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The Week | Hizbul Mujahideen: a martyred militia?

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Hizbul Mujahideen: a martyred militia?

By Nikhil Raymond Puri
Story Dated: Tuesday, February 7, 2012 18:27 hrs IST

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Lacking ideological glue, the Hizbul Mujahideen has fostered a network of fear to hold its house together

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According to recent media reports, a note circulating 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 training. 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 training, 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) loyalists, 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
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The Week | Hizbul Mujahideen: a martyred militia?

nucleus of like-minded (and similarly endowed) individuals to give the JI 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: sufficiently 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 from 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 dissatisfaction. The HM sipai' is aware that his commanders absorb the majority of funds flowing into the organisation. While Noorani's monthly salary 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 insufficiently radicalised and economically driven militants graduating from Pakistan's training facilities, 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 District). 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 can replace or refurnish as easily as it discarded them. However, the HM's organisational deficiencies 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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