India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004 by Praveen Swami

Author:Praveen Swami
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Military, History, Asia, General
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The birth of the JKLF

Indira Gandhi, wrote the journalist and historian M.J. Akbar, had succeeded in giving Jammu and Kashmir “a wonderful decade of freedom and peace”.115 While his assessment is, perhaps, excessive, the fact was that Sheikh Abdullah’s return to mainstream politics had stripped anti-India formations of both legitimacy and the ready pool of potential recruits that had fed both the Master Cell and the al-Fatah. Neither a party apparatus nor activists remained to be tapped.

Pakistan’s own position was, moreover, deeply compromised – and not just by military defeat. On paper, it remained committed to regaining Jammu and Kashmir. In a speech made to Pakistan’s National Assembly just weeks after the Shimla Accord was signed, Bhutto had asserted that if the people of Jammu and Kashmir want their independence, if they want to be liberated from the Hindu yolk, if they want to be a free people in friendship, and friendship and comradeship in Pakistan, they will have to give the lead and we will be with them.116

Maqbool Butt, however, was deeply skeptical of official Pakistan. In May 1973, still in prison, he wrote a pained letter to his niece Azra Mir, asserting that the Pakistani ruling class has never ever supported Kashmiris in their struggle for freedom, as they should have done. This class has never been interested in the liberation of Kashmiris. Whatever they say is merely lip service, and must not be trusted.”117

After all, he pointed out, “rulers who declared war against their own people cannot offer anything to anyone else but injustice”.

No accounts exist of what Butt made of the situation he was confronted with on his release from jail. Bhutto had a record of taking aggressive positions on Jammu and Kashmir, but his domestic position now was far from stable. In February 1973, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) discovered a consignment of arms shipped by Iraq’s Embassy to members of the Marri tribe, who were seeking independence for Balochistan, a sensitive eastern province bordering both Iran and Afghanistan.118 Bhutto promptly dismissed the provincial government. Baloch nationalists responded by launching a full-blown insurgency. In mid- 1973, meanwhile, Bhutto also dismissed the government of the North–West Frontier Province, accusing it of allying with the pro-Moscow regime of Sardar Daud, which had taken control of Afghanistan. The NWFP government, he claimed, had been working to realize Pakhtunkhwa, a homeland for Pashtun tribesmen sprawling across parts of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistan government attempted to counter Pashtun nationalism by cultivating Islamist exiles who had fled the country. Among them was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who would go on to play a key role in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.119 Problems were also evident in Punjab. In an effort to make peace with the clergy, Bhutto had declared Islam the religion of state, promised to introduce the teaching of the Quran and Islamic culture in government-run schools and set up a council to bring laws into conformity with religious injunctions. Bhutto’s efforts at appeasement in fact gave the clerics the scent of blood.

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