Achtung! Here Be Minefields

On March 30, four Jehadi groups gave a call for a general strike inJammu and Kashmir (J&K) on April 7 when the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad busservice is to be flagged off by Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, and warnedthat people boarding it would be branded 'traitors':

"We humbly request the persons selected to travel on first and secondbus to Muzaffarabad not to enter the coffin (bus) but if they do, they will findtheir names in the list of traitors," the little-known Al-Nasireen, SaveKashmir Movement, Farzandan-e-Millat and Al-Arifeen said in a joint statementfaxed to the local media. 

The statement, while describing the bus service as a "deadly weapon thatIndia wants to use against the jehadi forces", was accompanied bythe list of 40 persons, complete with residential addresses and application formnumbers, selected to travel on the inaugural bus journey.

Meanwhile, before the trans-Line of Control bus is flagged off, a marginalincrease in violence has been visible in the state after a relatively peacefulwinter. As the deadline to the journey approaches, attacks on civilians andsecurity force (SF) targets have seen an increase in the last two weeks.

Between February 16, 2005, when the two countries announced the commencement ofthe bus service, and March 31, a total of 153 people, including 54 civilians and13 SF personnel, have died in J&K. Of these, 24 civilians were killed interrorist attacks across the state in the week of March 24-31 alone. 

On March 31, in what is being seen as a specific threat to the bus service,the Border Security Force (BSF) recovered 117 kilograms of powerful explosiveshidden in four scooters on the route. The four explosive-laden vehicles wererecovered on the Arampur-Srinagar and Arampur-Highgam roads on theSrinagar-Baramulla Highway. 

Khalid Hussain, a former Deputy Commissioner of J&K, and his wife, whoare passengers, disclosed on April 1: "We have received threatening callsfrom terror outfit Al-Nasireen. The militant outfit has threatened us not totravel to Muzaffarabad and meet relatives." Passenger safety, evidently, isbound to be paramount for both countries.

While security forces have taken over the Baramulla-Uri road and installedadditional check points on the 45 km stretch to prevent any terrorist attack onthe bus, the security grid across the state has been tightened in the light ofpossible attacks on vital and sensitive installations. The Army has also clearedlandmines along the approximately six kilometer Uri-Muzaffarabad stretch inJ&K till the last Indian post - the Kaman Post - to ensure that the busservice rolls out. 

Terrorist groups could, however, still subvert the peace process through aspectacular act of terror in J&K or elsewhere in India. Hard-lineseparatists in the state, such as the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat led by Syed Ali ShahGeelani, have also been quick to reject the bus service as a sop that avoids thereal issue of the territory's status.

The Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus would link up the troubledIndian province with the area of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) referred to as'Azad Kashmir' - seven districts with their capital at Muzaffarabad - butexcluding the Northern Areas which were also part of the undivided pre-Partitionprincipality of Jammu & Kashmir. 

'Azad Kashmir' is an area comprising 13,297 square kilometers, with apopulation of about 3.271million. Ironically, there are few Kashmiris left in 'AzadKashmir' - 85.4 per cent of residents are 'Punjabi-speaking', while there aresubstantial numbers from other Pakistani provinces, significantly includingPathans from the North West, and only a small population of ethnic Kashmiris(105,000 in 1993, or 3.21 percent, according to one source in 'AzadKashmir').

While authoritative data is not available on the extent of the systematic'ethnic flooding' of the area, reports indicate that the expropriation of landand residency rights in PoK has been in sharp contrast to the situation inJ&K, where provisions of the Indian Constitution disallow non-Kashmiris fromacquiring property.

'Azad Kashmir' has also provided the base camp for the jehad in J&Kever since the dramatic escalation of militancy in 1989. Many Pakistan-based jehadigroups are headquartered in Muzaffarabad or have 'camp offices' in the area.Sources indicate that, as of January 2005, there were at least 36 jehaditraining camps in PoK, housing approximately 3,660 cadre, with a majority ofthese located in the Muzaffarabad and Kotli districts. 

The Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) maintains, among others, the Danna and Abdul-Bin-Masudcamps in Muzaffarabad and Badli camp in Kotli with almost 500, 300 and 300 jehadisrespectively. Similarly, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) has, among others, theJangal Mangal camp in Muzaffarabad and another at Mangla with at least 300cadres each. 

On December 10, 2004, Shazia Ghulam Din, the daughter-in-law of the Jammu andKashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF) founder, Maqbool Bhatt, told Indianjournalists visiting Muzaffarabad that Pakistan continues to maintain militantcamps in PoK, Gilgit and Baltistan. 

"The Pakistani establishment has merged several of these camps and movedthem away in the periphery of Muzaffarabad and other areas in PoK," GhulamDin disclosed. She also noted that the presence of foreign mercenaries in PoKhad created major social problems for the locals, and hoped that the worldcommunity would come to know about the real situation once theSrinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service was launched. "Life in PoK is worse thandeath," she declared, claiming that the Kashmiri culture and secular ethoshad suffered "constant degradation" due to the presence of foreignmercenaries.

On both sides of the LoC, terrorist groups and hard-lineseparatists, in radical contrast to its overwhelming popularity among thegeneral Kashmiri populace, have opposed the bus service, claiming that the 'coreissue' of Kashmir would be eclipsed, and that such measures would only helpIndia ultimately transform the LoC into a permanent border. 

While the jehadis insist that the bus would be "detrimental toour freedom struggle", the resumption of the road link between Srinagar andMuzzafarabad for the first time since 1947 is widely seen as a 'people-centricmeasure' or what D. P. Dhar, a former Home Minister of J&K, described in1966 a measure for the "emotional enlistment" of the people.

The jehadis, on the other hand, state unequivocally that solutions to theKashmir issue have to be territorial or land-centric. The bus, consequently, isof no significance to them, since the Kashmir issue has to be resolved on theirterms, which essentially require a merger of the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan.Thus the 'Supreme Commander' of the HM and chairman of the Muzaffarabad-basedUnited Jehad Council (UJC), Syed Salahuddin, ridiculed the bus service stating,"Neither can it hoodwink the world community nor the Kashmiris." 

Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, chief of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organisation ofthe LeT, similarly remarked that initiatives such as welcoming culturaldelegations and starting bus services could not put an end to 'the mountain ofenmity between India and Pakistan'. And in Srinagar, separatist leader Geelaniasserted: "We have not given the sacrifice of a lakh (hundredthousand) people for a bus service, but for the right toself-determination. " 

The fear among terrorist groups and separatists like Geelani is that suchmeasures would gradually obliterate their constituencies and radically underminethe course of the Kashmir jehad, and disrupting the bus service hasemerged as a critical extremist objective over the past weeks.

The concern that increasing people-to-people contacts could dilute the 'coreissue' of Kashmir in the long run has also been underscored by others inPakistan, and General Musharraf has found it necessary to reiterate, on March23, that confidence building measures (CBMs) between the two countries would notsucceed and would, indeed, loose credibility if the 'core issue' of Kashmir wasnot settled. 

During his address at the Pakistan Day parade in Islamabad, the Presidentwelcomed the bus service, but made it clear that it was not a solution to theKashmir problem. And, while replying to an e-mail sent by an Indian to his (Musharraf's)website asking his views on the reunification of India and Pakistan as well ashis 'silence' on the Kargil war, the President held out a veiled threat:"What is the future? Resolve disputes so that Siachens, Kargil, Marpola andChorbatla don't happen again. Let us resolve Kashmir first and then I am sure itwon't happen again."

One of the Pakistani military regime's major apprehensions is that allowingpeople from the Indian side to see the ground realities in 'Azad Kashmir', a jehadisedarea with little evidence of the culture and identity that underlies theircollective consciousness, and where the most basic rights and amenities arelacking, could result in a dramatic reassessment of the secessionistquest. 

The deepening of non-official linkages between Indian and Pakistanicontrolled Kashmir contains inherent risks that Pakistan may lose control overthe anti-India forces in Kashmir, once narratives from 'Azad Kashmir' becomepart of the open source discourse on both sides of the border. Pakistan'sdecision to forbid politicians from J&K to travel on the inaugural busreflects precisely such anxieties. 

Already, feedback in Islamabad from recent people-to-people exchanges,including the visit by journalists, has reportedly indicated that thepro-Pakistan constituency in Kashmir is much smaller than had been imagined, aperception that Pakistan's military establishment would like to reverse.

It must remain clear, however, that steps such as the bus service, the currentcricket-series bonhomie and CBMs in general, while they may, over time,strengthen processes of 'emotional enlistment', do not, in any measure, alterIndia's and Pakistan's stated positions on the Kashmir issue. In that sense,they will do little to change the fundamentals of the conflict in and overKashmir, which can easily escalate again if any of the extremist players - ortheir primary state sponsor - recovers the capabilities of disruption or theimpunity that they operated under before 9/11.

Kanchan Lakshman is Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management;Assistant Editor, Faultlines: Writings on Conflict & Resolution. Courtesy,the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal