A BUS-RIDE TO UNCERTAINTY
KANCHAN LAKSHMAN
Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management

On March 30, four Jehadi groups gave a call for a general strike in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) on April 7 when the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service is to be flagged off by Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, and warned that people boarding it would be branded 'traitors'. "We humbly request the persons selected to travel on first and second bus to Muzaffarabad not to enter the coffin (bus) but if they do, they will find their names in the list of traitors," the little-known Al-Nasireen, Save Kashmir Movement, Farzandan-e-Millat and Al-Arifeen said in a joint statement faxed to the local media. The statement, while describing the bus service as a "deadly weapon that India wants to use against the jehadi forces", was accompanied by the list of 40 persons, complete with residential addresses and application form numbers, selected to travel on the inaugural bus journey.

Meanwhile, before the trans-Line of Control bus is flagged off, a marginal increase in violence has been visible in the State after a relatively peaceful winter. As the deadline to the journey approaches, attacks on civilians and security force (SF) targets have seen an increase in the last two weeks.

Between February 16, 2005, when the two countries announced the commencement of the bus service, and March 31, a total of 153 people, including 54 civilians and 13 SF personnel, have died in J&K. Of these, 24 civilians were killed in terrorist attacks across the State in the week of March 24-31 alone. On March 31, in what is being seen as a specific threat to the bus service, the Border Security Force (BSF) recovered 117 kilograms of powerful explosives hidden in four scooters on the route. The four explosive-laden vehicles were recovered on the Arampur-Srinagar and Arampur-Highgam roads on the Srinagar-Baramulla Highway. Khalid Hussain, a former Deputy Commissioner of J&K, and his wife, who are passengers, disclosed on April 1 that "We have received threatening calls from terror outfit Al-Nasireen. The militant outfit has threatened us not to travel to Muzaffarabad and meet relatives." Passenger safety, evidently, is bound to be paramount for both countries.

While security forces have taken over the Baramulla-Uri road and installed additional check points on the 45 km stretch to prevent any terrorist attack on the bus, the security grid across the State has been tightened in the light of possible attacks on vital and sensitive installations. The Army has also cleared landmines along the approximately six kilometer Uri-Muzaffarabad stretch in J&K till the last Indian post - the Kaman Post - to ensure that the bus service rolls out. Terrorist groups could, however, still subvert the peace process through a spectacular act of terror in J&K or elsewhere in India. Hard-line separatists in the State, such as the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, have also been quick to reject the bus service as a sop that avoids the real issue of the territory's status.

The Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus would link up the troubled Indian province with the area of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) referred to as 'Azad Kashmir' - seven districts with their capital at Muzaffarabad - but excluding the Northern Areas which were also part of the undivided pre-Partition principality of Jammu & Kashmir. 'Azad Kashmir' is an area comprising 13,297 square kilometers, with a population of about 3.271million. Ironically, there are few Kashmiris left in 'Azad Kashmir' - 85.4 per cent of residents are 'Punjabi-speaking', while there are substantial numbers from other Pakistani provinces, significantly including Pathans from the North West, and only a small population of ethnic Kashmiris (105,000 in 1993, or 3.21 percent, according to one source in 'Azad Kashmir'). While authoritative data is not available on the extent of the systematic 'ethnic flooding' of the area, reports indicate that the expropriation of land and residency rights in PoK has been in sharp contrast to the situation in J&K, where provisions of the Indian Constitution disallow non-Kashmiris from acquiring property.

'Azad Kashmir' has also provided the base camp for the jehad in J&K ever since the dramatic escalation of militancy in 1989. Many Pakistan-based jehadi groups are headquartered in Muzaffarabad or have 'camp offices' in the area. Sources indicate that, as of January 2005, there were at least 36 jehadi training camps in PoK, housing approximately 3,660 cadre, with a majority of these located in the Muzaffarabad and Kotli districts. The Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) maintains, among others, the Danna and Abdul-Bin-Masud camps in Muzaffarabad and Badli camp in Kotli with almost 500, 300 and 300 jehadis respectively. Similarly, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) has, among others, the Jangal Mangal camp in Muzaffarabad and another at Mangla with at least 300 cadres each. On December 10, 2004, Shazia Ghulam Din, the daughter-in-law of the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF) founder, Maqbool Bhatt, told Indian journalists visiting Muzaffarabad that Pakistan continues to maintain militant camps in PoK, Gilgit and Baltistan. "The Pakistani establishment has merged several of these camps and moved them away in the periphery of Muzaffarabad and other areas in PoK," Ghulam Din disclosed. She also noted that the presence of foreign mercenaries in PoK had created major social problems for the locals, and hoped that the world community would come to know about the real situation once the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service was launched. "Life in PoK is worse than death," she declared, claiming that the Kashmiri culture and secular ethos had suffered "constant degradation" due to the presence of foreign mercenaries.

On both sides of the LoC, terrorist groups and hard-line separatists, in radical contrast to its overwhelming popularity among the general Kashmiri populace, have opposed the bus service, claiming that the 'core issue' of Kashmir would be eclipsed, and that such measures would only help India ultimately transform the LoC into a permanent border. While the jehadis insist that the bus would be "detrimental to our freedom struggle", the resumption of the road link between Srinagar and Muzzafarabad for the first time since 1947 is widely seen as a 'people-centric measure' or what D. P. Dhar, a former Home Minister of J&K, described in 1966 a measure for the "emotional enlistment" of the people.

The jehadis, on the other hand, state unequivocally that solutions to the Kashmir issue have to be territorial or land-centric. The bus, consequently, is of no significance to them, since the Kashmir issue has to be resolved on their terms, which essentially require a merger of the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan. Thus the 'Supreme Commander' of the HM and chairman of the Muzaffarabad-based United Jehad Council (UJC), Syed Salahuddin, ridiculed the bus service stating, "Neither can it hoodwink the world community nor the Kashmiris." Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, chief of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organisation of the LeT, similarly remarked that initiatives such as welcoming cultural delegations and starting bus services could not put an end to 'the mountain of enmity between India and Pakistan'. And in Srinagar, separatist leader Geelani asserted: "We have not given the sacrifice of a lakh (hundred thousand) people for a bus service, but for the right to self-determination." The fear among terrorist groups and separatists like Geelani is that such measures would gradually obliterate their constituencies and radically undermine the course of the Kashmir jehad, and disrupting the bus service has emerged as a critical extremist objective over the past weeks.

The concern that increasing people-to-people contacts could dilute the 'core issue' of Kashmir in the long run has also been underscored by others in Pakistan, and General Musharraf has found it necessary to reiterate, on March 23, that confidence building measures (CBMs) between the two countries would not succeed and would, indeed, loose credibility if the 'core issue' of Kashmir was not settled. During his address at the Pakistan Day parade in Islamabad, the President welcomed the bus service, but made it clear that it was not a solution to the Kashmir problem. And, while replying to an e-mail sent by an Indian to his (Musharraf's) website asking his views on the reunification of India and Pakistan as well as his 'silence' on the Kargil war, the President held out a veiled threat: "What is the future? Resolve disputes so that Siachens, Kargil, Marpola and Chorbatla don't happen again. Let us resolve Kashmir first and then I am sure it won't happen again."

One of the Pakistani military regime's major apprehensions is that allowing people from the Indian side to see the ground realities in 'Azad Kashmir', a jehadised area with little evidence of the culture and identity that underlies their collective consciousness, and where the most basic rights and amenities are lacking, could result in a dramatic reassessment of the secessionist quest. The deepening of non-official linkages between Indian and Pakistani controlled Kashmir contains inherent risks that Pakistan may lose control over the anti-India forces in Kashmir, once narratives from 'Azad Kashmir' become part of the open source discourse on both sides of the border. Pakistan's decision to forbid politicians from J&K to travel on the inaugural bus reflects precisely such anxieties. Already, feedback in Islamabad from recent people-to-people exchanges, including the visit by journalists, has reportedly indicated that the pro-Pakistan constituency in Kashmir is much smaller than had been imagined, a perception that Pakistan's military establishment would like to reverse.

It must remain clear, however, that steps such as the bus service, the current cricket-series bonhomie and CBMs in general, while they may, over time, strengthen processes of 'emotional enlistment', do not, in any measure, alter India's and Pakistan's stated positions on the Kashmir issue. In that sense, they will do little to change the fundamentals of the conflict in and over Kashmir, which can easily escalate again if any of the extremist players - or their primary state sponsor - recovers the capabilities of disruption or the impunity that they operated under before 9/11.

COURTESY: South Asia Terrorism Portal