8/3/2019 Inside the camps that foment terror

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15T H E H I NDU F R I DAY , FEB R UA R Y 3 , 2 01 2

BANGALORE

OP-ED

69. ...There is a fundamental flawin the principle of first-come-first-served inasmuch as it in- volves an element of pure chance

or accident. In matters involving awardof contracts or grant of licence or per-mission to use public property, the in-  vocation of first-come-first-servedprinciple has inherently dangerous im-plications. Any person who has access topower corridor at the highest or th e low-est level may be able to obtain informa-tion from the Government files or thefiles of the agency/instrumentality of theState that a particular public property orasset is likely to be disposed of or a con-tract is likely to be awarded or a licenceor permission would be given. He wouldimmediately make an application andwould become entitled to stand first inthe queue at the cost of all others whomay have a better claim… the duty of theCourt to exercise its power in larger pub-lic interest and ensure that the institu-tional integrity is not compromised the

State and its agencies/instrumentalitiesmust always adopt a rational method fordisposal of public property and no at-tempt should be made to scuttle theclaim of worthy applicants. When itcomes to alienation of scarce natural re-sources like spectrum etc., the Statemust always adopt a method of auctionby giving wide publicity so that all eligi-ble persons may participate in the proc-ess. Any other methodology for disposalof public property and natural re-sources/national assets is likely to bemisused by unscrupulous people whoare only interested in garnering maxi-mum financial benefit and have no re-spect for the constitutional ethos and values.

70. The exercise undertaken by theofficers of the DoT [Department of Tele-communication] between September,2007 and March 2008, under the lead-ership of the then Minister of C&IT[Communications & Information Tech-nology] [A.Raja] was wholly arbitrary,capricious and contrary to public inter-est apart from being violative of the doc-trine of equality. The material producedbefore the Court shows that the Ministerof C&IT wanted to favour some compa-nies at the cost of the Public Exchequerand for this purpose, he took the follow-ing steps:

(i) Soon after his appointment as Min-ister of C&IT, he directed that all theapplications received for grant of UAS[Universal Access Service] Licenceshould be kept pending till the receipt of TRAI [Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India] recommendations.

(ii) The recommendations made byTRAI on 28.8.2007 were not placed be-fore the full Telecom Commissionwhich, among others, would have includ-ed the Finance Secretary. The notice of meeting of the Telecom Commissionwas not given to any of the non perma-nent members …

(iii) The officers of the DoT who at-tended the meeting of the Telecom Com-mission held on 10.10.2007 hardly hadany choice but to approve the recom-mendations made by TRAI [or] theywould have incurred the wrath of Minis-ter of C&IT.

(iv) In view of the approval by theCouncil of Ministers of the recommen-dations made by the Group of Ministers,DoT had to discuss the issue of spectrumpricing with the Ministry of Finance-…However, as the Minister of C&IT was very much conscious of the fact that theSecretary, Finance, had objected to theallocation of 2G spectrum at the ratesfixed in 2001, he did not consult the Fi-nance Minister or the officers of the Fi-nance Ministry.

(v) The Minister of C&IT brushedaside the suggestion made by the Minis-ter of Law and Justice for placing thematter before the empowered Group of Ministers. Not only this, within fewhours of the receipt of the suggestionmade by the Prime Minister in his letterdated 2.11.2007 that keeping in view theinadequacy of spectrum, transparencyand fairness should be maintained in the

matter of allocation of the spectrum, theMinister of C&IT rejected the same bysaying that it will be unfair, discrimi-natory, arbitrary and capricious to auc-tion the spectrum to new applicantsbecause it will not give them level play-ing field. He simultaneously introducedcut off date as 25.9.2007 for consider-ation of the applications received forgrant of licence despite the fact that onlyone day prior to this, press release wasissued by the DoT fixing 1.10.2007 as thelast date for receipt of the applications.This arbitrary action of the Minister of C&IT though appears to be innocuouswas actually intended to benefit some of the real estate companies who did nothave any experience in dealing with tele-com services and who had made applica-tions only on 24.9.2007, i.e. one daybefore the cut off date fixed by the Minis-ter of C&IT on his own.

(vi) The cut off date, i.e. 25.9.2007decided by the Minister of C&IT on2.11.2007 was not made public till

10.1.2008 and the first-come-first servedprinciple, which was being followedsince 2003 was changed by him at thelast moment through press release dated10.1.2008. This enabled some of the ap-plicants, who had access either to theMinister or the officers of the DoT, to getthe bank drafts etc. prepared towardsperformance guarantee etc. of aboutRs.1600 crores.

(vii) The manner in which the exer-cise for grant of LoIs [letters of intent] tothe applicants was conducted on10.1.2008 leaves no room for doubt thatevery thing was stage managed to favourthose who were able to know in advancechange in the implementation of thefirst-come-first served principle…

71. The argument of Shri Harish Salve,learned senior counsel that if the Courtfinds that the exercise undertaken forgrant of UAS Licences has resulted in  violation of the institutional integrity,then all the licences granted 2001 on-wards should be cancelled does not de-

serve acceptance because those whohave got licence between 2001 and24.9.2007 are not parties to these pet-itions and legality of the licences grantedto them has not been questioned beforethis Court.

72. In majority of judgments reliedupon by learned Attorney General andlearned counsel for the respondents, ithas been held that the power of judicialreview should be exercised with greatcare and circumspection and the Courtshould not ordinarily interfere with thepolicy decisions of the Government infinancial matters. There cannot be anyquarrel with [this]. However, when it isclearly demonstrated before the Courtthat the policy framed by the State or itsagency/instrumentality and/or its im-plementation is contrary to public in-terest or is violative of the constitutionalprinciples, it is the duty of the Court toexercise its jurisdiction in larger publicinterest …When matters like these arebrought before the judicial constituent

of the State by public spirited citizens, itbecomes the duty of the Court to exer-cise its power in larger public interestand ensure that the institutional integri-ty is not compromised by those in whomthe people have reposed trust and whohave taken oath to discharge duties inaccordance with the Constitution andthe law …

73. Before concluding, we consider itimperative to observe that but for the vigilance of some enlightened citizens …and non governmental organisationswho have been constantly fighting forclean governance and accountability of the constitutional institutions, unsus-pecting citizens and the nation wouldnever have known how scarce naturalresource spared by the Army has beengrabbed by those who enjoy money pow-er and who have been able to manipulatethe system.

74. In the result, the writ petitions areallowed in the following terms:

(i) The licences granted to the privaterespondents on or after 10.1.2008 pursu-ant to two press releases issued on10.1.2008 and subsequent allocation of spectrum to the licensees are declaredillegal and are quashed.

(ii) The above direction shall becomeoperative after four months.

(iii)   Within two months, TRAI shallmake fresh recommendations for grantof licence and allocation of spectrum in2G band in 22 Service Areas by auction,as was done for allocation of spectrum in3G band.

(iv) The Central Government shallconsider the recommendations of TRAIand take appropriate decision withinnext one month and fresh licences begranted by auction.

(v) Respondent Nos.2, 3 and 9 whowere benefited by a wholly arbitrary andunconstitutional action taken by theDoT for grant of UAS Licences and allo-cation of spectrum in 2G band and whooff-loaded their stakes for many thou-sand crores in the name of fresh infusionof equity or transfer of equity shall paycost of Rs.5 crores each. RespondentNos. 4, 6, 7 and 10 shall pay cost of Rs.50lakhs each because they too had beenbenefited by the wholly arbitrary andunconstitutional exercise undertaken bythe DoT for grant of UAS Licences andallocation of spectrum in 2G band.

(vi) 50% of the cost shall be depositedwith the Supreme Court Legal ServicesCommittee for being used for providinglegal aid to indigent litigants. The re-maining 50% cost shall be deposited inthe Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.

(vii) However, it is made clear that theobservations and conclusions containedin this order shall not, in any manner,affect the pending investigation by theCBI, Directorate of Enforcement andothers agencies or prejudice the defenceof those who are facing prosecution inthe cases registered by the CBI and theSpecial Judge, CBI shall decide the mat-ter uninfluenced by this judgment.

Justice G.S. SinghviJustice Asok Kumar GangulyNew Delhi

‘Wholly arbitrary, capriciousand contrary to public interest’Reproduced here are excerpts from the concluding paragraphs of the SupremeCourt’s verdict cancelling 122 2G licences issued during A. Raja’s term as Ministerof Communications and Information Technology.

‘STAGE-MANAGED’: The verdict says the cut-off date decided by A. Raja for consideration of applications for grant of 2G licences was intended to benefit real estate companies with no real telecom experience. A file  picture of the former Minister for Communications and IT at South Block. — PHOTO: RAMESH SHARMA

Bill Sikes and Scrooge are among themost well-known characters in En-

glish literature but rather than being fig-ments of Charles Dickens’s imagination,their names were derived from real peo-ple — and new research has pinpointedthe writer’s sources of inspiration.

The thug from Oliver Twist , the miserin A Christmas Carol and the ghost of hisdeceased partner, Jacob Marley, amongothers, have been linked to people wholived or worked near Dickens’s first Lon-don home.

Detective work by Ruth Richardsonhas revealed that a trader named Wil-liam Sykes sold tallow and oil for lampsfrom a shop in the same bustling eastMarylebone street in which Dickenslived between the ages of 17 and 20.

Nearby, Richardson discovered the

home of a sculptor derided by locals as amiser, the premises of two tradesmennamed Goodge and Marney, and a local

cheesemonger called Marley — “so sug-gestive of Scrooge and Marley,” she said.

They all lived yards from Dickens’smodest lodgings at 10 Norfolk Streetabove a small cornershop. Crucially, helived nine doors from the barbaric work-house now thought to have inspired Ol-iver Twist a few years later.

Recent discovery; research

Richardson, the author of Dickens and the Workhouse , published to coincidewith next week’s 200th anniversary of his birth, described the number of fic-tional characters she has linked to Dick-ens’s neighbours as “breathtaking”.

 Although Dickens based other fiction-al characters on actual people — notablyMicawber on his father — biographershave overlooked the inhabitants aroundNorfolk Street and its link to Dickenswas only recently discovered by Richard-

son, an affiliated scholar at CambridgeUniversity. It was her research that lastyear identified the four-storey 1770s

workhouse in Cleveland Street as an in-spiration for perhaps the world’s mostfamous workhouse in Oliver Twist .

That led her to Dickens’s house. Sherealised that the address had changedsince Dickens’s day — 22 ClevelandStreet was formerly 10 Norfolk Street.

  While previous biographers had onlybriefly mentioned the house, if at all,assuming it had disappeared long ago,she found the building. It had been apeculiar biographical void, she said.

Sykes’s business was at 11 ClevelandStreet. Richardson said: “He was certain-ly there while Dickens was planning Ol-iver Twist .” So too, she added, was a localpublican called Sowerby: the fictional MrSowerberry is the “parochial under-taker” who takes Oliver into his service.She also found a glover-hosier calledCorney, a possible inspiration for theMrs Corney, whom Mr Bumble marries

in Oliver Twist . In the churchyard, shespotted a Mrs Malie, a doctor’s wife,whose name may have served for the

kindly Mrs Maylie. At No 20, oppositeDickens’s home, was Dan Weller’s shoeshop, from whom he might have cobbledthe inimitable Sam Weller for The Pick-wick Papers . A dancing master — like theone Dickens described in one of hisSketches by Boz — was a fellow lodger.

Norfolk Street in Dickens’s day wasfull of shops. Its businesses included apawnbroker’s that “may be central toOliver Twist,” Richardson said. Its plot —and Oliver’s identity — hinge on a lockettaken from his mother’s corpse andpawned. Readers learn that the pawn-broker’s was visible from the workhouse.Richardson considers it significant that“the pawnbroker’s stood diagonally op-posite the Cleveland Street workhouse,and was visible from Dickens’s front inNorfolk Street.” Dickens himself had topawn family belongings before his fatherwas imprisoned for debt. “It’s all too

much of a coincidence,” Richardson said.— © Guardian Newspapers Limited,2012

Real-life Dickens characters tracedDalya Alberge

Syed Salahuddin, supreme com-mander of Hizbul Mujahideen

(HM), reaffirmed his organisation’s“healthiness” last Tuesday, telling

Kashmir News Service that HM’s “in-frastructure is intact” and that “J&Kwill be freed soon.” He made a simi-larly convincing statement last May,claiming to possess “hundreds of training camps” where he could free-ly “recruit and train the mujahideen.”Salahuddin knows that his group’sstrength must be seen before it can bedisbelieved. So long as Pakistan’sevolving terror apparatus remainsshrouded in secrecy, he is at liberty toexaggerate HM’s muscle.

Camps and questions

Though press conferences, politi-cal speeches, news articles, and re-ports routinely contribute to theentity’s mainstream familiarity, theystop short of demystifying the terror-ist camp. Important questions per-sist: Where are such camps located?  What do they look like? What aretheir specific functions? Do similarlevels of secrecy characterise themall? Based on interviews I conducted

in Jammu and Kashmir in 2011 withlaw enforcement officials and surren-dered HM militants about the train-ing camps operated by HM inPakistan and Pakistan-OccupiedKashmir (all interviews with surren-dered militants were conducted inthe presence of the authorities), I be-lieve it is possible to lend some defini-tion to an otherwise nebulous entity.

  At its peak in the mid- tolate-1990s, HM’s physical infrastruc-ture was primarily concentrated inPoK, with a few camps and officeslocated in Punjab, Khyber Pak-htunkhwa (then the North-WestFrontier Province), and Islamabad.  While the experiences of individualmilitants vary significantly, anyrecruit who spent more than a fewmonths in Pakistan would likely en-counter several such facilities. Aftercrossing the border into Pakistaniterritory, often with the help of aguide on the Inter-Services Intelli-gence’s (ISI) payroll, recruits weretypically housed in an HM office inKotli or Muzaffarabad. Since bothtowns hosted ISI offices, it was easyfor newcomers to acquaint them-selves with their patron representa-tives. Once these preliminaryintroductions were complete,recruits were sent to one of a fewpossible locations depending on thefunctions they were to assume, andthe specific type of training theyrequired.

 While the media tends to homoge-nise terrorist camps, the latter in factrepresent a diverse collection of ad-ministrative and liaison offices, com-munication stations, base camps, andtraining camps. The larger constella-tion of a particular group’s terroristcamps is thus characterised by di- versity of location, function, size, ap-pearance, secrecy and demography.

 A small core

HM’s infrastructural network isbest depicted by a small core of train-ing camps, attended to by a largerlandscape of base camps and supportoffices. Training camps are intendedand designed to impart physical, ide-ological, and military training — ster-eotypical imagery of young mensurrounded by monkey bars and AK-47s is not far off. Base camps, onthe other hand, simply serve to housemilitants before, between, or aftersuch training courses. Generallyspeaking, training camps tend to belarger, and more removed from urbanenvironments.

Examples of former training campsinclude the Kotli Training Camp (inPoK’s Kotli district) and the GujarKhan Training Centre in Rawalpindi.Each camp was located in hilly, for-ested terrain, accommodating over300 trainees in tents. In addition tothese conventional training camps,HM also made use of the Mangla DamCamp. Located on the banks of theMangla Lake in PoK, this camp wasreserved for 30-40 trained militants,offering them swimming lessons that

lasted 15 days to a month.HM’s base camps generally took

the form of single-storey rentedbuildings providing six to eight bed-rooms for 35 to 70 trained or un-trained militants. Former examplesinclude: Kot Jamial Camp (located onthe outskirts of Kot Jamial in PoK’sBhimber district), Bhimber Camp(situated on Gujrat Road in PoK’stown of Bhimber), Samani Camp (lo-cated on Mirpur Road, two kilo-metres from the main bus stand inPoK’s Samani), the Kotli Camp (lo-cated less than a kilometre from themain bus stand in PoK’s Kotli), and AlMarkaz Camp (located in the base-

ment of a mosque, three kilometresfrom central Mirpur).

In addition to its training and base

camps, HM established a media officeon Rawalpindi’s Murree Road, not farfrom the branch office of the JangGroup of Newspapers. In Islamabad,apart from its administrative office inthe Khanna neighbourhood, HM pre- viously used one office to store pho-tographs and computerisedbiographies of all its militants, andanother to administer computercourses.

Communication with India 

In order to maintain regular con-tact with active operatives on the In-dian side of the border (or LoC), HMalso established wireless commandstations, including those in Zafarwal(Punjab) and Samani (PoK). The fa-cility in Zafarwal was run out of thestaff quarters of a rural health centre,allowing HM wireless operators tocommunicate with militants in Jam-mu and Kashmir’s Doda and Kathuadistricts, and in parts of Udhampurdistrict. The second facility was sit-uated on the outskirts of Samani, pro-  viding communication links withmilitants operating in Jammu andKashmir’s districts of Rajouri andPoonch, and parts of Udhampurdistrict.

  While HM might be impartial to-wards all the facilities it uses, its ISIpatrons are more discerning.  Amongst the multitude of installa-tions that HM militants come intocontact with in the course of theircareers, some are marked by moresecrecy than others. In general, sur-rendered militants tend to recallquite vividly the names and attri-butes of the camps they encounter.But often there is a stop on the itiner-ary about which they know surpris-ingly little. They call it ilaqa-e-ghair (which most appropriately translatesin this context to “forbidden territo-ry”). Ilaqa-e-ghair refers to a peculiartype of training camp. In fact, theonly defining characteristic of  ilaqa-e-ghair  is that the journey to andfrom this camp is always unusual:trainees are transported to the facil-ity blindfolded, or in tarpaulin-cov-ered trucks, to ensure they don’t pickup on their destination’s location andsurroundings. The destination itself typically constitutes an isolatedtraining camp surrounded only by“kachcha ” road and round-the-clockpatrolling. By the end of a two- tothree-month stint at ilaqa-e-ghair ,trainees are adept at handling weap-ons including AK-47s, RPG-7s, handgrenades, and light machine guns.

  A possible explanation for theseelevated standards of secrecy mightbe that ilaqa-e-ghair  directly repre-sents, or is sufficiently proximate to,military installations about whichthe ISI prefers not to divulge any de-tails – neither to the HM militant, norto the people he might speak withfollowing disengagement. An impor-tant implication of this relative secre-cy is that all other assets used by HMto train and host its militants aremore easily replaced, and hence dis-

pensable. Indeed, the Boi Camp in Abbottabad attests to the non-essen-tial character of most terroristcamps. It accommodated more than300 HM militants until 2008, wasabruptly shut down, and has sinceserved as a poultry farm.

Continuously mounting interna-tional pressure since 9/11 has com-pelled the ISI to reign in manyterrorist camps under its watch. As aconsequence, HM’s infrastructuralpresence in Pakistan and PoK standsdiminished. Aside from its peripheraloffices, the organisation currentlyruns two training camps, each target-ing a distinct demographic. The GarhiHabibullah Camp is located in Man-sehra district of Khyber Pakhtunkh-wa and caters to trainees fromPakistan. The Sensa Camp lies inPoK’s Kotli district and is geared to-wards youth from PoK. Both campshave strict orders: recruits from In-dia’s side of the border are unwel-come — at least for the time being.

( Nikhil Raymond Puri is a D.Phil candidate at the University of   Oxford .)

 Inside the camps that  foment terror 

  Syed Salahuddin— PHOTO: AFP

Nikhil Raymond Puri

 Answers from a series of interviews might makeit possible to define the Hizbul Mujahideen,an otherwise nebulous entity.

 Amongst the multitude of installations that Hizbul

militants come intocontact with in the courseof their careers, some are

marked by more secrecy than others.