While India by 1990
continued to back the Communist-regime of President Najibullah, Pakistan
supported warlords like the Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. India countered
Pakistan by backing the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, which controlled the
narrow sliver of Afghan territory north of the Shomali
plains. India sent military hardware and other supplies to the Northern
Alliance leader, Ahmed Shah Masood. With the fall of the Taleban,
India saw its chance to reassert its influence in the country, particularly as
many Afghans were openly unhappy with Pakistan's support of the Taleban.
At around the same
time, Pakistan's southern province of Sindh became embroiled in ethnic and sectarian
violence. The port city of Karachi, in particular, was the epicenter of turmoil
for years to come. Pakistan accused India's overseas intelligence service, the
Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), of instigating the violence in Karachi. In
1984 also Pakistan’s ISI began to drawn up a plan for Kashmir that was to
mature in 1991.
A Kashmir cell within
the ISI was assigned the tasks of recruiting, training, and arming Jamaat-e-Islami and its militant organization, Hizbul Mujahideen.
Once India started cracking down inside Kashmir, punishing rebels as well as
their family members, by the end of 1991 the ISI concluded that it could not
leave the insurgency to the Kashmiris only.
At the same time the
Jamaat-e-Islami also attacked the JKLF in Kashmir, an
offshoot of the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front (active during the
1960s) it was formed in 1977 by Kashmiris living in Britain . The JKLF demanded
that Kashmiris be given the option of independence from both India and
Pakistan, a position that did not sit well with Pakistan's decision makers. The
JKLF leader, Amanullah Khan, told a Press Conference in Islamabad in 1991 that
Hizbul Mujahideen not only liquidates JKLF fighters, it also informs the Indian
army of our hide-outs.
Several JKLF leaders
also were bought over; leading to the organization's splintering into at least
20 factions.
Thus in subsequent years, the ISI's desire for control led it to shift its
support from the Hizbul Mujahideen to other religious factions with fewer
Kashmiri members. Although the Hizbul Mujahideen was affiliated with the
Jamaat-e-Islami and therefore more amenable to the
ISI's control, its leadership was still Kashmiri. Hizbul Mujahideen was
reluctant to carry out some of the more radical ISI plans, such as attacking non-Muslim
indigenous Kashmiris.
As Pakistani-backed
insurgents escalated their attacks inside Indian-controlled territory, India
responded by stepping up its brutal repres¬sion of
Kashmiri dissent. Indian repression only increased the alienation of Kashmiris
and damaged India's international prestige, which in turn led Pakistan to
believe that its strategy was working. Since 1991 the Hindu Pandit community,
indigenous to the predominantly Muslim Kashmir valley, has been targeted and
most Pandits have left the valley to become refugees in either Jammu or other
parts of India.
This expansion of the
‘jihad’ in Kashmir coincided with the appointment in 1992 of Lieutenant General
Javed Nasir as director general of the ISI. General
Nasir was, by his own admission, a member of the evangelical Tableeghi Jamaat, and the first general officer with full
grown beard.
The Tableeghi Jamaat is a nonpolitical religious movement
associated with the orthodox Deoband school of Sunni Islam, which seeks to
purify the souls of Muslims by reminding them of their religious obligations.
Its members believe in pan-Islamism, and share the concern of political
Islamists about the ascendancy of non-Muslims in the international order.
When the
Soviet-installed regime in Afghanistan collapsed in 1992 and the civil war
among mujahideen factions got under way, some Deobandi groups such as the
Harakat-e-Jihad-e-Islami recruited and trained
volunteers to fight in both Afghanistan and Kashmir. Nasir widened the ISI's
covert operations against "the enemies of Islam," including the
"USA, Hindu leadership of India, the communists, [and] the Zionists.
"(Javed Nasir, complaint no. 107 before the
Anti-Terrorist Court, Lahore, October 23, 2002.)
When communal riots
broke out in India after the razing of the historic Babri mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics, Nasir authorized ISI
collaboration with Dawood Ibrahim, a Muslim leader of the Bombay underworld,
who organized an attack on the Bombay Stock Exchange on March 12, 1993.
Some General Nasir 's
actions and methods it should be mentioned were not approved by either the
civilian leadership or the Pakistan army high command, and he was prematurely
retired from his ISI position on May 13, 1993, after U.S. pressure.
Following the
ascension General Musharraf militant forays into Indian-controlled Kashmir
started declining, particularly after a meeting with that time President
Vajpayee during the Islamabad Summit conference of SAARC in January 2004
Where the jihadi
activities of Pakistan's Islamists were indeed greatly helped during the
establishment of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan when the Pakistan-Afghan
border was open for militants, this has not entirely been closed to date. Also,
it is difficult for some members of the law enforcement machinery to look upon
Islamists as enemies of the state, after almost two decades of treating them as
national heroes. One of the accused in the kidnapping and murder of reporter
Daniel Pearl was an employee of the Special Branch of the Karachi police. A
member of the paramilitary Rangers has been charged with plotting to murder
Musharraf in concert with the group responsible for the car bomb attack at the
U.S. Consulate in Karachi.
Recently New Delhi in fact has spent over
$500m in Afhanistan since the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001.
Whenever an elected
political leader has rejected Islamists' demands however, fears of a backlash
failed to materialize. Between 1972 and 1977, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto successfully
expanded the role of women in the public arena despite Islamist opposition, and
in 1997 Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif faced only a limited reaction when he
reversed the decision to observe Friday as a weekly religious holiday. Thus it should
not be impossible to transform Pakistan into a functional, rather than
ideological, state.
As for Bangladesh, it
is widely believed that the Islamists of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (and most
probably Taliban sympathisers from Pakistan) have
been indoctrinating, arming and financing the Jamaatul
Mujahedeen Bangladesh for quite some time.
And mor recently it
seems, as if the two major parties, Hasina’s Awami
League and Khaleda’s BNP, have been competing with each other to prove their
Islamic credentials to secure more votes from God-fearing Bengali Muslims.
While early on
Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman had formally
scrapped “Secularism” and “Socialism” from the Constitution. His successor,
General Ershad further Islamised
the polity by making Islam the “state religion” through an amendment of the
Constitution in 1988. Three successive governments under Khaleda and Hasina
since 1991 could neither restore “Secularism” as enshrined in the original
Constitution, nor scrap the “state religion” amendment. Realising
the political importance of Islam in this backward and predominantly Muslim
country, no major political party champions the cause of secularism by
scrapping the “state religion” clause from the Constitution.
Since the immediate
post-independence government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1972-75), regarded by
many as the founding father of the nation, miserably failed in delivering the
promised poverty-free, prosperous Bangladesh in a “secular” and “socialist”
authoritarian democracy, most Bangladeshis have become suspicious of secularism
and socialism.
And while democracy
has remained elusive, the average Bangladeshi Muslim has remained loyal to
traditional Islamic and authoritarian values.
Bangladesh’s Islamism
has similarities with its counterparts in Muslim majority countries like
Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia. All of them had gone through secular
national socialism and autocracies under civil/military rulers before turning
Islamic during the last decade and a half.
Although Bangladesh
emerged as a symbol of freedom and equality, unfortunately, it is only symbolilc.
While the rich and
powerful get their children educated in English medium schools, at home and
abroad, and are the most employable in the country, the fast disappearing
middle class sends its children to Bengali medium schools and the poor mostly
send their children to Islamic seminaries or madrassas.
The militant Islamist
groups of Bangladesh are a potentially important political force for several
reasons. First, they have ties to the powerful military-which over the course
of Bangladesh's brief history has repeatedly intervened in the running of the
government. In addition, Bangladesh suffers from extreme poverty, widespread
official corruption, and weak rule of law. Under these circumstances, militant
Islamic groups may hold considerable attraction. Some analysts fear that
Bangladesh, with the fourth largest Muslim population in the world, is being
drawn into the whirlpool of Islamist radicalism.
The local Islamist
group, Jamaat-e-Islami, has joined the political
process. In 2001 the group gained 17 of the 300 seats in Bangladesh's
Parliament and became part of the ruling coalition of the Bangladesh
Nationalist Party. Jamaat-e-Islami's leader, Motiur Rahman Nizami, and his colleague
Ali Ahsan are members of the cabinet. The party's youth wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, is part of an international structure of Islamist
youth groups, which includes the International Islamic Federation of Student
Organizations and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. The youth group leaders,
trained in Deobandi madrassas, are influential at Chittagong University,
located in the major Bangladesh city of the same name. Youth members have been
involved in the assassinations of secular party activists, such as Gopal
Krishna Muhuri, a leading secular humanist and
principal of Chittagong's Nazirhat College.
Supporters of
Jamaat-e-Islami shout anti-Israel and anti-U.S.
slogans during a demonstration in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
But Jamaat-e-Islami is not the only radical Islamist group in
Bangladesh. Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (the Party of
Islamic Jihad), led by Shawkat Osman (also known by
his alias, Sheikh Farid), has strong and well-known ties to Osama bin Laden.
The organization, formed in 1992, was one of the groups that forced author Taslima Nasrin, a critic of Islam's treatment of women,
into exile by putting a price on her head in 1993. Fazlul Rahman, leader of the
Jihad Movement in Bangladesh, was one of the original signatories of Osama bin
Laden’s jihad declaration.
When that time
President General Bhutto suggested that Pakistan recognize Bangladesh as an
independent country (December 1971), the Jamaat-e-Islami
led a campaign against the recognition "Bangladesh na-manzoor"
(Bangladesh is unacceptable). But where earlier President Kennedy displayed a
readiness, to extend America's nuclear umbrella to India in 1963 (because of
China), this was not the
case of America during the East Pakistan conflict.
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