The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Tikoo had been in the police control room on 20 January 1990, when the security forces shot up demonstrators near the Gawakadal Bridge in Srinagar, and he remembered watching, with a lump in his throat, as scores of corpses on stretchers were brought inside. Later many officers had cut out a passage from an Indian commentator, Balraj Puri, that was stuck on the office wall. ‘It was no longer a fight between the militants and the security forces,’ Puri had warned, ‘but a total insurgency of the entire population.’

  Rather than bolster the flailing Kashmiri police force, New Delhi had shipped in several hundred thousand outsiders from the CRPF, dark-skinned Indian paramilitaries with no affinity for the valley who, Tikoo thought, proved even more indiscriminate in their use of violence. By the last days of January 1990, Tikoo had counted at least 130 unarmed demonstrators shot dead, with the Indian paramilitaries shooting the wounded too. Srinagar’s Bone and Joint Hospital was dubbed the Hospital for Bullet and Bomb Blast Injuries. ‘That was when the law enforcers had begun fighting each other,’ he said, recalling how hundreds of local cops had trained their guns on the CRPF. Senior police chiefs referred to it as ‘the Mutiny’, while others more kindly called it ‘the Strike’. Either way, over a tense few days the Kashmiri police had their guns taken away, and the incoming Governor, Jagmohan Malhotra, publicly derided Kashmir as ‘the valley of Scorpions’.

  Ten minutes to go. How they had all hated that label. How demoralised the Kashmiri-born upper echelons of the force had become. For a clever patriot who was also a Kashmiri, watching New Delhi appointees leapfrog the local officer class had been too much for Tikoo to stomach. Bullying figures, with no local knowledge, they had thundered around the state throwing up dust, spilling blood and talking loudly in Hindi to people who didn’t understand the language. Tikoo and his golf buddies took to calling these New Delhi-planted police and intelligence officers ‘the East India Company’, like the English merchants who set out to establish a monopoly over trade in the Far East in the early seventeenth century. ‘They knew about as much about the Kashmir imbroglio as I did about my wife’s recipe for tandoori fish made from singara netted in the Baghilar Dam,’ said Tikoo. In return, the outsiders despised the Kashmiri police cadre too, suspecting them of collaborating with Kashmir’s uprising. They dubbed Tikoo and his local colleagues ‘the Pakistanis’.

  Any misfortunes that beset the East India Company were celebrated by the Pakistanis as proof of New Delhi’s failings. Tikoo cited one much-derided episode concerning a planned celebration for the centenary of India’s elite Intelligence Bureau (IB), which oversaw domestic spying across the subcontinent. In Kashmir, it was decided that the public would be invited to a party and a lecture. IB agents and their helpers were pressed into fly-posting announcements across the valley, inadvertently identifying themselves and their bases along the way. Thankful for this unexpected windfall, the militants were able to pick off a string of IB spies and their proxies in quick succession. ‘When the killing stopped there were thirty-nine dead, including four leading agents,’ Tikoo recalled. The IB’s Kashmir intelligence network would take years to recover.

  ‘The Pakistanis’ had also found it hard not to celebrate in January 1992, when the police chief of Kashmir, a brusque Indian called Jitendra Saxena, narrowly survived being blown up in his own office by his Kashmiri stenographer.

  Five minutes to go. Finally, in 1993, there had been a sea change as a result of a potentially calamitous event: the army’s ill-advised siege of the lakeside mosque at Hazratbal. It had started disastrously in October that year, when the siege had set in and Indian security forces had slain scores of unarmed demonstrators elsewhere in the valley who were protesting against the operation. The Kashmiri police backed a controversial strategy to offer everyone inside the mosque an amnesty, on condition that they agreed to being interrogated by local officers. This plan, which led to the peaceful defusing of the crisis, and the saving of the mosque, made everyone believe a little more in the judgement of the constabulary. Rajinder Tikoo, who by then was a senior officer, claimed to have had a personal hand in the matter, and used the momentum it provided to propose something more radical and permanent. Instead of relying on the heavy-handed CRPF, he suggested the police should raise a roving mobile unit of sharpshooters, made up of Kashmiri officers. They could be deployed to crack sieges and counter gunfights, thus placing Kashmiris, for the first time, at the forefront of counter-insurgency operations. He even suggested a name: the Special Task Force (STF).

  Although the East India Company had privately scoffed, Security Advisor Saklani and the Governor had liked the idea, since Indian security forces were already overcommitted in the region, and pitting Kashmiri against Kashmiri was always preferable to losing Indian men. Saklani was heard to say that the plan demonstrated Tikoo’s ingenuity, and by the time he was promoted to IG Kashmir Zone in February 1994, the STF was a reality. Selecting as its leader a respected and gruff Kashmiri Muslim police officer, Superintendent Farooq Khan, who had worked his way up through the ranks and was known as a straight dealer, Tikoo pitched the STF to his men: anyone who joined could keep the weapons or communication equipment they seized from the enemy. ‘It was an incentive that worked,’ Tikoo reflected. ‘However, the STF became a Dirty Dozen kind of a thing, and we attracted all the encounter specialists, the gang bangers and violent guys.’

  By the time Tikoo had become IG Crime Branch in February 1995, the STF was well on the way to becoming a mobile killing force. Two hundred men had now been signed up, and the sight of one of its white Gypsy jeeps thundering into a village was enough to terrify residents. The police’s sledgehammer was also proving difficult to control, with the STF facing mounting allegations that it was settling scores and syphoning off booty wherever it roamed, its officers associated with multiple claims of rape and murder. In remote areas where Indian Army camps and STF bases often sat side by side, it was also forming unofficial allegiances with the army that worried the regular police force. But the conception and execution of the STF idea had brought Tikoo recognition as an innovator, and as a bridge between the Pakistanis and the East India Company. Were these the qualities that had got him to the negotiating table with al Faran, he wondered. Or was he being punished?

  Then the phone rang. It was midnight on 15 July.

  Security officer Altaf Ahmed passed the handset to his boss, as had been planned. ‘I have my IG Crime here,’ Saklani told the caller. ‘Why don’t you talk to him? He is one of the most experienced in this field.’ He passed the handset to Tikoo, mouthing: ‘Arrange the next call in your own lodgings, and not in my office.’ Putting the phone to his ear, Tikoo heard the familiar hiss and whine that told him this was a local call. He and the kidnappers’ intermediary were probably sitting in Srinagar within a mile of each other.

  The room was empty, barring Tikoo. There was nothing but a yawning silence on the other end of the line. ‘These things were very ticklish, and hostage negotiation is not everyone’s cup of tea,’ says Tikoo. ‘If you fail to engage immediately, you have destroyed the whole thing in the first twenty-four hours. My way of working was a little different. I didn’t have a rulebook. But I was rather shaky at first, thinking, how will I descend to the terrorist level?’

  ‘Hello, my friend,’ he began tentatively, taking a note of everything said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Earlier, he had had a brief conversation with Saklani. ‘Sahib, how should I do it? What do I do?’ Saklani had replied, ‘You’re a good conversationalist. You go your own way, and try to drag it out as long as possible.’ That was all, there would be no script, and no analyst to assist him. ‘No markers, no “This is our considered policy. You stop at such and such. You offer this. You do this thing, yadda yadda yadda.” So I made it up as I went along.’

  At last a voice came over the line, spitting Urdu words like cherry pits.

  ‘You release our people, otherwise we will kill … this thing … you know. Finish them. We will, each of th
em, kill … murder … them. Do you understand? We will be true to our word.’

  Jotting down these words, Tikoo was annoyed. Nobody had spoken to him like this in a long time. He tried to slow things down, mindful as he did so of the imminent deadline. ‘Look, my friend, these things are not done in such an abrupt manner. We are not selling vegetables. I am not asking you the price of potatoes. You go slow. What do you want?’

  He imagined the caller concealed somewhere, perhaps above an embroidery shop in the maze of Khanyar, a pro-militant quarter of the old city, every fibre in his adversary’s body tensing as he spoke to the enemy. ‘This is the first base: we’re talking,’ Tikoo said to himself, before he was brought back to reality.

  ‘Release our people. It’s simple. Don’t treat us like we are fools. The consequences will be horrible. Don’t make us show you. We are not afraid to die.’

  Tikoo had to find a way to extend the deadline. ‘Who are your people?’ he asked. There had been a list of names delivered as long ago as 5 July, but Tikoo decided to make the man spell it out. ‘There are hundreds of people in the jails. You tell me. Which “our people”? There are hundreds of thousands of our people.’

  ‘A humdilallah [by the grace of God], we have given you the list.’ The man was not ready to play games.

  Tikoo tried another tack. ‘You are ringing me. You made this call. I am now authorised to talk to you, so can you please tell me, for God’s sake, how do we start? OK: “these people”. Who is the first? Who is the second? Who is the last? Which category? How did you choose them? Do you get me? I am trying to sort this out. I don’t want you to have to kill. Look, this conversation is now fifteen minutes old. I am sure you would like to break off and call me tomorrow. You call me at another number, and I will try to get permission to help you.’ He gave the caller his home telephone number. ‘Call me later, at 3 p.m. And at my home. You give me an order for who we release, etc. We can end this. We can sort this out. You and me.’

  There was a long pause. ‘By the grace of God, good night.’

  He had done it. Had he done it? The intermediary had not said no, so Tikoo thought he had just got himself another twenty-four hours.

  ‘Good night,’ Tikoo said, noticing how sweaty his hands were, and folding up his notes. Suddenly he was back in the plain surroundings of Saklani’s bedroom. He rushed downstairs, eager to share the news. But the Security Advisor was preoccupied with another matter, and simply showed Tikoo the door. ‘Keep up the good work, old chap,’ he said. The IG Crime slid back into his white Ambassador, and was driven to his bungalow on Transport Lane, just north of Maulana Azad Road, behind the Holy Family church.

  Outside his front door was a little-used exercise bicycle. He was going to have to get back into shape, he recalled thinking. He was surprised at how that disembodied voice had got under his skin. It was the kind of voice he heard in jail cells and holding centres every day. But the telephone conversation, where neither of them could see the other, had felt perilous. Five lives hung by the copper telephone wire, and upon his canny knack of ‘walking into a shitstorm’ with no gloves, or even a hat.

  The modest rooms he shared with his wife were all civil-service-issue brown beams and cream walls. A bathroom was off to the right, and his golf bag leaned against the wall in one corner. The dressing table in front of him faced a large window: ‘We looked out onto a brick wall. Beyond that wall was another. And then the wide-open greens of the SP College playing fields. So I almost had a view.’

  For Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne, who knew almost nothing about the back channel, other than that it had just commenced, every day felt as if it could be the last. They were relieved by the news from their liaison, Altaf Ahmed, that the deadline had been nudged back an inch, but to them it still felt as if a gigantic boulder stood before the mouth of a cave in which the captives were being held. Then on 15 July Saklani asked them to hold another press conference, ‘so as to encourage al Faran to keep talking’. The women had only just recovered from the first one, but they reluctantly agreed, so long as Saklani could find a less formal and formidable venue this time.

  Suzanne Goldenberg, a foreign correspondent for the Guardian, grabbed a seat in the garden of the state guesthouse. How exhausted they look, she wrote as they took their seats in a shady corner, and wondered if any of them would stand the pace. Cath set things off, reading from a script: ‘We are glad to hear from al Faran that the five hostages are in good health. But we repeat that the five are merely innocent tourists and are not responsible for the situation.’

  Goldenberg could not take her eyes off Julie, who rested her head on Jane’s shoulder, tears brimming. Anne stared at a vanishing point beyond the garden, as if she was in another time and country. All of them looked bewildered. Were they aware of what Indian intelligence had advised the press, Goldenberg wondered. In her report, she would write: ‘In the past two months, tension in the Kashmir Valley has risen after the destruction of Charar-e-Sharief.’ She noted also that one spy had told her: ‘After Mr Childs’ escape the remaining hostages had been stripped and beaten … they had since been forbidden to sleep in their clothes. Shoes, too, had been confiscated.’ She had heard from local journalists that there were said to be sixteen men guarding the hostages, some of whom were believed to have been involved in the 1994 kidnappings of Kim Housego and David Mackie. The story doing the rounds this morning was that officers from IB and RAW, India’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, were linking the two events, even as New Delhi and Western diplomats were not. The spies, Goldenberg wrote, gave the impression of knowing intimate details about the kidnap drama, such as the beatings supposedly administered to the remaining hostages after John Childs’ escape. She suggested that this was either a crude attempt to blacken the Kashmiri militant outfits, or an indication that India had assets close to the captives. Perhaps they were readying themselves for a raid.

  16 July, 3 p.m. Tikoo’s phone rang. He grabbed the receiver, hoping that something from the women’s press conference, which he had watched on the television news that morning, had reached the Pir Panjal mountains. ‘Hello, my friend,’ he began, reassured that the caller had rung at exactly the agreed time. ‘What can I do for you?’ He was off again, sight-reading and completely on his own, with no analysts standing in the wings, or psychologists listening in to offer another view. Only Tikoo, his new adversary, and a notepad – although he presumed that IB would be listening in from somewhere.

  ‘We want our comrades freed. Do not mess us around. There are lives at stake. Have you consulted? When will our demands be met? We need answers now!’

  There was a different tone to the voice. The intermediary sounded tired, irritable and out of breath, as if he had had to run to make the call in time.

  Tikoo, hoping to extend the deadline again, tried a different tack. ‘OK, my friend. I’ve been asking around. I’ve done the groundwork, but there are problems. Suppose I have to get someone from a prison in Rajouri, another from a prison in Jammu, someone else from Srinagar, or Agra, or Jaipur. How many people? What numbers? I need to know all the details, an order and a place to start. I told you this. A name to be the first. Have you brought the list and ordered it?’

  In the silence that followed, Tikoo decided not to ask the man’s identity, tempted as he was. Deep down, as a specialist in intelligence and a lover of minutiae, he wanted to trade names and do a verbal handshake. ‘I must not put him off,’ he thought. ‘I wanted to say, “Are you the commander? The deputy commander?” So on and so forth.’ But he was concerned that this might make the man feel threatened.

  ‘You already have our demands,’ the caller said sullenly. Tikoo wrote every word down. His notes would be stored on file in Crime Branch headquarters.

  The IG pressed home his advantage. ‘Well, my friend, what can I do? We must discuss some priorities with your demands. I told you to bring the list.’

  ‘I will ring back,’ said the caller grumpily. ‘You have until tomorr
ow. We will not kill the tourists until then. We will talk, and if you have concrete news then we can make progress.’

  Was this what Tikoo was supposed to be doing? He had no idea, as no one had told him. But he rang off elated at having extended the deadline once again. If the authorities were looking for a way out, planning a raid, gathering intelligence, then he was playing his part. During the next call, on 17 July, he would pry a little, he told himself, gently applying pressure. This was becoming a passive-aggressive interrogation, and he was rather good at those. ‘We had our methods. You may call it hot and cold, or good and bad. But I was pinpoint accurate at leveraging, and I knew how to squeeze a man.’

  He was starting to feel that this crime could be solved. ‘Earlier we had done the same with Mr P.K. Sinha, an esteemed MLA [Member of the Legislative Assembly] from Bihar state, who had got himself kidnapped in Kashmir while on holiday,’ Tikoo recalled, referring to an incident that had taken place in May 1993. ‘It began all blood and death, with “cut off his head”. By Day Three the kidnappers told me: “Look, sir, we are in a bad shape. Make a raid and make it look like we put up a fight, and we will leave the MLA out in the field for you.”’ Tikoo had worked his magic, and the captors had reduced their demands to just two: ‘We’ll settle for some ammo and a couple of bulletproof jackets. Throw that in, and the useless politician is yours.’ Tikoo had done it, without telling anyone: the Bihari had walked free. The kidnappers kept their dignity. No one was the wiser. He hoped he was doing it again.