The controversy and outrage over General VK Singh’s claim that the Indian Army used slush funds to pay some Jammu & Kashmir Ministers and politicians to maintain stability in the State is totally contrived, and was exposed by Wikileaks during its mega-leaks campaign way back in 2011. Indeed, several Indian newspapers and media sites had carried reports to this effect, but these failed to attract public attention in the absence of the context provided by the former Army chief’s revelations. VK Singh’s exposé, on open secret in Jammu & Kashmir, has inflamed passions because Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has been making intemperate statements against the accession of the State to India and demanding withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Experts believe Abdullah’s shoddy respect for the India is responsible for the sudden escalation of terror strikes in Jammu province and Srinagar Valley, where attempts to beat back a major infiltration by 30 to 40 terrorists accompanied by Pakistan Army Special Forces personnel have now entered the fourteenth day. According to US State Department Cable ‘Kashmiri Politics as filthy as Dal Lake’, from envoy David Mulford on February 3, 2006, the Indian Government “recently broadened its Kashmir dialogue by holding several public and private meetings with non-Hurriyat leaders”. Besides increasing the net of separatist interlocutors beyond the Hurriyat, the talks aimed at “conveying the Indian Government’s displeasure at the Mirwaiz-led Hurriyat’s recent endorsement of Pakistani proposals on Kashmir”. The talks have made little substantive progress and many believe they have only fragmented Kashmiri politics further. The cable adds, “Beneath the surface of these political developments, the corrosive combination of money and corruption continues to strengthen its grip on the lives and calculations of politicians, separatists, terrorists, police, Army, and civilian administration officials, raising the question of whether the Kashmiri elite has an incentive to find a lasting political settlement”. The cable continues, “New Faces, Same Old Results?” that PM Singh and his top advisors on Kashmir policy met with Sajjad Lone of the People’s Conference in early January, the first time the Prime Minister had met publicly with a non-Hurriyat separatist leader. According to official sources, the Prime Minister privately met with Yasin Malik of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in November 2005. Malik himself corroborated this to the American embassy, claiming that Singh embraced him for reportedly speaking out against violence when Malik visited Pakistani Kashmir after the earthquake (ref 05 New Delhi 8791).
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 10:53:44 +0000
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