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Wednesday, Apr 07, 2004

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National - Elections 2004

The Jaish-e-Mohammad's code of conduct

SHOPIAN, J&K

It isn't particularly threatening to look at, just an untidy scrawl hand-writing running across a sheet of crumpled paper which someone pasted on to the walls of the village mosque. But in the small southern Kashmir village of Mitari, near Shopian, most people know well enough to take the note seriously: it is, after all, an election-time guide to staying alive.

The Jaish-e-Mohammad leaflet left in Mitari, perhaps the first seen in Jammu and Kashmir during the 2004 Lok Sabha campaign, lays out a seven-point code of conduct for local residents. People's Democratic Party workers are asked "not to participate in the elections, or else face the consequences — which they understand."

Political workers are not the only ones to be governed by the Jaish's election code of conduct. Truck and bus operators must respect calls for strikes, while public works contractors have been given a "last chance" to stop executing projects for Indian forces. Local residents who had applied for recruitment in the Indian Army will have to abandon their new jobs "and thus save their lives." Finally, villagers will have to switch off their lights at night if they "want to keep your transformer intact," and remove fences from around their orchards, "which create problems for the Mujaheddin."

Election Commission officials have been promising that anti-election voters in Jammu and Kashmir will not be compelled to exercise their franchise, but no one seems to have a blueprint for ensuring that those who do wish to do so can live to tell the tale. During the 2002 Assembly elections, 250 companies of the police and paramilitary forces had been pressed into service to hold the ground. By contrast, this time, the Centre has informed the State authorities that it will be able to offer just 58 companies, less than 6,000 men.

Terrorist groups have made no secret they are sensing opportunity. On March 30, for example, the Lashkar-e-Taiba called on voters to support the election boycott campaign led by Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, saying he was "the only true leader of the Kashmiri people." The same day, an al-Umar commander code-named Khalid Javed warned people not to participate in the election process. "We have given sacrifices of one lakh people for the movement and we take it to its logical end," he noted, adding that the al-Umar would escalate attacks in the coming days.

Wireless control stations operating from other terrorist groups' headquarters in Pakistan have been sending out much the same message to their cadre for weeks. On February 29, for example, a Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin control station told a field unit that "the enemy is preparing for the elections, and you have to do something." Other transmissions have spoken of the need to pressure political workers, and to target campaign processions and political rallies.

For politicians in Jammu and Kashmir, none of this is surprising. The 2002 Assembly elections, hailed across India as free and fair, cost the lives of 41 political workers in the month of September alone. In all, 99 political workers died in 2002. In 1999, the year of the last Lok Sabha elections, 49 political workers were killed; 1998, the year of the previous Lok Sabha elections, saw 41 killed; 1996, the year of the last Assembly elections, saw 69 such deaths. The numbers indicate just how violent the 2002 elections were, notwithstanding widespread claims about their fairness.

In fact, violence skews politics in fundamental ways. On ground, many political workers have responded by cutting local-level deals with terrorists — a time-hallowed, if dishonourable practice. Posters were put up in several parts of southern Kashmir in 2002 asking voters to oppose the National Conference; the NC, prior to that, had often aided terrorist groups at the local level. This time around, although top PDP and NC leaders are known to have met the acting Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin chief, Abdul Ahad Pir, most deals seem to be cut at a local level, often without the involvement of the candidate himself.

After the recent assassination attempt on the former State Minister, Abdul Rahim Rather, Indian signals intelligence intercepted communications between a Hizb operative code-named `Ghaznavi', and a field operative code-named `Muslim.' `Ghaznavi' complained bitterly that the attack was executed without his authorisation, and asserted that `Muslim' had "created a big problem."

"Why did you target him when we ourselves wanted him to contest the election," `Ghaznavi' asked, according to transcripts of the conversation accessed by The Hindu.

It is profoundly unlikely that Mr. Rather, a well-respected politician, either asked such support, or knew of this Hizb desire. Rather, as the case of the recently-killed south Kashmir Hizb commander, Arif Khan, illustrates, such political deals are part of a freewheeling quid pro quo. Terrorists use election time favours to pressure party workers for the grant of lucrative government contracts to their immediate family and close relatives. Several of Mr. Khan's relatives — and a number of family members of active Hizb cadre — have won railway construction contracts in southern Kashmir.

Praveen Swami

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