Hafiz Saeed is holding public meetings, mouthing venomous anti-India slogans, promising to liberate Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), and stoking jihadi passions with impunity.
As India and Pakistan mull over whether or not to resume the stalled peace talks, Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has suddenly resumed his activities by taking to the streets.
He is holding public meetings, mouthing venomous anti-India slogans, promising to liberate Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), and stoking jihadi passions with impunity.
The most shocking aspect of the ugly episode is that he has been allowed to do all this from the platform of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), an organisation banned by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in December 2008. JuD is accused of being a front organisation for the now banned LeT, the jihadi group blamed for
the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai.
Saeed’s heightened activities come in the wake of the recent Indian offer to Pakistan for resumption of foreign secretary-level talks.
For the first time after being banned by the UNSC, the JuD was allowed on February 5 to hold a protest rally in Lahore under its original name. Such rallies are quite common on the Kashmir Solidarity Day, which is officially observed on February 5 every year in Pakistan.
That day, waving the black and white flag of the group and dummy Kalashnikovs and raising anti-India slogans, JuD activists first gathered at Markaz-ul Qudsia, the new headquarters of JuD and began the rally after the Friday prayers. The JuD’s Muridke head office was taken over by the Punjab government last year.
In his first public appearance since his release from house arrest in October 2009, Saeed told the audience that militants waging jihad in J&K were considering the revival of their armed struggle.
A day before the rally in Lahore, the JuD had organised a Kashmir conference on February 4 in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). It was attended by several key leaders of pro-Kashmir jihadi groups, including former ISI chief Lt Gen (retd) Hameed Gul, Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin and Al-Badr chief Bakht Zamin.
The conference adopted a declaration, asking Pakistan to revoke the ban on Kashmiri militant groups so that PoK can once again become the base for waging the “freedom struggle” in J&K.
Most analysts believe Saeed’s renewed activities couldn’t have been possible without the consent of the Pakistani intelligence establishment which is still adamant to keep some of the pro-Kashmir jihadi groups alive and to use them as the civilian face of the Pakistan Army.
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