After placing Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD)'s Hafiz Saeed under house
arrest on January 30, Pakistan has now banned his new terror front
Tehreek-e-Azadi-Jammu & Kashmir (TAJK).
JuD was declared a terrorist outfit by the US in 2014 and
and was again put under the watch list on January 27. The Pakistan's National
Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) put TAJK on the list of proscribed
organisations on June 8, forcing Saeed to run his activities under the TAJK
banner. Hafiz Saeed had adopted the name JuD after its terror outfit,
Laskar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) that basically perpetrates terror in India, was banned
by Pakistan on 14 January 2002 under international pressure.
However, it did not affect him. In December 2008, the UN
Security Council, under its Resolution 1267, imposed sanctions on JuD and Hafiz
Saeed for supporting Al Qaeda and Taliban. India had named Hafiz Saeed, LeT and
JuD as the perpetrators of the series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai in
November 2008. Since then there has been an unending drama of Hafiz Saeed being
put under house arrest or detained cursorily before being set free even if the
US declared a bounty of USD 10 million on his head in 2012.
Things took a turn after Donald Trump was elected president
in the United States. The US clearly told Pakistan to act against JuD after its
name prominently figured in the report of the Asia Pacific Group on Money
Laundering. If Pakistan failed to comply to this it would be put on the list of
blacklisted countries in the International Cooperative Review Group (ICRG).
That would make it necessary for Pakistan to put a formal request each time it
went about transacting any business through any of the international financial
institutions.
Left with no other option, Pakistan had to put Hafiz Saeed
under house arrest on January 30. Even if symbolic, it made a huge difference
that we can see now with TAJK ban, as Donald Trump is completing six months in
office. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump in a joint
statement, during Indian PM's US tour, labeled Pakistan a terror haven. Not to
mention the US has designated Pakistan-based Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed
Salahuddin as a global terrorist.
Pakistan, probably, was expecting all this to happen, and
therefore would have decided to act on Hafiz Saeed's new terror front before it
became another international rallying point against it.
©SantoshChaubey