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More than 20 years ago young and beautiful girls, if they happened to be intelligent as well, faced a peculiar threat in Pakistan. The threat came not from criminals but from a well- orchestrated propaganda through the Urdu press that India’s RAW had pushed a number of dazzling-beauties into different parts of Pakistan particularly into Sindh and Baluchistan where they put their spell on officials and carried on the task assigned to them. Thus Pakistani girls who visited India or Indian girls who visited Pakistan were all suspects and so were the Pakistani female artistes who visited Mumbai. Pakistan’s former Attorney General Yahya Bakhtiar’s actress daughter Zeba caused frowns for playing the leading role in Heena.
A host of factors were behind this fantastic propaganda. The military Government of Gen Zia-ul-Haq and his ISI were getting nervous at the growing craze among Pakistanis to visit India and participate in cultural and intellectual activities in a free atmosphere. The Zia Government gave advertisements in newspapers to advise Pakistanis not to visit India. It also used fundamentalist parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami to try to tell Pakistanis that as Muslims they did not share India’s composite culture. A virulent campaign was launched against saree, which was described as Hindu attire. It was also blamed for the liberation of Bangladesh because Bengali women wore saree and put bindi on their foreheads. That showed Hindu cultural influence in Bangladesh, they said.
Twenty years later, General Musharraf and his Government showed same nervousness when suddenly interaction between the peoples of India and Pakistan increased following Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee’s peace offer on April 28. Perhaps the most unnerving event for the Pakistani regime was the medical treatment given to Noor Fatima in Bangalore. That event gave India magnanimity a worldwide publicity. Then started exchange of delegations between the two countries. It was at the height of these exchanges that Pakistan made two allegations against India. First, the Indian army was preparing for military action in Kargil which was denied by Indian Defence Ministry. The other allegation was that India has started 55 training camps to destabilise Pakistan. This too was denied.
Some of the accusations against Indian intelligence agencies make hilarious reading. For example, an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked from Srinagar to Lahore in January 1971 by Kashmiris who had been trained for the purpose by Pakistani intelligence men in Rawalpindi. According to Hashim Qureshi, one of the hijackers, the petrol for burning the hijacked plane in Lahore was provided by a Pakistani intelligence man. The hijackers were taken into a procession as heroes. But when India reacted by banning Pakistani flights over its territory, the Pakistani Government felt stupid. As a result, its army was trapped in then East Pakistan, which subsequently won its freedom. The hilarious part of the story is that now Islamabad saw a conspiracy in the hijacking drama to bring about the separation of East Pakistan. It sounded that all the preparations for the hijacking were innocently made by the Pakistani intelligence mesmerized by its Indian counterparts.
A great point about Pakistani Government leaders is that they don’t feel bad when their accusations against Indian intelligence are proved wrong. They are always ready with new allegations. For example, Wall Street Journal’s South Asian Bureau Chief Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi in January 2002 and subsequently butchered. He was kidnapped while investigating the effectiveness of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's ban on terrorist organizations. Pakistan Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi held a press conference in Islamabad to claim that Indian Government and the RAW were behind the kidnapping. Gen. Musharraf parrotted this allegation during his interview with Washington Post although his ISI was well aware of the facts of the case through Syed Omar Saeed Sheikh whom an anti-terrorism court in Hyderabad subsequently sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing Daniel Pearl. The death sentence had become necessary because the Musharraf Government was under pressure to hand him over to America. Anyhow, the ISI’s role in the kidnapping and murder of Pearl will always remain suspect.
The faux pas in the Pearl murder case apparently had no sobering effect on the military-civilian leadership. For the past about two years, Shias in Baluchistan had been under attack from anti-Shia Islamists. The bloodiest incident occurred on July 4 when some gunmen entered a mosque in Quetta and gunned down 53 Shia worshippers of the Hazara tribe. Many more were injured. Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali at once blamed it on India’s Consulates in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Khost in Afghanistan. His Interior Minister Saleh Hayat supported this allegation and claimed these Consulates were not doing any diplomatic work. But Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said it was a case of Islamic terrorism. He also expressed the doubt that it could be because of the Gawadar Port development. Locals in Baluchistan are bitterly opposed to the Gawadar project. Mr. Jamali and his Interior Minister did not find any support for their allegation against India. Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmed Jalali snubbed his Pakistani counterpart by reminding him that sectarian killings had been going on in Pakistan much before India opened its Consulates in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Khost. A Baluchistan National Party (BNP) leader, Mr.Habib Jalib strongly refuted official allegations against the Indian Consulates and said if India was given to organising sectarian killings in Pakistan, it could have done this in Sindh and Punjab where it has a long border with Pakistan.
But Baluchistan Interior Minister Samaullah Zuberi, who resigned after the Shia massacre, said the ISI had turned the province into a police state. The civilian Government had no writ. It was the ISI, which ruled the province. Zuberi’s claim raises a doubt about ISI’s own role in sectarian violence in Baluchistan . There is reason to believe that since Gen. Zia’s Islamisation programme in the 1970s-80s, the Army has considered Shias expendable. See, for example, what the Army did to Shias in Northern Areas in the 1980s.
Within Pakistan the ISI is notorious for organising violence for political reasons and blame outside powers for it. Examples are countless. But a few should suffice to prove this point. After the return of Ms. Benazir Bhutto as the Prime Minister in 1973, ethnic violence was engineered in Karachi and the Indian Consulate was blamed and ordered its closure. During 1995 alone, 2000 Muhajirs were killed and it became clear that it was all in preparation for the removal of Ms. Bhutto. She was sacked in 1996.
But the ISI is known to have organised more horrible incidents with external ramifications. The hijacking of PIA plane from Karachi to Kabul in 1981 was suspected to be the handiwork of the ISI to bail out Gen. Zia-ul-Haq at a time when political parties had formed the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) to pressure him to hold the promised elections. The hijacking was very cleverly made to look like the work of AI Zulfikar of Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto, the sons of executed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Again in March 1991, the IB under Brig. Imitiaz Ahmed, organised the hijacking of a Singapore Airlines plane from Kuala Lumpur. The four hijackers claimed themselves to be supporters of the PPP. The four were killed and thus the real story was not known. But this incident sabotaged the move towards cooperation between Ms. Bhutto and the caretaker Government of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and the possible release of her jailed husband Asif Zardari.
Military Government’s policies since
Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s rule have made Pakistan a cradle of violence of all hues.
No outsiders can add to it. It is a country where the institution of police
has collapsed; where judges cannot give justice and where killing of Shias
is considered to be a service to Islam.
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