by Adrian Levy
‘Listen to me, my friend,’ Tikoo urged, knowing that the hostage-taking in Kashmir was far from the Prime Minister’s mind right now. ‘You have no idea of how governments function. Why don’t you speak to me tomorrow evening, by when …’
Jehangir barged in. ‘It can’t be done. I’ve told you, we know how to kill. Last time you found the body. This time we’ll discard the bodies at such a place you won’t ever be able to find them.’
Tikoo found it hard to suppress a wave of fury. He detested Jehangir’s casual cruelty. He was talking about real people. He could not bear to be pushed back into this tit-for-tat game once again. ‘Look, we know what you are capable of, that isn’t in question,’ he said. ‘So show us something new.’ He then threw a bone, one that he regretted as soon as he had let it go: ‘Look up. Allah is listening to you.’ This was slack. He had promised himself never again to talk about Islam, and he cursed himself under his breath.
Luckily, Jehangir was distracted. ‘Are you giving me a date or not?’ he shouted.
Trying to talk him down, Tikoo responded calmly: ‘I’m telling you, we are working out something. Why don’t you understand that such things take time?’ He tried one of Ramm’s suggestions: move away from dates, and focus on the consequences. ‘You and I will both regret the fact that you were not patient,’ he continued. ‘What will you gain by killing unarmed tourists? You will get a bad name.’
‘What bad name will we get?’ Jehangir snapped back. ‘We are not planning to form a government.’
Tikoo stifled a laugh. Jehangir was so dry, he thought, and he was also on the money. Tikoo knew that all New Delhi cared about was how things appeared, while these men only wanted actions. But he did his best to stick to the script. ‘Then why do it? You kidnapped them for a specific purpose? Aren’t you worried about the safety of [the jailed Movement leaders whose release the kidnappers were demanding]?’
Jehangir’s response floored him. ‘As for them, those people don’t really matter to us.’
Tikoo sat up. If he had heard correctly, Jehangir had just signalled a significant departure, giving him a possibility. Was he saying that Masood Azhar, the Afghani, Langrial and the others were now not important? Was Jehangir prepared to consider a new kind of deal?
Before Tikoo got a chance to think this through, Jehangir barged in again: ‘Those people don’t really matter to us.’
Tikoo had not misunderstood. He needed to think how he could turn this to his advantage. He had to report to General Saklani, and sound out Roy Ramm. The prisoners might not be a stumbling block any more. Al Faran had spent too many days stuck in the mountains, the IG thought. The ground was shifting. He said gently to Jehangir: ‘Please wait. Speak to me tomorrow at nine in the morning.’ He used a voice that he hoped sounded ‘knowing and open’. ‘I thought to myself, with everyone listening in to these calls, and all parties aware there were ears on the line, everything said had to be encoded to one degree or another. But luckily I understood Jehangir’s nuances. I had caught this one just as it popped out.’
Before ending the call, Jehangir returned to a well-trodden path, as if for the benefit of anyone who might be eavesdropping: ‘Let me make myself clear, if by nine you don’t talk in specifics, by 9.30 a.m. all four of them will be dead, and you won’t know where to find them.’ But somehow, both of them knew they had crossed a line. There had been a subtle shift in what was being said, and as Tikoo heard the line go dead, he felt his heart lifting.
But on 2 September, Day Sixty, there was no morning call from Jehangir. Tikoo grew more concerned by the hour: it was at times like these, when there was no talking at all, that he worried the most. Just after 3 p.m., the morning national papers arrived, having had to travel a long distance to reach Srinagar. They prominently carried a story that made Tikoo flinch: unnamed sources revealed that al Faran had scaled back its demands to just four prisoners, and that this too might be open to negotiation.
‘I just wanted to burst,’ Tikoo recalled. Leaks were an occupational hazard and a political indulgence in India, but his volatile dialogue with Jehangir was predicated on absolute secrecy: ‘Publishing even a small detail now could send the whole kit and caboodle flying.’ Jehangir must not think that he, the government’s negotiator, could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut. If Jehangir’s thoughts were exposed to his mentors in Kashmir and over the LoC, it would endanger his life. And now, just as Tikoo had been toying with a new kind of offer that took account of Jehangir’s radical change of heart about the prisoner releases, details of their secret negotiations had appeared in the press for the world to see.
After the initial shock, Tikoo began weighing up who could be responsible for the leak. Only a small number of individuals knew the hard facts: General Krishna Rao, the Governor of Kashmir, and his Security Advisor General Saklani; the Prime Minister and his inner circle in New Delhi; the top tier of the army, including the Commander of 15th Corps based in BB Cantt; and the higher-ups in IB and RAW, who listened in on his conversations with Jehangir. One of them must have tipped off the press. But why? ‘All of us were supposedly working towards getting the hostages released, so who stood to gain from upsetting the applecart?’
He struggled to comprehend what was going on. General Saklani was the closest to the negotiations, the first to learn of Tikoo’s successes and fears. He was an extension of Governor’s Rule, so his allegiances lay with New Delhi. But over the weeks Tikoo had put his prejudices aside and come to see that Saklani ‘played with a straight bat’, and often appeared as surprised by events as Tikoo himself was. He seemed sincere in wanting to get the hostages out alive. Tikoo could not say the same about Governor Krishna Rao, whom he rarely spoke to, and who many Kashmiris disdained. But he doubted that even this iron governor, a man on the brink of retirement, would court notoriety by being in charge of an operation that led to the death of five Western hostages, a stain on a much-decorated career.
Any suggestion that the Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, was giving in to the demands of Pakistani terrorists would be abhorrent to voters and valuable to Rao’s massing political opponents. Rao had come to power in 1991 pledging to expose Pakistan’s role in state-sponsored terror, especially in Kashmir. But violence in the state had surged, and Rao had been consistently outwitted by India’s ‘bad neighbour’ Pakistan, a country that in Tikoo’s mind had a standard operating procedure: do something intolerable, then go on the offensive with diplomats capable of snake-charming London and Washington into believing that India was overreacting and inflexible.
Tikoo reasoned that the Rao government would want to keep its dealings on the hostages secret, and not blurt them out. It would gain nothing, he thought, by bringing about the collapse of the negotiations, which would lead to its being labelled incompetent. Could the Prime Minister’s political opponents be the leakers, Tikoo pondered. One thing was for sure: at the moment everything to do with Pakistan was fraught. Just a few days back there had been uproar in the Indian press at rumours that US military hardware, promised to Pakistan in return for its support during the anti-Soviet secret war in Afghanistan, but withheld since 1991 (to punish it for covertly procuring nuclear weapons), was about to be released. ‘Pakistan can do no wrong, even when it has done wrong,’ was one Indian newspaper’s take on it. ‘And its reward? Nuclear bombs that will be aimed at India.’
Even if the government was not responsible for the leak, could the same be said about the intelligence agencies and the army? This was much harder to know. The army was slogging away at a brutal and draining insurgency. In the midst of all the bloodshed and intrigue, the hostage situation was a relatively minor irritation. If anything, the problem with the army was getting it to engage with the hostage crisis at all. All the army was really concerned about was rousting out al Faran, so as to eliminate another Pakistani-backed group operating in the Pir Panjal mountains. But in its attempts to do that, would it put innocent Western lives at risk? Tikoo was not sure: the army had committed so many abhorrent acts in
the valley since the militancy began in 1989 that five more deaths would be insignificant. As for IB and RAW, Tikoo shuddered. Their strategy in Kashmir was ever-changing, although it was seemingly underscored by two main ideas: to present Pakistan as being to blame for everything, and to cripple the Kashmiri independence movement. In recent days, Tikoo had seen evidence that the intelligence agencies were paying far greater attention to what was going on in Transport Lane. An IB officer, ‘Agent Singh’, had been installed in a nearby location, from where he listened in on every call Tikoo took from Jehangir.
Tikoo could not be certain of anything. But given the potentially incendiary nature of this case, he was glad he had decided to surreptitiously tape all of his conversations with Jehangir, knowing the state was doing the same. He would also continue negotiating to the best of his ability, but in the knowledge that someone, evidently high up in the establishment, seemed to want him to fail, for reasons that were not yet clear. It was not only the supercharged political climate that worried Tikoo. Winter was coming, and that would soon have a dramatic impact on the kidnappers’ mentality.
‘Up in the mountains, it would already be sub-zero at night,’ Tikoo said. Snow was on its way, and there would be increasingly little food available. The mountain villagers would be bedding in right now, storing grain, counting their livestock and conserving whatever vegetables they had. Many of them would be kept alive over the coming months by the winter rations book supplied by the government for rice and jaggery. Tsot bread made from flour and water was the only staple, primped with a thumb and thrown onto a hotplate. The kidnappers too would have been well aware that the crunch time was coming. Soon the mountain routes back to Pakistan would be blocked, trapping them in the Kashmir Valley until spring. Tikoo doubted the kidnappers would want this to go on for another six months, or were capable of sustaining it for that long, through a bitter winter, and he also worried about Jehangir himself. The al Faran mystery caller was becoming erratic, and other intermediaries (with no names attached) had stood in for him in many recent calls. ‘Stop-gap majors’, Tikoo called them, thinking of their clumsy, country voices that could barely string a sentence together. Whenever Jehangir returned to the dialogue, after these breaks, he was increasingly irascible. Facing a fading and paranoid intermediary, with a bruised and defensive government on his back and unseen establishment enemies sniping from all sides, and with even the weather against him, Tikoo needed to find a way out of this nightmare as quickly as he could.
3 September, Day Sixty-One. Tikoo awakened to the familiar gloomy vista. In Srinagar it was a warm morning, but he knew it could be sub-zero in the mountains. Suddenly, his VHF hissed into life. It had to be Jehangir, since the two of them had been taking it in turns to feed one another a frequency that had digits added and removed at prearranged intervals: a straightforward cipher that after some twiddling revealed the right channel. After yesterday’s leak, Tikoo had wondered if Jehangir would call at all. Anxious to avoid a slanging match about the news stories and to get the conversation off on the right footing, Tikoo pressed ‘Talk’ and got in first: ‘We have moved ahead, so you should also be patient.’ He wanted the words to ring out loud: ‘moved ahead’. He was certain that if they could get beyond yesterday’s headlines, they could reach some new demand, a trade-off, although he did not know what it might be.
‘You are just wasting time,’ Jehangir spat. He sounded tired and despondent. ‘What are you going to tell us now that you haven’t already said in the past two months?’
Tikoo took Jehangir’s tone to be an indication that he had seen the leaks in the papers. He came up with a sop to buy himself a little time. ‘Why don’t you understand? The decision has to be taken six hundred miles away from here [in New Delhi]. Please call me in the evening.’
But Jehangir was not in the mood. ‘We told you, we can’t give you an extra second. If you give us a date, we wait for a year. But first give us a firm date.’
A date by which some kind of deal would be done was all he seemed to want, but Tikoo did not have the authority to give it. ‘So many people are involved in such a decision. Why don’t you understand?’ he repeated. ‘I have assured you that the government isn’t planning any operation, so why can’t you just wait?’
‘What is the use?’ Jehangir was getting angry. He sounded unstable. ‘You have been saying the same thing for the past two months. We decided yesterday to kill them, and let me tell you, there is no difference in what we say and what we do.’
This straightforward dig about the respective sides’ codes of honour suggested to Tikoo that the leak had rankled badly. Jehangir sounded like a disappointed schoolboy, Tikoo thought. He hoped he would not go off the rails. Tikoo would have to up the stakes to get back on top of this. He decided to get his boss, the Director General of police, in on the next call, to show Jehangir that he was sincere, and that the higher-ups were listening. Mahendra Sabharwal, Kashmir’s most senior police officer, was ‘not easy with words’, Tikoo recalled. But Tikoo could borrow the DG’s authority to reassure Jehangir. And, as Roy Ramm had told him repeatedly, there was always something to be said for getting a new voice involved.
At 5 p.m. on 3 September, the VHF burbled for the second time that day. Now there were two men sitting and staring at the bricked-up view in Transport Lane: IG Tikoo and his plump Director General M.N. Sabharwal, who always kept a rictus smile fixed to his face. A third man, ‘Agent Singh’ of the Intelligence Branch, listened in from nearby, his pen at the ready. A fizz and a burr, and then Tikoo started talking with renewed confidence, hoping to set the tone. ‘How are you? What about the guests?’ Without giving Jehangir a chance to start complaining, he continued: ‘Mr Sabharwal, my boss, went to New Delhi by special plane. We are all at it. Why don’t you talk to him?’
The DG, clearly uncomfortable with the situation, took the handset. ‘Please don’t blow it,’ Tikoo thought to himself. ‘Solutions take time,’ the DG began uncertainly. ‘If you had not killed Ostrø we would have been closer to the destination.’ Tikoo could feel a sense of rising panic. Why was the DG going back there? He had already buried that tragedy, which he was certain Jehangir, who had openly cursed the Turk on more than one occasion, deeply regretted. But the DG seemed oblivious, and continued, his finger wagging: ‘You also know that the tourists are innocent, not involved in your fight. Why don’t you leave them first, and then we can carry on with our discussions?’ Tikoo heard the line going dead even as the DG chuntered on.
The debrief was cantankerous, Tikoo recalled. ‘The DG accused me of not being hard enough on the kidnappers. He seemed to think we had been courting, taking a “walk in the park”, while I tried to explain the backstory and how we needed to get on track after the disastrous leak and sound out a new deal – perhaps one that did not even involve prisoners.’ General Saklani backed him up, saying that reaching a solution was a delicate art. At the after-meeting with Roy Ramm and his counterparts from the FBI, the Indian team gave little away. ‘My hands were tied,’ Tikoo said. ‘I would like to have told them we were looking for a new solution, but was forbidden, and instead we waffled on about nothing in particular, as if it was the most important thing on earth, wasting everyone’s time.’
In the absence of any information from Transport Lane, Ramm and co. had been brainstorming for new approaches that might get the focus off the leak and the subsequent denials from the Indian government that it was responsible. With the PM under fire, and al Faran bitter at its dialogue being made public, the talks had to be redirected. Ramm suggested that in the next conversation IG Tikoo should offer the kidnappers something physical that might also reach the hostages. ‘Feed the criminals and you feed the captives too,’ Ramm said.
The radio hissed again, for the third time that day. This was a good sign, Tikoo thought as he picked up the handset, primed to go. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘do you need any rations or blankets? Some wheat or rice?’
Jehangir’s response was deadpan as usual: �
�We are not arranging a wedding here.’
Tikoo smiled. DG Sabharwal spoke up, this time taking things slowly: ‘In the end there will be a solution. But it will take time. Why don’t you speak to your commanders and appeal for time?’
This was Tikoo’s idea. For many days now he had wanted to reach out to Jehangir’s commander, Sikander, in the knowledge that intelligence showed Sikander’s hand had strengthened after Ostrø’s death. An intercept by Indian signals had caught an unknown voice from Pakistan, thought to be Farooq Kashmiri, the Movement’s military commander, castigating the Turk for the killing and reminding everyone on the ground that Sikander was running things. Tikoo had another thought, too. Unlike Jehangir, who was from Mirpur or somewhere close by, Sikander and he were both from Indian-administered Kashmir, which meant a lot more than speaking the same language. Regardless of the hatred that had come between them because of the conflict, Tikoo believed that as a Kashmiri, Sikander could be made to understand the need for a peaceful solution. ‘Kashmiris, however virulent and dogmatic, are not an inherently violent people,’ Tikoo said, ‘unlike the Pakistanis who were sent over here.’
‘It can’t be done,’ said Jehangir emphatically. Sikander would not be brought to the radio set. ‘Speak to IG Tikoo at five tomorrow,’ said DG Sabharwal weakly.
‘This can’t be done,’ replied Jehangir, whose tone suggested he felt piqued by the idea of bringing Sikander into the talks.
Tikoo took back the handset, thinking that the Director General’s presence only seemed to aggravate matters. ‘Call me tomorrow and I’ll let you know where we’ve reached,’ he said, hoping he sounded masterful.
But Jehangir was irreconcilable. ‘This is our last conversation,’ he spat back. Tikoo thought: ‘He sounds like we’ve had a lovers’ tiff, but the consequences are far more awful.’ He tried to recall the elation he had felt after first talking to Don Hutchings on 28 August.
