Friday, July 15 2005 14:47 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Lashkar says- God has ordered us to fight

The Lashkar-e-Toiba or the "Army of the Pure" is a militant organisation, formerly headed by Prof Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, who now heads Jamaatul Daawa , a pro-Sunni, anti-US fundamentalist group that was founded in 1989. Headquartered at Muridke [near Lahore], the Lashkar has been active against the Indian security forces in Jammu & Kashmir. Hafiz Saeed's worldview, knocked down into two basic sentences, is straight and simple: "God has ordained every Muslim to fight until His rule is established,' he says. "We have no option but to follow God's order".

The bearded Professor is following God's order and the instrument of God's order is jehad. A Lashkar-e-Toiba pamphlet titled "Why Are We Waging Jihad?" clarifies matters further. It establishes the Muslim right to revenge in history. Jehad is obligatory, it pronounces, for taking back Spain where Muslims ruled for 800 years. The same with Nepal and Myanmar. Of course, the whole of India, including Kashmir, Hyderabad, Bihar, Junagadh and Assam, also has to be retaken. The Lashkar had earlier claimed responsibility for the December 22, 2000 attack on the Red Fort in New Delhi that gives reason to the Indian security forces to suspect the group's involvement in the Ayodhya attack.

The day the Temple was attacked in Ayodhya on July 5, 2005 Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh reportedly told Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in Astana during a 45-minute meeting [on the margins of the summit meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation] that New Delhi was ready to give concrete evidence of cross-border terrorism. The same day, addressing a news conference in New Delhi, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee accused Pakistan of failing to dismantle the infrastructure of militancy in Jammu & Kashmir and of adopting double standards in fighting international terrorism. But Pakistan 's foreign office spokesman denied all these charges, adding that the Indian leaders should act responsibly.

LeT fund raising is open in Pakistan

The Indian allegations apart, the fact remains that despite being banned by the Pakistan government and branded by the US State Department as a terror group, the militant group continues to flourish, with its recruitment and the training activities still going on pretty much in the open. Similarly, the LeT's fund-raising campaigns and its public gatherings are being tolerated if not encouraged by the Musharraf administration. Saeed's close associates claim that young jehadis from various parts of the country continue to throng the LeT training camps at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir before being pushed into J&K, though at a limited scale now.

The Lashkar is the only jehadi group operating from Azad Kashmir that still keeps a comparatively large group of activists at its Khairati Bagh camp in the Lipa Valley. Another Lashkar camp is functional at Nala Shui in Muzaffarabad from where young militants are launched after being given initial training at the Jamaat-ud-Dawa's Muridke headquarters. Unlike the past strategy of launching large groups comprising of 25 to 50 militants on a regular basis from the camps located on the LoC, Lashkar sources disclose, it has now been decided to keep training militants in limited numbers to launch smaller groups of not more than five to fifteen people, that too, at intervals.

However, during the last one year, the Lashkar has largely refrained from carrying out any major terrorist activity in India, while acting under Islamabad 's pressure. But with the Ayodhya attack, the Indo-Pak blame game has already begun, which is going to affect the tempo of the peace talks between New Delhi and Islamabad. The critics will now have strong justification when they claim the much-celebrated India-Pakistan peace process has not helped in curbing threats of jehadi terrorism in India. But nevertheless, it also proves that there are more reasons to keep up the peace process with better tact and strategy.