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'The ISI and extremists consider me their enemy number one'

Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 14:25:00 +-100
From: Hashim Qureshi <Qureshi@laila.demon.nl>
Subject: My point of view

This is with reference to the news 'India's first hijacker wants to come home' put on your site by one Onkar Singh in New Delhi. I would request you to put this rejoinder on the Internet for some clarifications so that netizens are not put to any confusion.

The report is a mixture of distorted and exaggerated truths and half truths. My denouncing the hijacking of Indian Airliner IC 814 was in line with my avowed conviction that violence does not help solve any problem much less the complex Kashmir issue. But this is not the first time when I expressed myself candidly on the question of terrorism. In all of my published works, the latest of these being Kashmir: The unveiling of truth, I have consistently advocated for peaceful means for resolving issues and disputes.

Yes, I have been the first hijacker of an airliner in India. But with the passage of time, I made deep introspection and realised that violent acts lead us only to destruction. Nelson Mandela is lionised by the entire world as an apostle of peace after he left violence and won the Nobel Prize. Yasser Arafat became a legend after he abjured violence. I had left the creed of violence before he left it.

If they are accorded due respect for their philosophy of peace, I expect people to understand that human beings like the great personalities mentioned above can change from extremists into angels for humanity at large. If I speak the language of peace as they speak, I deserve to be listened and understood.

I cannot claim to become another Gandhiji or Martin Luther King. It is asking for the moon. I am not born an apostle of peace as these great men of our times were. But their thinking and their philosophy influenced me tremendously. I understood it and I want to follow it. I do realise that these apostles of peace became a target of violence. I know this could be my fate also. And if this be the Will of God, I shall consider my noble death a humble tribute to these great souls who brought the light of peace and truth to humanity.

I am a bit sad about what has been said about my two daughters aged 14 and 12 joining a school in India for continuing their education. They have been brought up in an extraordinarily comfortable environment in Europe. The basic reason for sending them to study in an Indian school is twofold.

One is to make them familiar and adjustable to the roots of our culture and civilization as there are also the wards of some NRIs and Kashmiris studying in that institution.

The second is to provide them an opportunity of learning English language because born and brought up in Holland, they know only Dutch which has a limited use in future life. They have been placed two classes below the one they were in Holland.

It is totally baseless to say that I established links with the Indian intelligence agency through some Indian politicians. I have been living in exile for the last 30 years: I met with my father in Saudi Arabia after 29 years in 1993, and with some of my brothers and sisters in Nepal after 23 years. There are some other of my closest relations with whom I have never met so far.

One of my sisters married in 1970 with her cousin is living in Peshawar. The Indian high commission in Pakistan has been refusing her a visa for the last 31 years. Even when our mother died in 1984 in Srinagar, she was refused a visa to visit the bereaved family. Do these facts speak of my links with the Indian establishment? The sense of exile impinged on me and I always longed to return to my motherland.

When peace was shattered in Kashmir in 1990, and the people were face to face with destruction and oppression in many ways, my sense of return to my home attained a new dimension. It was helping the besieged Kashmiri nation out of a serious and destructive situation. Kashmiris were subjected to a triangular -- extremists, Indian security forces and external elements -- hostage. The worst is from the self-seeking local leadership, which in the name of Islam and jihad, managed to bring death and destruction of thousands of Kashmiri youth while they provided their own sons and daughters with opportunities and facilities including lucrative government jobs.

Therefore, desiring to go back to Kashmir and addressing this sordid situation is no crime or calumny. This should explain my position to everybody´s satisfaction. For last six years, I had engaged late Mr Pathak (also the advocate of the late Maqbool Butt) as my advocate to fight my case in Indian courts. After his death, Mr Muzaffar Baig of Kashmir and based in New Delhi, has been engaged as my counsel.

The process of my return has been accelerated by the news of release of two Sikh youth from jail on charges of alleged hijacking of an Indian Airliner IC 423 in 1981. The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate of Delhi said in the verdict that Satnam Singh had already served a term in Pakistani prison and under Article 20 of the Indian Constitution, he could not be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once. My position is identical because I too have served a term of 9 years and 3 months in Pakistani prisons for hijacking an airliner named Ganga.

If my detractors think the veracity of Onkar Singh´s report that I am looking for establishing links with the Indian intelligence agencies through some politicians as acceptable, then it should convince them that so far I had no links with the Indian establishment, an allegation, which these detractors have been flinging into my face for the last so many years.

As regards the allegation of my connivance at destabilising Farooq Abdullah, I must say that Farooq Abdullah is his own worst enemy, and nobody has any need to enter into a nexus against him. But in regard to the question of blackmailing, it has to be recalled that Kashmiri, Indian and Pakistani leaderships have, during past fifty years, invariably resorted to the blackmailing of Kashmiri people.

Against this perfidy, I am prepared to join hands not only with Shabbir Shah but also with every sincere leader of Jammu and Kashmir so that this blackmailing and hostage syndrome of Kashmiris and the vast majority of sincere Indian and Pakistani peoples is put an end to.

I have no ambition to seek power and then become a turncoat as is the practice of contemporary politicians in Kashmir. I have declined many temptations. The ISI of Pakistan and extremists consider me their enemy number one because of my rejection of violence, and conviction in solving problems through peaceful dialogue. Not only I but even my family members are paying a heavy price for my conviction. Let me tell you that the Pakistan government has imposed a ban on the issuing of a visa in favour of my wife and children although her mother and other relatives are living in Pakistan.

Lastly, by putting this report of distorted and exaggerated truths and fiction on the Internet, you have only provided tools to my adversaries to defame me. It is a great tragedy of the subcontinent that opportunist politicians are always in search of opportunities to use these kinds of distorted reports to derive political mileage out of them even if these reports are put out by the enemies of hawkish politicians.

I am looking forward to your response on rediff

With regards,
Hashim Qureshi

Onkar Singh replies: I got this information from sources in the intelligence agencies and stand by my report.

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