by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Sheikh Qayoom,
Jammu/Srinagar : Even though permanent peace remained a distant dream for the people of beleaguered Jammu and Kashmir, 2017 was a comparatively better year for the state — security forces registered huge successes against militants, mainstream politicians once again moved out to meet people, the Centre appointed a special representative for a sustained dialogue, and the common man faced fewer life-disrupting protests and shutdowns.
On the anti-militancy front, the security forces killed more than 210 militants in Kashmir during the year. South Kashmir areas, including the Anantnag, Pulwama, Shopian and Kulgam districts, were once again brought under their dominance by the security forces.
These areas had virtually remained out of bounds for mainstream politicians during 2016 because of the presence of militants and an overwhelming public sentiment in their favour.
“Almost all the top commanders of militant groups were killed this year and area dominance operations in south Kashmir have kept the militants on the run,” said a senior intelligence officer who did not want to be named.
From the security point of view, this is a big success, but the bad news is that ground reports suggest that local youth in these areas are still joining the militant ranks.
It is precisely for this reason that the security forces, especially the local police, have been trying to persuade the youths who joined militant ranks to return and lead a normal life.
The return of Majid Khan, a footballer from Anantnag district, was for this very reason categorised as “neither surrendered nor arrested” by senior police officers in the state.
“He responded to the appeal from his parents and decided to come back since no message is as powerful as that of a mother to her son,” state police chief S.P. Vaid said when asked to comment on Majid’s return.
Encouraged by the success of Majid’s parents, more parents in the Valley have been issuing appeals to their children through social networking sites to give up the gun and return home.
Security forces say more local youth are likely to return, inspired by Majid’s decision.
“We have promised not to take any action against a local youth who decides to return to his family and lead a normal life. If some of them have been involved in any crime, they would have to face the normal process of the law,” said another senior officer of the security forces.
In the past, there have been serious reprisal attacks on “surrendered militants” in Kashmir. It is for this reason that parents calling their children back have also appealed to militant outfits to let them return without harbouring any ill-will against them.
Whether or not the “return” effort succeeds in motivating all the local youth to shun violence and lead a normal life would have to be watched.
Life for thousands of villagers living along the line of control (LoC) and the international border has been a nightmare this year. The Pakistani army has violated the bilateral ceasefire 720 times on the LoC this year, killing 17 security men and 12 civilians.
Each time guns boom on the LoC, life for villagers in Poonch, Rajouri, Jammu, Samba and Kathua districts goes into a tailspin.
People fear coming out of their homes, schools are closed, traffic comes to a grinding halt, villagers cannot venture out to carry the sick to the hospital and even cattle are not spared by the mortars that rain indiscriminately on civilian facilities along the LoC and the International Border in the Jammu region.
Promises by successive governments of allotting small pieces of land to border dwellers away from the line of fire remain unfulfilled and the only hope these people have is hoping for the impossible.
“Would India and Pakistan, in my lifetime, decide to live in peace?” asked Din Muhammad, 65, a border resident in Poonch district.
Politically, the situation has definitely improved in Kashmir as compared to last year when mainstream politicians had been confined to the four walls of security around them.
Politicians of both the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the opposition National Conference (NC) have been visiting villages, towns and even areas close to the LoC to reach out to the people.
In the forefront of this mainstream political activity have been Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and one of her predecessors, Farooq Abdullah.
Mehbooba has been visiting various districts in the Valley and the Jammu region to meet delegations of people and address their grievances on the spot as far as possible.
During one of her recent outreach exercises, Mehbooba had to spend the night in the north Kashmir Bandipora district because delegations kept pouring in till late evening to meet her with their problems.
Subsequently, during a similar exercise in Ganderbal district, she listened patiently to the people’s problems for over eight hours and directed officials to address these.
Her arch rival in the National Conference, Farooq Abdullah, has visited many places in the Valley and also areas close to the LoC to oppose the PDP and its leadership for aligning with the right wing BJP for power in the state. For the opposition leaders, the regenerated debate on article 370 and 35A of the constitution has come handy while targeting the PDP.
While the PDP stands to defend these special provisions of the Indian constitution, the BJP is ideologically committed to have them scrapped to ensure complete merger of J&K with the rest of the country.
To bring various stakeholders together so that issues concerning the three regions of Jammu, Valley and Ladakh are resolved, the Centre appointed former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma as the special representative to start a multi-layered sustained dialogue in the state.
Sharma has so far visited the state twice and met delegations of mainstream political parties, businessmen, surrendered militants, sportsmen and tribal organisations et al.
The separatist leaders have been keeping away from engaging in a dialogue with Sharma, although a report said recently he had met two of them while in the Valley last time.
The holding of the by-election for the Anantnag Lok Sabha seat has been kept on the hold by the Election Commission on the state government’s recommendations.
Elections for panchayats and urban bodies are also overdue in the state. The holding of these elections, expected some time next year, would be the litmus test of democracy in the state. It is expected these would be held some time early next year.
So far, the authorities have been reacting to separatist calls for shutdowns and protests by placing the separatist leaders under house arrest and imposing restrictions in areas where the law and order situation is sensitive.
Syed Ali Geelani, the octogenarian separatist leader, has been under house arrest throughout this year as authorities fear his participation in separatist-called protests could result in a major law and order problem.
In a nutshell, 2017 has been a year of mixed fortunes for the people in the state. While some semblance of comparative normalcy returned to Kashmir this year, permanent peace and normalcy continue to be as fragile in the beleaguered state as it has been during the last nearly three decades.
(Sheikh Qayoom can be contacted at sheikh.abdul@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
Winston Churchill’s observation that America can be depended upon to do the right thing after it has tried all the other alternatives is applicable to most countries.
The government’s latest initiative on Kashmir has come at the end of a similar tortuous route when it tried everything from a “muscular approach”, as the Congress has said, to letting the sword of abrogating Article 35A of the Constitution hang over the state’s head.
Like Article 370, which is anathema to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Article 35A underlines the state’s special status by preventing non-locals from buying or owning property in Kashmir.
But now the government wants to start a dialogue with its critics although, till recently, it appeared that the use of force was its most preferred option.
It isn’t only that the security forces added the pellet guns to their armoury for use against stone-throwers, in addition, of course, to an occasional recourse to real bullets if the situation warranted.
The forces also edged close to violating the Geneva Convention in the infamous incident when they tied a local person to the bonnet of a jeep as the vehicle traversed trouble-prone areas to deter those who were throwing stones.
Unfortunately, this crude display of the innate power of the authorities was acclaimed by, among others, the army chief, while a well-known Bollywood actor wanted a prominent human rights activist, who is a woman, to be similarly strapped to a jeep.
Given this atmosphere of virulence, it would have seemed that the government had only a one-track approach to the situation in Kashmir, which was to cow down the restive population by a formidable show of force.
Yet, as is known, such a blinkered attitude has rarely led to success in insurgency-prone areas, not least because democracies are invariably at a disadvantage when it comes to the use of unchecked power.
The reason is the prevalence of the system of checks and balances which calls for accountability lest any one section of the government cross a given limit.
In Kashmir, for instance, the Supreme Court has questioned the use of pellet guns in view of the danger they pose of not only blinding the demonstrators but also bystanders.
Furthermore, the government’s opponents have called for the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in view of the leeway which it gives to the security forces while its inbuilt safeguards against misuse haven’t always been in evidence.
It came as a matter of considerable relief, therefore, when the Prime Minister pointed out in his Independence Day address to the nation that the solution to the problem did not lie in abuses or guns but in embracing the Kashmiris. “Na gaali se, na goli se, Kashmir me parivartan hoga gale lagaane se,” he said.
Now, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has taken the cue from Narendra Modi by appointing an interlocutor for reaching out to the dissenters.
The government, therefore, can be said to be approaching the stone-pelters not with anyone tied to a jeep but on foot with open arms.
This is not the first time, of course, when such a conciliatory approach has been tried when belligerent measures had failed. But this is the first gesture of its kind by the Modi government.
The last intervention by a group of interlocutors took place when Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister.
But its recommendations about reducing the army’s visibility, reviewing the AFSPA, lifting the Disturbed Areas Act and expeditiously probing instances of human rights violations were ignored, as were the suggestions of others like N.N. Vohra, who was appointed in 2003 to investigate the causes of the continuing unrest. Vohra is now the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
It is possible that the change of government because of the departure of Manmohan Singh in 2014 and of Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2004 led to the reports of the earlier teams being mothballed.
Since the present government has at least a year-and-a-half to go, the new man for addressing the longstanding problem — Dineshwar Sharma — will have time on his hands.
But it is not so much the question of time as the sincerity of some of the stakeholders, such as the separatists whose loyalty to the government is under a cloud, which can hinder any forward movement.
Moreover, the differences among them — such as between the hawkish Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the moderate Mirwaiz Umar Farooq — will complicate the task of the official representative.
Thankfully, the government has given Sharma a free hand to choose to whom he wants to talk. But the hyper-nationalists in the Hindutva camp, who include a few television commentators, can queer the pitch for a meaningful dialogue at a time when suspicions are rife.
The prevailing lack of trust between the opposing sides was emphasised by former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha — now a prominent critic of Modi — when he visited Kashmir along with a delegation of “concerned citizens” and noted the “alienation of the masses of people who have lost faith in us”.
Retrieving Kashmir, therefore, from the “mess” which India has created, according to A.S. Dulat, a former Indian spy master, will be a gargantuan task.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
A protest by Kashmiri youth in Srinagar in August. (AP)
By Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh,
New Delhi : The biggest challenge and the top priority in Kashmir are to deradicalize Kashmiri youth and militants and prevent it from turning into a Syria of India, says Dineshwar Sharma, the newly-named interlocutor for talks in Jammu and Kashmir.
An old Kashmir hand, who headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) for two years from December 2015, Sharma says his mission to bring an end to violence would also include talking to anyone “even a rickshaw puller or a cart puller” who can contribute so that peace is ushered in the state “as soon as possible”.
He says he is personally pained to see the path Kashmiris, particularly youth, have chosen that would only destroy the society.
“I feel the pain and sometimes I become emotional also. I want to see this kind of violence ends as soon as possible from all sides. The youth of Kashmir like Zakir Musa (Kashmir Al Qaeda chief) and Burhan Wani (slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander) get hype when they talk about (establishing Islamic) Caliphate,” Sharma told IANS in an interview, referring to the new-age Kashmir militant commanders.
He said the way youth of Kashmir were moving, “which is radicalization”, would ultimately “finish the Kashmir society itself.
“I am worried about the people of Kashmir. If all this picked up, the situation will be like Yemen, Syria and Libya. People will start fighting in so many groups. So, it is very important that everybody, all of us, contribute so that suffering of Kashmiris end.
“I will have to convince the youth of Kashmir that they are only ruining their future and the future of all Kashmiris in the name of whether they call it azadi (independence), Islamic caliphate or Islam. You can take examples like Pakistan, Libya, Yemen or any country where such things are going. They have become the most violent places in the world. So, I want to see that it doesn’t happen in India.”
The former IPS officer, who led the spy agency’s “Islamist Terrorism Desk” between 2003 and 2005, was named on Monday to open talks in a bid to end the nearly three-decade-old insurgency in Kashmir.
When the IB was investigating the fledgling modules of the Islamic State in Kerala, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh in 2015, Sharma is widely known to have advocated a policy of arresting the problem by counselling and reforming, instead of arresting the potential recruits of the global terror network.
The soft-spoken intelligence veteran is known to have established friendly relationships with arrested militants in a bid to reform them when he was Assistant Director IB from 1992-94 – the time when militancy was at its peak in Jammu and Kashmir.
Serving in Kashmir as an IB man, Sharma was instrumental in the arrest of then Hizbul Mujahideen commander Master Ahsan Dar in 1993 after he broke away from Syed Salahuddin – the Hizb chief based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
He recalled how he had met Dar in Srinagar jails and how the militant commander asked him to bring his daughter and son to meet him in the prison. “I actually took them to meet him.”
Asked If he had identified the way to reach out to the youth in Kashmir, Sharma said he was still working out the modalities.
“I am open to talking to everybody. Anybody who believes in peace and wants to come and give me some ideas how to go about, I am willing to listen. He can be an ordinary student, ordinary youth, a rickshawwala or a thelawala with some good idea. I will consider that.”
He was asked if he had started reaching out to Hurriyat leaders, who have maintained silence over his appointment even though they had dropped hints in their statements about engaging in “constructive” talks with the government of India after some of their aides were arrested in terror funding case.
Sharma cautiously replied: “Let me see. I am ready to talk to everybody. Anybody who wants to contribute to peace.”
Replying to a query that radicalisation of Kashmiri youth was a more recent phenomenon than the problem of Kashmir itself, Sharma said the state was almost at peace before the 2008 unrest over a land row and the 2016 wave of violent street protests after the killing of Burhan Wani.
“Somehow the minds of youths and students have been diverted somewhere else. That is the point of address. I have seen the violence in Kashmir from very close quarters. I was posted in Srinagar. So the kind of violence I have seen, I am really pained. I am very sad.”
Commenting on the previous attempts by the government of nominating peace emissaries and other initiatives to solve the problem, he said he would “desperately like to try some new ideas”.
“I am studying the reports (of previous interlocutors) but other than that I am trying to see some new ideas.”
Kashmir is not Sharma’s first assignment of brokering peace. In June this year, he was tasked to initiate a dialogue with insurgent groups in Assam, including the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and those representing Bodos.
Asked over any difference between his previous peace brokering assignment and the new one, he said; “The big difference is that there is not any involvement of Pakistan and any third country in the northeast.”
(Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in and rajnish.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Syed Salahuddin
New Delhi : The NIA on Thursday carried out searches at the residence of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin in Kashmir valley in connection with a six-year-old terror funding case.
An NIA official told IANS, “The agency carried out searches at the residence of Shahid in Soibugh village of Budgam district early in the morning today (Thursday) which has concluded now.”
“We have seized mobile phones, laptops, hard disks and several incriminating documents.”
The raid comes two days after the counter-terror probe agency arrested Shahid, 42, a state government employee, in Delhi after he was called for questioning at its headquarters in a 2011 terror funding case that pertains to terror money sent through hawala channels by militants based in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to Jammu and Kashmir to instigate terrorist activities.
The NIA has alleged that Shahid over the years has been receiving and collecting funds through international wire money transfer from Hizbul Mujahideen militant Aijaz Bhat, a Srinagar resident now based in Saudi Arabia.
Shahid even during his questioning admitted to have received funds from the members of Hizbul Mujahideen on the direction of his father. He had also revealed the names of his associates abroad associated with the Hizbul Mujahideen and involved in raising, collecting and transferring funds from abroad to India.
After his arrest, the NIA said Shahid was one of Aijaz Bhat’s several contacts who were in telephonic touch “to receive the money transfer codes”. The money was meant to fund Hizbul Mujahideen’s militant activities in Jammu and Kashmir.
The NIA had filed two chargesheets against six accused in the case in 2011. Four of them – Ghulam Mohammed Bhat, one of the closest aides of hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mohammed Sidiq Ganai, Ghulam Jeelani Liloo and Farooq Ahmad Dagga – are currently in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.
Two of the accused, Mohammad Maqbool Pandit and Aijaz Bhat, are on the run and have been declared proclaimed offenders. Pandit, like Aijaz Bhat, has been an active Hizbul Mujahideen militant and is currently based in Pakistan.
Ghulam Mohammed Bhat, Ganai, Liloo and Dagga were arrested on January 22, 2011, and Rs 21.20 lakh was recovered from them.
After their arrest, Aijaz Bhat used to send money to Shahid.
The Hizbul Mujahideen chief’s son, according to an NIA official, received at least four instalments of money in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, News, Social Entrepreneur, Women Entrepreneur
Musharraf at her sanitary producing unit in Kupwara (left) // Mubeena Khan, a Kashmiri entrepreneur, at her sanitary napkin manufacturing unit in border district of Kupwara. (Photo credit: IANS)
By Sarwar Kashani,
Kupwara, (Jammu and Kashmir) : Growing up in a society that stigmatises menstruation, two women social entrepreneurs in this border village of Jammu and Kashmir are battling the taboos attached to what is a routine biological process. They are not only creating awareness but also manufacturing and selling sanitary napkins to help poorer women who cannot afford branded products.
Mir Musharraf, 18, and Mubeena Khan, 25, who grew up in an orphanage here, began their entrepreneurial journey two years ago, knowing well the arduous task they had chosen for themselves.
“We have experienced what women in Kashmir, particularly in the border and rural areas, go through during their periods. It’s not only about the stigma, it is also about hygiene during periods,” Mir told IANS.
Khan added: “It was never going to be easy. We knew that. Talking about menstruating is not easy even with women in Kashmir. But we wanted to defeat the stigma.”
Mir, who originally hails from Keran village, some 100 km north of state capital Srinagar, lost her father, a farmer, to blood cancer when she was still young. Keran, the last village of the eponymous border sector on the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan, has often faced the brunt of military skirmishes between the armies of the two countries.
Mir’s family had to relocate to Kupwara in the early 1990s after frequent heavy cross-border firing ripped the village apart. That was when militancy in the Kashmir Valley was at its peak and Pakistan was actively pushing armed insurgents into the Indian side under cover of border firing.
After her husband’s death, Mir’s mother had no other means of income to sustain the family. She got her daughter admitted to Basaira-a-Tabasum, an orphanage in Kupwara town run by Borderless World Foundation, a Pune-based non-governmental organisation that helps with the socio-economic development of people in border areas.
At the orphanage, Mir became friends with a “like-minded” Khan, who had also lost her father when she was just two-and-a-half.
The girls grew up in the orphanage that not only sheltered and fed them but also equipped them with entrepreneurial skills to be the agents of socio-economic changes in Kupwara — an area where an estimated 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Remembering their days in the orphanage, both Mir and Khan recalled how they used to talk for hours daily, planning what they wanted to do in their lives.
“I always wanted to do something for women, particularly those living in border areas. But I had not imagined even in my dreams that I would be talking about menstruation so openly, leave aside producing sanitary napkins,” Mir said.
“Actually, Mubeena came up with the idea and you know why,” she asked matter-of-factly.
Khan had always felt perplexed about the treatment women got during their menstrual cycles. They are not allowed inside kitchens, they are not allowed to pray, they become untouchables during their periods.
“The most difficult battle in the war against such evils was with ourselves. We, as women, too believe in the traditions and it is very, very difficult to break the norm. And believe me, many girls drop out of schools because of this,” Khan, whose village, Helmatpora, also lies on the LoC, told IANS.
And equally important was making women aware about hygiene and other health issues associated with periods. Hundreds of studies have conclusively revealed that the practice of using cloth during periods is associated with very high risk of cervical cancers.
“When we get our first period, our mothers generally hand us a bunch of rags with strict instructions that we should not talk about it openly and stay away from the rest of the family,” she said.
“Imagine when we set out to talk about this openly. I remember how people, in fact girls, used to whisper about our ‘shamelessness’. But nothing would stop us.”
The two girls have conducted hundreds of awareness camps in schools, colleges and community centres talking about the issue.
The next step was their own self-empowerment and the empowerment of as many women as possible in their extended neighbourhood.
Eventually, they spoke with the Borderless World Foundation and shared the idea of setting up a cost-effective sanitary napkin manufacturing unit in Kupwara.
They began researching on the Internet, reading about their proposed business — before travelling to NIRMA Industries training centre in Solapur, Maharashtra, where they were incubated for three months and taught how to handle machines, grinders and other nitty gritty of the business by experts.
The real challenge was to raise the money needed for investment and also working capital. Iqra Javed, project officer with the Borderless World Foundation in Srinagar, said the foundation itself invested nearly Rs 12 lakh (Rs 1.2 million) to set up and run the unit.
Apart from this, the foundation helped them win Rs 300,000 as investment at a 2016 start-up competition by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Chinar Internationals, a Srinagar-based NGO helping start-ups.
And finally came the time to make a “Happy Choice” — the name they gave to their business unit. Machines and raw material were brought and the unit was set up at the Borderless World Foundation-run women development and social-entrepreneurship centre, Rah-e-Niswan, in a shanty structure in Solkute, 6 kms from Kupwara town.
The plan was to start production at the Solkute centre and establish a supply chain to distribute the product to other villages of the district.
“It was a 24-hour job. Right from the production purchases to the product, and then marketing, was all done by the two of us,” Mir said. “It was a challenge worth taking, though it took a heavy toll on us.”
The production rate was 250 packs of six pieces each a day. Each pack was sold at Rs 26 — against an average market price of Rs 35. A profit margin of Rs 16 was still significant.
Their lives got better and they started contributing to their family incomes and came the basic essentials like kitchenware, flooring and clothes for their mothers and siblings.
But the sales dipped after a while. The product and its packaging did not match market standards. “Happy Choice” did not have flaps that fold over the sides to help prevent the fluid from leaking. The packaging in an ordinary polythene cover with a sticker attached was also below standard.
To improve, they needed a packaging machine and a machine that would make and attach wings to the pads. But it would mean another investment of about Rs 900,000. Starved of funds, the two had to temporarily close their unit and have set out on an investment hunt.
“So far nobody has come forward. But we will keep striving till we get it. And we are sure — it is about ‘when’ not ‘if’,” Mir said.
But the awareness campaign is on. “We will keep talking about menstruation till everybody talks about it without attaching a taboo,” Khan intervened. “The battle is on. We have not lost it. We have paused it.”
(This feature is part of a special series that seeks to bring unique stories of ordinary people, groups and communities from across a diverse, plural and inclusive India and has been made possible by a collaboration between IANS and the Frank Islam Foundation. Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in)
—IANS
