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According to recent media reports, a note c irculating in
Delhi's intelligence corridors
suggests the ISI is intent on engineering an increase in
militant activities in the
Kashmir Valley so as to shift focus from the tussle between the
army, government
and the judiciary in Pakistan. For this purpose, the ISI
summoned a meeting with
Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) supremo Syed Salahuddin and other members
of the United Jihad Council on January 10.
But Delhi shouldn't be too concerned. While events in Pakistan
and Afghanistan will have a huge bearing on the
ISI puppeteer's room (and desire) for manoeuvre, the HM puppet's
weak joints can't promise much of a show.
Notwithstanding contextual changes in the region, internal
disarray will keep HM from making a comeback even as
its ISI sponsors capitalise on the unfolding endgame in
Afghanistan.
In 1989, Ghulam Qadir Khan, Ghulam Mohammad Malik, and Mohammad
Ayub Bandey became HM's first batch
of Pakistan Trained Militants (PTMs). By March of the following
year, HM had successfully sent 13,000 recruits
across the Line of Control (LOC) to receive t raining. At the
time, Pakistan's willingness to patronise this new
stream of Mohajirs, met with severe infrastructural incapacity.
In fact, until 1990, a single facility near
Muzaffarabad was meant to accommodate more than 20,000 youth
from Jammu and Kashmir. Naturally, many
prospective mujahideen never made it to t raining, instead
languishing in POK. Pakistan's inadequate carrying
capacity, however, was only one problem.
Among those who did return to J&K as PTMs, many were
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) loyalis ts, dedicated to the liberation
of Kashmir. But it took more than an ideological base and
foreign training to become and remain a mujahid. Given
an option between the difficult militant life and the relative
comfort of a JI office, most chose the latter. As HM's
founders quickly learnt, inaugurating a militant outfit and
sustaining it were entirely different projects. Mohammad
Ahsan Dar, HM's architect and first Supreme Commander was
well-educated, and well-off. He mobilised an elite
GUEST COLUMN
Hizbul Mujahideen: a martyred militia?By Nikhil Raymond Puri
Story Dated: Tuesday, February 7, 2012 18:27 hrs IST
Lacking ideological glue, the Hizbul Mujahideen has fostered a
network of fear to hold its house together
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8/3/2019 Hizbul Mujahideen: a martyred militia?
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nucleus of like-minded (and similarly endowed) individuals to
give the J I and its ideology a militant appendage. But
these ingredientsa requisite ideology and the means to act upon
itwere reserved for leaders. As exemplified by
Ahsan Dar's own reluctance to join other outfits that were
already in place, the average HM militant would have to
be a follower: suff iciently committed to remain involved, but
economically ill-equipped to launch his own outfit.
The HM volunteer mujahid has long been a rare specimen. While
many in the valley continue to support the violent
pursuit of azadi, they prefer doing so f rom the sidelines.
Today's HM sipai' is primarily drawn to the organisation
by monetary incentives: a salary with occasional extortion
benefits. Lacking ideological glue, the group has
fostered a network of fear to hold its house together. Fear
ensures that half-hearted recruits remain involved longer
than inclination alone would permit. According to Abdul Noorani,
a surrendered HM militant, the group does not
have any exit provisions: It is immensely difficult to leave,
even if you've only been with the group for ten days.
Asked if he ever communicated his desire to surrender, Noorani
says that was not an option: If you talk about
leaving, they will kill you. And if you leave, they will find
you at home. Apart from its retaining potential, the
element of fear also allows HM to extort food, shelter, and
donations from otherwise unwilling purveyors.
But this formula of internal intimidation presents a trade-off.
While it renders surrender more difficult, it also makes
the consequences of surrender more costly for the organisation.
If surrender is punishable by death, it is often in
the surrendering militant's interest to disclose all and pray
that his former comrades are captured or killed. There is
no question that surrendering militants have informed the hunt
for numerous HM commanders. In 1991, Supreme
Commander Ahsan Dar delivered to JI's leadership his resignation
letter. When asked to reconsider, Dar presented
four preconditions, amongst which two were particularly
prescient. The first was that visibly reluctant recruits
should be allowed to leave before accumulating too much insight
into the organisation. The second was that if ever
a militant had to visit home, he would have to be accompanied by
his entire section. Dar's prescriptive conditions
were rejected then, and neglected since. During the Kashmiri
winter and Ramzan, half-hearted militants are often
granted solo trips home, at great cost to the organisation.
Inequity between HM's leadership and its foot soldiers also
presents a point of dissatisfact ion. The HM sipai' is
aware that his commanders absorb the majority of funds flowing
into the organisation. While Noorani's monthlysalary increased from
Rs. 500 to Rs. 1000 between 1996 and 1997, his commander Akhtar
Ansari was making
much more, sometimes Rs. 50,000 a month. A possible way for HM
to mute such disparity is through distractive
indoctrination: sufficient radicalisation and ideological
resolve might allow a militant to overlook potential irritants.
But HM's religious training is amateurish at best. In fact, so
depleted is its religious authority that Musarrat
Hussain, a madrasa dropout with barely four years of religious
education was in charge of indoctrinating over 300
PTMs at HM's Boi Camp in Abbottabad (the camp was shut down in
2008, coinciding with Osama Bin Laden's
suspected arrival in the area). The point is that for the
insuffic iently radicalised and economically driven militants
graduating from Pakistan's t raining facil ities, rumours that
HM Supreme Commander Syed Salahuddin lives in the
wealth, comfort, and safety of Islamabad's sector G-10/2 can
only displease.
HM's infrastructural presence in Pakistan has suffered since
2001. Camps that flourished in the 1990s are now
shut. HM's infrastructure has been reduced to training camps in
Garhi Habibullah (Mansehra District) and Sensa
(Kotli Distric t). A disproportionate focus on macro-context
tells us that HM's decline is a temporary phenomenon,
and that geopolitical shifts will once again unleash the ISI and
its Kashmir-specific designs. It is certainly true that
the majority of previously functional HM camps were based in
rented urban and suburban buildings that the ISI canreplace or
refurnish as easily as it discarded them.
However, the HM's organisational defic iencies suggest that the
group's fortunes won't be as cyclical as those of
the ISI. Despite the patronage, this quasi-indigenous client
might not be built to last.
Nikhil Raymond Puri is a D.Phil candidate at the University of
Oxford.
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