Young nurtured as soldiers for Islam

30 Oct, 2001 06:47 AM3 mins to read

By RAHUL BEDI

NEW DELHI - Kashmiri children are being "Talebanised" in free madrassahs (religious schools) that indoctrinate the young for jihad, say Indian officials.

Madrassahs, set up by the Din-e-Mohammad Taleban organisation and supported by Afghanistan's rulers and Pakistan-backed extremist groups, have opened in northern Kashmir's rural districts.

They are staffed by Islamic scholars with good oratory skills, say officials in Srinagar.

"These children are being prepared as soldiers for Islam," said Gurbachan Jagat, director-general of the Border Security Force, which is fighting Kashmir's insurgency.

"This is Pakistan's long-term design to create future recruits who will not falter in their commitment to fight for a Muslim homeland in Kashmir."

Pakistan adopted the same tactic in the mid-1990s by creating the Taleban (which means "Islamic student") movement in thousands of madrassahs across the country, said Jagat.

District officials said students were flocking to the schools because their parents were delighted at the thought of free education. Being poor and illiterate, many parents were not concerned about the sectarian content of the curriculum.

Reports from Pakistan's capital Islamabad said that in the absence of state-run schools, about 1.75 million Pakistani youngsters were receiving religious and basic military training in around 7000 madrassahs, for dispatch to Kashmir and other parts of the world to wage jihad against "infidels".

Mohammad Ajmal Qadri, leader of the fundamentalist Jamait Ulema-e-Islam party, which has close links to the Taleban, recently declared that 2000 of about 13,000 seminary graduates had already been sent to Kashmir.

Qadri declared that the thrust of the madrassah training was to deploy its students in Kashmir and Chechnya, but the United States was the ultimate target.

India accuses Pakistan, which occupies a third of Kashmir and claims the rest, of "sponsoring" insurgency that erupted in 1989.

Pakistan denies the claim, saying Kashmir's militancy was an indigenous movement to which it gave only diplomatic and political support.

Security analysts point out that the jihadi groups, nurtured by Islamabad's military dictatorship shortly after the campaign to oust the Soviet Union from Kabul began in 1979, are likely to turn inwards if not deployed in Kashmir, leading to more violence in Pakistan.

Satish Kumar, former professor of diplomacy at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said: "Over the past two decades Pakistan has fallen prey to the temptation of nurturing militancy in the name of Islam, thinking this to be an option to promote its strategic goals in the region, particularly in Afghanistan and India."

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