 "Will India's stance on Hurriyat meeting foreign dignitaries revive its importance?")
Is India back to its old stance of ignoring the Hurriyat?
Actually, people forget that Hurriyat was all but out of the India-Pakistan equation when Gen Pervez Musharraf came to India for the Agra summit.
Just to recap:
Some months passed. Relations between India and Pakistan were in deep freeze. In the summer of 2001, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani was on a visit to Jammu and Kashmir. It was he who suggested to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that India invite Gen Musharraf for a summit meeting. It was out of the box, but it could work.
Musharraf arrived in Delhi. He received a 21-gun salute. He was then formally welcomed by President K R Narayanan. He also became the first Pakistani leader to visit the Mahatma Gandhi memorial - a traditional venue for visiting dignitaries - where he laid a wreath and paid tribute to the Indian independence leader. He then paid a visit to his ancestral home in Daryaganj. In the evening he held a closed door meeting with the Hurriyat.
Here, instead of patting them on the back for the good job they were doing to keep the flag of Pakistan flying in Kashmir, he told them to wake up and smell the coffee. All they ever wanted was money, money and more money from Pakistan. "We have our own compulsions. We can't keep fighting your battles," he told them brutally.
This was the most interesting development of the Musharraf visit. But mired in trying to curtail the fallout of the failure of the visit, India didn’t play this up enough.
Now, the Hurriyat has once again been elevated to a position of exaggerated importance when the first foreign policy moves made by the Modi government was to call off talks with Pakistan because its High Commissioner Abdul Basit, ignoring India’s counsel, met with these leaders.
With Gen VK Singh’s statement in Parliament that Hurriyat members are citizens of India and as such, have the freedom to meet anyone they like including foreign nationals like the Pakistan High Commissioner, India has tried to de-emphasise their value in India Pakistan relations.
But the issue is not what Hurriyat represents in Jammu and Kashmir, but how India wants to deal with it.
Top Indian military commanders say it is individuals we should worry about in the Hurriyat, not the organisation itself.
Syed Ali Geelani is the leader of the militant faction of the Hurriyat. He is also old and ailing. He could be succeeded by Masarat Alam. Alam hit the headlines earlier this year when the Mufti Mohammad Sayeed government released him from jail, only to arrest him again under severe pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Centre.
A militant-turned-political leader, Alam’s political career as a separatist started in 1996. He was a top commander of the pro-Pakistan militant outfit Hezbollah, and after his arrest and release, joined the separatist Muslim League. He rapidly rose through the ranks to become party chief.
Alam went to Biscoe, the Valley’s leading missionary school, and went on to become a graduate. After joining militancy, he was arrested in October 1990, but released after 13 months. He was arrested again in 1993, and jailed for four years. From 1997 to 2007, he was arrested and released several times. He has spent pretty much his entire adult life in jail. It was Alam, a great believer in the politics of tactics, who was behind the strategy of ‘stone-throwing’ in Kashmir.
Individuals like Alam represent the biggest danger in Kashmir. How India will handle people like him, only covert agencies know.
Actually, people forget that Hurriyat was all but out of the India-Pakistan equation when Gen Pervez Musharraf came to India for the Agra summit.
Just to recap:
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In 1999, then Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif signed the Lahore declaration and pledged to jointly make efforts for peace and stability in South Asia. However, this was swiftly undermined between May and July 1999 following Pakistani incursions into Indian territory in a bid to salami-slice land held by India on the border around Kargil. The Kargil war ended with the humiliating Blair House meeting between Sharif and US President Bill Clinton. As Clinton’s Special Assistant on South Asian Affairs Bruce Riedel notes, it was a call for help by the Pak PM that led to the Blair House meeting. Sharif was anxious and desperate. Even Pakistan’s best friends, the Chinese, were counseling wisdom. The whole world was watching Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It was at the instance of US officials, including Riedel, that Sharif agreed to the formulation that “the (Pakistan) Prime Minister has agreed to take concrete and immediate steps for the restoration of the LOC”. Angered at the retreat, then General Pervez Musharraf organized a coup and deposed Sharif who had to flee to Saudi Arabia with his family.
Some months passed. Relations between India and Pakistan were in deep freeze. In the summer of 2001, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani was on a visit to Jammu and Kashmir. It was he who suggested to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that India invite Gen Musharraf for a summit meeting. It was out of the box, but it could work.
Musharraf arrived in Delhi. He received a 21-gun salute. He was then formally welcomed by President K R Narayanan. He also became the first Pakistani leader to visit the Mahatma Gandhi memorial - a traditional venue for visiting dignitaries - where he laid a wreath and paid tribute to the Indian independence leader. He then paid a visit to his ancestral home in Daryaganj. In the evening he held a closed door meeting with the Hurriyat.
Here, instead of patting them on the back for the good job they were doing to keep the flag of Pakistan flying in Kashmir, he told them to wake up and smell the coffee. All they ever wanted was money, money and more money from Pakistan. "We have our own compulsions. We can't keep fighting your battles," he told them brutally.
This was the most interesting development of the Musharraf visit. But mired in trying to curtail the fallout of the failure of the visit, India didn’t play this up enough.
Now, the Hurriyat has once again been elevated to a position of exaggerated importance when the first foreign policy moves made by the Modi government was to call off talks with Pakistan because its High Commissioner Abdul Basit, ignoring India’s counsel, met with these leaders.
With Gen VK Singh’s statement in Parliament that Hurriyat members are citizens of India and as such, have the freedom to meet anyone they like including foreign nationals like the Pakistan High Commissioner, India has tried to de-emphasise their value in India Pakistan relations.
But the issue is not what Hurriyat represents in Jammu and Kashmir, but how India wants to deal with it.
Top Indian military commanders say it is individuals we should worry about in the Hurriyat, not the organisation itself.
Syed Ali Geelani is the leader of the militant faction of the Hurriyat. He is also old and ailing. He could be succeeded by Masarat Alam. Alam hit the headlines earlier this year when the Mufti Mohammad Sayeed government released him from jail, only to arrest him again under severe pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Centre.
A militant-turned-political leader, Alam’s political career as a separatist started in 1996. He was a top commander of the pro-Pakistan militant outfit Hezbollah, and after his arrest and release, joined the separatist Muslim League. He rapidly rose through the ranks to become party chief.
Alam went to Biscoe, the Valley’s leading missionary school, and went on to become a graduate. After joining militancy, he was arrested in October 1990, but released after 13 months. He was arrested again in 1993, and jailed for four years. From 1997 to 2007, he was arrested and released several times. He has spent pretty much his entire adult life in jail. It was Alam, a great believer in the politics of tactics, who was behind the strategy of ‘stone-throwing’ in Kashmir.
Individuals like Alam represent the biggest danger in Kashmir. How India will handle people like him, only covert agencies know.