FIRST PERSON---(2)

Fai’s arrest a setback for Kashmiri separatist movement

Irony: Anti-Indians are secure in India, insecure in America

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Jul 21: At the end of the picnic at Luray Caverns, our host of the day, Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, treated us with a tea at his splendid office, one block from the White House. It was now the turn of politics. He wanted to know what the Kashmiris had gained and lost in the 16-year-long armed struggle against India. All four of my colleagues made brief interventions but all of them insisted me only to make the key presentation.

Since none of us appeared to be carrying anybody’s brief, I had no option but to be honest in my expression. I explained how an essentially political struggle of a major chunk of population in Kashmir valley had been turned into a goldmine of vested interest for a variety of pressure groups---mainstream and separatist politicians, government employees, bar and media, armed forces, security and intelligence agencies and unscrupulous guerrilla commanders. I explained how arrogance and flagrant intolerance of criticism from genuine intelligentsia had led to phenomenal loss of faith in the individuals as well as institutions across the Valley.

With an encore from my colleagues, I also narrated the potentially dangerous consequences of this phase of anarchy and cautioned Dr Fai that elopement of (till then) over 2000 Kashmiri Muslim girls---unmarried as well as married, young as well as old, poor as well as opulent, illiterate as well as educated---with outsiders, including hundreds of south Indian soldiers, could soon blow into a major catastrophe. Our radical leaders and militants would not allow us to utter a single word on this situation until those days.

What I revealed to Dr Fai in August 2005 came straight, later, from the mouth of our secessionist icons like Asiya Andrabi and Syed Ali Shah Geelani, albeit putting entire blame on India and her “illegitimate occupation of Kashmir”. Now retired, Chief Justice of J&K High Court, Bashir Ahmed Kirmani, encapsulated last week at a literary gathering in Handwara what I had told Dr Fai at his Washington D.C. office six years ago. Let it be on record that I essentially do not hold Justice Kirmani’s figures---25,000 women in prostitution in Srinagar alone, consumption of 25,000 bottles of liquor a day et al---credible in absence of an empirical survey.

Each of us was stunned on Fai’s revelation. He said that everybody from Kashmir had been invariably giving a rosy picture of the “freedom struggle” but JKLF Chairman, Yasin Malik, was one-odd person in the separatist camp who had told him in detail, in a recent meeting in USA, that the armed conflict had dismantled the Kashmiris’ centuries-old value system and the society was threatening to explode into the mess of promiscuity, permissiveness and social crime.

During the conversation Fai revealed to me that notwithstanding his heavily busy schedules, he had been reading the headlines of my stories and occasionally the whole body. It was the time to complain why none of our group---Mohammad Saleem Pandit of Times of India, Prabodh Jamwal of Kashmir Times, Bashir Manzar of Kashmir Images, Khursheed Wani of The Pioneer and myself---had been ever invited in the regularly held annual and biannual Kashmir Conference organized by Fai’s Kashmiri American Council (KAC) in USA and other countries.

“Left to me, I would have invited you alone”, he quipped and pleaded that his guest-lists were being made and finalized “by other people”. He described the meeting with our group as “rare and genuine” as, for a change, it was the only group of his guests not sponsored by him or his Pakistan-backed KAC. The fact of our being the guests of the Department of State of the United States of America, on the prestigious International Leadership Program, gave us unlimited confidence of calling a spade a spade. Even after the extensive meeting in Washington D.C, Dr Fai never invited any of us to speak on the Kashmir problem.

Fai’s high profile international conferences on Kashmir, that have been a regular feature of his activity since 1990, are threatening to end for ever with his arrest by FBI on Tuesday. Not only until our visit to USA in 2005 but also until July 19^th, 2011, meeting with Fai was a privilege for the Kashmiris. Four months before our visit, then Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had met Fai and attempted to clinch a ceasefire between militants and security forces through him in USA. It was reported in detail in the vernacular Srinagar weekly ‘Chattan’. Mufti’s Minister for Tourism, Dilawar Mir, met Shameema Shawl, wife of Fai’s close associate and head of his Kashmir Centre in London, around the same time.

During our meeting with Fai, we learned that the KAC Executive Director had played a key role in Hizbul Mujahideen’s ceasefire with the Indian security forces in July 2000. For the first time to media, Fai revealed that journalist R.K.Mishra was the pointman in the ceasefire initiative on behalf of Atal Behari Vajpayee’s NDA government in New Delhi. Our colleague, Khursheed Wani, sought Fai’s permission to use this piece of information in media. He granted immediately.

“As decided between us in Track-2, I was continuously in touch with Syed Salah-ud-din (head of United Jihad Council and Supreme Commander of Hizbul Mujahideen) in Islamabad. Mishra and Vajpayee did their best but they proved helpless before a radical lobby of bureaucrats and politicians in Delhi. Salah-ud-din and his militants were ready to tread ten steps but Delhi didn’t demonstrate any sincerity. Their last demand was that a third country---Egypt in this case---should stand as guarantee or at least make a supportive statement for face saving of the Kashmiri militants. Suddenly, some BJP Ministers made the hackneyed statement of J&K being an integral part of India. That immediately provoked Salah-ud-din to withdraw the ceasefire within 10 days of its announcement by Commander Abdul Majeed Dar”, Fai revealed.

[To be continued]