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When I watched my old friend, Yasin Malik, accidentally blow Sheikh Rashid Ahmed's cover last week, I laughed out loud.
When I watched my old friend, Yasin Malik, accidentally blow Sheikh Rashid Ahmed's cover last week, I laughed out loud. From an Indian perspective it is the only good thing that came out of the Hurriyat visit to Pakistan. Yasin did not have India's good in mind. He meant only to honour a man whose contribution to 'the freedom struggle' in Kashmir would, in his words, be recorded in letters of gold. When we came here at the start of the struggle, he said, when we came to this land, there was one man who took 3,000 of us to his farm and put aside everything else to help us. When this revelation became a bombshell and caused the cancellation of Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid's attempts to return with his Hurriyat friends to Srinagar, desperate damage control measures were put into effect.Sheikh Rashid went on Indian news channels to assert that he had been present when Yasin made his comments and that at no point had he mentioned anything about assistance in terrorist training. And, Yasin, looking embarrassed, tried saying something similar. Look at the video of what I said, he told NDTV, and you will see that all I am talking about is hospitality.
Rashid uncovered
Well, thanks to the wonders of television, many of us saw Yasin Malik make his comments and I noticed Sheikh Rashid in the front row of the audience and his discomfiture was patently evident..., or why was he squirming in his seat and looking around nervously?
In the days before 9/11, when terrorism was a vital component of Pakistani foreign policy and called freedom fighting, I remember many occasions on which Sheikh Rashid came out in virulent, aggressive support of the 'freedom-fighters' in Kashmir.
If all he was offering them was 'hospitality' or moral support as General Musharraf liked calling it, then what was he doing with 3,000 youths on his estate? So many Kashmiri guests?
Public memory is short, so allow me to remind you of the circumstances in which these 3,000 Kashmiris crossed into Pakistan. The year was 1987 and Rajiv Gandhi made the mistake of forcing Farooq Abdullah's National Conference into an electoral alliance in the assembly elections. When these two moderate political parties were no longer fighting each other, a new opponent was inevitably going to emerge and this was the Muslim United Front(MUF). Rigged elections in Kashmir are an old tradition and Farooq, though he has always denied it, appears to have kept the tradition up in 1987. When the radical, Islamic youths who made up the MUF realized that democracy was not going to be allowed in Kashmir, they went across the border to learn the arts of militancy. Yasin Malik returned, fully trained in terrorism, to kidnap Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Syed's daughter and when the V.P. Singh government released Kashmiri militants in exchange for her freedom, we saw the beginning of the insurgency in Kashmir.Since then, Pakistan's involvement in the 'freedom movement' has become deeper and more blatant and India has usually responded like the confused, soft state that it often is. What, for instance, were we doing in allowing Hurriyat leaders like Yasin Malik and Mirwaiz Omar Farooq to go across the border without any understanding of what they planned to do there? In retrospect, it appears that their only motive was to reach Islamabad and start abusing India. If you and I went there and spoke the way they have, we would have been arrested for treason.
It's easy to understand why Pakistan would be thrilled with theirbehaviour, why officials in that country would treat them like conquering heroes, but what were we thinking? My own view is, we were not thinking at all or maybe different departments of the government of India are thinking at cross purposes or Hurriyat's terms of engagement in Pakistan would have been clearly defined.
As someone who has covered the Kashmir story for more than twenty years, may I say that I do not accept that the Hurriyat leaders represent the people of Kashmir. It is my view that between the lot of them they would win less seats in a fair election than the National Conference when it lost the last election.
Timid militants
Besides, they are an ugly, untrustworthy
bunch. Some of these so-called leaders openly declare their loyalties to
Pakistan, others are more duplicitous. Yasin Malik is among the duplicitous
ones or he would have the courage to stand up in Islamabad and tell them
how his JKLF (Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front) was destroyed by the ISI
because it talked of independence rather than merger with Pakistan as the
ultimate goal of the 'freedom movement'. In its place was created, undoubtedly
by people like Sheikh Rashid, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, who brought Islam
and jehad into Kashmir. Omar Farooq is another of the duplicitous ones
or he would have the courage to stand up in Islamabad and tell them how
his father was killed by Hizb-ul-Mujahideen terrorists. It was our misfortune
that Jagmohan was Governor and so hated and incompetent that he allowed
blame to be placed on the Indian government, instead. But, I was there
at the time and believe me, when I tell you that most Kashmiris knew who
the killers were and which country's interest they represented. Just as
everyone knows who the killers of school children were in Pulwama last
week, but some of Kashmir's so-called leaders have already started blaming
Indian security forces. Why does the Indian government allow them to get
away with their lies? For the same reason that it has sat back and watched
Hurriyat leaders tell their lies in Islamabad. It does not have the courage
to stand up for what it believes in and innocent Indian lives will continue
to be lost to terrorism because of this.
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