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The NIA raids have had a salutary effect, but a lot more needs to be done to shut down the funding networks and penalise and reduce to penury of the conflict entrepreneurs.

Traditionally, seizing weapons has been the fundamental pillar of Indian law enforcement agencies’ strategy for combating terrorism and separatism. The idea was that without weapons, there wasn’t much that militants could do to challenge the Indian state. The American strategy was totally different. They always focused on the money that fuelled terrorist activity. According to the Americans, strangulating the supply of funds asphyxiates the activity of terror organisations.

Perhaps, the approaches followed by Indians and Americans were the outcome of their national experiences. Unlike India where access to weapons is extremely restricted, in the US the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a constitutional right. Even so, if India’s experience in combating terrorism and separatism in the state of Jammu and Kashmir is anything to go by, there is a lot of merit in adopting and incorporating the American focus on cracking down on the financial networks that sustain terrorist networks. In other words, it is simply no longer enough for the Indian security forces to double down on the kinetic operations to eliminate terrorists. Without dismantling the terror funding networks and the conflict economy in which terrorism and separatism have become the biggest money-spinning industry in Jammu and Kashmir, there is no way India will ever get a handle over the disturbed situation in the state.
 

Over the last few years, there is an increasing recognition in the security establishment that it needs to put the conflict entrepreneurs out of business. The NIA raids on the money laundering and terror finance networks heralded the new approach of the government. More than the kinetic anti-terror operations, it is these NIA raids that have enthused ordinary Kashmiris who have finally started seeing the Indian state target the conflict entrepreneurs who have prospered and enriched themselves on the blood of the people of the state. For far too long, loyal citizens in Jammu and Kashmir have seen the separatists and their sympathisers and supporters, including those who kept one foot in the separatist camp and the other in the Indian camp, profit from the conflict.

The real shocking part of the terror industry in Jammu and Kashmir was the fact that it was in part fuelled by agencies of the Indian state. A former intelligence chief has even written a book describing how the spooks paid money to separatists to keep them happy. This kind of a pay-off would have been understandable, even justified, if in exchange the guys being paid-off switched sides or at least worked for the Indian state from inside the ranks of the separatists. But this wasn’t the way it played out. If anything, they kept stringing the spooks along but delivered on nothing. In fact, even as they kept getting the payments from the Indian side, they were also plied with funds by the Pakistanis. Not only were these despicables paid, the Indian state also turned a blind eye to their other activities – encroaching on public land, land-grab from ordinary people, building illegal malls and shopping centres, and laughing their way to the bank, which as it turns out was the government owned J&K Bank which allegedly laundered their money.

The recent corruption scandal in the J&K bank is only the tip of the iceberg of how an entire ecosystem was built to undermine the Indian state and empower and enrich all those who stood against the idea of India. Things had become so bizarre in Kashmir that much of the anti-India propaganda was actually being funded by the state and central government! In no other country of the world does this kind of a thing happen, and yet in Kashmir the most rabid anti-India newspapers, columnists, journalists were surviving on the largesse bestowed on them by the government in Srinagar and Delhi.
 

Given the level of ‘intelligence’ (the pun is entirely intended) that has been displayed in financing the very people who were India’s biggest enemies, it is no surprise that the spooks also took their eye off the ball when it came to allowing Kashmiris to go and study in Pakistan, or letting the Turks play proxy for Pakistan by permitting Istanbul to become a meeting point for Kashmiri youth who were seduced with fellowships and offered all sorts of other blandishments. And then there were the ‘princelings’ – the kids of terrorists and separatists who were mollycoddled and facilitated into government jobs, given admissions in engineering and medical colleges, allowed to travel and study abroad. No one ever asked where the money came from for the assets they created, or how these characters were able to afford their lavish lifestyles without having done a single day of honest work. As if this were not enough, Delhi in its infinite wisdom (or the lack of it) opened cross-LoC trade which then became a conduit for funding terrorism and smuggling narcotics.

Hopefully, all this could now be ending. The NIA raids have had a salutary effect, but a lot more needs to be done to shut down the funding networks and penalise and reduce to penury of the conflict entrepreneurs. If the speech of Home Minister Amit Shah is anything to go by, then it seems that gloves are coming off and the authorities will follow the money and dismantle the terror industry that has been flourishing for decades in Kashmir. This more than anything else will help in restoring normalcy in the troubled state.

This commentary originally appeared in Mail Today.

Sushan Sareen (ORF)
12 July 2019

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