New Delhi: The shadow of Pak agent Ghulam Nabi Fai who has been charged by the FBI stalks a two-day conference of MPs from India and Pakistan — the India-Pakistan Parliamentarians Dialogue — that began at Vigyan Bhawan annexe today.
The links to Fai lie silently buried in the list of the board of advisors to the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT), the non-profit organisation facilitating this dialogue from the Pakistan side.
As per PILDAT, nearly 40 Indian MPs are expected to attend, including Mani Shankar Aiyar, Jaswant Singh and Shashi Tharoor. Some 20 MPs have come from Pakistan, including Mir Jan Muhammad Khan Jamali, deputy chairman of the Pakistan Senate.
PILDAT’s advisors include Lord Nazir Ahmed who heads the UK Parliamentary Group on Kashmir, and is believed to have close connections with the Kashmir Centre in London run by a Fai affiliate, the Justice Foundation.
This London centre is mentioned in the FBI chargesheet against Fai. “The KAC (Kashmir American Council) was founded in 1990 and goes by the name Kashmir Centre. It is one of the three Kashmir Centres that this investigation revealed are run by elements of the Government of Pakistan. The others are Justice Foundation/Kashmir Centre located in London, England, run by Nazir Ahmad Shawl and the Kashmir Centre — European Union, located in Brussels, Belgium, run by Abdul Majeed Tramboo. The director of KAC is Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, who often works out of his home in Fairfax, Virginia.”
According to Ahmed’s disclosure in the UK Parliament’s Register of Interests, he enjoyed the hospitality of the Justice Foundation in February. This direct involvement of the UK Parliamentary Group on Kashmir with the Justice Foundation and its Kashmir Centre in London is also a subject of an official protest by the Indian High Commission in London. Ahmed has been in the forefront of the campaign in UK for the Kashmiri right to self-determination. He originally belongs to Mirpur in PoK.
Another member of the board of PILDAT’s advisors is Mohammed Sarwar, a British Labour Party politician and a former MP from Glasgow Central. The seat is now represented by his son Anas Sarwar, who is also a member of the UK Parliamentary Group on Kashmir.
In 2006, the Justice Foundation organised a two-day International Kashmir Peace Conference in the House of Commons, where Mohammed Sarwar called for the UN to appoint a special envoy for Kashmir. That session of the seminar was chaired by Fai himself.
Another British MP Khalid Mahmood had in the same conference, which even came out with a London Declaration, called for internationally monitored elections in J&K. Now, Mahmood makes up for the third Pak-origin British politician in PILDAT’s board of advisors.
The Indian co-chair for the event is former Finance and External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha. When contacted, Sinha told The Indian Express: “PILDAT is facilitating the Pakistani delegation for the dialogue. This is a completely private effort but we have informed Parliament and also the Ministry of External Affairs. We have not gone into such detail but nobody has ever objected. I had earlier traveled to Islamabad in January for this dialogue.” In January, the MEA had raised a red flag on PILDAT and the British origins of its funding. As reported by The Indian Express on January 5, the Lok Sabha Secretariat had informed the MPs then that if they participate, they should not accept foreign funding. The matter was somewhat resolved with PILDAT giving an assurance that it will not use the funds obtained from British sources for this purpose.
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