The August 9 riots at Kishtwar in Jammu, dubbed as
'communal', were actually another bid by Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) at orchestrating ethnic cleansing in the northern
Indian state, according to a senior defence expert.
"Our
estimate is that the ISI used the riots to get rid of the village
defence committees (VDCs) to clear the way for ethnic cleansing," Maj
Gen (retd) GD Bakshi, whose book 'Kishtwar Cauldron: The Struggle
Against ISI's Ethnic Cleansing' just hit the stands said on Sunday.
"It
is the first phase of a diabolical move by the ISI to further carry out
its agenda of ethnic cleansing in Jammu and Kashmir," he added.
On
August9, three people died when a group of people, raising
anti-national slogans after the Eid prayers, was attacked by another
section of people in Kuleed area of Kishtwar.
The Army was later called out to help the district administration and indefinite curfew remained clamped for 13 days.
According
to Bakshi, after ISI-inspired militants drove out the Kashmiri Pandits
from the Kashmir valley, the Pakistani agency has next set its sights on
the Dogra population in the mountainous districts of Doda and Kishtwar.
The
ethnic cleansing being sponsored by the ISI is one aspect of the terror
operations being carried out that has escaped public notice completely,
Bakshi avers.
"In February and March 1990, (the now
defunct) JKLF (Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front) started a
systematic ethnic cleansing campaign to kill, terrorise and drive out
the entire 400,000-strong community of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley
of Kashmir," Bakshi said.
"Over 20,000 houses of
Kashmiri Pandits were burnt, some 105 of the Pandit educational
institutions were destroyed and 103 temples razed to the ground. Over
1,100 Kashmiri were tortured and killed."
According to Bakshi, some 140,000 to 160,00 Kashmiri Pandits fled the valley between February and March 1990.
This
was followed by high profile killings of senior Kashmiri Pandit
officials, intellectuals and prominent citizens that resulted in the
total exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit population from the valley.
According
to Bakshi, the pogrom against the Dogra community by ISI-sponsored
militants started in 1993 when 14 Dogras were massacred in a bus near a
place called Hasti August16 that year.
The next
year, 800 Dogra families fled to Himachal Pradesh and in August that
year, the Sector 9 Rashtriya Rifles was raised in Kishtwar.
In 1995, the Indian government set up village defence committees and armed them with World War I-vintage Lee Enfield rifles.
That stabilised the situation in the area and six Border Security Force (BSF) battalions were withdrawn.
Immediately thereafter, in 1996, a total of 39 Dogras were killed in separate incidents.
This
persecution against Dogras continued till 2001 claiming scores of
lives, according to Bakshi, who commanded the Sector 9 Rashtriya Rifles
from 2000-end to 2002.
In 2001, Bakshi led a massive
manhunt to track down and kill a group of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)
militants who had targeted several innocent Dogras.
That had a salutory impact and there were no major incidents against the Dogra community after September 2001
Bakshi's book comes just over a month after the latest violence in Kishtwar.
The
book provides details of the intense operations in a very sensitive
region of Jammu ~~amp;amp; Kashmir and also gives the doctrinal overview
of such operations.
"Pakistan's recent peace
overtures (to India) are quite apparently designed to get a free hand on
its western front - to decisively influence the outcome in
Afghanistan," Bakshi writes in the post-script of the book, adding that
the withdrawal of the US-led troops from Afaghanistan in 2014 will cast a
shadow over the whole of the south Asian region.
"For
this, it (Pakistan) needs a temporary truce on its eastern front with
India in 2014-15 so that it can deal undisturbed with Afghanistan and
then turn around and send in thousands of out-of-job Taliban cadres into
J~~amp;amp;K and even the rest of India for a final phase of the
Gazhuwa - the civilisational conflict to dismember India," he states.