The two wars in Jammu

Communal conflagrations make matters worse for the residents of Rajouri and Poonch, who are already waging a bitter war against terrorism.

IN most places, severed heads of cows and pigs or hate-filled speeches start religious riots. In Rajouri, all it takes is a football.

On the afternoon of September 16, Muslim students at the Degree College in Rajouri were playing football. One shot hit a Hindu student who was watching the game on the sidelines. The student responded with abuse and it degenerated into a brawl. Soon hund reds of people from the town joined in. Within an hour, groups of Hindus and Muslims were throwing stones at each other across the Degree College football field. Two students were badly injured in the first round of violence. When the police tried to int ervene, the stone-throwing escalated. Two students were injured in the firing that followed. Subsequently, mobs set fire to government property, and the authorities responded by imposing curfew.

Under other circumstances, the Degree College riot's toll of four deaths might have been considered relatively minor. But Rajouri and the adjoining district of Poonch are the most explosive theatres of Jammu and Kashmir's bitter war against terrorism. Co mmunal combat here is feeding another, larger conflict.

Today, a policeman stands outside the Degree College, checking identity cards to make sure that Rajouri's communal armies do not make their way inside. However, it has done little to solve the college's real problem, which mirror those of the town. Outsi de the classroom, student groups remain segregated on religious lines, and there are students who want to take it further. Young men at the Degree College claim that most fights break out because of women; they want them removed to another college at a s uitable distance. In the college, as in the town, communal suspicion is evident. No one discusses the evident secular problems that the college faces - run-down buildings, poor educational resources and so on. Things are not better outside either. Hindu and Muslim leaders would not even see eye to eye after the riots.

The Degree College riot was the latest in a long series of communal conflagrations in Rajouri. On August 17, just a month before the riot, six Hindus were killed by terrorists at Kotdhara village. The bodies were brought to Rajouri. Violence broke out in Rajouri when activists of the Hindu Right threw stones, attacked District Commissioner B.A. Runyal, and set fire to his car. The fact that Runyal is a Muslim made the activists' communal convictions explicit. Little attention was paid to the fact that o ne of the victims of the massacre was a Muslim - Nooruddin Mohammad - whose throat was slit by the terrorist group on suspicion of passing information to security force personnel. Nor did the brutal execution of three Muslims by terrorists in the same vi llage on August 14, again on suspicion of being police informers, provoke protest or reflection.

Indeed, it has passed largely unnoticed that Muslims in Rajouri and Poonch have been the worst victims of terrorism, year after year. The latest massacre in the area targeted Gulzar Husain, a forest guard who worked at Nar Smuthi, Poonch. Three terrorist s belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked Husain's home before dawn on September 30. They failed to find Husain. His wife Ashraf Bi and four of their children were shot dead at point-blank range. Allegations that Husain and his eldest son were providin g information to the security forces may have provoked the killings. However, police investigators believe that the attack may also have been the outcome a local feud, about Husain's alleged affair with another woman. Killings like these should have form ed the basis for building a genuine people's consensus against terrorism. However, both Hindu and Muslim communal politicians have, however, chose to ignore the atrocities.

Muslim communal politicians have, like their Hindu counterparts, instead worked to invent problems where none exists. On August 8, about 2,000 people from the village of Same Semat blocked the movement of an Army convoy, protesting against the alleged be ating of local residents by soldiers. Troops responded by firing, and Mohammad Sadiq, a Gujjar herdsman, was killed. Sadiq's body was brought to Rajouri town and kept at a local mosque. Rumours that a police officer who eventually removed the body for bu rial had worn shoes inside the mosque led to mob violence. Similar incidents are common in the area. On September 23, a twenty-year-old dispute over a plot of land led two families at Palma village, one Hindu and the other Muslim, to attack each other. T he Muslims involved were arrested, but the Hindus, who were hospitalised, earned a reprieve. This sparked protests by Muslim chauvinists, who demanded that the Hindus be handcuffed to their hospital beds.

Part of Rajouri's problems are historical. Affluent business families in the city's Hindu-dominated Jawahar Nagar area and Muslim-dominated Ward 10 have not quite forgotten the pain they inflicted on each other during Partition. Politics also plays a rol e. The victory of two Congress (I) nominees - Ashok Sharma and R.S. Sharma - from two of Rajouri's four Assembly constituencies in the last elections provoked the local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to use aggressive communal mobilisation as a means to ga in political space. Among rural Muslim communities, there was tension over initiatives by chauvinist organisations to take control of religious institutions. In Kandi, for example, village leaders protested against efforts by a local leader of the religi ous right, Mir Husain Samshi, to set up a Deobandi madrassa (seminary). National Conference (N.C.) politicians, with a poor record in bringing development to the region, have also sought to cash in on the communal divide by reinventing themselves as defe nders of the faith.

The inevitable happened when Rajouri and Poonch's larger war against terrorism was placed at the centre of its communal conflict. In some instances, communal elements within the Army have proved the best allies of Pakistan-based terrorists. In June, for example, a grenade was found outside a temple in Tarkundi, a mainly Muslim village which straddles the Line of Actual Control (LoAC) in Poonch. Soldiers, local residents said, responded by mass public beatings, singling out the local numberdar and other village officials for special treatment. Army officials denied the charge. However, days later the people of the village migrated en masse to the other side of the LoAC. Few in Poonch believe Army claims that the migration was provoked by calls from a mo sque on the other side of the LoAC. The migration from Tarkundi has done not a little to fuel Muslim communal feeling.

Village Defence Committees (VDCs), vigilante groups set up to protect vulnerable Hindu communities, which have been under attack from the Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Islamist organisations since at least 1997, have been a second key element in local commun al feuds. Poonch saw rural tension in late May when a member of a VDC, who was drunk, shot dead a Muslim labourer who strayed near his home at Golath, near Mendhar. There was nothing to show the incident was expressly communal. But fire aimed at Muslim h omes in late August, after the killings in Kotdhara, certainly was. Some politicians have demanded that Muslim villagers in communally heterogeneous areas be armed as well. That would most certainly lead to the wars, now fought with stones, turning into full-blown shootouts. However, officials have done their best to resist pressure. At the same time, little sustained effort has been made to depoliticise the VDCs and rid them of Hindu chauvinist elements, who get the support of the local Army units.

The mingling of communal politics and terrorism is not new to the area. Rajouri's first major communal killing was provoked by the marriage of Manzoor Hussein, a Gujjar Muslim schoolteacher posted at Sewari Buddal, to a Hindu girl, Rita Kumari, in August 1997. Hindu communal reaction was prompt. Tension built up, and the couple were arrested at Reasi on a false charge of abduction. Released, they married again at a civil court in Jammu and returned home. This time, despite community pressure, the police refused to intervene. Rita Kumari was then abducted by Hindu extremists, while Hussein and his mother-in-law were beaten up. Subsequently, Hussein approached the Farid Khan group of the Hizbul-Mujaheddin for vengeance. Eight members of the three familie s that were behind Rita Kumari's abduction were slaughtered. This, in turn, was used by local Hindu fundamentalist organisations to provoke a communal riot.

However, fundamentalism peddled by politicians of the Hindu and Islamic Right in Rajouri and Poonch has had little relevance outside the towns. The far-Right ideologies that have driven terrorism in Kashmir are alien here, and the small numbers of local Muslims who have joined insurgent groups have done so mainly for local reasons. "If a Gujjar joins one tanzeem (group)," says the Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami's 17-year-old Shahzad Qamar, a Surankote resident recently arrested along with seven other terrorists by the Poonch police, "then a Pathan or a Rajput will join another one, to protect his community's interests." Caste and village feuds between different groups of local terrorists, and between local terrorists and those from Pakistan, are common in the area. More important, much of the Jammu and Kashmir Police's successful cadre and members of the covert-action units set up to infiltrate and engage terrorist groups in the area are recruited from local Muslim communities.

But the escalating communal tension could not have come at a worse time. Rajouri and Poonch have been the principal thrust areas of Pakistan-based terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir, along with areas further to the south along the LoAC in Jammu. Intel ligence estimates suggest that around 1,600 terrorists, over 90 per cent of them Pakistani in origin, are estimated to have moved across the LoAC in the area over the last year, and there was a marked escalation of violence along the international border in Jammu and Kathua, which was relatively free of trouble until 1998. Poonch and Rajouri are of special strategic importance. Terrorists who cross the LoAC in Rajouri can head east into Udhampur and Doda through Manjakote or the Fatehpur Enclosure or no rth through Thana Mandi into Poonch and into Kashmir. Similarly, the Surankote area of Poonch is a hub for terrorists crossing the Pir Panjal range into the Kashmir Valley.

However, if infiltration rates have been high, however, both districts have also seen successes in combating terrorism. Despite the difficult terrain, the number of terrorists killed in Rajouri and Poonch is among the highest in the State. The Jammu and Kashmir Police have played a key role in counter-terrorist operations, and there appears to be a relatively high level of coordination with the Army's dedicated Romeo Force in Rajouri and counter-insurgency brigades of the 39 Mountain Division and the 25 Infantry Division. Special Police Officers (SPOs), recruited locally for an honorarium of Rs.1,500 a month, and retired troops, who receive Rs.2,000, have also played a key role in the operations in the area. On August 24, a group of nine police personn el, SPOs and retired soldiers succeeded in killing seven Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists in an ambush in Kalani, Poonch.

However, there have also been reverses which illustrate the intensity of the fighting in the area. Substantial details have not emerged so far of an incident that took place in June at Wansi Dhoke, Poonch, in which 19 soldiers were rumoured to have been killed by terrorists using flame-throwers. Officials deny that the incident took place. Nonetheless, the fact remains that casualties among security force personnel have been relatively high. Nor is all well on the LoAC itself. Data obtained by Frontline show that only 19 of the 82 encounters reported in Poonch from January to September-end took place within 2.5 km of the LoAC and these resulted in the death of just 59 of the total 171 terrorists killed in the district. In only two of the encounters wer e large groups of terrorists eliminated. The figures for Rajouri are even worse; they suggest that efforts to contain infiltration have had only limited success. Problems have also emerged in densely-forested areas such as the Fatehpur Enclosure and the high forests around Surankote in Poonch, fuelling insecurity in rural areas.

Unchallenged communal politics could prove to be the most dangerous factor of all. The deep fissures between Hindu and Muslim communities, abetted by local politicians and the security forces, are certain to affect counter-terrorist operations. Already a slow but visible process of migration from vulnerable rural areas to towns has begun - a process that threatens to propel larger communal conflagrations. A communal conflagration is something that the area can ill-afford. Recoveries of large quantities of heavy weapons, including solar-triggered missiles, 82 millimetre mortars, armour-piercing ordinance and anti-tank mines, suggest that terrorists will, in the months to come, take an increasingly aggressive posture. In late September, Rajouri town was itself brought under mortar attack, albeit somewhat ineffectually, when terrorists targeted a bridge on the road to Thana Mandi and Army fuel supplies. Living through this war is going to prove hard enough for the area. The last thing it needs is anothe r, parallel war.