That attack on July 13, 1999 changed the rules of the game and fixed the spotlight on the Lashkar. It marked the departure from the ‘hit-and-run’ strategy adopted by Kashmiri militants for years. The group has since remained in the spotlight. Nine years, four months and 13 days later, when terror struck Mumbai, the Lashkar had only changed the stage and the scale of its attack. Its aspiration to widen its influence outside the borders of Jammu and Kashmir is not new—the attack on Red Fort on December 22, 2000, when two militants stormed the fort in Delhi, was eulogised with details by Lashkar’s Al-Dawa magazine in its February 2001 issue. Mumbai might have got the Lashkar global attention but Kashmir will always define its identity. And whatever contours New Delhi’s diplomatic strategy takes, it cannot overlook the Lashkar’s involvement in Kashmir. The group has been surprisingly silent during the last several months in Kashmir and did not even target the assembly polls spread over five weeks.

Tied to Kashmir

The story of the Lashkar’s birth and rise shows how it focussed on Kashmir though its founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed did talk of extending the war across India while addressing a rally in 1999, raising the issue of Hyderabad and Junagarh.

Saeed was born on June 5, 1950, at Sargodha in Punjab province of Pakistan, but his roots are in Jammu and Kashmir. His family originally belonged to a Gujjar tribe in Poonch district of Jammu province and his father Kamal-ud-Din moved to Haryana for work. During Partition, 36 members of his family were killed in the course of their journey to Sargodha. The family finally chose Janubi in Mianwali district as their home in Pakistan.

... contd.