It was almost close to midnight when news broke of the FBI arresting Ghulam Nabi Fai, executive director of the Washington-based Kashmiri American Council, for acting as a front of the ISI, the Pakistani spy agency which unabashedly sponsors global jihad, for close to two decades. His colleague, Zaheer Ahmad, managed to give the FBI the slip; he is reported to be in Pakistan at the moment. By itself, the news was worth little, apart from the fact that the famed FBI had remained in the dark for so many years about the real identity and intention of a Pakistani spy who had easy access to offices of Senators and Representatives on the Capitol Hill and lobbied to influence US policy on the issue of Jammu & Kashmir. Or, conversely, it is only now, with relations between the US and Pakistan rapidly unravelling and the CIA at war with the ISI, that the Americans have thought it fit to expose someone about whom they had known all along. After all, various US agencies were aware of the ISI’s links with Daood Syed Gilani, also known as David Coleman Headley who too, like Fai, is an American citizen of Pakistani origin.
But there’s more to the Kashmiri American Council story than the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s Chicago cell and its activities which makes it far more sinister. Headley facilitated the multiple strikes by Pakistani terrorists on high profile targets in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, resulting in a ghastly carnage and terrible loss of human lives. But what Fai and his associates, as well as those who sponsored his activities in the US, are guilty of has wider ramifications and greater implications. In a sustained, sophisticated manner they sought to legitimise radical Islamist impulses in the Kashmir Valley and separatism disguised as a political cause although it is terrorism by another name. For this the services of usual suspects on the Hill, including Dan Burton, were secured — for a price. The lubricating power of ‘Brylcreem’, the code word used for millions of dollars supplied by the ISI and funneled into ‘lobbying’ activities by Fai, remained unknown till the KAC racket was exposed.
Along with many others in Delhi, this writer was on the mailing list of Fai’s KAC and would regularly receive invitations to attend ‘conferences’ organised in one of the Congressional chambers on the Hill. A detailed report on who all had attended the ‘conference’ and who had said what would follow, often penned by Victoria Schofield, one of the many Western journalists whose proximity to the Rawalpindi establishment is the subject of much speculation, none of it flattering. In the absence of any of the participants refuting the contents of these reports, they also serve as irrefutable documents of their having accepted Fai’s — and hence by implication the ISI’s — hospitality, including business class tickets, five-star hotel accommodation and a ‘token’ fee which really means an undisclosed amount of money, its quantum depending on how ‘influential’ the participant was perceived to be. It is entirely possible that Arundhati Roy who spends her afternoons in the company of Maoists listening to grasshoppers sing or helping radical Islamists hoist the Pakistani flag in Srinagar, Kuldip Nayar whose columns are published by a larger number of newspapers in India and Pakistan, Justice Rajinder Sachar of ‘Sachar Committee’ fame and Dileep Padgaonkar who was earlier editor of The Times of India and now heads the panel of interlocutors for Jammu & Kashmir set up by the Union Government had higher budgets allocated to their participation than, say, Bharat Bhushan who is editor of Mail Today and Gautam Navlakha who turns apoplectic with rage every time he is told India is a sovereign country with a republican Constitution. We don’t need to go into the details of their denunciation of the Government of India’s policies, the abuse they heaped on the Indian Army, the allegations they levelled against our security forces fighting terrorists and the horrible lies of rape and murder they repeated knowing full well these were slanderous and unsubstantiated. They are far too well known to merit elaboration.
All of them now say they were not aware of Fai’s links with the ISI or that the KAC was a front organisation of the Pakistani spy agency, that if invited again (of which there are slim chances), they won’t go. That’s balderdash. None of them is a novice in his or her chosen profession and the linkages of ‘think-tanks’ are a badly kept secret in Delhi. Back in the mid-1980s, some of us would receive invitations from Gurmit Singh Aulakh, the self-appointed ‘President’ of the imaginary ‘Council of Khalistan’, to attend ‘conferences’ organised by him in the Congressional chambers on the Hill. That’s not the only thing he shared in common with Fai; every ‘conference’ would be graced by Dan Burton. In those days there was no e-mail or fax; the invitations came by airmail in plain white envelopes containing neatly typed letters carrying the ‘official seal’ of the ‘Council of Khalistan’. It’s difficult to recall anybody accepting Aulakh’s invitations or travelling at his expense to Washington, DC — everybody knew it was a Pakistani operation, abetted, if not aided, by the CIA. So we would all have a laugh at the expense of Aulakh and his sponsors, and the invitations would go straight into the wastepaper basket. Similarly, everybody knew Fai’s antecedents and instinct should have told them that there was nothing kosher about his KAC or the ‘conferences’ organised by him. So, it’s difficult to believe them when they say that they did not know about Fai’s intentions and the KAC’s ISI link; in any event, as any court in the world would tell an accused, ignorance of the law is not an admissible plea. This brings us to where we began. A friend and fellow columnist described the beneficiaries of Fai’s hospitality with the ISI picking up the tab as “useful idiots, but idiots nonetheless”. I thoroughly disagree with him: They are not idiots, but yes, they have proved to be useful for Pakistan.
Fai’s KAC was only one of the many such operations by the ISI. The Kashmir Centres in London and Brussels are two more examples. How many of our Left-liberal intellectuals attended ‘conferences’ organised by these Kashmir Centres? And how many of them attended ‘seminars’ organised in nondescript American and European universities to ‘discuss’ the Kashmir problem? One such conference, “Kashmir in Crisis: Pathways to Peace”, was organised at the University of Colorado, Boulder, ostensibly by its students. The real organiser was a certain Ayesha Nawaz, Development Director of Al-Imtiaz Foundation, who was sending out mail and following up on travel plans for those invited to attend the ‘conference’ from “Pakistan, Kashmir and India”. A simple check on the Internet reveals that Al-Imtiaz Foundation has its headquarters at Mansehra Road, Supply Bazar, Abbottabad, Pakistan. Surely our Left-liberal intellectuals who attended this conference and held forth on India’s ‘villainous misdeeds’ in Jammu & Kashmir were not unaware of these details?
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