ABSTRACT
Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq’s body rests in a corner of the graveyard near the Idgah in Srinagar, where so many of those who lost their lives in the long jihad against India are buried. Mirwaiz Farooq’s story has figured at many points in this book, as he was for decades an emblem of secessionist sentiment in urban Jammu and Kashmir, a thorn in the side of the Indian state. Buried nearby is the body of Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen terrorist who assassinated him. To the faithful, both the assassin and his victim are martyrs; they are martyrs, moreover, for exactly the same cause. Making sense of the house-of-horrors that Jammu and Kashmir has been
reduced to through almost two decades of war – a low-intensity war, it is true, but one that has claimed far more lives than many full-blown ones – is a difficult enterprise. The intensity and violence of what is on display that constitute it make it near-impossible to provide a useful guide to lead us through the exhibits. My account of the jihad of 1990-2001 is not intended to be a detailed rendering of the many and infinitely complex events of those years. My intent is, rather, to provide an overview of this period – a sense of the final flowering of Pakistan’s covert war in Jammu and Kashmir, which had steadily grown since 1947-1948 and to provide some understanding of the circumstances that paved the way for its subsequent withering. One aspect of this phase of the covert war is, to my mind, of critical relevance:
it was a nuclear jihad, in the sense that it would have been unsustainable, even inconceivable, without Pakistan’s acquisition of the Bomb. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the terms and structures of this phase of Pakistani’s secret
war against India were shaped by its possession of nuclear weapons. India would more likely than not have gone to war when faced with Khalistan terrorism or the putsch of 1988-1989, were it not for fear that a conventional conflict with Pakistan might escalate to catastrophic levels. As we shall see, the architecture of the nuclear jihad – its peaks and troughs – would be underpinned by the new, nuclear reality in South Asia. Full-scale India-Pakistan war, a perpetual threat in each phase of the covert war, would haunt the nuclear jihad. For all the blood spilt during these years, and the constant risk of a cataclysmic confrontation, it is remarkable how little is changed. In political terms, that is in the relative influence and weaknesses of the parties who had been engaged in combat through the course of the endless war in Jammu and Kashmir, 2002 was much the same as 1990. The story of the nuclear jihad, then, illustrates not only the horrors war can
inflict, but also how little purpose it can serve when waged by adversaries who cannot be overwhelmed.
