"Top militant commander killed", "A fierce encounter on in Kashmir" and "Tensions rise on the Line of Control". After a lull, headlines like these made a comeback in 2013. But last year may have been but a trailer. Exactly 25 years after arriving in the valley and about ten years after going out of fashion among Kashmiri youth, militancy is back in the reckoning.
Pakistan observes February 5 as Kashmir Solidarity Day. It's an official holiday, a day when the country's right-wing groups demand an end to what they see as India's occupation of Kashmir.
This year, in public speeches, their leaders spewed the same indignation about Kashmir; in private, people cracked the old Pakistani joke about a line that a rich miser might use: Kashmir ki azadi tak udhari band -- I won't give you a loan until Kashmir gets freedom, which is a euphemism for, I will never give you a loan.
On Tuesday, Pakistan's National Assembly, its parliament's lower house, adopted yet another resolution about Kashmir to express solidarity with the region's people, TV channels broadcasted special programmes on Kashmir, the government asked the public to observe a minute's silence at 10:00AM and people formed a human chain on the Kohala bridge running over the Jhelum river and linking Pakistan with Kashmir.
Yet this Kashmir Day felt different from those of recent years, reminiscent more of the 1990s, when the country first marked Kashmir Day at the suggestion of the Jamat-e-Islami than the decade that followed. It felt like Kashmir was back on Pakistan's agenda.
“Without a doubt, in recent years, Kashmir waned from mainstream Pakistan's radar and is definitely re-featuring in the new Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's new paradigm for India,” says Wajahat S Khan, an Islamabad-based journalist who covers national security. “As Sharif pushes for peace and trade with India, he will be asked questions about Kashmir. It used to be said that the route to peace in Kabul lies through Islamabad and Delhi. Now it may well lie in Srinagar.”
If flare-ups along the Line of Control throughout last year were not signal enough, the Pakistani establishment has brought Maulana Masood Azhar out of cold storage. Azhar, whom India freed in exchange for passengers of an Indian Airlines plane hijacked in 1999 to Kandahar in Afghanistan, addressed a mammoth rally in Muzaffarabad on January 26 via phone from his home in Bahwalpur in south Punjab.
Azhar called for the rally on India's Republic Day, marked as a black day by many in both Pakistan- and Indian-administered Kashmir, to release a book by Mohammed Afzal Guru, the man India executed for the Parliament attacks. India held Azhar's group, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, outlawed in Pakistan, responsible for the attacks. In the phone address, he said the standard things, complaining about India's persecution of Kashmiris, warning India of revenge and asking Pakistan to allow jihad.
“The reactivation of leaders of the outlawed groups does not seem accidental," a commentator in the Dawn newspaper noted, "It is a disturbing development for the international community as well as for our national security...The rally in Muzaffarabad was very well organised – thousands of people were bussed to the venue. So, it is not possible that the local administration and security agencies did not know about the event."
New turn to old path
Security hawks and doves, Indians and Pakistanis alike agree that they once again smell gunfire in the Kashmiri air. The only debate is about the scale: is Pakistan returning to Kashmir as a matter of policy, given that the US is leaving Afghanistan, or is it merely using the Kashmir bogey to deflect militants who have taken to attacking the Pakistani state.
Former President Pervez Musharraf had banned groups such as the JeM in 2002 and had verbally agreed to a ceasefire with India along the Line of Control. This had angered a number of these militants, who then joined other militant groups, some of which have been involved in attacks against the Pakistani state or Pakistani minorities such as the Shias.
The Pakistani establishment is seeking JeM's help to negotiate with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is the most anti-Pakistan of all groups. JeM, whose fighters have fought against US-led forces in Afghanistan, will logically make Kashmir part of the quid pro quo.
Militant infiltration across the Line of Control decreased every year from 2003, except in 2013, when it increased. Also, last year, for the first time in many years, more security personnel (81) than militants (73) were killed.
“Unearthing Masood Azhar is self-contradictory for Pakistan because it is engaging India in a peace process," said Ayesha Siddiqa, Islamabad-based security analyst and author of a book on the Pakistani military. "At the same time, one has heard that there's been increasingly a lot of activity in [Pakistan-administered] Kashmir. Masood Azhar motivates people with fiery speeches, rouses emotions and helps collect donations. That is his significance.”
She added: “This needs to be seen in the backdrop of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. What is the Afghanistan that the Americans will leave behind, with how many troops and what happens in the forthcoming election in Afghanistan are all factors that will affect the larger security situation, including Kashmir."
Pakistan believes Afghanistan gives it strategic depth in the region. The earlier idea of strategic depth was that Pakistani forces could take refuge in Afghanistan in the event of an Indian invasion. After both countries conducted nuclear tests, strategic depth meant that the Taliban in Afghanistan could help Pakistan in its low-intensity conflict in Kashmir. The Indian Airlines plane hijack was a more visible example of this, but so were the many foreign fighters who fought in Kashmir after 1995.
But after banning these groups and reigning them in, General Musharraf took a new security approach towards India: one of resolution. Most people who matter in Pakistan agree that part of the reason why the military did not back Musharraf when he was on his way out, as a result of both domestic and American pressure, was that they did not agree with the way he was trying to settle territorial disputes with India.
The back channel talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thus came to an abrupt end. They left behind a forward-looking model of a workable solution in the form of a “four-point formula” that sought neither to create new borders nor to dissolve the Line of Control, but merely to make it an irrelevant line on the map of a demilitarised, post-conflict zone.
As India waged peace with his successor, President Zardari, the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai brought that to a halt. Renewed talks sought to create a long-term mutual constituency of peace in the business community, but the Pakistani establishment seems to have vetoed the idea of normalising trade relations, by, for instance, not reciprocating India's giving Pakistan Most-Favoured Nation status. As Nawaz Sharif tried to pick up the threads left hanging by Zardari, rising tensions along the Line of Control gave the signals that the time wasn't right.
1989 all over again
The reactivation of Muzaffarabad's war on Srinagar may just have a limited purpose – to be used as a bargaining tool for Afghanistan to be left in Pakistan's terms, to divert anti-state militant groups in Pakistan or to tell Nawaz Sharif to tone down his dreams of returning to the Lahore Declaration, in 1999, between his government and Atal Behari Vajpayee's. But even this limited purpose, as opposed to a proper low-intensity conflict, could lead to spectacular attacks meant to grab the headlines.
Indian analysts have a similar assessment that a new round of militant activity in Kashmir could be making itself heard, which is particularly alarming in an election year.
“The broad assessment is that 2014 will be fraught with uncertainties, and a blowback of Afghanistan and Pakistan's internal situation on Jammu and Kashmir is likely,” said defence analyst C Uday Bhaskar, a retired Commodore. “It is a time of turbulence, which makes clarity about policy difficult. This is a country that came out of 26/11, yet our intelligence agencies continue to be at loggerheads with one another and the credibility of the investigative and judicial process remains low. We could do far better to be prepared."
India can perhaps do little strategically, diplomatically or militarily, but hawks think options remain. “It is a policy decision that the political leadership will have to take, about whether they want to strike back or not. Apart from that, India has done the best it could,” said Vikram Sood, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's foreign intelligence agency.
India's biggest problem in Kashmir may lie on its own side of the Line of Control. The push factor from Muzaffarabad can do little unless supply meets demand. The pull factor is angry Kashmiri youth.
The post-9/11 consensus in Srinagar that militancy did not help their cause has given way to a renewed faith in the gun. “There's a sense amongst the youth of being choked," says Khurram Parvez of the Srinagar-based Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society. "India did nothing after the 2008 and 2010 uprisings. [The then Home Minister P] Chidambaram had said Kashmir is a unique problem that needs a unique solution. Where is that? The execution of Afzal Guru came as a final nail in the coffin. That was when Kashmiris felt absolute disgust, helplessness and frustration."
Kashmiris, and others, were angry not only about Afzal Guru's execution but also its circumstances. Many thought he was innocent, that he was hanged clearly for short-term political gain. Moreover, they were dismayed that he was hanged secretly, that he was not allowed to meet his family and that his lawyer was not informed, which foreclosed the option of him going to the Supreme Court to appeal against the rejection of his mercy petition, like others have done.
“New Delhi has done all the wrong things in Kashmir,” says Jammu-based Anuradha Bhasin, editor of Kashmir Times. "Kashmir today is caught between an arrogant India and an unreliable Pakistan." Bhasin agrees that the mood of the youth has changed in favour of militancy as an approach, and that in Pakistan, where she recently attended a conference on Kashmir, the Valley is suddenly back on the menu.
Young people, who once thought throwing stones would bring azaadi, are not moving towards the gun out of mere frustration. As Hafiz Saeed, head of the Jama'at-ud-Da'wah who India says has links to the terrorist Lashkar-e-Taiba, explained in Islamabad recently: "America, which did not want to leave Afghanistan, is now forced to leave it...India will have to leave Kashmir."
The jihadis see that the US is engaging the Afghan Taliban in talks for a negotiated settlement. In Kashmir, people see this as an indication that the gun is needed to make New Delhi take the Kashmiri seriously and engage with the Hurriyat in similar talks.
Most militants who have been getting arrested or killed are local Kashmiris, and most of them have never crossed the Line of Control. There are enough arms dumps and a flourishing grey market; ideology and the internet are perfect trainers. Graffiti saying “Welcome Taliban” can be spotted in Srinagar's bylanes – or at an event atop the fort on the centre of the city. A report by Kashmiri journalist Fahad Shah on the transformation of a young man who turns into a militant and gets killed is revealing.
These young men join the local infrastructure of the Hizbul Mujahideen and the LeT. The JeM is a minor force, despite reports of revival. A veteran Hizbul fighter recently told an Al Jazeera journalist, “You can say that this border-crossing activity is two to three percent of our operations. Now our real focus is on operating within [Indian-administered] Kashmir. We acquire resources there, we train people there and we get all of our arms from there - be they stolen or bought - as well. This is how things have been since 2002."
Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a veteran anti-India leader in Srinagar, hasn't been heard speaking of the gun for years. But recently, he acknowledged the changing winds. “We are telling the people that we should continue the struggle on the basis of peaceful ways. But India is not taking any notice.” He further warned, “At this juncture we are fighting as far as the Jammu and Kashmir people are concerned, but if anybody is coming to help the suppressed nation, it is also natural.”
Kashmir taking inspiration from Afghanistan, Pakistan readying militants to help Kashmir, New Delhi, hamstrung by political uncertainty, twiddling its thumbs, Hindu nationalism making a bid for power while the economy stagnates -- all of this sounds like 1989 all over again.
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Pakistan observes February 5 as Kashmir Solidarity Day. It's an official holiday, a day when the country's right-wing groups demand an end to what they see as India's occupation of Kashmir.
This year, in public speeches, their leaders spewed the same indignation about Kashmir; in private, people cracked the old Pakistani joke about a line that a rich miser might use: Kashmir ki azadi tak udhari band -- I won't give you a loan until Kashmir gets freedom, which is a euphemism for, I will never give you a loan.
On Tuesday, Pakistan's National Assembly, its parliament's lower house, adopted yet another resolution about Kashmir to express solidarity with the region's people, TV channels broadcasted special programmes on Kashmir, the government asked the public to observe a minute's silence at 10:00AM and people formed a human chain on the Kohala bridge running over the Jhelum river and linking Pakistan with Kashmir.
Yet this Kashmir Day felt different from those of recent years, reminiscent more of the 1990s, when the country first marked Kashmir Day at the suggestion of the Jamat-e-Islami than the decade that followed. It felt like Kashmir was back on Pakistan's agenda.
“Without a doubt, in recent years, Kashmir waned from mainstream Pakistan's radar and is definitely re-featuring in the new Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's new paradigm for India,” says Wajahat S Khan, an Islamabad-based journalist who covers national security. “As Sharif pushes for peace and trade with India, he will be asked questions about Kashmir. It used to be said that the route to peace in Kabul lies through Islamabad and Delhi. Now it may well lie in Srinagar.”
If flare-ups along the Line of Control throughout last year were not signal enough, the Pakistani establishment has brought Maulana Masood Azhar out of cold storage. Azhar, whom India freed in exchange for passengers of an Indian Airlines plane hijacked in 1999 to Kandahar in Afghanistan, addressed a mammoth rally in Muzaffarabad on January 26 via phone from his home in Bahwalpur in south Punjab.
Azhar called for the rally on India's Republic Day, marked as a black day by many in both Pakistan- and Indian-administered Kashmir, to release a book by Mohammed Afzal Guru, the man India executed for the Parliament attacks. India held Azhar's group, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, outlawed in Pakistan, responsible for the attacks. In the phone address, he said the standard things, complaining about India's persecution of Kashmiris, warning India of revenge and asking Pakistan to allow jihad.
“The reactivation of leaders of the outlawed groups does not seem accidental," a commentator in the Dawn newspaper noted, "It is a disturbing development for the international community as well as for our national security...The rally in Muzaffarabad was very well organised – thousands of people were bussed to the venue. So, it is not possible that the local administration and security agencies did not know about the event."
New turn to old path
Security hawks and doves, Indians and Pakistanis alike agree that they once again smell gunfire in the Kashmiri air. The only debate is about the scale: is Pakistan returning to Kashmir as a matter of policy, given that the US is leaving Afghanistan, or is it merely using the Kashmir bogey to deflect militants who have taken to attacking the Pakistani state.
Former President Pervez Musharraf had banned groups such as the JeM in 2002 and had verbally agreed to a ceasefire with India along the Line of Control. This had angered a number of these militants, who then joined other militant groups, some of which have been involved in attacks against the Pakistani state or Pakistani minorities such as the Shias.
The Pakistani establishment is seeking JeM's help to negotiate with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is the most anti-Pakistan of all groups. JeM, whose fighters have fought against US-led forces in Afghanistan, will logically make Kashmir part of the quid pro quo.
Militant infiltration across the Line of Control decreased every year from 2003, except in 2013, when it increased. Also, last year, for the first time in many years, more security personnel (81) than militants (73) were killed.
“Unearthing Masood Azhar is self-contradictory for Pakistan because it is engaging India in a peace process," said Ayesha Siddiqa, Islamabad-based security analyst and author of a book on the Pakistani military. "At the same time, one has heard that there's been increasingly a lot of activity in [Pakistan-administered] Kashmir. Masood Azhar motivates people with fiery speeches, rouses emotions and helps collect donations. That is his significance.”
She added: “This needs to be seen in the backdrop of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. What is the Afghanistan that the Americans will leave behind, with how many troops and what happens in the forthcoming election in Afghanistan are all factors that will affect the larger security situation, including Kashmir."
Pakistan believes Afghanistan gives it strategic depth in the region. The earlier idea of strategic depth was that Pakistani forces could take refuge in Afghanistan in the event of an Indian invasion. After both countries conducted nuclear tests, strategic depth meant that the Taliban in Afghanistan could help Pakistan in its low-intensity conflict in Kashmir. The Indian Airlines plane hijack was a more visible example of this, but so were the many foreign fighters who fought in Kashmir after 1995.
But after banning these groups and reigning them in, General Musharraf took a new security approach towards India: one of resolution. Most people who matter in Pakistan agree that part of the reason why the military did not back Musharraf when he was on his way out, as a result of both domestic and American pressure, was that they did not agree with the way he was trying to settle territorial disputes with India.
The back channel talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thus came to an abrupt end. They left behind a forward-looking model of a workable solution in the form of a “four-point formula” that sought neither to create new borders nor to dissolve the Line of Control, but merely to make it an irrelevant line on the map of a demilitarised, post-conflict zone.
As India waged peace with his successor, President Zardari, the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai brought that to a halt. Renewed talks sought to create a long-term mutual constituency of peace in the business community, but the Pakistani establishment seems to have vetoed the idea of normalising trade relations, by, for instance, not reciprocating India's giving Pakistan Most-Favoured Nation status. As Nawaz Sharif tried to pick up the threads left hanging by Zardari, rising tensions along the Line of Control gave the signals that the time wasn't right.
1989 all over again
The reactivation of Muzaffarabad's war on Srinagar may just have a limited purpose – to be used as a bargaining tool for Afghanistan to be left in Pakistan's terms, to divert anti-state militant groups in Pakistan or to tell Nawaz Sharif to tone down his dreams of returning to the Lahore Declaration, in 1999, between his government and Atal Behari Vajpayee's. But even this limited purpose, as opposed to a proper low-intensity conflict, could lead to spectacular attacks meant to grab the headlines.
Indian analysts have a similar assessment that a new round of militant activity in Kashmir could be making itself heard, which is particularly alarming in an election year.
“The broad assessment is that 2014 will be fraught with uncertainties, and a blowback of Afghanistan and Pakistan's internal situation on Jammu and Kashmir is likely,” said defence analyst C Uday Bhaskar, a retired Commodore. “It is a time of turbulence, which makes clarity about policy difficult. This is a country that came out of 26/11, yet our intelligence agencies continue to be at loggerheads with one another and the credibility of the investigative and judicial process remains low. We could do far better to be prepared."
India can perhaps do little strategically, diplomatically or militarily, but hawks think options remain. “It is a policy decision that the political leadership will have to take, about whether they want to strike back or not. Apart from that, India has done the best it could,” said Vikram Sood, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's foreign intelligence agency.
India's biggest problem in Kashmir may lie on its own side of the Line of Control. The push factor from Muzaffarabad can do little unless supply meets demand. The pull factor is angry Kashmiri youth.
The post-9/11 consensus in Srinagar that militancy did not help their cause has given way to a renewed faith in the gun. “There's a sense amongst the youth of being choked," says Khurram Parvez of the Srinagar-based Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society. "India did nothing after the 2008 and 2010 uprisings. [The then Home Minister P] Chidambaram had said Kashmir is a unique problem that needs a unique solution. Where is that? The execution of Afzal Guru came as a final nail in the coffin. That was when Kashmiris felt absolute disgust, helplessness and frustration."
Kashmiris, and others, were angry not only about Afzal Guru's execution but also its circumstances. Many thought he was innocent, that he was hanged clearly for short-term political gain. Moreover, they were dismayed that he was hanged secretly, that he was not allowed to meet his family and that his lawyer was not informed, which foreclosed the option of him going to the Supreme Court to appeal against the rejection of his mercy petition, like others have done.
“New Delhi has done all the wrong things in Kashmir,” says Jammu-based Anuradha Bhasin, editor of Kashmir Times. "Kashmir today is caught between an arrogant India and an unreliable Pakistan." Bhasin agrees that the mood of the youth has changed in favour of militancy as an approach, and that in Pakistan, where she recently attended a conference on Kashmir, the Valley is suddenly back on the menu.
Young people, who once thought throwing stones would bring azaadi, are not moving towards the gun out of mere frustration. As Hafiz Saeed, head of the Jama'at-ud-Da'wah who India says has links to the terrorist Lashkar-e-Taiba, explained in Islamabad recently: "America, which did not want to leave Afghanistan, is now forced to leave it...India will have to leave Kashmir."
The jihadis see that the US is engaging the Afghan Taliban in talks for a negotiated settlement. In Kashmir, people see this as an indication that the gun is needed to make New Delhi take the Kashmiri seriously and engage with the Hurriyat in similar talks.
Most militants who have been getting arrested or killed are local Kashmiris, and most of them have never crossed the Line of Control. There are enough arms dumps and a flourishing grey market; ideology and the internet are perfect trainers. Graffiti saying “Welcome Taliban” can be spotted in Srinagar's bylanes – or at an event atop the fort on the centre of the city. A report by Kashmiri journalist Fahad Shah on the transformation of a young man who turns into a militant and gets killed is revealing.
These young men join the local infrastructure of the Hizbul Mujahideen and the LeT. The JeM is a minor force, despite reports of revival. A veteran Hizbul fighter recently told an Al Jazeera journalist, “You can say that this border-crossing activity is two to three percent of our operations. Now our real focus is on operating within [Indian-administered] Kashmir. We acquire resources there, we train people there and we get all of our arms from there - be they stolen or bought - as well. This is how things have been since 2002."
Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a veteran anti-India leader in Srinagar, hasn't been heard speaking of the gun for years. But recently, he acknowledged the changing winds. “We are telling the people that we should continue the struggle on the basis of peaceful ways. But India is not taking any notice.” He further warned, “At this juncture we are fighting as far as the Jammu and Kashmir people are concerned, but if anybody is coming to help the suppressed nation, it is also natural.”
Kashmir taking inspiration from Afghanistan, Pakistan readying militants to help Kashmir, New Delhi, hamstrung by political uncertainty, twiddling its thumbs, Hindu nationalism making a bid for power while the economy stagnates -- all of this sounds like 1989 all over again.