BJP's backward glance in Kashmir is retrograde

What kind of a Republic Day present did the Bharatiya Janata Party think it wanted to give to the nation? Even its main ally, the Janata Dal (U), has come out against its move to hoist the national flag at the Lal Chowk in Srinagar. Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumar, has said that the Ekta Yatra organised by the BJP’s youth wing had little meaning “given the kind of tension prevailing in the Valley.” He is probably expressing the national sentiment.
The BJP, of course, sees it in a different way. Integrating Kashmir to the Indian Union has been one of its three “core” agendas, along with a uniform civil code and the construction of a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
 
Mookerjee
There is a deeper background here. In its recounting, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor of the BJP, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee was martyred for that cause. Mookerjee died, of an illness complicated by his poor treatment in 1953, after he had been arrested by the then J&K government headed by Sheikh Abdullah— the grandfather of the present chief minister, Omar Abdullah— while entering Kashmir.

BJP youth wing on their Ekta Yatra at the Punjab border

Mookerjee differed fundamentally with the Nehruvian policy of accommodating Kashmiri aspirations for autonomy. For Mookerjee, the idea of not permitting outsiders to settle in the state, or the special privileges that the state had got, through negotiations with New Delhi, were an anathema.
Kashmir is an issue on which the BJP  calibrates itself— measures the extent to which it remains true to its ideology. Having been helped by a befuddled Congress to recover from its seven-year enervation, the party is pacing itself against its tried and tested causes to see how it functions as a political unit.
As of now its current second-tier duo— Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley— seem to have marshalled the ideology, and the troops, effectively. But the Kashmir agenda could once again blow up in its face. We need only recall the fiasco that was the Rashtriya Ekta Yatra led by Murli Manohar Joshi in 1991. Given the troubled times, it had to eventually carry out its flag-hoisting mission in Srinagar under the protection of a curfew and CRPF guns.

We are not suggesting a Mookerjee-like tragedy or Joshi like farce here. But what can happen is that the party may over-reach itself. The almost all-round condemnation of its proposed plan to hoist the tricolour in Srinagar is a pointer towards that and Nitish Kumar’s condemnation is almost a confirmation. Politics cannot be run through fetishes, and the Kashmir integration issue, which the BJP sees in simplistic terms, has become that.
All those who have seen the bloodbath in Kashmir in the last two decades know just how complicated the Kashmir problem is. This was not simply an outcome of the lack of integration of the state with the rest of the country. What has become evident in recent years is that while the armed militancy has been defeated, it has not been completely eradicated. There are still a substantial number of gunmen around to disrupt the peace of the state, should they choose to. Knowing that they have little chance against the Indian security apparatus, they bide their time and choose their strikes with great care. This was evident in the killing of separatists like Abdul Ghani Lone and the shooting of Fazal Haq Qureshi, both of whom were for a dialogue with the Union government.
 
Fear
While militancy may be down, separatist sentiment remains high in the Valley. It is carefully nurtured through strikes, hartals and the like and mobilisations —such as those relating to the alleged rape and murder of two sisters in Shopian, or the proposal to lease some forest department land to the Amarnath Yatra Shrine Board.
Last year the cause of the day was the killing of Tufail Ahmed Matoo. But what added extra fuel to the upsurge were the Machil killings of three persons, allegedly by army personnel who wanted to pass them off as militants. The emotional alienation of the Valley’s young is such that they are always a ready source of foot-soldiers. Earlier, they took to guns, but now they have begun using stones.
At the heart of the Amarnath agitation, which was, at first sight, a trivial issue, was the reservoir of fear into which those who planned the agitation tapped. This is the fear that the Valley Kashmiri Muslims have of being overwhelmed by the “Hindu” majority. Thus calls to integration—BJP style—which means the possibility of outsiders buying land and possibly displacing the locals, plays well into the Kashmiri Muslim psyche.
Actually, in today’s day and age, while it is easy to displace a couple of hundred thousand people, like the Kashmiri Pandits, it is simply not possible to see how you can change the religious and ethnic composition of a compact area of 15,000 sq kms, where 98 per cent of the nearly
6 million people who reside, are Muslim.
But you cannot argue against fear. Especially, since that is exactly what the more extreme members of the BJP would want to instill in the Valley. As a result the small, but perceptible shifts in the state pointing towards greater accommodation to the national mainstream and a distancing from the separatist agenda, are being jeopardised.
 
Vajpayee
The BJP’s urge to calibrate itself against its foundational movement and the reactions of the Kashmiri Muslims, are coming in the way of efforts to resolve the long festering problem. Over the recent years some issues have become manifest. First, that Pakistan is willing to abandon its long-held positions relating to a plebiscite or self-determination in the Valley. Second, that  military commanders like Syed Salahuddin are also ready to work out a peace agreement. Third, that the separatists in the Valley, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani, are willing to work out a deal with the Union government.
The only “dissidents” here would be the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and some elements of the Pakistani security establishment, both of whom have an agenda which is not really related to Kashmir.
In this background, the attitude of the BJP is that of a spoiler. It has no workable proposal to make on J&K, but it wants to use the issue as an element in its national strategy to return to power at the Centre. That’s a pity. The key steps that have led to the present favourable situation in  the Valley, be it with Pakistan or domestic opinion, were both initiated by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. But the BJP of today seems to be harking back to an earlier phase of its political life.
Perhaps it is time for the leadership of the party to reflect on whether they would like to go back to the post-Mookerjee past which turned out to be sterile, or adopt the path of pragmatism and commonsense charted out by Vajpayee.
 Mail Today January 26, 2011

The Prime Minister needs one more reshuffle

The reshuffle of the Union Council of Ministers is unlikely to alter the perception that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second government is simply not working. The key dysfunctionalities in the Cabinet remain unaddressed, as do the larger issues between 10 Janpath and 7 Race Course. There have been some important ministerial changes, but accountability, that key to performance, has been minimally enforced in Wednesday’s anodyne exercise.
 
Incompetence
Dr Singh will have to do more, much more to get his government back on track.  Perhaps there is need for a bureaucratic reshuffle as well. That many of his ministers let him down is no secret, but surely what should be more galling to him is the failure of his chosen top bureaucratic team comprising Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrashekhar and his Principal Secretary T.K.A. Nair. These are the people he chose and nurtured with the expectation that they would ensure that his government works smoothly, his agenda moves forward and his flanks are protected from the activities of wayward ministers. They have managed to do none of these things.
 Mr Nair as a retired civil servant serves at the will of the PM, but Chandrashekhar has received two unprecedented extensions in service after he retired. Within the system he is known as a decent, even cerebral man. But in hindsight, perhaps, it can be said that he has lacked the “can do” personality that a CabSec must have.
The CabSec is no ordinary bureaucrat. As the head of the civil service and the chair of the informal Committee of Secretaries, he effectively runs the day-to-day affairs of the government, supervises the country’s nuclear weapons programme and clears logjams across the governmental system. He is also the “coordinating secretary” in a number of areas— the civil servant charged with looking after a particular subject. The two important areas he looked after in the last couple of years are the Commonwealth Games and prices, both of which have formed the vortex that threatens to pull the government down.



Farcical
 The failure with prices has been more serious and was brought out most illustratively by an extraordinary document issued from the prime minister’s office. Though issued by his media adviser, it seemed to be a haphazardly thrown together list of things the entire government planned to counter the price rise.  The document, simultaneously a mea culpa and a cri de coeur is also an effort to pass the buck. In a peculiar way, it sums up all that has gone wrong with Dr Singh’s second government.
That it was a bureaucratic grab bag is apparent from the collection of proposals that went into the 3-page document. First, the blame — on late rains for the onions and, on the rising incomes and, curiously, “inclusiveness” programmes, for the increased prices of milk, fish, meat and eggs. Then were the usual empty threats against hoarders and the pathetic calls for awareness campaigns involving Resident Welfare Associations, as though all of India is some kind of a South Delhi suburb.
Along with the homilies on the need to enhance productivity and diversification of agriculture are two sound proposals on the need to review the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Acts, and the somewhat shaded hint of the need for FDI in organised retail chains. 
There was a touch of the farcical, too, in the declaration that NAFED and National Cooperative Consumers Federation (NCCF) would sell onions at Rs 35 a kilo at their retail outlets. To see what had been done I trawled the net and checked the websites of both organisations. And here’s the gem: A PTI report of Saturday 15th, two days after the PMO press note declared that “20 tempos loaded with a cumulative quantity of about 8000 kg of onions [had been sent out to] different localities in the national capital to sell the vegetable at Rs 35 a kg to the common people.” Since 2 kilos per family was the norm, a grand total of 4,000 Delhi households had presumably benefited. There is nothing in the website to suggest that such sales took place outside Delhi. It is not known how many kilos the NCCF sold, but its website lists a grand total of 14 retail outlets, all in New Delhi.
 
Accounting
Just as “security” really means the safety of Lutyens Delhi, where the babus and netas reside, price control, too, seems to have meant taking measures in Delhi. Maybe the foxy babus had another goal in mind—to ensure that the masses in Delhi remain quiescent and do not do a Tunisia here. Uprisings elsewhere can easily be suppressed, but food riots in Delhi are quite another thing. 
But this is to digress.
Tucked away at the end of the document were the two issues that are germane to our critique. The government, it said, had decided to set up an inter-ministerial group under the Chief Economic Adviser Kaushik Basu to review and monitor the situation.
For the past forty years or so, it is the Cabinet Secretary who has chaired a committee of concerned secretaries who monitor the food prices. The committee met monthly, but when the price pressure was high, it would meet more frequently. Its job was to take quick decisions—ban export, increase import, order raids, get the railways to move commodities fast and tweak  rules in ways that only the babus can to ease the pressure. Clearly, the committee had not done its work in recent times. Having failed on the job, the Cabinet Secretary and his colleagues, have retreated to the margins and pushed the Chief Economic Adviser to the centre stage knowing that he has great prestige, but little executive authority. This new inter-ministerial body is a needless layer in the mechanisms to fight rising prices. All it does is to lengthen the time taken for an effective executive response to a crisis and, perhaps more important, help spread the blame for
any failure wider. 
The shoddy document only serves to illustrate how ill served the PM has been by his bureaucratic team. Lacking dependable ministers, he invested a great deal of power and authority on them. But, as any fair accounting will reveal, he has got little in return.
Mail Today January 20,2011

The LCA is but a shallow achievement

The good news is that, though it has taken an unconscionable twenty six years, the Light Combat Aircraft has got its initial operational clearance. Hopefully by 2012, it will enter squadron service. We now have a platform that we have developed with considerable difficulty, and through which we have gained extensive new facilities located in the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA). These can be exploited to further advance Indian military aviation industry.
The bad news is that both the HAL and ADA are the same old organisations that have given us what one expert has termed as a “stunted” design, not particularly well suited for further exploitation. As it is, the Indian Air Force probably does not know what to do with it. Air Chief Marshal P.V. Naik’s left handed compliment described it as “a Mig 21 plus plus”.
Considering that the Mig-21 joined service in the mid-1960s, that does not quite look like a resounding vote of confidence.
Image: Rahuldevnath


After all, for an Air Force that flies aircraft like the Sukhoi 30 MKI, is in the market for a medium multirole fighter aircraft (MMRCA) and dreams of soon acquiring a fifth generation fighter, the LCA is a poor relative that must be kept far from sight and “out of harm’s way.” So it will be based at Sulur, near Coimbatore. 
 
HAL
 The LCA is likely to be a kind of discontinuity— just like the HF-24— in Indian aviation history. Meaning that it will soon wither on the vine. Yes, there is talk of an Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft to be taken up by the ADA with Rs 100 crores being advanced for preliminary work. But this should have begun ten years ago to effectively enter the cycle of design, development, production and obsolescence that all aircraft must go through.
For this, the DRDO and the Air Force are both to blame, as is the leadership of the ministry of defence which should provide  strategic guidance and directives to our R&D and production institutions and ensure that they are implemented.
The sad thing is that things  need not, and should not, have been this way. From the outset, the LCA project became more of an expression of bureaucratic power— in this case the DRDO—rather than a project that would enable the emergence of an Indian military aviation industry. The DRDO sought to do an end-run around the IAF which, in turn, disdained the project through its key first decade. Ideally, a senior IAF officer should have led the project carried out under DRDO auspices, much in the way the Advanced Technology Vessel programme.
The big problem the government faces is the poor quality of the defence public sector units (DPSU) and ordnance factories. In their work culture the producer is the king, not the consumer. Over the years the DPSUs have perfected the art of skimming the cream from defence contracts. They will compel the MoD to canalise orders through them, and then, instead of absorbing a particular technology, simply buy kits and assemble them and sell it to the armed forces at a higher cost than would be paid to import the same equipment.
Perhaps the worst offender in this category has been the HAL which has failed to absorb technology from projects such as the Mig-21, the Jaguar, the Advanced Light Helicopter, and the Sukhoi-30MKI. Because had it done so, we would not have had to go hat in hand to the Russians for an FGFA, or for that matter, buy an MMRCA. The latest example is the Sukhoi-30MKI which the HAL swears is being made from “raw materials” in India. The facts, as my colleagues in Bangalore tell me, are otherwise. Besides some localisation, the aircraft still comes in sub-assemblies  from Russia. In the case of the aircraft’s engines, there is not even a pretence of indigenisation, all of it— and it is 40 per cent by value of the aircraft— comes from abroad. Yet, the project was sold to the country as one which would give a massive boost to indigenisation of the Indian aviation industry, and the country paid for the transfer of technology.
Allowing HAL to remain a monopoly military aviation producer is bad for the IAF and the country. There is need to split it into two or three separate and, ideally, competing units, with their own design bureaus.
 
Privatisation
Aviation is not the only high-tech area that has been grossly mismanaged. The story is the same when it comes to the government shipyards. While the absorption of technology has been better, the costs and delivery schedules are simply unacceptable. The Navy’s acquisition programme has been hamstrung by the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the defence shipyards which lack the capacity and the quality consciousness to take up high-tech projects such as the construction of advanced warships and submarines.
The new defence procurement and production policy seeks to open up the defence industry to the private sector, but it does not go far enough. On paper there has been a policy of getting the private sector into defence production since 2001. But the realities are more complex. There is, the well known way in which ordnance factories are being kept on life-support by allowing them to obtain kits from Tata and Ashok Leyland for assembly into trucks that are passed off as their own product. Then there are genuine problems—private sector companies cannot afford the stop-go approach of the ministry of defence where orders come in piece-meal, depending on the budgetary commitments which are annually determined.
A private producer with a contract to make five ships, would like to buy the steel, cabling, and other components in bulk from the cheapest quality vendor. But in our system, he will be told, you make one of a class, and we will decide on follow on ships later. And later often never comes.
 
Corruption
Unlike the aviation sector, there are already a number of top quality shipyards in the private sector in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, some of them better equipped than their military counterparts. They would be happy to participate in the ship-building projects, provided the government displays some sensitivity to the manner in which businesses run, as compared to ordnance factories and PSUs, which take a cost, and an arbitrarily high “plus” method, to fix their prices.
It is no secret that many of the problems of defence procurement arise from good, old fashioned, corruption. The elimination of middle-men or agents has done little to check the underhand games that take place. In 2009, a retired head of the Ordnance Factory Board that supervises 39 factories across the country, was arrested along with three other persons for alleged bribery. The recent mysterious loss of a file relating to offsets in the MMRCA competition gives a hint at the processes that are at play when a big buy is undertaken. The 2010-2011 CAG’s report has brought out small instances where “shadow” companies work in tandem with ordnance factories in such a brazen manner that tenders purporting to be from different firms have the same telephone and fax numbers.
Few in the country would grudge spending money on defence of the country. But they would be astonished if they knew the full story of the bureaucratism, egos, incompetence and plain corruption that characterises the Indian defence R&D and production system. Defence Minister A.K. Antony is trying to change the system, but his efforts are too little and too late. The man who needs to wield a big broom to clean up the system, has only a flimsy feather duster in his hand.
Mail Today January 14, 2011

Flat-footed response to a deep crisis

The Congress party’s response to the ongoing corruption tsunami is, to quote Alice, getting “curiouser and curiouser”. It began with a flourish over the New Year, promising an ordinance to deal with the issue. Then it transpired that the measure was nothing but old wine in new bottles — a dusted up version of the Lok Pal Bill thats been around for a while. Now, according to some reports, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) plans, believe it or not, to constitute a Group of Ministers (GoM), headed by the indispensable Pranab Mukherjee.
 Its two shining lights are, M K Alagiri whose anti-corruption credentials are mysterious, to say the least, and Sharad Pawar, whose presence in the body seems to be a brilliant stroke of black humour. For the record it also has St Antony, no doubt, to give it a veneer of probity, along with a motley crew of Mamata Banerjee, P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Veerappa Moily. 
The party has also let it be known that  it is ready to include the Prime Minister in the  ambit of a new Lok Pal Bill, as if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were being accused of any personal wrong-doing. This is such a transparent — if futile — gesture to deflect popular anger, that we can only term it pathetic. It is not going to win any converts among the masses, leave alone moderate the rate of erosion of its popularity.
 
Politics
Clearly, besieged by allegations of corruption, the Congress party leadership is losing whatever little touch it had retained with the habit of mass politics. Here we don’t count staged durbars, contact programmes à la Rahul Gandhi and election rallies. Mass politics is where ideas and issues flow up from the grassroots with the same felicity they come top-down.
In place of a political system that draws its energy and self-esteem from the people, as it were, we have a system where fixers, not only of the corporate variety, but also those who claim to speak on behalf of 10 Janpath or various coalition leaders, decide issues. Legislation is vetted by them, as are key political and bureaucratic appointments. Orders and instructions flow from the top to the bottom, with little understanding of the context.
One of the more revealing actualities that the Radia tapes have provided is an understanding of the role that corporate  lobbyists play in positioning politicians to become members of the Union Council of Ministers. The role of political fixers, however, still remains to be unveiled.




 In our system, selecting the Cabinet  is supposed to be the PM’s call, no doubt worked out through consultation with party bigwigs and coalition partners. But the final choice  is the undisputed prerogative of the PM. Now, with hindsight, we can explain the dissonance that has affected the UPA-II government — it arises because the PM is working with colleagues who he may not have selected, or even wanted, in his team.
There is, of course, a more profound problem. This has to do with the nature of the Congress party. Having neutered the politicians, it functions through the agency of bureaucratised politicians, or bureaucrats themselves. Instead of depending on inputs from the orthodox political grassroots, it is used to handling things top-down. That is the reason, the party has begun to put so much store by  the agency of legislation as a means of fixing social and political problems. So we have had in quick succession, the Right to Information Act, the Right to Education Act, the National Rural Guarantee Employment Act, and the yet to be passed Right to Food Act.
It is still early days with the RTI, but we can already see the system’s backlash. The killing of RTI activists is one indicator of this. Another is the effort being made  to strangle the act by restricting its ambit post facto and packing it with former bureaucrats — the equivalent of having a committee of foxes to organise the security of a chicken coop. The extent of corruption with NREGA is only now becoming manifest. As to RTE, it is simply not working.
 
Legislation
The Right to Food Act, besides being virtually impossible to implement, is likely to become a major source of revenue for corrupt babus. Last year, in what is being called the mother of all scams, it was revealed that `2 lakh crore of food grain meant for Below Poverty Line card holders covered under various schemes  had been  smuggled not only outside the state, but outside the country in the 2001-2010 period.
Legislation has its place in a democratic country. But it is usually the culmination of a political process that comes from below, or a codification of a set of policy measures needed to make the government work better. Top-down legislation can work if you happen to be Otto von Bismarck.
The problem of hunger, illiteracy and maternal and neonatal health plaguing the country are not because money is lacking or that there is any lack of a specific legislation. You do not need laws to feed the hungry or eradicate illiteracy. The problem is that money appropriated for doing the needful ends up in the wrong hands.
More important is the structural problem. More than 60 years after independence, sections of the people — Dalits, women and tribals — are systematically excluded from development schemes because of social prejudice.
The political class can play a positive role here by mobilising and educating mass opinion. Unfortunately they’re more focused on enriching themselves and their families.
We need a political class  that understands that the state is distinct from the government. When there is an act of corruption by a minister or a public servant, it is the state, on behalf of the citizen that must act against him. This is not an issue that lies within the discretion of this or that party because it happens to be running the government.
 
State
State institutions have been undermined by our political class. What is needed now is to empower them and this can, indeed, come through legislation. Given our parliamentary system, we cannot have any system which is not answerable to Parliament. And that can only be done through a ministry and a minister. But that does not mean that the department of the ministry — say an autonomous prosecutor’s office under the Ministry of Law and Justice — cannot be guaranteed real autonomy.
Legislation is indeed needed to make the  Central Bureau of Investigation, which today functions as an attack dog of the government, into a body that uses its investigative and prosecutorial arms on behalf of the state, not the party in power. Likewise, the country needs a strong Central Vigilance Commission, given real autonomy by the laws of the state.
Individuals can play an important role here. After all, it was people like T N Sheshan, a pliant civil servant if there was one, who liberated the Election Commission from its political servitude. Subsequently Commissioners like J M Lyngdoh have burnished the body’s credentials, despite the effort by the Congress to undermine the commission by putting a Gandhi-family friend in-charge of the body. The Comptroller and Auditor General, too, has emerged as an important state entity who is playing the constitutionally mandated role as a watchdog of the people.
Sadly, independence and integrity seems to have been bred out of many of our senior bureaucrats, and the problem is worsening by the year. The public mood is one of cynicism and anger. The Congress will have to do much better to deflect public anger than by pulling some faux legislation and GoMs out of the hat.
Mail Today January 7, 2011

Thinking ahead in Kashmir

Back in August 2010 at the height of the stone pelting in Srinagar I had written ( for the whole article see http://mjoshi.blogspot.com/2010/08/there-are-options-on-jammu-kashmir-but.html :

"The key short- term policy that needs to be put in place is the creation of a special police force for the Valley which is trained and mentally conditioned to deal with crowds, rather than militants. A word of caution here; it took the Union government several decades of communal riots to establish a special force to deal with it— the Rapid Action Force.
But the crowd control force that Kashmir needs requires an entirely different laundry list of equipment, training and personnel. It is not a matter of equipment alone. After all Tufail Mattoo whose June 11 death reportedly triggered off the current unrest died after being hit by a spent tear- gas shell, a non- lethal munition as such. People can die of pepper gun shots, if hit at close range, and it is a fact that many young boys may have drowned while trying to escape a police charge."

Here is a report from Greater Kashmir on the DGP's annual press meet. It seems that people have been thinking on those lines. 
Back in August 2010 at the height of the stone pelting in Srinagar I had written ( for the whole article see http://mjoshi.blogspot.com/2010/08/there-are-options-on-jammu-kashmir-but.html :

Separatists fund, fuel unrest: DGP

‘Everyone Knows Harsh Reality Behind Political Killings’

SYED AMJAD SHAH

Jammu, Jan 3: Blaming the separatists for funding and fuelling stone-pelting in the Valley, the state police chief Kuldeep Khoda Monday said that 207 persons were detained for stone-pelting during the summer unrest out of whom 55 were booked under Public Safety Act (PSA).
Khoda said that everyone in Kashmir knows the harsh realities of political killings and it was the right time for the ‘right thinking’ and ‘truth speaking’ people to come forward and tell the ‘reality’ to the people, which will be helpful for restoring peace in trouble hit-state.
“A senior Hurriyat leader spoke the truth and has vindicated our stand. The right thinking and truth speaking people should come forward so that people get to know about the reality. They should tell people about the truth and it could prove helpful in restoring peace and normalcy in Kashmir,” the police chief said at a press conference here today.
He was reacting to a question on the statement of senior Hurriyat leader Prof Abdul Ghani Bhat that top separatist leaders were killed by “our own people”.
“Everyone knew the harsh realities of political killings in Kashmir. He (Prof Bhat) revealed what everybody knows. I do not know what is the reason for him to say this at this moment? But this is the truth,” he remarked.
DGP said the Hurriyat leader had vindicated the police stand. “He has said what we had been saying all along.
The person involved in the killing of Mirwaiz Farooq is also buried in the same ‘martyrs’ graveyard’ where the senior Mirwaiz was laid to rest. Both killers and the killed are martyrs for them,” he maintained.
During a seminar, Prof Bhat had said that Mirwaiz Moulvi Muhammad Farooq, father of moderate Hurriyat chief Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, and Peoples Conference chairman Abdul Gani Lone were killed “by our own people”.
DGP remarked, “We had always maintained that militants were killing leaders of rival factions. When a separatist leader himself makes this disclosure, all I can say is that our stand has been vindicated.”

500 MILITANTS ACTIVE IN JK
Khoda maintained that 450-500 militants are active in the state where militancy has been lowest in past two decades but infiltration bids had increased.
“There are 450-500 militants actively operating in the state and 45-50% of them are foreign militants,” he said.
Referring to militancy in the state, he said the situation is under control and incidents are lowest in over two decades.
There are 488 militancy-related incidents in 2010 against 499 in 2009, 20 militants have surrendered in 2010 compared to 15 in 2009, he said adding lowest 47 civilians were killed in militancy related incidents in 2010 compared to 71 in 2009. Not only this, 69 security forces and police personnel were killed last year as against 79 in 2009.

SPECIAL IRP BATTALIONS
Blaming the separatists for fuelling and funding the summer unrest, the DGP said that five battalions of Indian Reserve Police (IRP), recruited recently, are being provided special training, body gears and weaponry to deal with the “abnormal situation” in Kashmir valley.
Describing year gone as the “highly challenging” for the J&K Police, the DPG said 2828 cops, and 1351 CRPF personnel were injured while dealing with the unrest in Kashmir valley, adding that 59 police personnel had been rendered disable for police department due to critical injuries. “91 civilians were killed while 545 others had received injuries in the summer unrest,” he added.
Khoda, who was reviewing the ‘performance and deficiencies and also to introspect’ the department’s functioning in 2010, remarked, “To counter such a violent situation and to maintain law and order, five IRP battalions are undergoing training in different police training schools so that the department could deal with the abnormal situation effectively.”
“The recruits of upcoming 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 IRP Battalions would be given special body gears to wear as it would reduce injuries while dealing with the abnormal situation,” he added, while saying that these recruits would be equipped with less or non-lethal weapons.
He said that the cops would be provided body protectors, poly carbonate shields, poly carbonate lathies, helmets and visors. Referring to the non-lethal weapons, Khoda said the police personnel would also be equipped with stun grenades, laser guns, teaser guns, gas guns, anti-riot rifles, and pump action guns to reduce civilian killings.
The DGP maintained that the Police are focused to reduce the “unnecessary civilian causalities” and also to safeguard the security personnel involved in dealing with the law and order situation.
He disclosed that a total of 207 persons were detained for pelting incidents and out of them, 55 had been booked under Public Safety Act (PSA).

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Jan/4/separatists-fund-fuel-unrest-dgp-52.asp

The ISI feared leaders wanted deal with New Delhi

My comment on the news item relating to a seminar in Srinagar where Prof Abdul Ghani Bhat acknowledged that some key leaders of the separatist movement were killed "by our own people." 
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/125374/top-stories/separatists-kashmir-hurriyat.html

The truth, they say, will out. Sometimes it takes time. The admission by Professor Abdul Gani Bhat, a key member of the original Hurriyat, that the gunmen who had assassinated top leaders such as Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq,  People’s Conference and Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) ideologue Abdul Ahad Wani, had been killed “by our own people” and not the Indian security forces is part of the painful process through which Kashmiri separatist leaders are coming to terms with the turbulent history of their own movement.
He did not say it, but the subtext of his statement was clear.
All these leaders had sought to move on a course that was different from the one that was being set by the puppet masters in Islamabad, who thought they were running the Kashmir movement.
There has never been much doubt in the minds of the Indian security establishment that they had been assassinated  on the orders of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of the Pakistan Army, notoriously known as the ISI.
It is significant that Professor Bhat made his remarks at a JKLF-organised seminar. Notwithstanding its initial role in triggering the Kashmiri militancy, the JKLF represented the secular edge of the separatist aspirations of the Valley Kashmiris.
Not only was it targeted by the Indian security forces, it was also hounded by the ISI. There are good reasons to believe that many JKLF leaders were betrayed to the Indian security forces by the ISI and in Pakistan. Leaders such as Amanullah Khan and Javed Ahmed Mir recorded the ill-treatment they suffered on account of their insistence that they were for an independent Kashmir, rather than one which merged with Pakistan.
The reason why each of these figures were assassinated was that the ISI feared that they would strike a deal with New Delhi. This has been a pattern that has not altered.
Even people like the current Mirwaiz, Umar Farooq, who knows that the ISI was involved in his father’s killing, exercise  abundant caution in keeping their bridges with Islamabad open.
In fact, between 2004 and 2007, when India and Pakistan were close to settling the Kashmir issue, the Mirwaiz developed a close relationship with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Indeed, so cruel are the compulsions that Abdul Ghani Lone’s funeral procession was accompanied with pro-Pakistan slogans.
The ability of the ISI to eliminate separatist leaders remains unchecked. Though Indian security forces guard even people such as Syed Ali Shah Geelani, an assassination can be arranged almost at will. Lone, for example, was gunned down at a memorial function for Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq when the police believed that no one would be heartless enough to strike.

Kashmir’s tragedy is not that Pakistan alone is responsible for all the assassinations. The many groups there have been involved in killing each other — Qazi Nisar, the Mirwaiz of South Kashmir was killed by the Hizbul Mujahideen in 1994.
They may have also been responsible for the killing of Dr Abdul Ahad Guru in 1992. Dr Guru was a leading physician in Srinagar and a JKLF leader, who was talking to Indian officials and ministers like Rajesh Pilot at the time of his assassination.
No doubt, the Indian security establishment has also used the instrument of assassination in the Valley.
In the main, they have used the instrumentality of former militants, or Ikhwanis. In great measure such killings belong to the past. In recent years there have been no significant assassination of a top-ranking leader.
Nevertheless, there should not be any doubt that all sides retain the capacity of eliminating anyone they choose to target.

Mail Today January 3, 2011