When floods hit the largely Buddhist enclave of Leh in Kashmir
recently, the chief minister Omar Abdullah, representatives of state government
and the Indian army were out providing relief. Absent, however, was the
presence of Kashmiris from the rest of the state, notably the normally vocal
Valley Kashmiris, in expressing support for their fellow co-habitants. They
seemed unconcerned about the tragedy.
This went by unnoticed by the national and international media.
But it was not lost on the majority of Kashmiris, confirming their views that
those in charge of the state see themselves as being responsible only to one of
the six major groups that form Kashmir: the Valley Sunnis, the Shia, the
Buddhists, the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Gujjars. That single-pointed attention
has kept wider Kashmiri interests unattended, but kept the Valley of Kashmir in
the global spotlight.
Today, Kashmir is very much part of the cauldron that is "Af-Pak",
the storm that is raging across the Pashtun belt in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
As in Af-Pak, the base for the jihad that is being waged in Kashmir mainly
comprises a small fringe of a single community – the Valley Wahabi Sunnis, who
are 1 million of the total 6.7 million Kashmiri Muslim population.
In the case of Af-Pak, the indigenous Taliban fighters are
almost entirely Pashtun, and from those human pools nurtured by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Saudi
Secret Service during the 1980s to fight against the USSR. In the case of
Kashmir, those involved in the current intifada are Sunnis - mostly Wahabis -
from the Kashmir Valley who have financial and other links with the military in
Pakistan and the numerous Wahabi religious trusts and foundations in Saudi
Arabia that work at exporting their 300-year old faith across the world.
