Terror mastermind who inspired militants

Arun Joshi

Before he founded the terror outfit, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Maulana Masood Azhar was a prisoner in the Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu. On the night of December 30, 1999, mandarins from New Delhi, including the former RAW Chief  A.S. Dulat,  flew to Jammu to persuade the then Jammu and Kashmir chief minister  Farooq Abdullah to order Masood Azhar's release.

The soul of pan-Islamic militancy in South Asia, the urgency to secure his release was because Harkat-ul-Mujahadeen men, in connivance with  Lashkar-e-Toiba, an  off-shoot of  the Al-Qaida, had hijacked the Indian Airlines airbus IC 814  on its way from Kathmandu to Delhi. There was pressure on the NDA government, led by Atal Behari Vajpayee, to free Masood Azhar and two others, Mushtaq Zargar of Kashmir, and Ahmad Omar Sayeed Sheikh of Pakistan. Omar later killed Wall Street Journal's South Asia Bureau Chief Daniel Pearl in Karachi.

Twice  before Masood Azhar's  men had attempted to   secure his release. In 1994,  it was done  by a group called Harkat-ul-Ansar. Two  Britishers, including the son of a British journalist based in Delhi, were kidnapped from the woods of Pahalgam. And, in July 1995, an hitherto  unknown group Al-Faran had kidnapped six foreigners from Aaroo on the upper reaches  Pahalgam  in South Kashmir. The demand in both the cases was for the release of Azhar Masood. The Indian Airlines plane was hijacked in December 1999 to achieve the same objective.

 On the night of December 30, Farooq Abdullah had refused to release Azhar but yielded after pressure from Delhi, especially from the then Union Home Minister  L K Advani and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.

Incidentally, Masood Azhar's arrest in 1994 was accidental. He was caught  while travelling in an autorickshaw in Anantnag. Why was Azhar so important for the  militant groups and the ISI  that had sent him to Jammu and Kashmir on a fake Portuguese passport?  

 Radha Vinod Raju, a brilliant investigator and founder of the NIA, the then Inspector General of Police, Jammu, explained,  “Azhar is a strategic asset for Pakistan's ISI. They can afford to get any number of militants killed, but they need someone who can motivate the young to pick up guns to kill or die. They are cannon fodder. He is an ideologue. That's the difference.” Before ordering the release of Azhar,  the  chief minister who had taken a similar stand against the release of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front  men  to secure the release of  then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's youngest daughter  Rubaiya Sayeed, had warned of big trouble once Azhar was released. Delhi  did not heed the advice. The impression was that Farooq Abdullah was not interested in saving  the lives of crew and passengers of the hijacked aircraft parked in Kandahar, the capital of Taliban  in Afghanistan .

Azhar had founded Jaish-e-Mohammad when he reached  Pakistan soon after his release. He was the mastermind of many terror attacks, including the one on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. After the attack on the Pathankot Air Force base,  there is a  sudden urgency in  getting the custody  of the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief. This is necessitated by the national security and foreign policy imperatives. The Indian establishment is haunted by the fear that the idea of Masood Azhar could spell more disasters. A terror group that could reach a high-value asset like the Air Force base, is capable of doing anything. Now China too has come to the aid of Pakistan.  China has blocked the Indian  request to declare Azhar as a terrorist so that UN sanctions can be  imposed on him. But the Chinese  Permanent Representative at the U N  Liu Jieyi  said that Azhar did not qualify as a terrorist. Though in reel-life, getting Masood Azhar like Hafiz Sayeed  could be the storyline of a Bollywood thriller, in reality untold damage  has been done. It is a classic case of the  flip-flop policy of the government. At the time of Masood's  release, India secured the release of  165 crew members and  passengers of the hijacked plane. There is no count of the many more who have been killed in the attacks sponsored by Jaish-e-Mohammad since the release. He was on trial in a Jammu court, but he could not be convicted. Instead, men who escorted him  to  the court, believed that he had spiritual powers and asked him for a taweez (amulet)  to guard against evil spirits and help to solve their domestic and professional  problems. Such was the aura of Masood Azhar among his jail mates  and others .

Without going into details about how the Indian system succumbed to the hysterical images of the relatives and friends of the captive passengers flashed by TV channels, the fact is that  even if the terror mastermind is handed over to India — which in any case would never happen — there is no guarantee that the Indian leadership and bureaucratic system will not repeat the mistake as they had done on December 31, 1999.  

On the eve of the millennium In India, there were celebrations over the release of a man who had motivated militants. Can there be a more tragic  story  than this?

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