ISI backed Ghulam Nabi Fai, Kashmir groups linked to US based Khalistan agitation

New Delhi, Sep 26 The most worrisome aspect of US-based Khalistan agitation is the likelihood that Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI is responsible to a considerable degree, according to a report by the Hudson Institute.

The research titled, "Pakistan's Destabilization Playbook: Khalistan Separatist Activism Within the US", says that in 2011, the FBI identified the Kashmir American Council and its head, Ghulam Nabi Fai, as tied to "a decades-long scheme to conceal the transfer of at least $3.5 million from the government of Pakistan to fund his lobbying efforts in America related to Kashmir."

Fai had long partnered with Khalistani organizations and Sikh activists. In 1992, for example, he and a number of Khalistani supporters attended the Democratic Party convention to lobby for Kashmiri and Sikh secessionism.

In 2000, Indian media reported that Fai and Paramjit Singh Ajrawat, founder of the Anti-Defamation Sikh Council for Khalistan, together visited a gurdwara in Silver Spring, Maryland, where they called for the US and the UN to increase their efforts to obtain a peaceful solution to the "liberation of the Sikh homeland, Khalistan and the 52-year-old Kashmir conflict".

The involvement of Fai and Kashmir-related groups in the US based Khalistan milieu should be taken seriously, the report said.

Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, a US citizen and director of the Kashmiri American Council