The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : From bullets to ballots in Kashmir?

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Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006

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Opinion - Leader Page Articles

From bullets to ballots in Kashmir?

Praveen Swami

Is the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen contemplating turning to politics? If he takes the peace road, Syed Salahuddin could face opposition from within his own organisation too.

MOHAMMAD YUSUF Shah's family could well have been invented as characters for a propaganda film on the opportunities six decades in the Republic of India have opened up for Jammu and Kashmir's rural elites. Shah's oldest son, 35-year-old Shahid Yusuf, works as a teacher, while 30-year-old Javed Yusuf is an agricultural technologist. His third son, 26-year-old Shakeel Yusuf, works as a medical assistant at a government-run hospital. Wahid Yusuf, 23, studies at the Government Medical College in Srinagar, where the family's contacts helped him obtain a seat through a quota controlled by the Jammu and Kashmir Governor. Momin Yusuf, at 19 the youngest of Shah's sons, studies engineering. Shah himself lives in a palatial home, far from the family's orchard holdings in central Kashmir, and drives to work each day in a Toyota Land Cruiser.

A picture-perfect life? Not quite. Shah's home is in Rawalpindi, not Srinagar, and using the nom de guerre Syed Salahuddin, he commands the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the numerically strongest terrorist group in Jammu and Kashmir.

A spate of recent media pronouncements, though, have fuelled speculation that the improbable Islamist is preparing the ground for returning home. In a recent interview, the Hizb amir-i-jihad, or chief commander, told the Srinagar-based Kashmir News Service that the organisation was willing to initiate a dialogue with New Delhi even as the conflict continued, mirroring "experiments in Afghanistan and Vietnam." A ceasefire, he added, could also come about if India brought troop levels "in Jammu and Kashmir to the 1989 position," adding that "it should release detainees, it should stop all militarily operations, it should acknowledge before the world community that there are three parties to the dispute."

In 1987, two years before the long jihad began in Jammu and Kashmir, Shah stood for election on behalf of the Muslim United Front — a formation that marked the political coming-of-age of an alliance between rural elites and the bazaar or petty-bourgeois trader class. But two decades of conflict have claimed the Islamist political networks that politicians like Shah built up over decades among their casualties. Despite the military power of jihadi terror organisations, Islamists have been unable to mount a coherent ideological challenge to the Indian state.

Is Shah now preparing for a second political innings?

Battles within

Mohammad Ashraf Parrey was just 16 when he joined the Hizb in 1995, and made his way across the Line of Control to the Hizb's base camp at Jungle Mangal, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. He had no intention of ever returning home. "It was great," recalls the Hizb's district commander for Pulwama, "waking up without having to worry that this day was to be your last."

In 2000, a year after the Kargil war, the Hizb split down the middle, after a pro-dialogue faction within the terror group began a short-lived dialogue with the Government of India. Shabbir Bhaduri, the Hizb's top pro-Shah commander in south Kashmir, was in desperate need of cadre, and Parrey was ordered back across the LoC. Once in Srinagar, though, he promptly married, and, with the aid of a Rs.250,000 loan from the organisation, purchased a house. Although he rose to hold a district command, he rarely participated in armed operations.

Hizb cadre like Parrey, on both sides of the LoC, are amongst the strongest advocates of participation in a dialogue process. An investigation by the Karachi-based Herald magazine found a mood of "lethargy and disorientation" in jihadi training camps. A generation of founding Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operatives have died in combat — and those who remain are now in their forties and fifties, with little inclination for active field service.

But not all in the Hizb's field units share this perception, particularly the generation of young men who are now acquiring command of battalion and district-level units. Several south Kashmir Hizb commanders, like Panzath-based Riyaz Ahmad Deva, are known to have large proxy interests in public works contracts. Others, like Laroo-based Fayyaz Ahmad Naikoo and Batapora-based Sajjad Ahmad `Tahir,' target contractors and businessmen for extortion. In a recent interview, Shah acknowledged the scale of the problem, accepting that "some criminals have managed to infiltrate the ranks of the Mujahideen."

Just how large scale the loot is becomes evident from diaries recovered from Farooq Ahmad Bhat, the Hizb's commander for the district of Kulgam. Bhat succeeded in raising an estimated Rs.595,000 between December 12, 2005, and May 17, 2006, no small amount given that the Hizb's active cadre strength in Kulgam was then just over a dozen men. In addition, a staggering Rs.38,61,550 was distributed to the families of 290 killed Hizb terrorists.

Young Hizb cadre, who have little education and few prospects, would gain little from a peace deal. Some cadre could defect to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has made clear its disdain for movement towards dialogue. In an August 18 press release, issued just a day after Shah's dialogue offer, the Lashkar claimed that "the day is not too far when India would have to vacate Kashmir like Israel withdrew from Lebanon." Indeed, during the abortive ceasefire between Hizb elements and the Indian Government in 2000-2001, civilian fatalities across Jammu and Kashmir rose sharply because of Lashkar attacks.

A bruising power struggle between the Hizb's two top commanders in Jammu and Kashmir points to another key problem the terror group could confront as it seeks to transform itself into a political entity: its internal, command-level conflicts. Mohammad Yunus, who using the twin aliases Ghazi Misbahuddin and Shahnawaz has overall charge of the terror group's Jammu and Kashmir operation, has found himself in frontal confrontation with the head of its numerically strongest component, south Kashmir division commander, Mohammad Ashraf Shah.

Yunus, a one-time resident of the small south Kashmir village of Arwani, was despatched across the LoC in 2004, after the Hizb lost a series of senior chief operations commanders. These losses had three major consequences for the Hizb. First, its Pakistan-based leadership ran out of field commanders who it could depend on to resist pressures to engage in a dialogue with India. Secondly, the Hizb's efforts to build political space for itself in Jammu and Kashmir through the medium of the People's Democratic Party came to a grinding halt. Finally, Hizb amir-i-jihad Shah himself came under pressure from dissidents to return to India and fight, rather than sending subordinates to their death.

Shah now turned to Yunus to rebuild the Hizb in Jammu and Kashmir. Both men shared a long-standing personal relationship. Yunus had chauffeured the amir-i-jihad for several years, and played a key role in the administration of the Hizb's Jungle-Mangal camp near Muzaffarabad. More important, he came from a family with an impeccable record of service to the Jammu and Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami — the political organisation which gave birth to the Hizb, and with whose support Shah had unsuccessfully contested the 1987 Assembly Elections.

But the decision to hand over command of the terror group to Yunus incensed Mohammad Ashraf Shah — a veteran of the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir who has operated for years using the alias `Sohail Faisal.' Division commander Shah had trained Yunus in Pakistan when the new chief operations commander was a fresh recruit. As the south Kashmir commander's supporters saw it, his sole liability was that his parents, unlike the Jamaat-e-Islami-linked family of the new chief operations commander, had a Congress background. Over the past two years, the feud has steadily deepened, and other faultlines have also opened up. Nazir Ahmad Dar, who operating under the codename Jehangir Khaliq controls the northern division, is suspected by some within the Hizb of being an Intelligence Bureau mole.

What all this points to is this: should the Hizb in fact come to the table, just who will have the right to speak for it will be energetically contested from within the ranks of the organisation itself. Should powerful division and district-level figures feel the amir-i-jihad could compromise their political and material interests, a full-blown split is not inconceivable.

Hizb chief Shah's final decision will be driven by a hard-headed assessment of the risks — and the potential payoff of turning to politics. In 1987, Shah lost an election marred by large-scale rigging, but one that also demonstrated Islamists would be unable to take power on their own in Jammu and Kashmir. Delhi University scholar Navnita Chadha Behera, for example, has recorded that in "a fair election, the MUF would have won 10-20 seats at best, and it would not have been able to dislodge Farooq Abdullah."

Jammu and Kashmir politics today is far more competitive than in 1987. Moreover, the Mirwaiz Umar Farooq faction of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference is bracing itself for competition with the Hizb and Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The Srinagar cleric's recent polemic has matched that of Islamist patriarch Geelani in its hawkish character, and the rebirth of an al-Umar Mujahideen-Jaish-e-Mohammad alliance in the city suggests his APHC grouping is seeking an armed capability to take on the Hizb should the need arise.

"Twenty years of jihad," says Parrey, "has not liberated an inch of Jammu and Kashmir." Shah knows this too: but can he afford to take the risks travelling the road to peace holds out?

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