By Shazia Yousuf
SRINAGAR, Indian-held Kashmir
Kashmiri leaders have rejected claims made by the former Indian spy chief that they received bribes from Indian intelligence agencies, calling the allegations a "pack of lies."
AS Dulat, who headed India's top intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) head, said in an upcoming book and interviews with Indian newspapers that Kashmiri pro-independence leaders, militants and pro-India Kashmiris all took bribes.
“Nobody is immune to bribes. Not the militants, not the politicians and not the separatists. Over the years, they have all been paid by intelligence agencies,” Dulat told Indian newspaper the Hindustan Times. “We paid money to demonstrate that what the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence] can do, we can do better, except kill people.”
Two of Kashmir's leading pro-independence figures, the Hurriyat group's Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front's Yasin Malik have both rejected the claims that Indian intelligence paid for their health expenses.
Malik pointed out that, contrary to Dulat's claims, he had been in prison when he underwent open-heart surgery at a public hospital in the 1990s.
“The courts had not granted permission for me to undergo surgery at a private facility and RAW had no role in the surgery,” Malik said.
Geelani's spokesperson similarly told Anadolu Agency that after "unsuccessfully trying to meet with Geelani for almost two decades, Dulat was now spewing lies about him."
Dulat also claimed that Indian intelligence helped move the son of militant commander Syed Salahuddin into a medical school in the Kashmiri capital Srinagar, in the hope that it would help win over the militants.
Salahuddin's son admitted that the intelligence services had been involved in his move but that it was not a favor.
“He had real security issues in Jammu Medical College as he was Salahudin’s son and there is a provision of migration from one college to another but it must be on security reasons," a senior police official told Anadolu Agency. "The intelligence agencies and the police do that process, so someone from his family must have sought the help of the officials in getting him to migrate from Jammu to Srinagar.”
Dulat rose through the police to first head India's internal intelligence, the Investigation Bureau, before finishing is career as the head of RAW, which deals with external intelligence, and has served as a government adviser on Indian-held Kashmir.
In recent days he has used TV and newspaper interviews to share parts of his upcoming book, which has been accused of focusing on the way intelligence services purportedly tried to control Kashmiri leaders through bribery and favors while leaving out the allegedly brutal methods used to put down the 1990s anti-Indian insurgency.
“Will the former RAW chief ever reveal India’s real assets in Kashmir? He is not revealing official secrets and their games but he is releasing distorted versions of conversations and meetings with resistance leaders whom the Indian state have failed to control. Now he is maligning them,” said Khurram Parvez, a human rights activist with the Kashmir-based Coalition of Civil Society.
Parvez rebuffed Dulat’s claims that the intelligence services tried to control the resistance leadership through money rather than assassinations, claiming that killing, torture and rape were at their worst during Dulat’s time as the head of Indian intelligence agencies.
“After hundreds of assassinations, with these selective and distorted revelations, he is now going for character assassinations,” Parvez said.
Aditya Sinha, a senior Indian journalist and co-author of the book, confirmed in an article about the process of writing the book that there were several stories that Dulat would not reveal to him "for a variety of reasons, including the cliched ‘national interest.'”
Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region, is held by India and Pakistan in parts and claimed by both in full.
The two countries have fought three wars -- in 1948, 1965 and 1971 -- since they were partitioned in 1947, two of which were fought over Kashmir.
Since 1989, Kashmiri resistance groups in Indian-held Kashmir have been fighting against Indian rule for independence or for unification with neighboring Pakistan.
More than 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed so far in the violence, most of them by Indian forces. India maintains over half a million soldiers in the Indian-held Kashmir.
A part of Kashmir is also held by China.
