After recent allegations leveled in Dis InfoLab Report against Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) J&K over its involvement in a conference held in Bosnia, the organisation on Wednesday clarified that it had nothing to do with the ‘Russell’s Tribunal’ on Kashmir (RToK)
The Jamaat, a politico-religious organisation, disassociated itself with the organisers of the RToK like ‘Kashmir Civitas’ and Muslim Brotherhood (MB). While Kashmir Civitas (KC) claims itself as an international civil society and strategic advocacy organisation, the MB is a transnational Sunni Islamist organisation founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928.
Addressing a press conference here, the Jamaat chief Abdul Hameed Fayaz said that their organisation or any of its associates were not involved in the conduct or promotion of any conference on Kashmir in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
“The Jamaat is not functional due to the ban (by the Centre since 2019) and it has no associated organisations anywhere in the world nor any representatives,” he said. “Any organisation or individual claiming to be an associate organisation or representative of the Jamaat is quite against the facts and is hereby challenged.”
The Jamaat chief claimed that any of its members migrating to any place outside Jammu and Kashmir ceases to be a member of the organisation as per its constitution.
In its August report, Disinfo Lab had exposed the links between US/UK-based ‘Kashmiri activists’ and Pakistan’s spy agency ISI. The report had also thrown light on “the Jamaat-led business enterprise run in the name of Kashmir which benefits only a handful of individuals and their families – all settled in the US and Europe.”
“After a recent exposé, these individuals and organisations have been discredited and are no longer capable of running the Kashmir conflict industry. And hence, it seems that the baton of the Kashmir conflict industry was handed over to the MB, a veteran of the conflict industry in Palestine,” the latest report says.
“This transition was first witnessed during the previous boycott campaign that was launched against India – which was led from the front by the Brotherhood and its affiliate ‘news media’ including Al Jazeera,” it adds.
The DisInfo Lab report further says that the absence of their (ISI’s) carefully groomed next generation of activists at the RToK except for a handful of ‘doyens’ of the Kashmiri conflict industry was also an indication that MB would run the show on its own.
“However, it needed the ‘Kashmiris’ at the event to establish its connection with Kashmir, even if by Kashmiri it meant only the ISI agents and convicts living in the US/UK and having no connection with Kashmir whatsoever. The fact that the Tribunal did not even pretend to engage other stakeholders on Kashmir indicates that MB means business – the business of collecting funds in the name of Kashmir,” it alleged.
Some of the Kashmiris, whose names have surfaced in the report, include businessman Mubeen Ahmed Shah, who was earlier based out of Malaysia, activists Muzzammil Ayyub Thakur, Farhan Mujahid Chak and Dr Asif Dar.
However, the Jamaat chief in today’s presser disassociated itself with all these members. “Nobody has taken any verbal or written consent from any erstwhile leader or functionary of the Jamaat to speak in any conference and at present due to the ban, it is quite out of question to get such consent,” he said.
He said that all queries raised about the participation of Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir in the conference Russell Tribunal on Kashmir held at Sarajevo Bosnia openly or tacitly are not justified at all.