Significantly, Islamabad has turned Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) — including both Azad Kashmir and GB — into a hub of Islamist extremism and terrorism since the 1990s. Militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and many others have been facilitated in creating bases and training camps in the region. These terror camps are ‘global in nature’ — including terrorist formations that have an international agenda. India maintains that “42 terror training camps were very much alive and kicking in PoK”. On April 6, 2012, China indirectly alleged that insurgents of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) were trained at camps in PoK. Significantly, a British court, on February 9, 2012, sentenced nine persons, including one of Pakistani origin, for plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange and build a terrorist training camp in PoK. Three of these men, Mohammed Shahjahan (27), Usman Khan (20) and Nazam Hussain (26), had planned to raise funds for a terrorist camp in PoK and recruit Britons to attend.
Crucially, while naturally maintaining a studied silence on the role of state agencies, federal minister of interior Rehman Malik, on April 4, 2012, stated that the conflict in GB was not ‘sectarian’ in nature, and that some “hidden forces are involved”. Sub-nationalist groupings in GB have alleged, further, that there were no sectarian tensions among the ‘natives’ in the region, and that local Shia and Sunni groups had united in their demand for the reinstatement of the State Subjects Rule, which offers particular protection to ‘natives’, on the issue of travel and trade towards Ladakh (in India), and on the issue of ‘no taxation without representation’. The current violence, they allege, has been orchestrated by outsiders acting at the best of ‘hidden agencies’ who seek to disrupt this local unity, in order to perpetuate the inequitable conditions that prevail in the region.