Conflict and India

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Three militants were shot dead and six hostages freed in the Jammu area of Kashmir. Two women and four children were rescued, but the militants had killed three male hostages. Read the story of the children in The Indian Express:

Sheetal, Arshil, Kajal and Vipan would like to forget Wednesday as quickly as possible, but they probably never will. Three militants in khaki who locked the children in a room and threatened to put bullets in their heads if they so much as wept have, in 17 blood-soaked hours, scarred them for life.

A day of gunfire and trauma came to an end with six bodies being taken out of Billu Ram Bhagat’s yellow two-storey house on the outskirts of Jammu some time before midnight. Three of the dead were killers of the other three – Billu’s tenant and his children’s tutor Ashok Kumar, the family’s neighbour Sandeep Singh Chib, and Military Intelligence Jawan Sham Murari who had followed the militants to the house.

Home and away

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on August 29, 2008

in Conflict

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Pradeep Magazine, a Kashmiri Hindu, remembers his life in the Muslim-dominated valley and wonders why things turned out so wrong. From Hindustan Times:

To be a Kashmiri and a Hindu can be a painful experience these days. To which side of the divide do we belong? The answer is taken for granted and in this fight between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between Hindu and Muslim, I am supposed to articulate the agony of exile, the religious persecution of ‘us’, minorities, and fight for my homeland from which we have been thrown out through ‘violent’ means.

These are questions that are not easy to answer, especially by someone whose father migrated from the Valley in the early 60s to better his economic prospects. I am a migrant like a large number of Kashmiris who had been moving out of the Valley into mainland India for many decades now, as there were not many jobs back home for want of any economic development.

A Jihad Grows in Kashmir

Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times:

For more than a week now, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have filled the streets of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-ruled Kashmir, shouting “azadi” (freedom) and raising the green flag of Islam. These demonstrations, the largest in nearly two decades, remind many of us why in 2000 President Bill Clinton described Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both India and Pakistan, as “the most dangerous place on earth.”

Mr. Clinton sounded a bit hyperbolic back then. Dangerous, you wanted to ask, to whom? Though more than a decade old, the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir, which Pakistan’s rogue intelligence agency had infiltrated with jihadi terrorists, was not much known outside South Asia. But then the Clinton administration had found itself compelled to intervene in 1999 when India and Pakistan fought a limited but brutal war near the so-called line of control that divides Indian Kashmir from the Pakistani-held portion of the formerly independent state.

Azaadi (freedom)

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on August 24, 2008

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Arundhati Roy visits Kashmir in Outlook

For the past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half-a-million heavily-armed soldiers in the most densely militarised zone in the world.

After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage.

This one is nourished by people’s memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been killed, thousands have been ‘disappeared’, hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, raped and humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, re-bottled and sent back to where it came from.

[Azaadi means freedom]

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