Tracking terror funds

The NIA’s crackdown on the terror funding networks in Kashmir is paying off rich dividends, and how. Already, the agency has seized around Rs 1.5 crore in cash from diverse sites in Jammu and Kashmir. Houses and office premises of separatist leaders like Naeem Khan, Javed Baba Gazi and Bitta Karate, including close aides and kin of hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, were raided. Apart from these leaders, eight other hawala dealers have also found themselves in the net of the investigation agency, which was set up in 2009 to foil large-scale terrorism bids eating away at India’s peace and territorial sovereignty.

However, it is important that these charges are taken to their logical conclusion — to convictions or to acquittals. These investigations are not unprecedented in the strained history of the power struggle in the Valley. Even in the past — 1995 and 2003 — raids by the Central Bureau of Investigation and of the income tax authorities have taken place, only for these probes to be lost in bureaucratic and judicial lag.

Few know the status of those past probes and fewer still care for what has come out of them. Practical underpinnings of the complicated intelligence dynamics in the state show that these antics are often resorted to as an intimidation technique to force the separatist leaders to come to the negotiating table and deter them from cultivating even closer relations with Pakistan. This probe shouldn’t suffer the fate of the earlier probes. It must sever the umbilical cord between the strife in Kashmir and Pakistan.