BJP will benefit in J&K elections if Congress-NC alliance fails: Ex-RAW chief Amarjit Singh Dulat

In his opinion piece titled “Den of Intrigue: India’s border with Pakistan chooses a new chief minister” which was carried by Russian media house RT on Saturday,  Dulat, said while the Narendra Modi government claims to have brought “normalcy” in Kashmir, but it is “abnormal normalcy."

Dulat served as Joint Director of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) during the most turbulent period of Kashmir’s history between 1988-1990.

In 1999, he became chief of the Research and Analysis Wing until his December 2000 retirement. After retirement, he was appointed as Adviser on Kashmir in the Prime Minister’s office where he served from January 2001 to May 2004.

As per his opinion piece, Dulat believes Kashmir can see a radical change overnight as the region heads for a “historic” election. “But which way it is now headed, nobody can say. It looks increasingly messy and fragile,” he said.

“More scary is the silence in Kashmir. Silencing even the past is not easy and will continue to haunt us. To paraphrase the renowned Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, desolation cannot provide peace,” Dulat wrote.

According to him, there was a presence of around 100 foreign terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir; 50 in the valley and 50 in Jammu recently. The actual figure may be twice as many, Dulat insisted.

Opining about the recent spate of attacks in the otherwise peaceful Jammu, Dulat said, "the Pakistani Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) appears to have figured out our counterterrorism deployment and strategy, whereas our sources of ‘humint’ (human intelligence) are drying out with shifting loyalties. An increase in terrorism is a clear sign of the growth of pro-Pakistan sentiment."

“The All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), a conglomerate of separatist Kashmiri organizations, was a Pakistani creation but because of our engagement with it, we always had information from across the line of control. The separatists are now muted but so is intelligence,” said the former RAW chief.

Commenting about the jailed parliamentarian from north Kashmir, Er Rashid, Dulat said, “As for now, Sheikh Abdul Rashid, also known as Engineer Rashid, who was elected to parliament from North Kashmir in June (despite having been detained in Tihar jail since 2019 for allegedly funding separatists in the valley), is of more value to Pakistan than the Jamaat. Let him out on parole and he will not be half as useful to anyone than he is in jail.”

Expressing his views on NC chief Farooq Abdullah, Dulat said that when it comes to elections in Kashmir, nobody can choreograph an election better than he can.

He concluded the article by saying, “If the Congress-NC alliance stays, then Jammu will vote for it; if it frays, then the BJP is sitting pretty and we have every chance of a Hindu chief minister for the first time in Jammu and Kashmir’s history.”

The Jammu Kashmir Assembly polls are historic, being held for the first time since the region underwent major changes over the past five years, including the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019.

This led to the conversion of the state to a Union Territory (UT) and its division, with Ladakh becoming a separate UT without a legislature.

The elections will be held in three phases on September 18, September 25, and October 1, with the results expected to be announced on October 4.