The arresting moment

US's destruction of the Fai network is one of the most important turning points in India’s ongoing battle with Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir militancy.

File image of Ghulam Nabi Fai | Wikipedia Commons

First the disclaimer: no, I did not attend any of Ghulam Nabi Fai’s now infamous conferences. Then the disclosure: of course, I knew him. He was a constant presence on the South Asian conference circuit in Washington, and specially sought out Indian speakers. An amiable sounding fellow carrying a bunch of pamphlets and calling cards, both of which he dispensed with a generous smile, laced in humility and warmth. But all of it, the injured air of Kashmiri victimhood, and Americanised English would not fool you about who he exactly was, and what precisely he was after. He was a Pakistani lobbyist for their Kashmir cause, leading a very cleverly constructed overground support base for the malevolent movement that was picking strength in the early nineties. You would have to be utterly nuts, delusional or smoking some awful prohibited substance to not figure this out. Would you have known he was funded by the ISI? Again, you had to be from another planet to believe anything else, although, two decades back, the CIA was considered about as hostile to India as the ISI and I do remember one of the most able members of our almost all-woman diplomatic team in DC elbow me in my side at one of these conferences to whisper, dekha, yeh inki company ke logon ki sewa mein hai (see, he serves their company here). Company was the usual euphemism for CIA. In DC those days, CIA would look more like the usual suspect.

Either way, the choice was CIA or ISI. But there was no doubt that Mr Fai was well-funded. The rest was left to your own judgment, sense of discretion and prevailing norms of disclosure. Or it depended on how difficult you found it to say no to the next junket to Washington, DC. To many of us who had covered terrorism in Punjab closely, and were used to dealing with globalised Khalistan activists, particularly Ganga Singh Dhillon (Khushwant Singh famously suggested once that he rename himself Potomac Singh, since he was betraying the nation of Ganga and lived in Washington),there was no mystery to the fact that these overground campaigners worked in close coordination with militant movements in India and enjoyed the backing of hostile intelligence agencies with unaudited funds.

This week’s argument, however, is not so much about the merits of accepting business-class tickets and hospitality from any such characters. It is, in fact, surprising that so many are running around claiming they had no idea who Fai was, and if they did, they would never have accepted his hospitality. A more honest and morally totally convincing answer would have been the straight one. That as an intellectual or, in case of some, as a civil society activist, you were fully within your rights to go and speak at any forum, even if it was funded or organised by the Pakistanis and that just the fact of accepting a free ticket and a tiny per diem would not have compromised your integrity. Till reports last came in, none of these worthies, the leading lights of the liberal establishment, had shown that much honesty and courage which, indeed, would have put a quick end to the controversy. It is much better to simply say that this is a free country, and as a free citizen you are fully within your rights to speak at any forum, even if Pakistan-sponsored, and put forward your views, even if at variance with your country’s official position. That nobody except Gautam Navlakha, activist of the radical left has had the honesty to say this underlines to us the fact of how shallow the intellectual establishment is in our country. And how quickly it loses nerve.

The larger argument, however, is about what the FBI move on Fai and his network means for the cause he and his masters have been campaigning for. Foundations of the ongoing militancy in Kashmir were laid in Zia-ul-Haq’s last years. He had seen the strategy of death by bleeding through a thousand cuts work against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and decided to replicate it in India. That is how the Khalistan campaign was launched in Punjab in the early eighties. Its initial success led to the idea being expanded to Kashmir subsequently. Self-flagellation is a chronic disease among our liberal-intellectual establishment, so it was commonly said in these circles that militancy in Punjab was entirely because of the games Indira Gandhi and Zail Singh played with Bhindranwale and similarly that the Kashmir eruption was indigenous and caused by Rajiv Gandhi’s rigging of the 1987 election. As subsequent evidence proved in both cases, this view was also self-defeating and delusional. The Congress party’s dabbling in Sikh politics and hijacking of the 1987 Kashmir elections did add fuel to the fire, but both militant movements were planned, funded, led and sustained from Pakistan, as was the expansion of terror into the rest of India, starting with the serial Bombay blasts in 1993. Why else does Dawood Ibrahim have such an exalted status in Pakistan? For Kashmir, as they had done for Punjab, the ISI built a strong, overground civil-society network in the West, particularly in America and Britain. That is how the Fai network came into being. And for more than two decades the Americans did nothing about it. Surely they are not so delusional as not to have known who was funding it.

That is why their destruction of the Fai network now is so important. It is one of the most important turning points in India’s ongoing battle with Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir militancy. It is a firm indication that the Americans have dumped all pretence and are no longer willing to ignore and thereby tacitly support the ISI’s campaign in Kashmir. Of course they are not doing so because they have discovered a new love for us. They are doing it because they love themselves. Howsoever strong their strategic interests, they can no longer overlook the fact that the ISI is essentially a one-dimensional (anti-India) organisation that sees no issue with sponsoring violence and terror in pursuit of its main objective. Afghanistan and Pakistan’s own western borders are secondary in its calculations. Its old and too-clever-by-half argument that it would help the Americans in the west as long as they overlooked what they were doing in the east (in India) has now been trashed. The central message of the FBI move against Fai is, essentially, this: that Pakistan’s own stalwart allies and moneybags will no longer accept this utterly cynical double-nuancing of the war against terror.

This is the real import of this week’s crackdown on Fai. Of course, we in India are too distracted by our own problems, too internally focused to think about this. This is a real turning point in our war against terror. It helps further that it comes at a time when militancy in Kashmir is at its lowest ebb. It’s an opportunity we need to find the focus to build on. Who accepted Fai’s free tickets and hospitality, knowingly or unknowingly, is entirely irrelevant in the big picture. Particularly when Fai, and this entire ISI-funded operation, is now history.