Author: Rahul Datta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: September 20, 2006
The Indo-Pak Havana 'breakthrough' may have legitimised Pakistan's claim of being a co-victim of terror, but evidence suggests that Islamabad has stepped up terrorist activities and is now sending trained militants into Jammu and Kashmir through Nepal and Bangladesh.
Taking a serious note of this trend, the Army's Northern Command, responsible for tackling insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, has informed the Government that most of the militants owing allegiance to indigenous outfits like the Hizbul Mujahideen are no longer infiltrating into the State through the Line of Control.
Incidentally, the Army was kept in the dark about India's initiative to set up a joint anti-terrorism mechanism with Pakistan, and there is considerable unease within the security and intelligence establishments about the way the Prime Minister had gone about the whole exercise without consulting security and intelligence experts.
The Northern Command, in its recent situation assessment report, pointed out that after receiving training in handling sophisticated weapons terrorists transit through Nepal and Bangladesh and enter the strife-torn State. The militants easily merge into the local milieu unlike foreign militants who reach Srinagar by bus from Udhampur after travelling up to the last railhead through train, sources said on Tuesday.
The report said that security forces were finding it difficult to curb the trend as the militants did not carry even small arms. They were handed the weapons by their local contacts after they reached their designated locations in Jammu and Kashmir.
As the October 2005 earthquake damaged large chunks of the anti-infiltration fence along the 750-km long LoC, Pakistan seized the opportunity to smuggle across large caches of sophisticated weapons into Kashmir. Local sympathisers salted away these weapons at several hideouts and the security forces were making concerted efforts to unearth these caches and cut off this access to the terrorists.
Since the fence was erected two and a half years back, weapons smuggling into the State from across the LoC was the biggest ever, sources said.
Stating that out of every ten terrorists operating in the State, six were Hizbul Mujahideen cadres, sources said the new route into Kashmir had gained currency with the terrorists in the last six months. They admitted that infiltration levels had not gone down as terrorists were now exploiting other routes into the Valley rather than the heavily guarded LoC.
Only the Afghan and Pakistani cadres of hardcore groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba still preferred to sneak into India through the LoC as they feared being exposed if they took the Nepal and Bangladesh routes, they said.
The newly trained terrorists, meanwhile, were going for soft targets like lobbing grenades in crowded markets and targeting civilians, sources said adding, reports indicated that the new inductees, at present, were refraining from taking on the security forces.