Neither Saeed’s sentiments nor the proclamation of war were a surprise; despite the fact that the Lashkar-e-Taiba is proscribed in Pakistan, and its parent political organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, claims that it has no links with the terrorist group, the Muridke-based organisation has spewed venom – and terrorism – against India at regular intervals.

What did surprise observers was the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s choice of chief guest: the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader, Mohammad Yasin Malik. Ever since the JKLF renounced ‘armed struggle’ a decade ago, after its decimation at the hands of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), Malik has repeatedly asserted on more than one occasion that he is committed to the principles of Mahatma Gandhi. Malik has also claimed the JKLF’s struggle is ‘secular’, despite its past involvement in attacks on the Kashmiri Pandit community, while the Lashkar-e-Taiba makes no secret of its loathing for Hindus, Jews and other ‘unbelievers’.

In recent weeks, J&K’s political life has been thrown into uproar by another surprise: news that, just three weeks after the Lashkar rally, Malik also secretly met with the man India has entrusted with making sure the jihad fails: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. At his February 1, 2006, Press Conference, the Prime Minister said that he had met with Malik as part of his ongoing dialogue with secessionist leaders in J&K. When the JKLF leader responded with an irate denial, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) issued a clarification that Dr. Singh had in fact been referring to meetings held while he was in the Opposition.

For the most part, Indian newspapers have reported the event as an inconsequential spat over facts. Bar the entertainment drawn from the PMO’s spin-doctors tying themselves up in polemical knots, the Malik-Manmohan Singh meeting has been represented as being of no intrinsic value. In reality, though, the affair illustrates serious problems in the structure of India’s engagement with secessionist groups in J&K. Little noticed, New Delhi’s search for peace is being reduced to a series of covert machinations which could create problems more serious than those they were intended to solve.

Just what might these problems be? And why should policy-makers in New Delhi and Washington be thinking about them seriously?

Hidden behind veils of secrecy, India has for several months been pursuing an energetic secret dialogue on J&K, involving interlocutors from the state and US-based members of the ethnic-Kashmiri Diaspora. On January 25, The Hindu broke news of these meetings. Malik, who authoritative sources say had been driven to the PMO under Intelligence Bureau (IB) escort, was the most high-profile participant so far in a covert peace process being conducted by India’s National Security Advisor (NSA), the former IB chief M.K. Narayanan.

Neither the PMO nor Malik publicly responded to The Hindu’s report, although sources say the JKLF leader registered his protest with the NSA about the leak in no uncertain terms. When Prime Minister Singh was asked by a journalist about the India-Pakistan ditente process at the Press Conference, though, Singh volunteered the information that Malik had been among those he had met. According to a Press Trust of India report, Singh said that, “after coming to office he had interacted with a number of separatist Kashmiri leaders such as Yasin Malik and Sajjad Lone” [emphasis added].

Incensed by this assertion, Malik promptly called a Press Conference in Srinagar. He accepted that he had met with Singh in 2001 and 2003, but insisted that “talk of our [secret] meeting circulating in the media is nonsense.” Asked why the Prime Minister had then said that a meeting had taken place, Malik blamed “New Delhi-based NGOs.” “When we don’t meet them,” he claimed, “they come up with such things.” Soon after the JKLF leader’s press conference, the PMO affirmed Malik’s assertion that he had only met with Singh prior to the Prime Minister assuming office.

In the absence of a transcript, a final assessment of what the Prime Minister said is impossible. It is, after all, plausible that several reporters who filed similar accounts misunderstood what he said. What hasn’t been denied, though, is that secret meetings have in fact been taking place. In January 2006, for example, Narayanan met with Farooq Kathwari, a US national who is a significant contributor to Islamist organisations, to the Asia Society and to mainstream political groups. Prime Minister Singh himself held a meeting with the US-based Kashmiri Pandit leader, Vijay Sazawal.

Other signs of energetic back-channel movement aren’t hard to come by. In December 2005, for example, the Union Government reversed years of policy and issued travel documents to the hardline Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. With the foreknowledge of India’s covert services, Geelani used the cover of the Haj pilgrimage to hold extended discussions with the HM’s Pakistan-based leader, Mohammad Yusuf Shah aka Syed Salahuddin, as well as the US-based Islamist leader, Ghulam Nabi Fai. Most observers believe the HM hopes to use Geelani as its representative in future talks with India.

But why, it can reasonably be asked, are these secret meetings a problem – particularly since their aim is to bring about reconciliation between apparently implacable enemies? It is well known that covert services worldwide conduct negotiations where the political principals find it impossible. Israel’s long-running secret talks with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, or the Central Intelligence Agency’s Cold War dialogue with the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security, the KGB, are often cited as successful examples. India’s former spymaster, A.K. Verma, and the Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Hamid Gul, are also known to have held moderately-successful negotiations to restrict urban terrorism in the course of the Khalistan movement in Punjab.

In the course of the conflict in J&K, India’s covert services have maintained secret contacts with both political secessionists and members of terrorist groups. Indeed, one of the first exercises conducted by Narayanan after he took office as N.S.A. was to audit expenditure on India’s covert contacts in J&K, and prepare an inventory of what had been achieved – a long overdue stock-taking exercise. In some senses, the ongoing dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir is the fruit of these contacts, although they have sometimes appeared a waste of both energy and hard cash.

What has now happened, though, is a conflation of political and covert processes, both of which are contained in the body of the NSA. While critics of the NSA have claimed that Narayanan’s conception of his role is overweening, this critique is misdirected. The real problem lies in India’s leadership vacuum. Where the present Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh presided over the execution of the policy objectives in Punjab, or the late Rajesh Pilot engaged secessionists in J&K, the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has no-one who seems interested in playing a similar role today. Instead, New Delhi’s conflation of covert dialogue and political intervention holds out serious risks for policy-making on J&K.

India’s spies have thus stepped in where its politicians have failed. Malik’s case, though, provides excellent illustration of kinds of consequences this can have. The JKLF leader’s decision to share a platform with the Lashkar, a move intended to protect his person, violated Indian law on association with terrorist groups. In the interests of enabling his secret meeting, however, no action was taken. As a result, others under credible threat, like the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, have been gifted an excuse to appease Pakistan and the terror groups it chooses to patronise. Second, and more important, these moves undermine the credibility of the legal framework against terrorism. While covert contacts with figures across the political spectrum might indeed be useful, the decision not to prosecute Malik signals that the Indian state is willing to bargain away its commitments to punish terrorism. Third, and most important, contact at the level of the PMO leaves no room for failure. If dialogue involving the Prime Minister of India fails, New Delhi will be left with no alternative medium through which negotiations with secessionists in J&K might credibly be conducted.

Washington needs to be paying close attention to these facts, for the covert dialogue is principally intended for audiences in the US. Discussions with figures like Kathwari are intended to meet demands from the US that New Delhi help President Pervez Musharraf demonstrate that he is making progress in J&K – put bluntly, payback for the US pressure on Pakistan to de-escalate violence. As President George Bush’s visit to New Delhi draws closer, the pressure on New Delhi will, most likely, intensify.

Just why such pressures are misguided is well-illustrated by the decision to engage with Kathwari, whose organisation, the Kashmir Study Group, has advocated a communal division of J&K. Until 1999, when the intervention of then Research and Analyis Wing Chief A.S. Dulat enabled him to meet with several key politicians, Kathwari’s Islamist affiliations had even led to his being denied permission to visit India. Whatever status and influence the millionaire businessman’s wealth lends him, a meeting in the PMO – as opposed, say, in a discreet hotel room in New York – sends out the appalling signal that his ideas are open for discussion.

Put simply, Washington is ill-advised if it believes that it can sustain a distinction between ‘authorised Islamists’, and those that wage war against the US and India. Indeed, part of the reason why secessionists in J&K, as well as groups like the Hizb ul-Mujahideen are so reluctant to bring serious proposals the table is that they believe that US pressure on India will let them secure a better deal in the future. New Delhi, for its part, is equally ill-advised if it believes that secret deal-making is a substitute for real dialogue. Either way, a process intended to help prepare the ground for peace is actually stalling it, by shifting focus away from the principals – the people of J&K and those they have chosen to represent them through the electoral process.

Is there a way out? Yes – but only in the unlikely event that the hidebound, dissent-allergic intellectual establishment that informs policy on J&K demonstrates will and vision. Even as it allows covert processes to proceed, the Union Government could, for example, give N.N. Vohra, its chosen official interlocutor, a mandate and agenda for the consultations he has been holding in J&K. It could also ask Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz to begin a state-level dialogue on autonomy with all major groups. The US could, for its part, make clear to Pakistan that no level of support for terrorism is acceptable; that it must let go the strings that let it guide the course of the jihad in J&K.

For this to happen, though, both New Delhi and Washington D.C. will have to abandon their evident conviction that history can be manufactured behind closed doors, and at a tempo laid down by bureaucrats. Covert processes do have an invaluable and necessary role in policy execution, but cannot be a substitute for political policy-making. One of the things the troubled history of Jammu and Kashmir teaches us, after all, is that secret deals are of only so much value outside of the rooms where they are sealed.

The writer is Deputy Editor and Chief of Bureau, Frontline Magazine, New Delhi.

Courtesy : South Asia Terrorism Portal

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