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Kashmir : Step-up in violence

	January 07, 2002

Two months after the attack on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly killed 38 people, militants last week lobbed three hand grenades at three different points near its main gate, killing a policeman and wounding 12.

The attack comes in the wake of reports that the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Hizbul Mujahideen had threatened fresh strikes. The JeM threatened attacks despite Pakistan Government’s announcement that it has rounded up its members.

Militants, believed to be of the Hizbul Mujahideen, first threw a grenade at a police party at Jehangir Chowk, near the main gate of the Assembly, but it failed to explode. Policemen immediately cordoned off the area. While they were removing the explosive, the militants struck again, lobbing another powerful grenade which exploded, killing one policeman and injuring eight others. Another grenade was targeted at a Border Security Force picket in Magermalbagh leaving two soldiers injured.

Earlier, reports in a local newspaper said JeM spokesman Abu Hijira had asked militants to carry out lethal attacks on military and para-military installations in the next few days. Quoting the JeM spokesman, a local newspaper said the militants were told to strike with greater accuracy. The Hizbul commander Mohammad Yousuf Shah alias Syed Salahuddin, according to a party spokesman, told militants in Muzaffarabad, PoK, that any Indian aggression would prove disastrous.

Meanwhile, a “bandh” (strike) called to protest the killings of six Hindus in Mangnard village crippled normal life in border towns of Poonch and Rajouri last week even as people refused to cremate the bodies and held protest demonstrations. As the bodies of the six Hindus reached Poonch town from the village, all shops and business establishments downed the shutters and vehicular traffic went off the roads. People shouted anti-state government and anti-police slogans. In Rajouri, Sunderbani, Kalakote and Mendhar, people observed partial bandhs in protest against the killing.

In the third incident of its kind, unidentified gunmen attacked the house of senior Hurriyat Conference leader Abdul Gani Lone but no loss of life or damage was reported.The gunmen opened fire at his Sanat Nagar residence in Srinagar prompting his security guards to return the fire. Lone and his family members were inside the house at the time of the attack. This was the third attack on Lone during the past two months.

In November, unidentified gunmen fired a few shots at his house and on Christmas, an unknown person threw a hand grenade at his parked vehicle in Doda town.

Meanwhile, the build up along the Line of Control threatens to escalate. At least 11 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 17 of their bunkers destroyed in retaliatory motor shelling and firing by Indian troops on Pakistani formation along the Line of Control (LoC) in the Jammu-Poonch sector, defence sources said. Two Indian soldiers were killed and three injured and two Indian posts suffered damage in the exchange of fire.



Centre disconnects Kashmiris

In order to ensure that the telephone system and the Internet in Jammu and Kashmir are not misused by militants, the Vajpayee Government has simply switched off the Internet and effectively banned most Kashmiris from calling long-distance. Even as the rest of the country literally rang in the New Year by calling friends and relatives around the country, people in J&K woke up to find that they had, quite literally, been disconnected.

While militants can still communicate through walkie-talkies and satellite phones, a Srinagar resident cannot now go to a PCO to talk to relatives in the State or correspond with outside world. Journalists can no longer file news via the Internet or PCO fax.

Under orders from the communications ministry - acting on instructions from the Cabinet Committee on Security - Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd suspended all public STD and ISD facilities out of the State, as well as Internet services. Private subscribers and offices can still call the rest of the country, but the majority of people in J&K who rely on PCOs to communicate with the outside world have been thrown into the telephonic equivalent of solitary confinement.

Jammu-based activist and writer Balraj Puri called the Centre’s latest move as another step in the isolation of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Intelligence agency officials felt that the ban won’t stop the bad guys from talking to each other. It has been pointed out that in any case it was never possible to dial Pakistan from the State and that ordinary Kashmiris would be inconvenienced and alienated. Such measures could actually prove counter-productive, observers felt.

Communications minister Pramod Mahajan’s statement that the temporary ban had been imposed because of the border situation. The Government wanted to ensure that spies do not convey details of troop movements using PCOs or e-mail. But additional troops have also been deployed on the Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat borders. That the Government had not suspended STD facilities from PCOs in these States, has upset the Kashmiris.

While the locals in Jammu and Kashmir are up in arms against the Government decision to snap STD and ISD services in the State, the worst victims of the decision seem to be the security personnel deployed there. The security officials used to be in touch with their families through STD once a week. Due to the heightened terrorist risk, the families of the personnel felt relieved when they talked to them. Snapping of the facility abruptly came as a shock to the security personnel as it was done at a time when tension at the border increased and families back home were worried.

The suspension of telecom services and the withdrawal of Internet facility have evoked strong resentment from traders, business houses and public call office (PCO) operators in the Valley. In the absence of government jobs for the educated youth, parents of thousands of youth had set up PCOs to keep them busy and enable them to earn something, but the decision has rendered them jobless.



Shabir Shah rules out talks with Centre

Senior Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah has ruled out any further talks with the Centre and alleged that the earlier process initiated through the nomination of K C Pant as interlocutor was a farce and lacked sincerity. He did not see any purpose in having talks with him in Srinagar as well as in Delhi when the Centre was not ready to budge from its earlier policy on Kashmir. Shah heads the Democratic Freedom Party. Stressing that a solution to the vexed issue could be achieved only through dialogue and not guns, Shah said the Centre had not responded to his suggestions for creating a conducive atmosphere in Kashmir. He said he had always maintained that a dialogue was the only way of solving the Kashmir issue, but felt that the entire process was initiated to let him down. Stating that he had responded to the Centre’s initiative despite threats from various outfits, Shah pointed out that the Centre had not acted even on his basic demand for cutting down the custodial killings. Over the time, he had started feeling that the Government was not serious and Pant’s mission was just an eyewash. .



Indo-Pak tension moves on to cyberspace

Pakistani hackers have made several attempts to hack into Indian sites—especially those containing data on sensitive information relating to nuclear test management—to access sensitive information related to the country’s security, according to sources in the Intelligence Bureau. The sites targeted include those of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), the Nuclear Science Centre (NSC) and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC).

Although these three sites have been repeatedly hacked in the past, according to IB officials, the recent attempts were aimed at accessing crucial data secured under severely firewalled servers. It is quite apparent that the new breed of hackers are much more equipped and trained. There could have been at least a couple of successful attempts to break the codes of the sites.

There have been as many as seven attempts to hack into the BARC data since the attack on Indian Parliament on December 13. The IB is also on the lookout for spy programs that might have been installed. The IB has already written to the Defence and the Home ministries about the issue. The two ministries have, in turn, sought the help of cyber security firms to shore up the sites.

The hackers, it is suspected, could be on the payroll of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence. There has been a history of infiltration into Indian sites with sensitive information by Pakistani hackers. The first infiltration into BARC was in 1998, when it was hacked by three members of Milworm, a Pakistan-based hacker group. Ever since, BARC servers have been favourite targets of Pakistani hackers. This year alone, at least one spy program has been detected in a BARC mail server.

The first intrusion into IGCAR was reported in January last year when G-Force, a Pakistani hacker group, defaced its main server. Subsequently, other servers in IGCAR have been repeatedly hacked by G-Force. Indian intelligence officials have identified one hacker as Rsnake, who is said to have copied the master database from IGCAR and provided some data to Pakistani intelligence as proof of his access. The ISI, in turn, has realised the risks of hackers after BARC was hacked in 1998. The first Pakistani hacker group-Pakistani Hackers Club-was formed by two ‘hacktivists’ who used the pseudonyms Doctor Nuker and Mr Sweet. Doctor Nuker took to hacking when he was a computer science student at Karachi University. Along with fellow hacker Dizasta (real name: Fahad Shamshek Khan), he started hacking into critical Indian and US servers.

Doctor Nuker, say IB officials, was the first hacker whose skills were recognised by the ISI and under the latter’s directives, focused on critical Indian government servers (especially those relating to nuclear and atomic establishments). But sources disclosed the most active Pakistani hacker in the recent past had been a person impersonating as Rsnake, who started hacking from the Netherlands where he was working with a group of portals. Inspired by Doctor Nuker, he started the hacker group G-Force from Holland. The ISI has now got him to Pakistan to coordinate other hackers targeting Indian websites, charge IB officials.



Civilians death toll 10.000 in proxy war in J&K

Eleven years of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir has taken more lives than all the casualties suffered during the three Indo-Pak wars together, according to official figures.During the past 11 years of proxy war, which Pakistan has forced on India since 1990, nearly 10000 innocent civilians were among the 28000 who lost their lives and property worth millions of rupees was destroyed. As many as 14356 militants had been killed since 1990 till last year.The well co-ordinated operations of police and security forces backed by accurate intelligence in-puts inflicted heavy casualties on the ultras during 2001.

The meticulously planned counter-insurgency operations led to the elimination of 2020 militants in 2001 as against 1520 in the year 2000. Nearly, 85 ultras also surrendered to authorities taking the total number of surrendered militants to 3197 so far. A total of 568 personnel of state police, 2485 personnel of other security forces followed by 208 SPOs and 66 VDC members have sacrificed their lives while combating militancy from 1990 to ending 2001, they said.

Since the State police had been at the forefront in the fight against militants, Kashmir police suffered the highest number of casualties in 2001.



Is there hope for Kashmir?

Is there any way to bring J&K out of the deep freeze, with its sub-zero temperature carefully maintained by regular terrorist strikes, wonders columnist Pamela Philipose. With its brutal security regime and deep mutual suspicion between the people and the state? With its unkept political promises and almost non-existent government? Because even as despair rises every time corpses are gathered from bloodied pavements, there can be no doubt that if terrorism has to be convincingly fought in this country, it has to be fought here first, and it has to be fought in ways more imaginative, more committed, more transforming than the mechanical deployment of brute force.

Tragically, the Centre has allowed itself to play to the design of the terrorist by more or less suspending every initiative that promised to break the impasse. The ceasefire initiative that was ended as a sort of exchange deal for the Agra Summit is today distant memory. The completely arbitrary ‘’talks’’ that the prime minister’s emissary, K.C. Pant, has had with ‘’Kashmiris’’ have always threatened to be something of a joke. As if to underline this, STD and Internet facilities have now been withdrawn rendering empty the much-publicised development package of setting up PCO and cyber cafes by mobilising bank loans to address the problem of unemployment and isolation here. As for the Abdullah government, it is best symbolised by an absentee Chief Minister.

Yet, in a curious way, despite the reversals and the very present threat of violence, the possibility of changing this dismal history is brighter today than it has been in a long while. There are several reasons for this, but foremost among them is the crackdown on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e-Toiba responsible, according to independent sources, for 70 per cent of the terrorists strikes in Kashmir over the last three years. Pakistan has, by no means, discarded its Kashmir agenda and has carefully underlined its commitment to ‘’indigenous’’ groups functioning in the Valley. It would also be naive to dismiss real concerns about groups like the Al-Qaeda, presently on the run, finding their way into Kashmir. But the fact that there are enormous dents in the terrorist network of yore presents both an opportunity and challenge.

At no point of time did the jehadis ever capture widespread support among the Kashmiris and their tactics of indiscriminate blood-letting has not helped. The faces of ordinary people on the streets after any strike reflect only despair and helpless anger. Apart from this, fundamentalist elements have never in any case found widespread public support. When a little known outfit, the Lashkar-e-Jabbar, set itself the relatively modest task of getting Muslim women in the state to don the burqa with the help of a bottle of acid or two, it created fear and resentment - not exactly the right responses to elicit popular support.

But if it is to benefit from this historical moment, India should also be serious about finding political solutions in a year that should witness the state going to the polls. For too long have we regarded J&K as a badge of our honour and a wound in our side. Changing this reality would require a long process of developmental and democratic initiative, of easing the reins and letting the Kashmiris themselves take charge of their destinies.

On the one hand, is this business of furthering democracy. The Prime Minister was rash enough to promise ‘’free’’ and ‘’fair’’ elections in Kashmir in his Independence Day address, two words that cannot describe any election in that benighted state apart from the 1977 one. The election that brought the present State Government to power was, even by the Election Commission’s own admission, a command performance. A repeat of this in September-October 2002, when J&K is scheduled to go to the polls, should not be allowed.

So let us get that locomotive of change to start chugging again, that missing rail line, the four-lane NH-1, the horticultural packages, the primary education and rural electrification projects. Let’s get our best bureaucrats, our best engineers, our best planners, to invest their energies in this endeavour. Let us also re-initiate the process of dialogue with the people of Kashmir and honour the historical commitment inherent in the Instrument of Accession of preserving the region’s autonomous status. The unilateral offer of the pre-1953 status, not just to the Valley, but to Jammu and Ladakh as well, could underline the seriousness of this intent.

Final solutions on Kashmir may be a long time in coming and would certainly involve talking to Pakistan at some point. But what prevents India from talking to ourselves, if indeed Kashmiris are regarded as ourselves? If 2002 sees real progress along these lines, if it sees reconciliation rather than recrimination, if it witnesses one ‘’free’’ and ‘’fair’’ election, it would change the tenor of politics, not just in J&K, but within India as well.



Hurriyat team to meet envoys in Delhi

The All- Party Hurriyat Conference has decided to send a three-member delegation to Delhi to meet diplomats of different countries to find an “honourbale and fair” solution to the Kashmir issue. Comprising firebrand Jamaat-e-Islami leader Syed Shah Geelani, J&K Peoples Conference chairman Abdul Gani Lone and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front president Mohammad Yasen Malik, the delegation will leave for Delhi shortly, according to a spokesman of the 23-party amalgam.The delegation will meet envoys of different countries and stress an honourable and fair solution to the lingering Kashmir issue to ensure peace and tranquility and a secure future.