A Sick Joke

In response to President Musharraf's request for evidence of Pakistanicomplicity in the Mumbai blasts, the government has demanded that Dawood Ibrahimand Syed Salahuddin should be deported to India. It is a pathetic response. Andseeking deportation of Salahuddin sounds like a sick joke. It revives memoriesof the criminal complicity of the Indian Establishment in allowing terrorism togrow from its modest beginnings.

Syed Salahuddin was a minor politician who contested elections in the J-Kassembly poll. He believed he was robbed of victory through rigging. He became amilitant. He rose to become eventually the head of the Hizbul-e-Mujahideen andtook sanctuary in Pakistan. Salahuddin first came under the scanner of Indianauthorities in the Jain Hawala case. The case was originally a TADA case. Theoriginal charge sheet described how two Jain hawala case militants, AshfaqueHussain Lone and Shahbuddin Gohri, visited the Kashmir Valley to interact withSalahuddin. The Hizbul at the time was a fledgling organization. Lone, was thedeputy intelligence chief of the Hizbul and he introduced Gohri to Salahuddinand Mohammed Ashan Dar. Salahuddin briefed Gohri on how to help the Hizbul.Later both Salahuddin and Dar rose to become leading militants.

But these and other leads against terrorists were abandoned when the JainHawala case was converted from TADA to a corruption case. This was done toprotect the forty odd leading politicians who received hawala money from thesame conduits that funded terrorism. Among the leading politicians who werelisted in the incriminating diaries of having received the hawala money were thelate Rajiv Gandhi, the late Madhav Rao Scindia, the late Choudhary Devi Lal, MrLK Advani and Mr Sharad Yadav. There was therefore vested interest cuttingacross party lines to have the case scotched.

The CBI, with the Supreme Court turning a blind eye, succeeded in doing that.The case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence. Former Chief Justice JNVerma headed the Bench that on a day to day basis monitored the investigation byall agencies in the case. After retirement he publicly blamed the CBI and saidthe Jain Hawala case should be reopened.

After 9/11 US authorities woke up. Mohammed Atta involved in the 9/11conspiracy was funded by Pakistani terrorists. That led the US to focus on thecrucial need to choke hawala operations in order to tackle terrorism. That wasprecisely what the Jain Hawala case sought to accomplish. At that time the mazeof illegal funding which made politics, business and terrorism separatetentacles managed by a single octopus had not grown to its present gargantuandimensions.

In the light of this, however harsh the truth, citizens shoulddispassionately consider whether the corrupt and compromised present Indianpolitical Establishment can ever effectively fight terrorism.