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.
 

For updates click homepage here