T H E I N F O R M A L WAR

as nothing less than a war between two different and mutually opposed
ideologies: Islam, on the one hand, and disbelief (kufr), on the other.
This is portrayed as only one chapter in a long struggle between the two
that is seen as having characterized the history of the last 1,400 years ever
since the advent of the Prophet Muhammad. The roots of the Kashmir
problem are seen in its Muslim rulers having been replaced, first by the
Sikhs and then by the Hindu Dogras through British assistance. With
India (i.e., the Hindus ) having taken over Kashmir in 1947, a long and
protracted reign of bloody terror is seen to have been unleashed on the
Kashmiri Muslims. This is seen as a direct and logical consequence of
Hinduism itself, because, it is alleged, the Hindus have no compassion
in their religion. Hence, it is the duty of Muslims to wage jihad against
the Hindu oppressors. All Hindus are tarred with the same brush.
Thus, Hafiz Muhammad Sa eed declares: In fact, the Hindu is a mean
enemy and the proper way to deal with him is the one adopted by our
forefathers    who crushed them by force .93
Language of this kind would have been familiar to the covert groups who fought
the Informal War. Trained in Sialkot, a small town in Pakistan-administered
Kashmir, Bagh Ali s group was the first to strike. Their first operation was the
bombing of a shop in Jammu s main shopping boulevard, Residency Road, on
June 18, 1957. By the time of their arrest in November, 1957, the group had
executed four other strikes on targets of potential military value two bombings
of bridges, one targeted at the United Nations Military Observer Group s office
in Jammu and another directed at an Indian Airlines Corporation van.
One action, however, was expressly terrorist in character, an attack on a
temple in Dharmkhoh on October 1, 1957. The intention was, presumably, to
incite Hindu Muslim violence. Abdul Rahim s Poonch group came close to
this objective by assassinating a prominent Hindu, Roopay Shah, and injuring
several others, in a bomb attack on July 23, 1957. Mohib Ullah Beg s group
used similar tactics in the course of its work in the Valley. While it carried o
ut
attacks on legitimate targets notably the bombing of two small culverts across
streams in Pulwama and Budgam it also sought to incite communal violence.
On September 8, 1957, the unit planted two booby-trapped explosive devices
inside a mosque in Maisuma, one of the most politically violent neighborhoods
of Srinagar. A local resident, Abdul Ahad Bakaya lost both his sons when one
of the mosque bombs went off, and his wife and daughter were injured.94
A variety of factors seem to have motivated members of these covert units,
not all of them expressly political. Aziz Parwana, for example, began his career
as a Pakistani covert operative through the startling medium of falling in love
with a Srinagar woman, Attiqa Bano. Parwana was told, however, that he would
first have to obtain the permission of her father, Ahmad Ullah Bhat, who had
migrated to Rawlakote in Pakistani Kashmir. Desperate to marry Attiqa Bano,
Parwana made the perilous journey across the CFL. Having left Indian-held
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