India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad

The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004

Praveen Swami

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134137510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad explores the history of jihadist violence in Kashmir, and argues that the violent conflict which exploded after 1990 was not a historical discontinuity, but, rather, an escalation of what was by then a five-decade old secret war.

Praveen Swami addresses three key issues:

• the history of jihadist violence in Jammu and Kashmir, which is examined as it evolved from 1947-48 onwards
• the impact of the secret jihad on Indian policy-making on Jammu and Kashmir, and its influence on political life within the state
• why the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir acquired such intensity in 1990.

This new work will be of much interest to students of the India-Pakistan conflict, South Asian politics and security studies in general.

1
A HOUSE ON A HILL

The last argument is the sword.

Nurul Amin, Chief Minister of East Pakistan and President of the East Pakistan Muslim League, 1950¹

Perched above the Dal Lake in Srinagar, on the slopes of the Shankaracharya mountain, is one of Jammu and Kashmir’s least known monuments: a modest two-storey house that sits under the shade of a magnificent Chinar tree. It shows signs of neglect – the hand-carved walnut-wood ceilings have been painted over with hospital-white enamel, and a spectacularly unappealing concrete office block has come up on its right flank – but even the considerable efforts of the Public Works Department have not succeeded in obscuring its beauty. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India’s third Prime Minister and the architect of its most decisive military victory over Pakistan, is reputed to have spent a part of her honeymoon in this house. While the story might be apocryphal, few who have seen the house would disagree that she would have been well advised to do so.

On all sides of the house on the hill are other landmarks of Jammu and Kashmir’s recent political history. A few hundred metres to the left is the house of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the leader who was central in crafting the state’s independence from monarchical rule and was without dispute its most important political figure. The Lieutenant-General of Indian Army’s XV Corps, who commands the military forces that defended what is now Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistani assault in 1947–1948 and have held it ever since, lives and works across the road. Other centres of power are scattered all around: the home of the Indian state’s supreme representative in Jammu and Kashmir; that of the head of its external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the Pari Mahal, or the Palace of Fairies, which has served both as a home to many of Srinagar’s most powerful bureaucrats and as a top-secret interrogation centre.

Students of the spatial geography of power might find the location on the house of the hill significant: from there, it is but a short downhill stroll to any of these places. Their inhabitants, on the other hand, must march up the slope if they wish to visit the home of the Assistant Director of India’s Intelligence Bureau, the covert service responsible for the nation’s domestic security and counter-intelligence. This book is a history of the secret storm that swirled around the house on the hill: the long jihad that has been fought in Jammu and Kashmir from 1947–1948 to the present day. In the first half of this introductory chapter, I shall provide a brief overview of my arguments and a discussion of their significance, an introduction to the sources and documents I have used, as well as some conceptual questions. The second half of this chapter provides an overview of the strategic significance and pre-Independence politics of Jammu and Kashmir, leading up to the long jihad that began in 1947–1948.

The Jihad in Kashmir

To my mind, the course of the long jihad in Jammu and Kashmir raises questions that far transcend the spatial stage on which it was and is still being enacted: questions that may give both students of conflict and policy-makers cause for reflection on our understanding of and responses to jihadist forces.

In a world transfigured by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and their still-developing fallout, we have become accustomed to placing Afghanistan and the events that transpired there after its invasion by the Soviet Union at the centre of our understanding of global war unleashed by the Islamist far-Right. Much of the literature on modern Islamist groups sees them as children of the unhappy histories of post-colonial regimes, notably their poor administrative structures, poverty and repressive character, and the consequent expression of popular wrath through primordial religious identities. Islamist terrorism is, in this reading of history, the consequence of failures of nationhood; the politics which underpin it are seen as narratives that lie outside of and in opposition to the system of modern nation-states.

The jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, however, defies almost all of these conclusions. Contrary to much received wisdom on the subject, this jihad did not arise as a consequence of the dramatic events which transfigured what is sometimes called the Muslim World in the third quarter of the twentieth century. It commenced, instead, in 1947, within weeks of the birth of India and Pakistan and decades before the Iranian revolution or the movement of Soviet forces across the Amu Darya into Afghanistan. It was, as we shall see in coming chapters, the child of the very creation of two modern nation-states, India and Pakistan. Its extraordinary longevity is, albeit perversely, evidence of their success. Most of the protagonists of the long jihad were deeply entwined with the state-structures of both India and Pakistan: the military and covert apparatus of the two states, their geo-strategic fortunes, their ideological concerns and their existential anxieties. If we are to engage in a serious search for peace in Jammu and Kashmir, where the conflict has claimed well over 40,000 lives of both civilians and combatants in the last decade alone, we must first revisit the conflict and examine again our premises about its causes and course.

Ever since 1990, when the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir began to engage the world’s attention, a number of excellent books have sought to examine the political causes behind the violence. Victoria Schofield’s magisterial Kashmir In Conflict, for example, provides a fine overview of the roots of India–Pakistan contestation in the region, and the origins of the political forces that for a time threatened to evict India from the part of the state it controls.² Sumit Ganguly’s The Crisis in Kashmir provides an incisive account of the post-Independence collision between new social forces and flawed institutions that underpinned the explosion of violence from 1990.³ Navnita Chadha-Behera has, in turn, carefully examined the conflicts of ethnicity and regional identity in Jammu and Kashmir.⁴ All of these are but a very small sampling of the great volume of high-quality work on the origins and structures of the ongoing conflict. Most of these accounts see the violence in Jammu and Kashmir as a phenomenon of relatively recent genesis. Mohammad Amir Rana has, typically, asserted that the modern Pakistani “culture of jihad was strengthened by the revolution in Iran, nurtured by the Americans via Operation Cyclone, nourished by the extremist views and money of Osama bin Laden and came to fruition in the acts of the Taliban”.⁵

While this argument has some merit – the intensity and character of the jihad as well as its popular legitimacy was without dispute transformed by the cataclysmic changes in South, Central and West Asia witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s – it is far from a complete rendering. The jihad in Jammu and Kashmir had in fact raged on ever since Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Union of India in 1947, and Indian troops landed in Srinagar to defend the state against Pakistani irregulars. Although much scholarship contains references to the existence of terrorist activity at various points between Kashmir’s accession to India and the events of 1989–1990, there has so far been little history of what actually transpired in the interim period. Both India and Pakistan have different reasons for having maintained a discreet silence on the question. India has not wished to acknowledge the intensity and depth of resistance to its control of Jammu and Kashmir from the very outset. Pakistan, for its part, has had no desire to admit its sustained support for terrorism over almost six decades, conduct perhaps unprecedented in the relationships between two nation-states anywhere and at any time. Given the singular lack of archival material, the history of the long jihad in Jammu and Kashmir has existed only, so to speak, in the footnotes.

In essence, this book presents a new map of Jammu and Kashmir, a re-drawing of events with the jihad and its authors at the centre. It traces the long jihad through several distinct phases. The first began with the war of 1947–1948 and continued until the early 1960s, waged by small groups of Pakistan-backed covert operatives, whose principal objective was to bring pressure to bear on political processes in Indian-administered Kashmir. Nehru, appropriately, described this as “an informal war”.⁶ From the early 1960s to the mid-1960s, the informal war acquired greater momentum and structure with the emergence of the second phase of the jihad. Led by what came to be known as the Master Cell and its subsidiary covert organizations, this second phase of activity was intended to create the conditions for a mass rebellion in Jammu and Kashmir, and was informed by both expressly Islamist notions of jihad and emerging Pakistani military doctrines on sub-conventional warfare. After Indian counter-intelligence eliminated the Master Cell, the lessons learned from its failure were applied to a third phase of the jihad and manifested in al-Fatah, a group that thrived from the late 1960s until the war of 1971.

Al-Fatah, like its predecessors, failed to achieve its objective. Again, like its predecessors, it helped create a corpus of committed personnel, trained in covert warfare tactics and techniques, who would play a considerable role as mentors and inspirational figures in the future. In the immediate aftermath of its destruction and the territorial vivisection of Pakistan during the war of 1971, the task of rebuilding the jihad fell into the hands of the National Liberation Front. Suspect in the eyes of Pakistan’s covert services, the National Liberation Front nonetheless succeeded in running the fourth phase of the long jihad with some successes. It was, however, to gain little institutional support from Pakistan until geo-strategic circumstances in the late 1970s, and the subsequent successes of that country’s nuclear weapons programme, afforded the opportunity to escalate the long jihad to unprecedented levels. Much of the fifth phase of the jihad was fought outside of Jammu and Kashmir itself – a conflict I have described as a “war of many fronts”. It was this fifth phase of the jihad that led to the events witnessed after 1989–1990: a sub-conventional war fought under the cover of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Several commentaries on the India–Pakistan conflict have metaphorically described it as unending or unceasing. This book suggests, among other things, that this description is also accurate in a very literal manner. The four India– Pakistan wars – of 1947–1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999 – and the multiple crises that nearly led to more wars can be visualized as the great pillars that hold up the multiple spans of a bridge. Each of them constituted a defining historical moment that both shaped the course of the long jihad and was in turn influenced by its unfolding. Between these wars, however, there was no peace. While the jihad was fought by small numbers of covert operatives, the scale of whose armed activities was by today’s standards trivial, they had an enormous impact on both political life and policy-making. As shall become evident in this book, some of the participants in the early phases of the long jihad were to have a direct role in the events after 1989–1990. Social, economic, political and ideological forces far larger than the jihad itself indisputably contributed to that cataclysmic event: my effort here is to highlight an ignored narrative thread in the history of those events.

Documents and sources

My interest in writing this book was triggered, in part, by an event that took place in the house on the hill.

In the late 1990s, when terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir was at its peak, an elderly post office clerk showed up at the house, asking to meet with an officer who held some savings in the post office. It emerged that the clerk had no real interest in the officer or in the matter of his savings. In the mid-1950s, the clerk said he had been assigned to a remote post office near the Banihal Pass, the high Himalayan passage that was then the sole land route from the Indian plains into the Kashmir valley. One brutal winter evening, a message arrived informing him that a man who would soon make his way across the snow was to be given immediate access to a telephone upon his arrival. Despite the blizzard raging outside, the man did indeed arrive. He exchanged a few terse words with whoever was at the other end of the telephone line, and then asked for a personal favour – that his servant be asked to ready his home for his arrival and prepare water for a hot bath.

With little else to do, the clerk made a few inquiries over the next few days. It turned out that the man on the other end of the line had been Jammu and Kashmir’s second Prime Minister, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. The man who had appeared through the snow was Colonel Hasan Walia, the first official inhabitant of the house on the hill. Ever since then, the clerk had wished to see the inside of the home.

True or otherwise, the story of the postal clerk piqued my curiosity. India’s first spymaster in Jammu and Kashmir – a confidant of both India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and its first Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel – Hasan Walia is little remembered today. To his contemporaries in Jammu and Kashmir, though, he was a central presence. Sheikh Abdullah saw the spymaster as an emblem of what he believed were New Delhi’s intrigues and machinations in Kashmir, and a driving force behind his alienation from Nehru.⁷ Abdullah’s strenuous efforts to have Hasan Walia removed from Jammu and Kashmir, however, yielded nothing. Hasan Walia’s professional skills may have won the argument, for India’s covert services secured considerable successes in their battle against their Pakistani counterparts through the 1950s. At the outset of my research, I had hoped to excavate the course of Hasan Walia’s war and the political battle that had raged around it. In this enterprise, I had little success.

My search for material on the early phases of India–Pakistan covert warfare in Jammu and Kashmir did, however, lead me in the direction of a considerable volume of material, much of it classified, that had been generated during the long jihad. Notable among this collection were two large volumes of investigation records authored by the head of Jammu and Kashmir’s own counter-espionage service, Surendra Nath, a police officer who played a key role in Indian counter-terrorist policy-making and execution until his death in an air crash in 1993. In addition, I succeeded in exhuming some diaries maintained by participants, as well as posters, photographs and propaganda material. Much of this material is now part of the collection of Indiana University at Bloomington, whose staff has rescued these documents from the near-hopeless condition in which I found them. In addition to this material, my work as a journalist gave me considerable access to participants in the conflict. Where possible, I have cited specific documents and sources. I have not, however, referred to conversations with sources who I cannot name, for I believe that unverifiable citations serve no purpose.

It is worth acknowledging, at this stage, the fairly obvious limitations of my sources: to underline the fact that I have only succeeded in peeking through the window into the secrets that might be contained in the house on the hill. First, neither India nor Pakistan declassify intelligence-related documentation; neither, indeed, have a legislative mechanism that would enable them to do so. What I have obtained was made available by sources I had access to as a journalist. It is entirely possible, even likely, that new material could emerge in the future that would challenge all or significant proportions of my conclusions or, at the very least, my emphasis. One reason that I find the documents I have used to be credible is because their authors never intended for them to be made public. Nonetheless, like all official and non-official documentation, they do recount history from particular points of view. Many key individuals, who I would have liked to have spoken with had passed away before my work even began, including Surendra Nath himself. Many others in the covert world, both officials and their adversaries, were unwilling to talk. I had no access, most importantly, to the many Pakistani nationals whose stories, should they tell them, may lead to a reassessment of many of my conclusions.

If this book nudges some of the many individuals who authored the events I describe to reveal their stories, or to the official disclosure of greater amounts of archival material from the covert services of India and Pakistan, I believe the effort that has gone into writing it would be worthwhile.

Jihad and terrorism

In the course of my book, the terms “jihad” and “terrorism” shall appear with some frequency. Writing in 2005, at a time when the United States of America’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have led both of these terms to be deployed as polemical abuse, my decision to utilize them requires some explanation. It is not my purpose here to attempt a scholarly discussion of the meanings of these words; that is not a project I, a journalist rather than a social scientist, am competent to engage in. My objective is, rather, to make explicit the position from which I see them, and the meaning I vest in them.

Of these two terms, the use of “jihad” is perhaps easier to address. I have chosen to describe the groups who have waged the long war in Jammu and Kashmir as “jihadist” principally because they themselves defined their project in this fashion. It is not, however, intended as a judgement on the legitimacy of the use of this term. Scholars and theologians have energetically disputed the degree of sanction Islam gives to the use of force, and indeed the very meaning of the term jihad itself. I have no competence to discuss these questions. My use of the term merely draws on its deployment by the groups whose history I trace in this book and the state which sponsored them. Thus, this book is at its core a history of the use of terrorism by the forces of the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, and the relationship of these forces with the two nation-states, India and Pakistan.

Jihad was not, of course, a form of warfare invented by Pakistan. Leaving aside its place in the history of Islam, jihad had in the course of the nineteenth century developed into a part of modern warfare in South, West and Central Asia. Calls for holy wars were frequently made through the age of imperial expansion, as the great powers of the time jostled for influence. Covert operatives of Great Britain, Germany and Russia each vied to have their local allies declare the other power an enemy of Islam and thus give strength and legitimacy to their own cause. Great Britain’s covert services, for example, encouraged a rebellion by right-wing clerics in 1924 and 1928 to destabilize attempts by the Afghan regime of Aman Allah to encourage democratization and ensure the education of women.⁸ Opponents of imperial expansion, in turn, sought to mobilize the religious beliefs of their subjects and supporters to resist the growing influence of the great powers. Bar the superb scholarship of the historian of Islam, Yoginder Sikand, and some others, relatively little work is available on the intellectual development of the Islamist far-Right in India. None, moreover, touches on the development of the jihad as a modern way of warfare and its evolution across space and time.

My use of “terrorism” may arouse greater contention, particularly since it has in recent years come to be used in an indiscriminate and abusive fashion. My decision to use this term, rather than several possible alternatives, is underpinned by two reasons, one personal and the other theoretical. It is perhaps best to state the first of these up-front. Indian journalists who reported on the struggle for the creation of a separate Sikh state, Khalistan, had traditionally used the terms “extremists” or “terrorists” to describe the character of the groups engaged in this enterprise. Khalistan groups subsequently imposed a set of codes on civil society in general, and on the media in particular, which among other things deemed the use of these terms impermissible.⁹ Known as the Panthic Codes, these rules of reportage were imposed upon the media at gunpoint. The term “militant”, now widely used in the Indian press to describe armed opponents of the State, was the product of this coercion. As a journalist who worked through that period, and because the term “militant” conflates non-violent political radicalism with specific forms of armed activity, I find its use unacceptable.

More important than my personal preferences, however, is the fact that the word “terrorism” describes a particular form of armed activity with considerable accuracy. Part of the current confusion caused by the term is the result of the fact that it is used, loosely and inaccurately, to describe the ideological character of armed actors, rather than their military tactics....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: A House on a Hill
• 2: The Informal War
• 3: The Master Cell
• 4: Al-Fatah
• 5: Years of Retreat and Revival
• 6: The War of Many Fronts
• 7: The Nuclear Jihad
• 8: Towards Peace?
• Notes
• Bibliography