The cover of 'India's Pakistan Conundrum: Managing A Complex Relationship' by Sharat Sabharwal
In June 2009, the Lahore High Court released Hafiz Saeed from preventive detention. Though the Government of Pakistan challenged this decision in the Supreme Court, it failed to make out an effective case, resulting in the apex court upholding the High Court judgment in May 2010, while also ordering the government to pay a small fine for the casual manner in which it had handled the case. Such decisions have been cited repeatedly by Hafiz Saeed and the Pakistani authorities to argue that no case was established against him in the Pakistani courts. However, the orders of the Lahore High Court and the Supreme Court were in respect of his release from preventive detention. The evidence given by India regarding his lead role in the Mumbai attack, including the reference to him in the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab, has never been presented in any court of law in Pakistan. Moreover, since the Mumbai attack was planned in and executed from Pakistan, most of the evidence against him would lie there.
As 2009 drew to a close, there were clear signs of an attempt by Hafiz Saeed's patrons in the security establishment to bring him back gradually into public life. He had maintained a low profile after his release from detention. However, that had not prevented activists of Jamaat-ud-Dawa from openly carrying out relief activities for those displaced by the military operation in Swat under the banner of Falahi Insaniyat Foundation. Towards the end of the year, Hafiz Saeed gave some TV interviews, initially with his back to the camera. Gradually his "camera shyness" disappeared and he started giving interviews more openly. We learnt from journalistic circles that some of those who had interviewed him early on had set up the interviews through the ISI. In the coming months, he also became a leading figure in the effort to whip up hysteria on the alleged violations of the Indus Waters Treaty by India. Some of his meetings with anti-India rants took place in the Aabpara area of Islamabad, close to the heavily fortified office of the ISI. Around this time, we gathered from senior American diplomats that the Pakistanis were telling them that they were apprehensive about the possibility of a large number of Lashkar-e-Taiba cadres charting out an independent course by linking up with the terror groups threatening Pakistan or fighting international forces in Afghanistan (there were also media reports of the Americans having apprehended some erstwhile LeT cadres in Afghanistan) and felt that Hafiz Saeed's presence was needed to thwart this trend. Our interlocutors in the American Embassy in Islamabad seemed inclined to buy this argument.
In a meeting in August 2010, a senior army interlocutor gave me the following message: (i) The Mumbai terror attack was not authorised either by the army or the ISI leadership. (ii) India was progressing fast and they realised that such acts of terror would neither halt India's progress nor aid the cause of providing better economic opportunities, health and education facilities to the Pakistani people. (iii) The army had helped with the investigation that resulted in nabbing the Mumbai culprits. However, if India was waiting for action against Hafiz Saeed before resuming dialogue, that would not happen because there was no evidence of his involvement in the attack. (iv) Pakistan had its own concerns regarding Indian interference in its internal affairs and would like them to be addressed. I referred to the evidence provided by India regarding Hafiz Saeed's role, but my interlocutor remained non-committal. The above was clearly a mixed message, with some reasonable sounding words, but also the usual harping on the so called Indian interference and no intent to act against Hafiz Saeed. There was much scepticism in Delhi even about the reasonable words. It did not escape my attention that while ruling out authorisation of the Mumbai operation by the army or the ISI leadership, my interlocutor had not ruled out the involvement of army officers at other levels and yet no such officer was brought to book.
An argument that I often heard in Pakistan was that it would have been illogical for the army/ISI leadership to authorise such a large scale attack at a time when their hands were full in dealing with terrorism within Pakistan. I heard the counter to this argument from a prominent Pakistani journalist, who felt that the generals, who were not pleased with President Asif Ali Zardari's declared intent to improve relations with India, seemed to have authorised the attack to sabotage the President's agenda, in the belief that the ten terrorists would be neutralised quickly by India, resulting in a few killings. In the event, however, it took the Indian authorities much longer to contain the attack, resulting in a large number of casualties. Yet another possibility is that the attack was among the LeT operations against India, conceived and fleshed out by the ISI at some stage and was carried out by the LeT with the help of some army officers without getting an express go ahead from the army/ISI leadership. Whatever the reality, it is clear that an attack of this magnitude could not have been prepared without the involvement of state structures at some point and the army/ISI leadership was at the very least guilty of hiding the involvement of army officers and not charging them in the Mumbai attack trial.
Reproduced from India's Pakistan Conundrum: Managing a Complex Relationship by Sharat Sabharwal with permission of INFORMA UK Limited through PLSclear. Order your copy here. No part of this extract may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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