India to keep tabs on jehadis' meeting

By Atul Aneja

NEW DELHI, DEC. 22. India will keep tabs on a meeting of key militant groups and their supporters in Saudi Arabia, which is expected to take the Kashmir peace process forward.

Saudi Arabia will play host to representatives of Kashmir militant groups as well as some Pakistanis to address some of the obstacles coming in the way of peace talks. According to highly- placed sources in the Government, the Hizb-ul- Mujahideen chief, Syed Salahuddin, is already in Saudi Arabia to apparently perform Umrah. He will be joined by his top commander in Kashmir, Mr. Abdul Majid Dar. Two representatives of the All- Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), another two from the Pakistan Foreign Office, representatives of the Jamaat-e-Islami (Pakistan), the Jamaat-e- Islami (Kashmir), the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and a contingent from Saudi Arabia are also expected to participate.

One of the prime objectives of the conference is to ``persuade'' the jehadi groups to bend their hardline position on Kashmir. The Lashkar and the Harkat have rejected the Kashmir peace initiative and the former led high-profile attacks on Indian security forces during most of the ceasefire month of Ramzan. The Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, during his address to Parliament singled out the two outfits as the jehadi groups still active in Kashmir.

Analysts here say Saudi Arabia holds the key to ``softening'' the Lashkar and the Harkat through a ``carrot and stick'' approach. Riyadh, because of its past financial and ideological linkages with some the jehadi groups, exercises tremendous leverage over them.

For instance, Saudi Arabia was one of the key financiers of the Harkat-ul-Ansar, renamed Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, since the mid- 1990s. Led by Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the Harkat is said to be the military wing of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI). The JUI, led by Maulana Fazlur Rahman, a former chairman of Pakistan National Assembly's Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, enjoys close ties with the Saudis. The JUI's close political links with the Saudi were cemented in July 1996 during a secret visit to Pakistan by Prince Turki al-Faisal, chief of the Saudi General Intelligence Agency. Saudi Arabia also exercises considerable ideological influence over the Lashkar. The military wing of the Markaz Dawat wal Irshad based in Muridke near Lahore, the Lashkar's members are practitioners of the ``Ahle Hadis'' with doctrinal roots among the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia.

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