Patriots, puppets or parrots ?
Options before the Hurriyat conference

By Sati Sahni

Pakistani President General Musharraf's tea party in New Delhi, may prove to be kiss of death for Hurriyat Conference, opine political observers in Kashmir.

Hurriyat leadership seems to have got into a situation which may ultimately prove to be a trap. No one is suggesting that it was deliberately laid down plan by anyone least of all, the Government of India. The seeds were inherent in the umbrella organisation right from the very beginning.

The ISI of Pakistan created All Parties Hurriyat Conference in 1993 after the unwept demise of really indegenous Tehrik-ul-Hurriyat-i-Kashmir set up on March 4, 1990 at Srinagar. This body was formed by 11 secessionist outfits on the initiative taken by Kashmir Bar Association, whose President, Mian Abdul Qayoom was made its first Chief. The new organisation declined to be totally subservient to ISI and this was principal cause of its end in its infancy. Besides, the ISI felt desperate need to have in Kashmir Valley a political set up which it could manipulate, control and direct. Additional reason was the ISI requirement to have a political facade and also a cover for armed militant outfits. There were some organisations which were dorment for many years but there were some flag bearing individuals available ''for employment'', was wags put it.

The ISI was soon able to locate three bodies which did have a political presence. The oldest and the best organised was the Jamait-i-Islami dominated by Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The second was the Awami Action Committee which was headed by the young Mirwaiz of Kashmir, Moulvi Omar Farooq. Then there was the J&K Liberation Front which had gathered popular support in first four years of armed militancy. The ISI was able to get together 32 anti-Indian organisations-small and big. Since it was a body of disperate organisations, it was given an omnibus constitution which embraced different objectives. These organisations ranged from religious, social, educational, professional and charitable. The seven organisations represented on the Executive Committee believe in and hold diverse views ranging from merger with Pakistan on one extreme to independence of united Jammu & Kashmir State. The two common objectives holding them together are secession from India and hatred for India.

The general impression sought to be propagated is that the All Parties Hurriyat Conference is political face of the armed militant outfits operating in Jammu & Kashmir but time and events have proved it hollow. It has no control or direction over them. It is true even of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen which still has some Kashmiri element in it but truly Pakistani outfits like Lashkar-i-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohamnmad and Al Badr do not deal with it directly. No doubt, it has been left about total control, direction and provision of logistics being in strong hands of ISI.

Contradictions among the conglomerate have been surfacing from time to time. The JKLF decided to chart its own course when it said goodbye to armed struggle and use of gun as means to achieve its objective. This annoyed other constituents but JKLF was considered to be more popular than others with Kashmiris and therefore APHC bent backwards to retain JKLF with it. However, Syed Ali Shah Geelani of Jamait-e-Islami made no bones of concealing his uneasiness though he felt uncomfortable in company of JKLF.

The Government of India changed its track in early 2000 by wanting to involve Hurriyat leadership in a dialogue. The Hurriyat leaders in detention were also released and channels of communication were opened with them. Pakistan fearing that it may be left out in the cold made quick moves and the effort came to nought. Other pressures had been building up. Soon the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen announced a ceasefire. This was not allowed to succeed because both Hurriyat and Pakistan felt left out from the reckoning. But moves and countermoves were being planned.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's announcement in November 2000 to halt unilaterally all combat operations in Jammu Kashmir unless provoked, as part of peace process and as a goodwill gesture at the beginning of holy month of Ramazan. This again caught the Hurriyat off guard and unnerved them somewhat especially after subdues response from Pakistan. Claiming to be principal party to Kashmir ''dispute'' and also the sole representatives of Kashmiri people, the Hurriyat asked to be allowed to travel to Pakistan to meet leaders there and chiefs of various outfits to arrange a ceasefire. New Delhi did not take a final decision keeping them on tenterhooks all the while.

New initiative of New Delhi in appointing Mr K C Pant as an Interlocutor to hold talks with different political elements and individuals in Jammu & Kashmir, created a dilemma for Hurriyat leadership. Some were ready to sit with Pant but most of them were wary especially when they were not sure how Pakistan would view it. After former Chief Minister, Mr Ghulam Mohd, Shah and the popular secessionist leader Syed Shabir Ahmed Shah announced their readiness to meet Pant and convey to him their own views, the pitch was queered for the Hurriyat. They had all along held that only workable plan could be trilateral negotiations. Perhaps, because of this the Hurriyat refused to meet Pant.

When Pakistan agreed to a summit meeting with India to discuss Kashmir, Hurriyat was dismayed, felt slighted and humilated. Insult was added to injury when initially Pakistan submitted to Indian pressure and decided not to invite Hurriyat to high tea or Pakistan High Commissioner's residence at New Delhi. Hurriyat leaders felt let down and made desperate pleas. Some of its leaders flew to Delhi to ask Pakistan High Commissioner to persuade Pakistani President to relent and agree to have them over for a ''cup of tea''. They seemed to have made it matter of honour for them and of very survival of Hurriyat. With Pakistan agreeing to bilater talks with India and keeping Hurriyat out of reckoning, its stock among its protagonists in Kashmir, fell steeply. With this came the chorus of voices from Ladakh and Jammu regions questioning the claim of APHC to be the sole representative of people of Jammu & Kashmir separatist elements from within Kashmir and outside also questioned Hurriyat's claim.

While JKLF (Malik) had refused to go along with Hurriyat Executive Committee for tea with Musharraf, the other faction led by Rawalpindi based Amanullah Khan described the Hurriyat Executive Members as ''seven jokers of the amalgam''. Dr Ayub Thakur, their patron in London advised them to keep only interest of Kashmiris in mind and not be swayed by tea parties. The well-known all-women secessionist body in Kashmir, ''Dukhtarsan-e-Millat ''Chief Asiya Andrabi ridiculed Hurriyat claim of being sole representatives and said, ''They are not acceptable. They are not leaders. They are being provided security by those whose hands are soaked with blood of Kashmiris.

Hurriyat was sorely disappointed with Pakistan which radically shifted its stand when from trilateral, it agreed to bilateral discussions with India. Two other shocks further unhinged Hurriyat, when Musharraf announced that there was no military solution to Kashmir issue and that there was no need for mediation in this matter by any third party. The last nail seemed to be Musharraf not even once mentioning UN Resolutions while he was on Indian soil.

The Hurriyat leaders for many years, have been criticised for indulging in lavish lifestyle and constructing palatial properties. To keep them away from violence and militancy, they sent out their wards from Kashmir for education, training and establishing profitable businesses in other parts of India and abroad. Their political adversaries have pointed out that none of their wards ever became a militant and became a freedom fighter as Pakistan would like us to believe. Critics of these Hurriyat leaders have been demanding that these ''representatives'' of the people disclose sources of their wealth and income with which these properties have been created. Allegations have been made publically about crores and crores of rupees which were received by them from Pakistan and other foreign countries for furthering the ''peoples movement'' and for distributing relief to victims of violence, widows and orphans. Now OIC has accepted Hurriyat's request to collect and remit to APHC funds for such purposes. Doubts have been expressed in political circles whether it would be proper for OIC countries to funnel funds through Hurriyat whose financial record is not transparent and above board. After Agra summit, serious allegations of misappropriation of Rs 80 crores by Hurriyat leaders, have been made by Mir Khurshid, Chairman of Jammu & Kashmir Mutihada Mahaz (United Front). In a statement published here, he has alleged that he had sent this amount to Hurriyat from collections made by him in PoK, as claimed by him, during his stay in PoK from 1990 to 1996.

The critics of APHC have been asking for details of donations received since its formation in 1993. Nothing is known whether any accounts have been maintained properly and if those were ever got auditted by any Chartered Account. No Balance Sheets are known to have been published. The public does not know if the ''Sole Representative Body'' has a Treasurer, elected or even appointed.

How seriously does Pakistan take the Hurriyat? What is the criteria? Did Pakistan insist that Hurriyat Executive members be allowed to travel to Pakistan? Did Pakistan insist that unless Hurriyat is involved in negotiations, no summit would be held? Just as President Musharraf in his country held consultations with various parties, groups, organisations and individuals to prepare himself for discussions with Indian Prime Minister, did he hold any consultations with the Hurriyat Executive that during half hour meeting with General Musharraf at Pakistan High Commissioner's residence at New Delhi, the General only listened but did not ''say anything in return.'' This proves JKLF thesis that the invitation was ''for a cup of tea'', not for political discussion.

The APHC today finds itself in an unenviable position. Its friends are undetermined. Its objective is blurred. It is not sure if its stock within Kashmir will fall further if it continues to hitch its wagon only to Pakistani locomotive. According to reports, some rethinking has started within its ranks. Some elements feel that like other secessionists it would be wise to open channels with New Delhi by agreeing to meet Mr K C Pant now that Indian Home Minister L K Advani has told Parliament that like other Kashmiri groups, Indian Government would be ready to talk to them if Hurriyat so desired.

An opportunity has appeared for Hurriyat to decide what role they want for themselves now-- of a patriot, a puppet or a parrot ?

Death of Phoolan

By M J Akbar

The first, and possibly the only, time I have reached the end of the road was twenty years ago. We had set off in a couple of jeeps from Kanpur towards Kanpur Dehat, an unambiguous definition of territory that started at the dying edge of the city and rose towards the dust-choked ravines in sudden profusion to shape the course of rivers, armies, kingdoms and destinies in the heart of India.

We were in search of a village that had become instantly famous as the birthplace of a young woman who was using a gun and a gang for revenge that was personal, political and age-old. This was unique, a sensational combination of gender war and rough revolution; this was exotica at its most exotic, in a landscape out of fiction. Her name was Phoolan Devi would come much later, when caste support for her courage evolved into a mild form of veneration. She never quite became a goddess, but a Queen of Hearts was apt. Reality fused quickly into legend.

A sudden bump, and then a straight line at some arbitrary point where the Public Works Department of some government had either run out of money, or out of imagination, or simply decided that enough progress had been made. This was where the tarred, motorable road ended, with decisive finality, in a straight line that dropped a couple of inches into hard mud overlain with dust. Our jeeps now had to negotiate towards our destination by query and strong stomach. But the comparative ease with which we reached the edge of a stunning ravine, towering over a pristine blue river on which picture boats moved with slow patience, was testimony to the growing fame of yet another bandit in a region that offered poverty and violence as its staple realities.

This was Sholay country. As it so happened Sholay was still running to nonstop and generous applause in the small-town cinema hall on our way, a single-source catchment area for bioscope entertainment in a land that had remained dark, brutal and hungry for centuries. They knew no other life, and wherever we paused we encountered excited curiosity in modern India's interest in their traditional caste wars.

Caste and crime were the flavour of the Eighties in the Hindi heartland. The flavour has not gone, but it was pungent and acrid then. It had not stabilised into the cuisine of today's political recipes, and sold through fast-talk chains across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The caste domination of the upper layers was facing a challenge from those in the middle, the so-called Backwards; the empowerment of the lowest castes would come to the Nineties, with the arrival of Ram Vilas Paswan, Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.

Indira Gandhi had been defeated in 1977 by the folly of her own Emergency, but among the victors were Backward caste leaders like Charan Singh, Devi Lal and the then still-unknown Yadavs, Mulayam and Laloo Prasad, who would use power to quicken the pace of a caste conflict predicted by Dr Ram Manohar Lohia but still waiting to be born. When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she responded in the Gangetic plains by seeking a coalition of the two upper castes, her own Brahmins and the Thakurs, as the engine of a social coalition that would include the Muslims and Dalits. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, therefore, became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (and Abdur Rahman Antulay chief minister of Maharashtra). V P Singh, then unknown for any proclivity towards crusades, launched his first own in the name of a cliche, law and order Against dacoits. Maybe he too had seen Sholay. But life was more complicated than a movie.

Life is also more complicated than journalism. So we will have to use a little shorthand to get by. The Thakurs of Hindi India did not represent only the power of landed interests; they were also synonymous with social power, reinforced by the gun, which defined justice and social equations as it suited them. One offshoot was the spread of Thakur banditry, from the dispossessed margins of this syndrome. These gangs were despotic, and ruled over clusters of villages and perhaps even districts, leaving the traditional order helpless when it was not indifferent. These gangs made the Chambal valley into a nest of stories that made their way into literature and cinema. As the Backwards began to stir, one of the options they chose was to answer terror with terror. As the nouveau element they were mostly at the receiving end of the conflict, but the war had begun. When V P Singh started his law and order campaign, his machinery, also a part of the traditional caste-power structure, chose to be selective against the Backward gangs. The Backwards interpreted Congress pious hypocrisy as yet another attempt by the upper castes to eliminate, this time by the use of state machinery, their rising power. Two decades later the Backwards are as firmly anti-Congress in the north as ever and show no sign of changing. Into this bubbling chemistry Phoolan threw charismatic acid. A mallah by caste, a queen by disposition, she taunted the Thakurs with her tongue, lashed them with her gun and provoked them with her courage. No one had seen anything like her. In one stunning incident, she and her gang killed 22 Thakurs in Behmal as punishment for their violence. The incident mesmerised both rural and urban India.

Urban India, at least partially influenced by the investigative reporting of Sunday magazine, had begun to discover caste in its rural dimensions Kurta-clad undergraduates from Delhi University and its Brahmin cousin. JNU, now ambiguous about the Naxalite uprising, which was the high of the Seventies, went out in search of the Kurmi and the Yadav of Bihar, often meeting them at teashops in cities called Champaran and Hajipur. I have no emprical evidence of the Kurmi response to this historic intervention of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in their lives, but I gather that they treated it with their customary, stoic silence. It was a phenomenon, and it would pass. The politics of this social upheaval, however, would stay, not least because at the end of the social upheaval, however, would stay, not least because at the end of the Eighties V P Singh became Prime Minister of India with an anti-Congress coalition and, learning from his tenure as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, set the caste fires further alight by accepting the job-protection recommendations of the pro-Backward Mandal Commission in 1990.

By this time Phoolan was on the road to redemption, thanks to another Congress Thakur, but one who did not leave the party during Rajiv Gandhi's time, Arjun Singh, a thinking Congressman with still some personal relationship to ideology. We will, perforce, us time-compression techniques again in our narrative. Suffice to say that Arjun Singh understood the politics of the Phoolan upsurge as well as Vishwanath Pratap Singh and before him. As chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Arjun Singh tried to balance off the pro-upper caste policies of his party by stretching out to the Backwards; he knew that his party could not afford to alienate them. Rajiv Gandhi listened, but did not hear as much as Arjun Singh would have wished. Rajiv Gandhi in fact tok Arjun Singh but of Madhya Pradesh and sent him as governor of troubled Punjab; a political mistake. It was a formative period in northern social life. If today the Congress still lives in Madhya Pradesh it is because of Arjun Singh and a few others like him. For Rajiv Gandhi, the inability to fully comprehend the social change taking place in the Eighties in the north was a bigger problem than Bofors. Arjun Singh brought Phoolan back, step by typically cautious step, to civil society via surrender and an obligatory period of detention.

Phoolan went on to join the system without quite surrendering a foreboding, maverick identity as she struggled with the contradictions within herself, and within the social forces she represented. From child rape to marriage is an impossible transition in our biased and merciless male centric culture. Her trauma needed better interlocuters than she got. She could not adjust easily to the icon status bestowed upon her by urban India's journalists, authors and filmmakers in search of a story. For a little while she confused their attention with sympathy and a search for the truth. Sympathy she got, but truth was another matter, particularly if it interfered with popular drama. She resolved her anger, as she had resolved her anger earlier, and accepted.

Once in the mainstream, winning elections was the easy part. What was she to do with her victory? Sit in Parliament as a silent and strange exhibit? She had, one understands, just begun to think out a few answers when she was shot dead within the inner radius of Parliament and governmentl. In the broad daylight not of Mirzapur but of Delhi, by assassins whose identity could shape the next ten years of social conflict in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. The system will not make it easy for anyone to find the truth. At one level, this will be further exposure of the decay of governance under the vigil of the BJP and its principal ideological strongman, Lal Krishna Advani. On another level, the fate of governments in Lucknow and Delhi is involved. This in turn impacts upon the fate of India.

Phoolan was born to be larger than life.When we reached her village, she of course was not there. A single adult male relative spoke briefly to us, uncertain and edgy. Phoolan's sister. In ragged clothes and snotty, about five years old, was playing somewhere in the village and was dragged back to meet this unexpected jeepload of shirt-and-trouser, sari-and-blouse sophisticates from English India. The child looked frightened and nervous, and her tension must have communicated itself to my daughter, who was less than five then and who got frightened as well. But they were the only ones to share something on that morning in the ravines as time calmed their nerves.

The hut in which Phoolan had been born was empty. Fame had brought journalists and even their families but there was still no food, only a yard of cotton as dress, and straw pretending to be shelter overhead. There was a sort of helplessness in my questions as I tried to be a journalist, as if it was all pointless and nothing would change.

I never did write that story for Sunday and often wondered why. I know now. The story was only beginning then.

I am not so sure that the story had ended with Phoolan's death.