Kashmir Youth Move On From Militancy

 At a hip cafeteria in central Srinagar groups of young men and women sit around sipping cappuccinos and cafe lattes. Background music is the BeeGees and Bryan Adams, the dress code is jeans and T-shirts for men and traditional but elegant salwar kameez for women. There are very few headscarves. It’s a scene which would have been unthinkable in Kashmir a few years ago. For almost two decades, the region has been in the grip of a violent insurgency by militants opposed to Indian rule and chants of ‘azaadi’, or freedom, were the first words one heard on arrival. Today, the word ‘azaadi’ is still part of some people’s lexicon, but with many young Kashmiris it comes out only after some probing. ‘Last on the list’ ‘In our college, the most discussed issue is personal life. Students talk about their boyfriends and girlfriends, their love trouble,’ says Ibrahim Wani, a biochemistry student at Sri Pratap College. ‘The number two topic of discussion is education, career, employment opportunities. Then we share our concern for the environment. The fight for Kashmir’s freedom or where the separatist movement is headed is last on the list,’ he says. A stroll through Srinagar University’s walkways, shaded by centuries-old chinar (plane) trees, shows the shift in the priorities of the young in Kashmir. The clamour here is for well-paying jobs, better infrastructure, women’s rights and peace. ‘India is doing very well economically. In the past few years, the country has progressed well. Since we are part of India, we too have a bright future,’ says commerce student Mudassar Hussain, who is 21. A job fair was held on the campus recently and Hussain was among the 400 students who were offered places by various firms. ‘The situation is much better in Kashmir now. The killings and blasts which characterised the 1990s and the first few years of this decade have reduced considerably,’ says Salfia, 22, who is studying to become a lawyer. ‘In the far-flung rural areas, there are still large numbers of troops and the situation is sometimes grim, but in Srinagar we feel happy now,’ she says. ‘We are fed up of the India-Pakistan stories. The youth is not interested in the movement any more.’ ‘Sensible’ Hussain says the days when young people answered the call to arms are over. ‘People are more sensible now. Today no one can drag us away and convince us to be a militant. We have to think for ourselves, not follow [separatist leader Syed Ali Shah] Geelani or some other leader.’ Ibrahim, Hussain and Salfia all belong to that generation which was just taking baby steps when militancy blew up in Kashmir. Violence, strikes and protests have been part of their growing daily life. But today when Kashmir is enjoying relative calm, the young think they can hope for a better future. ‘We’re not interested in going back down that route [of militancy] again. We need to move ahead, we want a normal life. We want peace,’ says Saima Farhad, an assistant professor at Kashmir University. ‘When we go out of Kashmir, to other parts of India and to other countries, we wonder what we have done with ourselves? We realise we’re destroying ourselves,’ she says. Five years ago, after the state assembly elections, the regional People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Congress party formed a coalition government. Since then, the situation in the troubled valley has been gradually, but steadily, improving. Troops are still present in large numbers, but less visible. And the withdrawal of despised counter-insurgency personnel has definitely helped ease the situation. Also, with the Taliban (who provided support to the separatist movement) under pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan and improved relations between India and Pakistan, there has been a dramatic improvement in the security situation. ‘Superficial’ ‘In the first five months of 2007, there were 27 incidents of violence in which several people were killed. This year, in the same period, there have been only three incidents and none were major,’ says inspector general of Kashmir police. Today, the streets of Srinagar are buzzing – shops are open until late at night, tourists who shunned the picturesque valley for many years are now back in their hundreds of thousands, and morale is high. But, says senior separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani the changes are ’superficial’. ‘If all is well here, then how come we still have the Disturbed Areas’ Act in place? Why does the army still enjoy special powers? The army says there are only 2,000 militants left, then why do they need 800,000 soldiers to fight them?’ He admits that a large number of youth have moved away from the separatist movement. ‘Our youth are being led astray by India, our students are being taken out of Kashmir on education tours and they are being mislead. We are being subjected to cultural aggression.’ But, Mr Geelani says he is confident that the movement for Kashmir’s independence will survive. ‘People’s priorities may change from time to time, but there’s no change in our basic stand which is the fight for freedom,’ he says. Fragile peace Another separatist leader, Shabir Shah, says the present situation can perhaps best be described as a lull before the storm. ‘To say that militancy and the Kashmiri’s desire for independence is over is a mistake,’ he says. ‘If the government of India makes one mistake, the people of India will have to pay for it.’ Current events may support his view. In recent days, Kashmir has erupted again with angry protests against plans to build facilities for Hindu pilgrims in the mainly Muslim state. This, say some, shows how fragile the peace is. It needs just a spark to set the place on fire again. Is this the Kashmir they want to leave behind for their children? Do they want Kashmir to be a failed State before they rest in peace? Will the youth take it upon themselves and restore Kashmir’s lost glory? Think about it and act before it is too late!

Help Kashmir!

Winters- Wild & Beautiful

Wular in winter

Harvest in the Valley

What amazes me most is the total rubish that get published in papers and magazines. I wonder if the people of the world will ever come to know whats the true story. I really wish both the goverments would stop making a joke of what is THE most beautiful place on Earth. An obscene amount of money has been pushed in to the state and an even more obscene number of lives have been lost. The people are trully disgusted with the political games being played. The youth are distraught, jobless and being lured into drugs and alcohol. Wood smugling is rife. Did you know that a smugller, to go to a forest and cut one tree and haul it back to the road, is paid Rs 150/- or around $3.00! Do you know that the media reports regarding unmarked graves did not say that most graves in Kashmir are unmarked…. only a head stone is placed.. its common pratice. In any case, which ‘Human Right Violator’ would kill an innocent and put him in a registered grave in a registered grave yard! I have not seen one non-Kashmiri reporter cover events inside Kashmir. Even parents and siblings of Army officers serving there are clueless of what is the ‘Kashmir Problem’. Actually they could’nt careless. Somebody else’s problem I guess.

KUKKA PARREY

1.         Parrey, known as the “king of counter-insurgency” operations in the Kashmir Valley, was credited with having broken the back of the militancy in the Valley in the mid-1990s. A militant who received training in Pakistan, Parrey surrendered to the Indian security forces in 1993. Along with some other surrendered militants, he then formed a pro-government militia – the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen – with the blessings of the Indian government. “Friendlies”, as the Indian soldiers called these “pro-India militants”, gave the intelligence network and the counter-insurgency operation in the Valley a big boost.

 

“It was the logic of setting a thief to catch a thief that lay behind the Indian army’s strategy of using the surrendered militants” to fight the Hizbul Mujahideen and other Pakistan-supported militant groups in the Valley, a senior army officer told this correspondent some months back. After all, these were once militants, many of them armed and trained in Pakistan. “They knew who was who in the various militant groups and understood the mind of the militant far better than the armed forces did.”

 

2.         The Ikhwanis are mainly ethnic Kashmiris with a deep hatred for the Islamist militants and their political backers, the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the early 1990s, militant groups such as the pro-Pakistan and Islamist Hizbul Mujahideen had trained their guns on such groups as the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and al-Jehad. Scores of militants from these groups were killed not by guns held by the Indian security forces but by weapons wielded by fraternal militant groups. Many of the Ikhwanis were those who had been at the receiving end of the fratricidal fighting.

 

3.         Now with backing from the Indian forces, they went after the Hizbul Mujahideen and the other militants. The Ikhwanis were particularly successful in marginalizing the Hizbul in northern Kashmir. Several surrendered militants have also been absorbed into the police as well as units that were specifically fighting militancy in J&K. It was to the credit of the Ikhwanis led by Parrey that militancy declined in the mid-1990s, enabling India to hold elections to the J&K state assembly in 1996. Parrey formed a political party, the Awami League, contested the election and won, becoming a legislator in the state assembly.

 

4.         Parrey inspired many militants to switch sides and cooperate with the security forces. “The power that Parrey and his boys came to wield and the new-found legitimacy they got by strutting around with the Indian forces and flaunting their weapons in the open was undoubtedly a big attraction for several militants who were fed up with life underground and disillusioned with ‘the cause’,” a Kashmiri police officer pointed out. Consequently, hundreds of militants surrendered to the Indian forces.

 

5.         The Indian forces have used the Ikhwanis for information about the militants and their movements as well as to carry out counter-insurgency operations. What is more, they used them to terrorize the local population as well. A mid-level army officer admitted to this correspondent that he had used the Ikhwanis to persuade “locals who had filed baseless complaints and cases against his men to withdraw their charges”. The officer said he was “not alone in using the Ikhwanis in this manner … This is a dirty war. The enemy is not fighting according to civilized rules of armed conflict. The surrendered militants were willing and able to give as dirtily as they got from their erstwhile comrades,” he added. But while the Ikhwanis proved useful in killing hundreds of militants, their use came with a very high price. They added a new, complicating dimension to the militancy. They unleashed a new wave of terror on the Kashmiri people.

 

6.         Not only did they train their guns on militants but they did so against unarmed civilians as well. They were brutal in their methods to elicit information from the locals. They used their weapons to fight the militancy but gradually they used it to settle personal scores, to extort and to further their individual interests. “And since they were fighting militancy, they would get away with anything,” said the police officer. Several killings, where the identity of the killers was not clear or where the motive for a massacre was hard to explain, came to be blamed on the Ikhwanis. The terror unleashed by the Ikhwanis has been so serious that many Kashmiris say they fear them more than they do the militants or the security forces. “Undermined both by public dislike of their ruthless tactics as well as Islamist propaganda campaigns, they found the political establishment arrayed against them,” wrote Praveen Swami in The Hindu. They were stripped of official cover in 1998. That led to another spate of bloodletting, with the militants gunning Ikhwanis down for cooperating with the Indian forces. Hundreds of Ikhwanis are said to have been killed by militants since 1998.

 

7.         The role of the Ikhwanis in turning the tide against militancy was substantial. But their contribution has not been acknowledged enough by Delhi, prompting some to accuse India of not doing enough to protect its own in the Valley. All the men of a village in Ganderbal near Srinagar were pro-government militants. Militants swooped down on that village one night and wiped out its men. Its residents recall the contribution of their men to fighting militancy and point out with bitterness that India had left them unarmed to fend for themselves. Several Ikhwanis, discontented with their lot, told this correspondent in December 2000 that they had ended up falling between two stools. While Kashmiris reviled them as “renegades”, the Indian armed forces had never treated them with respect, never fully trusted them. “Hundreds of our cadre laid down their lives for India, but we have received only harassment and insults in return,” 26-year-old Khurshid, Parrey’s son, told Swami.

 

8.         While some in the Valley describe the pro-government militias as “misguided policy”, the strategy, notwithstanding its flaws, did contribute to the decline of militancy. Besides, as one officer in the Border Security Force (BSF) said, the creation of the pro-government militias was the “best thing to do with a militant”. “Rehabilitation of these militants rarely works,” he pointed out. “They return to militancy soon after they are freed.”

 

9.         A senior army officer in Jammu said: “If I have to put a militant through the police or judicial process, it is a waste of time, energy and effort. I have to put five of my men to guard the militant, find a vehicle with armed guards to take him to Srinagar or Jammu and, after all this, he will either escape or walk free, only to surface again as a militant. “It makes more sense to put a bullet through his neck,” he said. “The [alternative] to that is that we use them to fight the militants.”

“The policy became a problem when the surrendered militants forgot they were once fighting the state and with considerable blood on their hands. Some had murdered policemen. They wanted bulletproof cars and armed guards and fancy salaries,” recalled the BSF officer, adding that these were “unreasonable demands” that could not be met. “They were just terrorists, after all.”

 

10.       The story of Kuka Parrey is perhaps the story of several others in the Valley. They might have switched sides, but that did not necessarily mean they had mended their ways. At the end of the day, they were “just terrorists after all” and ended up living and dying by the gun.

DUKHTARAN-E-MILLAT – ASIYA ANDRABI

1.         Asiya Andrabi

(a)        Aliases: No known aliases

            (b)        Group: Dukhtaran-e-Millat
 

(c)        Role: Founder and Leader

(d)        Current Location: Kashmir

(e)        Biography: Asiya Andrabi is the founder and leader of Dukhtaran-e-Millat, a militant-Islamist women’s group in Indian-administered Kashmir. Described as both an Islamist and a feminist, Andrabi is one of the most vocal separatist leaders in Kashmir. Never one to shy away from controversy, Andrabi has expressed support for Osama bin-Laden, the Taliban, attacks on women not wearing Islamic dress, and generally anything she deems to be un-Islamic. In 1993, Andrabi was jailed for a year with her son for “anti-national activities.” In September 2005, Andrabi was arrested again and sentenced to two years in jail for allegedly beating a woman who was sitting with a man in a restaurant (the man was the victim’s husband.) Andrabi’s detention caused widespread outrage and protest in Kashmir, and she was released before her sentence was fully served.

Dukhtaran-e-Millat

2.         An all-woman outfit, the Dukhtaraan-e-Millat (DeM) can be categorized as a soft-terrorist outfit in the sense that it uses extra-legal means including threats to impose its doctrines but has not taken to arms so far. The outfit, formed in 1987 has claimed that the Kashmir issue is primarily a religious issue and jehad is mandatory. It also supports the accession of the Kashmir valley with Pakistan. The DeM primarily operates in the Kashmir valley and its present strength is reported to be approximately 350.

3.         The outfit has grabbed attention in spurts due to controversial remarks made by its leader, Ayesha Andrabi, particularly in the context of developments since year 2000. Of late, Ayesha Andrabi has been very vocal in supporting a new outfit named Lashkar-e-Jabbar (LeJ). This outfit has come into the news after its activists reportedly threw acid on two women in Srinagar on the grounds that they were not dressed in ‘Islamic’ style. The Lashkar-e-Jabbar had first announced that it would begin to use violence against Kashmir Muslims who were not dressed in their version of ‘Islamic Dress Codes’. While supporting this, Ayesha Andrabi issued a press statement asking for an extension of the deadline, a request that was promptly acceded. Later, in an interview, she said that the current campaign was the “beginning of a comprehensive social reform movement based on true Islamic thought” and also asked women in Kashmir to stay away from government jobs. These reactions led to speculation that the Lashkar-e-Jabbar could be a front for the DeM to renew its campaign directed at implementing its version of ‘Islamic’ social values.

4.         The Dukhtaraan-e-Millat had also opposed recent peace intiatives in the State. It had rejected the cease-fire declared by Prime Minister A B Vajpayee and criticised persons and organisations that accorded a positive response to the cease-fire, going to the extent of calling upon foreign mercenary outfits such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba to take action against senior leader of the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), Abdul Ghani Lone for his reported remarks against Islamic fundamentalist outfits.

5.         Ayesha Andrabi, described as a conservative Muslim and radical feminist, leads this orthodox outfit. The outfit has sought to work in tandem with the insurgency which broke out in 1989. During the 1990’s, the outfit was active in organising protests against Kashmiri women who did not adhere to the burqa (veil) system. In May 1993, the DeM issued warnings to the women in Srinagar not to venture outside their houses without wearing the veil. It also organises protests against the alleged display of objectionable literature in Jammu and Kashmir. Another issue that the outfit periodically raises is alleged excess of security forces conducting counter-insurgency operations in the State. It has regularly co-operated with the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) in organising protest demonstrations on this issue. In June 2000, the DeM called for a strike against alleged custodial killings by the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir.

6.         Security forces are yet to report any instances of terrorist strikes conducted by the DeM though they suspect that activists of the outfit act as couriers of arms and funds for various terrorist outfits operating in the State. The U.S State Department Report of 1995, held a Dukhtaran-e-Millat activist responsible for a parcel bomb blast at the BBC office in Srinagar in which one person was killed and another two injured.

7.         The DeM has recently been linked to certain cases of money laundering. The Jammu & Kashmir Police in May 2002 while ascertaining an Islamabad-London-Srinagar linked hawala (illegal money transfer) network arrested Imtiaz Ahmed Bazaz of Batmaloo. Bazaz, editor and publisher of a Srinagar magazine Mountain Valley reportedly confessed that he had approached Ayub Thakur, the London-based president of World Kashmir Freedom Movement for funneling Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) funds to the Dukhtaran-e-Millat chief Andrabi.

8.         Furthermore, cases have been registered under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) against Andrabi on charges of allegedly receiving money from the ISI through hawala channels. A massive search operation was launched on June 9, 2002 to arrest Andrabi, who has reportedly gone underground. This follows the arrest of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, former chairman of the separatist alliance All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) on June 9 from Srinagar under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 for allegedly receiving money from the ISI through hawala channels and for later distributing the same to different terrorist groups, including the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM). According to official sources, because Andrabi’s husband Qasim Faktu was the financial chief of Jamait-ul-Mujahideen (JuM), she reportedly started getting money from Ayub Thakur through Imtiaz Bazaz to provide finances to JuM as well as the DeM.

Role of Human Rights Organisations

1.         Human Rights and Human Survival are inalienably linked. In concrete terms, the endurance of the society is a human right. But this basic human right to live with peace and security, liberty and equality and prosperity cannot be rejuvenated by any government faced with the threat of terrorism. Terrorism is a negation of life and violation of norms of human behaviour recognised by all civilised people of the world. By spreading terror and panic among people, it hits the very roots of democracy. So every society cherishing the democratic way of life is bound to fight terrorism. But any democratic government, while countering terrorism becomes subject to charge of “excesses” and “violation of human rights” and are thus “damned if they do and doomed if they do not”. This is due to the fact that while the permissible spectrum of terrorism is being narrowed in international law, the growing international commitment to human rights tends to further legitimize political violence and terrorism. As a result, public interest and opinion continue to press more and more for effective controls not only over the “siege of terror” but also over “reigns of terror”. It is here that the role of human rights activists and organisations become relevant and important. A modest attempt is made in this paper to evaluate the role of human rights organisations in the context of ongoing terrorism in the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Before touching the main aspect of it is necessary to put on record some preliminaries:

 

(i)         A democracy, even when confronted with a serious terrorist threat, is still reluctant to suspend basic freedoms as a counter measure in the belief that this action is a greater danger to the legitimacy of the democratic state and the mass consensus vital to its preservation than a terrorist challenge itself. Aware of this situation, the terrorist is often able, sometimes openly, to manipulate the democratic process to create a climate favourable to him. In fact, the very ambivalence of free societies concerning their operations is what lays the democratic process open to manipulation by terrorists.

(ii)        However laudable one might find the objective of any militant group, the employment of terror as a means to press for the attainment of that objective is abhorrent. International conventions and treaties, even those pertaining to human rights, do not recognise terrorist violence as legitimate political action, arising out of any ideological or political commitments or any value-basis.

(iii)       No quibbling can hide the inherent bestiality of terrorism. To quell terrorism, its primitive savagery should be eliminated. It is no use rationalising terrorism. Shorn of verbose jingoism, terrorism is nothing but an organised system of intimidation and, as such, it should be dealt with most sternly and without vacillation simply because terrorists undo and threaten the very basic regime of human rights. For, to violence they take and violence they evoke.

(iv)       Implementation of human rights had come to be acknowledged nationally and internationally as a major concern and essential in the development of not only the individual but also the nation and, ultimately the world. But one of the most dangerous and pernicious threats to humanity today is terrorism, both territorial and extra-territorial, and the forces internal and external which back terrorists and terrorist organisations. It is, therefore, necessary that while assessing the human rights situation, consideration should be given to the way in which international terrorism, especially state-sponsored terrorism, cuts at the very roots of society’s enjoyment of human rights.

(v)        In countries having a liberal democratic order, the extent and guarantee of human rights for the terrorists is a real bone of contention between human rights activists and the nationalists of the terrorist infected countries. If the aim of terrorists is to break a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country to carve out their own sovereign home-land on the basis of religion or ethnicity then such terrorists are not entitled to full-scale guarantee of human rights as postulated by the International Human Rights Law. They are entitled to “minimum of human rights” guarantee which must include a guarantee of fair-trial conducted by an independent judiciary, right to appeal, right to represent one’s case through an Advocate at least in an appellate court and guarantee against extra- judicial killings, etc.

(vi)       Unlike bilateral and multilateral inter- governmental forms of inquiry, the authority and competence for NGO fact-finding is usually self- created. NGOs define the scope of their study and try to legitimize it after the fact by the reliability of these findings. In doing so, these organisations must put together a puzzling set of isolated pieces of information into a coherent picture after due scrutiny and cross checking.

2.         With these preliminary remarks let us try to survey the role of various human rights agencies, as a response to on-going terrorism in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

3.         Fact finding is the heart of human rights activity. The prescription of human rights norms implies an understanding of the needs to be addressed, which in turn requires an appreciation of factual conditions. Since the application and supervision of human rights norms do not take place in abstracts but in relation to specific circumstances and situations, what we require is an awareness of the factual conditions. Therefore, all claims, that human rights are, or are not, being respected, or are being violated, turn essentially on the question of fact. And as for all human institutions, the success of the difficult task of fact-finding in the field of human rights will depend on men as well as procedures. For in a divided and distrustful world, and on questions where there exists a profound difference of views, fact- finding itself and the conclusions and recommendations emanating from it are more likely to find acceptance if it is done by impartial persons competently and objectively and without any bias. The entire process should take care against any suppression or distortion to arrive at its findings.

4.         Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working at the international and/or national level engaged in the implementation of human rights profess to function as unofficial ombudsman safeguarding human rights. In this endeavour, these NGOs gather information which can be effectively mustered- either directly or indirectly- to influence the implementation of human rights by governments. In order to inspire remedial action by governments, human rights organisations must demonstrate that their factual statements are true, that is, they constitute a reliable basis for remedial governmental policy. Since the truth or falsity of any given statement may be very difficult to know, human rights organisations must pursue reliability by using well-accepted procedures and by establishing general confidence in fairness, impartiality and truthfulness. Admitting that such fact-finding should not be constricted within unduly a priori rules, it must be based on certain rules and respect certain principles. These rules and principles must be such that, having regard to the procedures followed and the persons entrusted with it, the fact- finding process enjoys the confidence of the international community as well as of the state concerned.

5.         With these basic postulates and fundamental assumptions, let us now try to examine and evaluate the role of human rights organisations by probing some critical areas:

(i)         Who are these human rights activists/organisations?                  It has become a fashion in contemporary politics and a good recipe to instant leadership to become a self-appointed champion of human rights in India. Whenever a terrorist or an assassin is arrested under TADA or killed in an encounter, issue a statement condemning the police or para-military forces. Obliging press is ready to give you much-needed newspaper coverage and project you as a political messiah and human rights leader over-night. To formalise the credentials, all that one has to do is gather half a-dozen people (all interested in a synthetic approach) for a human rights organisation with a catchy name and issue a statement that the organisation will fight against violation of human rights of thousands of “innocent” people being killed or arrested by the police.

(ii)        Blind to inhuman wrongs and sufferings of terrorist victims.        It is a matter of pity that some of these fast- mushrooming organisations pretending to be human rights groups are so short-sighted and devoid of objectivity that they either cannot, or do not want to, see the inhuman wrongs and blatant violations of human rights committed by those very people whose cause they champion. It seems that these human rights activists remain tongue-tied to these inhuman wrongs because of fear of terrorists or political compulsions. Needless to say that the single most important threat today to the enjoyment of human rights comes from terrorists. It is, indeed, deplorable that some human rights organisations reporting on the Kashmir situation have conveniently ignored the gross human rights violations against Kashmiri Pandits. Their silence on the genocide of this community and the terrible plight facing the community after the exodus is intriguing and exasperating and puts the credibility of these organisations into shade. Reports about violation of human rights in the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir issued by international organisations like Amnesty International, Asia Watch, International Commission of Jurists, and at the national level by organisation like Initiative on Kashmir, Indian Peoples Front, Peoples Union of Civil Liberties, Radical Students Organisation and some State-based human rights organisations have all suppressed this vital and basic information. While raising howls about violations of human rights by security forces in the valley they make no more than passing references to the inhuman brutality with which Pak-backed terrorists in the state massacred large number of Kashmiri Hindus. They conveniently forger to focus on the plight of more than three lakh “internally displaced” Kashmiris who were hounded out of their homes and hearths for their belief in secularism, nationalism and democracy. These groups are yet to report the details of unpardonable crimes indulged in by the terrorists. They simply ignore the dictum that “Terrorists are greatest violators of human rights”.

(iii)       Partisan evidence and biased reports.      The success of human rights activists and bodies depends upon whether true human understanding and democratic process comes to prevail over narrow group interests and partisan thinking; Unfortunately, certain Human Rights and Civil Liberities Organisations in our country and abroad have shown sympathy for a group of people whose only aim is to break India in the name of decentralization and autonomy. Most of their assessments and reports are based on avowedly partisan evidence. So much so that in some cases, blatant lies are projected under the garb of human rights violation details. These biased and one-sided reports serve as propaganda material for the anti-India forces and terrorists. In this process, a distorted picture about the human rights situation in India is being projected.

(iv)       Attempts to rationalise terrorism.    Attempts have been made to draw a distinction in variety of terrorist violence involved in various parts of India and to rationalise terrorism. Aggrandised and monopolised academic scholarship and chorus of human rights activists lends its prestige and sophistication to this wasteful exercise in refinement and micro-analysis of terrorism in India. In their zeal to over-do the job, these so-called experts try to give contrived meaning to universally established concepts of “state sovereignty”, “rule of law” and other democratic norms. This art of “social science sorcery” has complicated the issue. As a result, the truth becomes a matter for disputation and, if need be, suppression. They seem to have forgotten the dictum that “a terrorist is a terrorist”. The level of procedural due process manifested by a fact-finding mission has a direct correlation with the fairness of the mission’s report, as well as being an important factor in the reports’ credibility. In the field of human rights, the report of a mission which has conducted itself in accordance with a high standard of due process would carry far greater weight in the organs of international public opinion thereby increasing pressure on a state violating human rights to comply with international norms. Unfortunately, it has been generally observed that NGOs engaged in neither human rights activities have neither separately nor jointly articulated procedures for fact- finding to ascertain violations of human rights. Consequently, it is not possible to distinguish between “allegations” and “established facts” of human rights violations from their reports. In the context of ongoing terrorism, the task of these groups is very delicate, sensitive and important. In order that these groups have respectability and their reports have credibility, they have to conduct themselves fearlessly in such a way that the state and the people are convinced about their bonafides, as being genuinely concerned about protection of human rights free from biased political propaganda and political overtones.

6.         To ensure this, following suggestions are made:

(i)         Organisations working in the field of human rights should include within all substantial factual reports an account of the methodology and procedures used in making the findings contained in the reports.

(ii)        The methodological note or the body of the report should contain the terms of reference.

(iii)       If witnesses were interviewed, the report should state who generally did the interviews and what were the circumstances of the interviewed.

(iv)       Government statements or efforts to obtain government materials on the incident under scrutiny should be stated.

(v)        The report should indicate what methods were used for ensuring the reliability of information received.

(vi)       The report should specify the national and international substantive legal norms, which it uses to assess the facts found.

(vii)      The report should separate the factual findings from any recommendations the organisation may wish to make.

(viii)     Lastly, the report should state what efforts, if any, were made or will be made, to obtain a government response to the report and any reaction forthcoming.

7.         To conclude, it is submitted that when the issue juxtaposes the lives of innocent citizens and the possible curtailment of personal liberties we all cherish, the answers are not easy. Human Rights Organisations must handle the tangled web of facts, circumstances, perceptions and the situations more realistically. The tendency to be selective while choosing facts, opinions and aspects to fit pre- determined concepts must be avoided. This is the minimum imperative to establish their credibility.