MEN AND MATTERS
Al-Umar Mujahideen re-activates PoK units

By B L Kak

Land route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad will not be thrown open to human and vehicular traffic in the near future. But the illegal passage of terrorists into Jammu and Kashmir in twos and threes in the coming days and weeks is not ruled out, if one were to go by the uncontradicted reports about the ominous activity triggered by the dreaded outfit, Al-Umar Mujahideen, in some parts of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), including Muzaffarabad.

Known for the support, moral and material, to it from Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) since it came into being in December 1989, Al-Umar Mujahideen has avoided to open any office in Pakistan. Instead, the organisation set up its office in PoK's capital city, Muzaffarabad, which, in spite of the US pressure on Islamabad for action against militants and terrorists, has been reorganised. This apart, Al-Umar Mujahideen has also opened units or camps for its members and operatives at nearly half a dozen places across Poonch and Rajouri sectors of Jammu region.

Government sleuths have been fed with broad hints about the involvement of a group of Pakistani regulars in the task of reorganising and strengthening the Al-Umar Mujahideen cadre in the PoK, with the ultimate aim of keeping alive cross-border infiltration and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The needle of suspicion, in this regard, is pointed towards Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar.

Mushtaq Zargar was released, alongwith two other militants under the hostages-for-terrorists deal at Kandahar (Afghanistan) towards the end of December 1999. The trio also included Masood Azhar. If Azhar never fired a gun after a brief training stint in Afghanistan, Zargar revelled in violence. Before his freedom from an Indian jail, Zargar was charged with responsibility for over three dozen murders in downtown Srinagar and had a reputation for brutaility, even outright sadism.

Zargar is, expectedly, in some area or locality of Pakistan, after Kabul, not long ago, conveyed to New Delhi that he did not stay back in Afghanistan when he was freed by the Indian Government under the hostages-for-terrorists deal at Kandahar. If many eyes continue to be focussed on Masood Azhar, founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Mushtaq Zargar just cannot be ignored or under-estimated by Indian authorities in J&K. Zahoor Sheikh, according to data available with the Union Home Ministry, belonging to Anantnag in south Kashmir, introduced Zargar to the world of terror in 1988.

In August 1988, Zargar crossed into Pakistan through Trehgam and received training at a camp organised by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). He went to Pakistan for a second training stint in May 1989 and returned through Uri. He subsequently made a name for himself, carrying out several attacks on security force personnel and executing a series of murders of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs).

Without its own apparatus firmly in place in Jammu and Kashmir, the ISI saw in Al-Umar Mujahideen an instrument through which the ascendancy of the JKLF, which favoured independence for Kashmir, could be challenged. Mushtaq Zargar proved only too willing to do the job. The fact that he was the only resident of Indian Kashmir on the list of 36 prisoners whose release the hijackers had sought (at Kandahar) offered some indication of the precise use that terrorists across the J&K border hoped to put him to. Will anti-India jihadis across the border try to make use of Zargar's undisputed organisational skills and his residual apparatus in Srinagar and put them to work to escalate violence in Kashmir? This question has, significantly, engaged the attention of some official and intelligence circles as well.

Another question : Will Income Tax Department close the 'crucial' file which was opened in the none-too-old investigations against a few secessionist leaders of Kashmir, including the hard-liner, Syed Ali Shah Geelani? ''No, is the official reply. It is official: In the wake of investigations, Geelani, for instance, had claimed an annual agricultural income of Rs 10,000 in his tax returns, and also received the official pension of Rs 85,200 due to two-term MLA.

His expensive house in Hyderpora on the outskirts of Srinagar, however, had several cars parked there and the house-hold was run by a personal staff of 14 people. The monthly kitchen expenses amounted to Rs 25,000. Income Tax Department searches of the Geelani home also yielded Rs 10.25 lakhs and 10,000 dollars in cash. Geelani's son-in-law, Altaf Ahmed, who allegedly used his legitimate operations to launder funds, was slapped with a Rs 40 lakh penalty.

Separate income-tax penalities of Rs 2 crores were imposed on businessman, Abdul Rashid Saraf, who was allegedly involved in handling hawala funds. In 2002, Income Tax authorities found that Saraf had failed to disclose income of Rs 3.37 crores between 1996 and 2002. There are many people in Kashmir, who do not want their ''money-making tools'' to get dried up in the event of total peace and tranquility in the troubled State. There are also people, who do not want a rapprochement between New Delhi and the Hurriyat leaders.

However, a very special moment is being witnessed in Kashmir now-a-days, created by the US-brokered India-Pakistan agreement for the termination of cross-border infiltration and de-escalation at the border. True, the Hurriyat's claim to represent the Valley's people remains untested because it has never participated in elections---- it identifies such participation with accepting India's sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir. But it stretches credulity to think that the All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) is irrelevant, it stands for nobody, and that elections held without its participation will make no difference to their legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

New Delhi cannot be faulted for the rejection of the Hurriyat's proposal for ''triangular discussions''--that is, separate dialogue with New Delhi and Islamabad. It will have to be admitted, in the altered scenario, that the Kashmir issue or 'dispute' is no longer bilateral, if it ever was. There is a third party, indeed an overwhelmingly important one : the Kashmiris.

Aspirations and expectations of the people of Ladakh and Jammu region are as important as those of the people of the Kashmir valley. At the same time, there is no denying that popular alienation from the Indian state is a central, inescapable, feature of Kashmir's reality. Unless New Delhi gets its act together and cleans up the mess in Jammu and Kashmir in a purposive, comprehensive way, rather than through the tokenist 'packages' that fail to impress anyone, it cannot possibly combat this alienation.

The age of adolescents

By Kedar Nath Pandey

The much-heralded Age of Ad-olescents has finally dawned. But it is not likely to usher in a brave new world because, notwithstanding the rhetoric, the grim reality is that though young people today constitute the largest-ever segment of the world population, they are not being truly empowered to lead their lives with dignity and freedom. "Empowerment", all are agreed, is the key word. If it is to be meaningful, we will have to shed our prejudices and redesign our socio-cultural and moral framework. Else, we will be swamped by a booming and rootless population. Unfortunately, we have not moved very far in this direction.

Come January 2005, and we will have an unprecedented world population of six billion. Until the beginning of the 19th century, the world population never exceeded one billion. Wars, pestilence, natural calamities, famine, a limited life span, all took their toll of the population, and in turn bequeathed a heavy socio-religio-cultural disposition towards large families. The role model of woman as child-bearer is a legacy of this human need to survive against all odds.

Tragically, tradition still bears down on us though the socio-cultural landscape has since transformed dramatically. Today, societies are being torn apart by the purported demands of faith/tradition on one side, and the shrill exhortations of pragmatism on the other. The first is rigid, and has little to offer by way of moral-spiritual sustenance beyond a tyrannical threat of loss of redemption/salvation. The second is often banal, and tends to get lost in statistics or self-righteousness. A new approach is needed, which can address the moral and the material landscape of ordinary men and women.

There is an urgent need to give the population debate a soul, so that it can appeal to men and women as moral-spiritual beings for whom family planning, contraception, and even abortion, are moral choices. Family planing must be liberated from the guilt that it violates an immutable moral precept, as well as from the perception that it is a purely secular decision, as this pits it against organised groups that claim that it violates God’s will. This false juxtaposition between Religion and Reason has proved the greatest stumbling block to birth control, even in developed nations. It is time to call the bluff.

All societies are based on reverence for life. This frequently translates into a belief that children are "gifts of God", as, in a sense, they are. But it also erroneously fosters the view that life in the womb must on no account be terminated, nor attempts made to inhibit conception, and this creates our present dilemma. How do we best demonstrate our respect for the dignity of human life? Do we regulate birth as we control other things in life, or do we breed ourselves to chronic starvation, ecological catastrophe, even extinction?

Science has freed women from being hostage to unwanted pregnancies, and provided safe exit routes to victims of violence and lust. We can now regulate birth to suit our needs, which have changed because of improved health services. We know that over-population degrades human beings and destroys respect for life. Yet we complicate our lives with dogmas that deny us the chance to live our lives to the optimum.

The young, of course, are the worst affected. Some years ago, a 14-year-old rape victim, pregnant with a child she didn’t want, was almost prevented from having an abortion by religious busybodies in a conservative Western nation. She was saved by courageous political intervention, but at the cost of a sharply divided nation. The moralists who called a minor schoolgirl’s abortion a subversion of God’s will were least concerned how cruelly a baby would impact her young life. Besides her physical, mental and emotional health, it would affect her basic education, negate the likelihood of higher education, and effectively disempower her for life.

Today, most baby boomers face this fate as governments face conservative opposition in providing youth with access to information about safe sex and relief from unwanted pregnancies. The recent UN General Assembly Special Session on the 1994 Cairo Population and Development Conference (June 30-July2, 1999) discussed women’s rights to sexual and reproductive health, including the issues of abortion, rape and incest. The final document ruled that abortion should not be promoted as a means of family planning, though it is often the last resort of desperate women.

There was similar concern over HIV-AIDS, which afflicts over 47 million people worldwide, and has already claimed 14 million victims. Half the world’s new infections are among youth. Yet no real answers emerged, because of the fear of recognising the sexual and reproductive health rights of adolescents, especially young women.

The issue of emergency contraceptives for young women was dodged at the Youth Forum at The Hague earlier in February also, despite being raised and approved from the floor. But it is now too late to debate whether youth should be having sex. With one billion adolescents in the reproductive age group, with one-tenths of all births being teenage pregnancies, with HIV/AIDS a grim universal reality, we cannot indulge in moral attitudes. If young people are having sex, we cannot deny them access to safe sex.

This issue is becoming controversial in India as well. The Union Health Ministry proposes to amend the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP) to empower minor girls (married or unmarried) to have abortions without their guardians’ consent. The purpose is to check illegal abortions (eight out of ten abortions are illegal) and the high rate of maternal mortality (45 per 10,000) on account of childbirth to young, particularly teenaged mothers. Predictably, the amendment has fallen foul of a group called the Society of the Protection of the Unborn Child, which is threatening an agitation of the issue, on grounds that it will destroy the social fabric and promote "immorality" among the youth.

However, one powerful consolation in India is that religion does not pamper obscurantism. The desire for a male child goes deep, and the common complaint of women with several daughters, but helpless against further pregnancies, is that the husband wants a male child to continue the line and perform the last rites. Yet, in cities one finds daughters performing last rites in families where there is no male heir. Earlier, a male relation would be asked to do the honours.

My point is that whenever these breaches of convention take place, the officiating male priest at the ceremony graciously goes along with the spirit of the occasion and the times. There is no known instance of his citing chapter and verse of the scriptures to obstruct this development. Thus, even as India gears up to face a one billion population, it is quietly chiselling away at the foundations of the social order that made this possible.

I conclude with the Japanese philosopher, Daisaku Ikeda: "It is by no means certain that methods good in one historical age will be appropriate in another. The true spirit of religion is to adopt only those measures that protect the dignity of life". It is high time we stopped defending coercive motherhood as a religious value, and promote sexual and reproductive health programmes for the young, as an investment in the future. INAV