The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  A day or two later, a compounder (a village pharmacist) came forward. He claimed to have been forced by al Faran to walk blindfolded for eight miles deep into the forest, to treat some gunmen and two sick hostages. ‘One was much worse than the other,’ he said, but both were ‘deteriorating in extremely cold, unhygienic conditions with a restricted diet and psychological pressure’. He had not seen where they were staying, as he had been told to wait in a copse, and the hostages were brought to him.

  For the partners, the hardest day was 12 October, the ninety-ninth day of captivity for Don, Keith and Paul, the ninety-fifth for Dirk. Thick snow now carpeted all of the upper reaches east of Anantnag, and the women, down in humid New Delhi, tried not to think too much about how their loved ones might be facing the milestone of one hundred days in captivity. The day plodded by like so many others, although Jane called home to Spokane, knowing friends there were marking the occasion with a meditation session in her back garden. Her and Don’s extended family of mountaineering enthusiasts, doctors and nurses had kept their home life going, watering the garden, caring for the two dogs, Bodhi and Homer, answering phone messages and dealing with the press. There had been candlelit vigils in local parks, and the people of Spokane had tied yellow ribbons around trees, trekking posts and other local landmarks to remind everyone that Don was still out there. Some had wanted to make more of a public fuss, such as picketing the local airport to warn travellers not to visit India. Jane had stopped them, asking everyone to keep things low-key, in line with the repeated warnings from the diplomatic liaison officers that too much publicity could both scare off al Faran and turn the Indians hostile. In her heart, Jane was starting to think she needed to go home to her close friends and family. Nothing had been heard from the kidnappers in twenty-four days, and she felt as if she could achieve more in the United States lobbying for Don’s release than hanging around the oppressive Chanakyapuri compound, going stir crazy.

  In Srinagar, Roy Ramm’s frustration was also mounting. He sensed al Faran was exhausted – the hostages too, no doubt. A deal was there for the taking, but he knew nothing of the negotiating process, or even if there was one ongoing. If only they could reach out and pluck the hostages, he said to himself every morning as he contemplated the pins blossoming on the map. Then, on 15 October, several eyewitnesses emerged at once. All reported seeing four hostages sitting in the back of a truck in Anantnag. This was tantalisingly close, just a ninety-minute drive from Srinagar. The Indian authorities came forward, but only for a spokesman from the Home Ministry to once again put the kibosh on things, dismissing any talk of a rescue. Militants stalked Anantnag just as they dominated the hills above it, the spokesman said, adding that the time lag between sightings and their reporting made them difficult to act upon. Any sweeps of the city by the security forces would lead to the hostages being killed, he warned, crushing any last remaining hopes that such action was being contemplated.

  The foot-dragging and inertia continued, even as evidence of al Faran’s increasing desperation grew. A bus driver came forward to say thirty militants had hijacked his vehicle in broad daylight near Hapatnar. Among the party were four Western prisoners, one of whom was limping. The driver had taken them to a village he identified as Langanbal, where the militants had bought painkillers and antibiotics from a pharmacy before taking off east with a Kashmiri trekking guide.

  A new pin was placed on the map at Langanbal, six miles from Pahalgam, where all this had started back in July. However preposterous the bus driver’s story seemed, Roy Ramm, who kept returning to the Housego and Mackie abductions, found logic in it. Back in 1994, Sikander’s men had commandeered two taxis outside Pahalgam to take their footsore captives on the last part of their journey to the poplar nursery. Kim Housego later recounted how this last stage of their journey had become a farce when one of the taxis had suffered a puncture: ‘All the gunmen tried to cram into the other car, arguing over who would get a seat, an issue that became so heated that several gunmen had jumped into the open boot, spilling loaded weapons onto the road.’ Now, in Ramm’s mind, the only logical reason for Sikander to circle Anantnag was to engineer another hostage handover and somehow save face. The trick would be giving him something that would enable him to back out gracefully. Ramm hoped India was thrashing out the details in secret.

  Back in Middlesbrough, Mavis and Charlie Mangan’s local paper, the Gazette, leapt on the sightings at Hapatnar and Langanbal, saying they ‘provide the first real evidence of [the hostages’] safety after negotiations … broke down a month ago’. But Keith’s parents struggled to comprehend why things were moving so slowly. In Blackburn, Bob Wells had cobbled together a map of the Kashmir region, using pages he had photocopied at a local library. Like Roy Ramm in Srinagar, Bob had marked all the sightings, and ran his finger along the paths and roads between them, concluding that the distance between Indian-controlled Srinagar and rebel-held Anantnag was infinitesimal. He could not understand why there was no rescue attempt. ‘It was so frustrating. But we just kept being told the same thing: the Indians were on top of things.’

  On 24 October the hostages were spotted back in Anantnag, clothed in pherans and plastic shoes. Again, one of them was said to be limping. Ramm and his assistants wished they could talk directly to the witnesses. Everything that arrived from General Saklani’s office was shorn of particulars, making each account a mere waypoint, of little use as evidence in a building inquiry. That was being conducted elsewhere, Ramm was certain. He hoped the Kashmiri detectives, as coppers back home would have been doing, were crawling all over the countryside, even if their political masters were recalcitrant: ‘Anywhere else in the world, the fraternity of police would have shared intelligence and war stories. Here everything was infused by politics, shrouded in secrecy and predicated by control.’

  Something else was bugging Ramm and co. as they stared at the newly crowded map in their improvised operations room. An inconsistency. ‘Why were there so many hostage sightings in Anantnag, a turf that New Delhi maintained was completely under militant control? If al Faran was among its own then it would remain invisible here,’ Ramm told himself. Something was missing in their understanding of the situation on the ground in Anantnag.

  In September, after cautiously interviewing villagers in the Warwan and sifting through the literary moraine left behind there by the hostages, scraps that revealed their desperate attempts to stay sane and their growing interdependence with their captors, the Kashmiri Crime Branch Squad had also concluded that al Faran was heading to Anantnag, and looking to broker some kind of deal. The detectives decided that they would try to intercept the hostage party as they descended from Mardan Top, in a mission they regarded as ‘going behind enemy lines’.

  For six long and bloody years, the knotted pine forests above Anantnag, with their cascading mountain rivers, abandoned Mughal gardens and corkscrew tracks, the plateaux of paddy and the walnut groves, had cradled the azadi movement. Here a field of militant outfits had sprung up like purple saffron crocuses. Some groups were Kashmiri, others created by Pakistan. Most did not consist of battle-hardened mujahids, but of students, mechanics, tailors, carpenters, bakers, schoolteachers and the unemployed, an army of amateurs supported by hundreds of thousands of poor country people whose resentment of India kept their lips sealed. All too often the price of their loyalty was a terrible retribution from the Indian security forces: ancient wooden villages incinerated and angry garrisons parked outside the ruins, a corrosive cycle of military operations – crackdown, cordon-and-search and catch-and-kill – that saw thousands of residents detained without warrant, tortured and killed without a trial, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves scattered throughout the district’s woods. Despite – and because of – the Indian brutality, outfits like Sikander’s Movement and Hizbul Mujahideen flourished. Although they fought with each other, bloodily, over supporters and territory, disagreeing bitterly too about religion and ideology, with HM winning the upper hand, collectiv
ely they still controlled most of the villages and hamlets in the Anantnag district, as the Squad knew from bitter experience.

  Mushtaq Sadiq’s men arrived in the region in the third week of September, pitching up in Lovloo, a remote village of wooden houses strung out along a ridge twenty miles south-east of Anantnag. They had been tipped off that this was an important Movement stronghold, and they trod gingerly as they attempted to pick up al Faran’s trail. Lovloo was one of the last Kashmiri outposts before the hills became mountains, criss-crossed by perilous icy passes that led into the Warwan, and was, as far as the police knew, a dormitory for gunmen who came down from the heights at the end of summer, the village’s haylofts providing beds for the night.

  However, what the Squad found in Lovloo was a Kashmiri calling himself ‘the Tiger’, who claimed he was paid by the Indian government to control all the villages visible on the hilltops above his home. A surly figure, who sat wrapped in his pheran in a well-tended garden of neon-yellow daisies in front of his cottage overlooking the routes down from Mardan Top, the Tiger was surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards, and openly carried a rifle. Unlike Lovloo’s other inhabitants – farmers and woodcutters who scurried away as soon as they saw outsiders – he was not frightened of anyone in authority. But he didn’t wear a uniform either.

  The predatory Tiger, whose fat fingers have seen so much action over the years that he is barely able to close them in a handshake, still lives in Lovloo. His real name is Basir Ahmad Wagay, and he was formerly a builder by trade. His radio call-sign, ‘Tiger’, derived from the ostentatious moustache that curls around his cheeks, and from his self-professed ‘fondness for a brawl’. He had a vicious temper that got people jumping (including his wife and two daughters, who cowered indoors, he said). ‘Fuck with me and I’ll fuck you up,’ the Tiger bragged as he crushed fresh walnuts in his fist, explaining candidly how he came to be roaming around Lovloo, openly armed to the teeth.

  In 1991 his father had been arrested and tortured by ‘behanchod Indian soldiers’, he said, calling the troops ‘sisterfuckers’. After that the Tiger had gone to war, joining the Muslim Brotherhood in 1992, the same militant outfit Sikander had enlisted in during his college days in Anantnag. At first, all had gone well, with the Brotherhood claiming scores of hits against the security forces, who in the Tiger’s words were ‘suor ka bacha’, or sons of pigs.

  ‘But things changed in 1994,’ the Tiger reflected. ‘Our discipline eroded, and the true militancy became no more noble than mugging. We were gandu [arseholes], and badly outgunned by the Indian dogs.’ Not wanting to end up rotting among the faceless corpses stacked in mass graves all along the Line of Control, and disenchanted by the azadi cause, the Tiger and his followers had secretly agreed to switch sides after being approached by Indian intelligence agents who offered them money and protection to hunt down their former comrades. From now on they would be known as ‘renegades’, allowed to keep their weapons and any spoils they procured.

  The existence of the Tiger’s group was secret, and vehemently denied by the Indian government. Although the Squad knew about the classified operation to recruit Kashmiris to spy for the security forces, which had commenced in 1994, they had had no idea that it had penetrated this far into the militant-infested Anantnag hills, or that it involved arming former militants as well as using them as informers. From what the Squad understood, the intelligence agencies had modelled the plan on a tactic used by India in Punjab state in the 1980s, when a Sikh insurgency had risen up, and fighters disgruntled with it were lured to the government side and deployed to crush their erstwhile comrades. The philosophy that underpinned the initiative, turning one community against another, was also a central tenet of the Game.

  ‘I’m the fucking law now,’ the Tiger says he told the police. He even has a laminated identity card bearing his photo, which he keeps in a creased red-plastic shopping bag. Stamped by the 36th Battalion of the Rashtriya Rifles, the card describes him as a ‘Battalion Commander’ and gives the serial number of his rifle, which was bought for him by Pakistan when he went over the LoC to train during the early days of the insurgency. The Squad could not help but marvel at the irony of this. The force that was created to crush Kashmir’s insurgency, India’s brutally effective RR, had endorsed the Tiger and sanctioned his weapon, both of which had been tools of Pakistan, triggering a new kind of insurgency. According to the Tiger there were thirty-five men under him, spread across six or seven large villages and a number of hamlets, all militants who had flipped to the government side and were authorised by the RR to bear arms, carrying similar cards to prove it.

  They were paid ‘two bottles of wine a day’ by the 36th RR’s Colonel Awasthi, for whom they ran a network of unofficial informers, villagers who received small amounts of cash for revealing whatever the Movement or HM was up to. Whenever the Tiger’s men got a call from one of these sources, they commandeered a fleet of taxis to get to the fight, since they had no cars of their own. Without mobile phones, they were dependent on the confused copper wires of India’s public call boxes to keep in touch with each other. And in a remote and under-resourced region riddled with poverty and petty village disputes, this DIY government hit squad also used their newly-gifted power to settle a lifetime’s worth of grudges.

  The Tiger boasted: ‘I say to my boys, “Go into so-and-so village and start shooting those dog-fuckers.” Then we used to leave some of our boys behind.’ He dusted off his hands. ‘Ragdoo, ragdoo [smash, smash], they misbehave. And I come back and tell the people sitting in the ruins of their homes, “Lath choos [cocksuckers], unless you come over to my way of thinking, we’ll be back.”’ He said the speech normally sorted things out, as did the stories that had reached all of the villages across south Kashmir that government-paid renegades were permitted to do whatever they liked.

  Strong-arming, informing and looting soon became wholesale killing. The Tiger said that in early 1995 the 36th Rashtriya Rifles had introduced a cash-for-corpses incentive scheme, in line with another rule of the Game: My enemy’s enemy is my friend. ‘Now, for every body that I or my men dump at the local 36th RR camp, we are paid between ten thousand and twenty thousand rupees [between £200 and £400], depending on the seniority of the deceased militant. But no one examines the bodies, asks for debriefs or IDs, so we shoot whosoever we choose. And so long as the RR remains in power, no one is going to stop us,’ was the way the Tiger told it. He had taken to his task with gusto, carrying fat rolls of five-hundred-rupee notes, testifying to the eighty-nine kills he would personally rack up, most of which he could no longer put a face to. He became so valuable a resource that when he got shot himself in 1995, the army sent him to Srinagar, where he received medical treatment at the military hospital in BB Cantt, Indian Army headquarters. ‘Since we took over, we got rid of those zinheke [sons of whores] completely,’ the Tiger said, referring to the militants from HM and the Movement whom he had once considered as brothers.

  This area in the upper hills was no longer a haven for Sikander or his men, the Squad could see. When they asked the Tiger what he knew about the hostages, he said he was sure they were heading this way. He recalled: ‘Our sources told us the kidnappers arrived here from the Warwan – end of September – and spent the first few days hanging around the upper forests. We climbed a few mountains and we found some freshly used militant hideouts where the bedbugs were full of blood. They had been there all right. We hung around for seven or eight days, waiting, but did not see them. We did hear them on the VHF sets, chattering, saying the hostages were healthy, but cold and hungry.’ He concluded that al Faran was intending to come down into town: ‘Those halamke [bastards] were heading for Anantnag town. But they would have to cross us first, and then we’d have them.’

  Letting rip with a fusillade of shots, to show the conversation was at an end, the Tiger snatched back his paperwork, tossing his photo-ID and other assorted documents into the red shopping bag. ‘I only know bits and bobs,’ he said, shi
fting from one leg to the other, appearing to have become uncomfortable with this subject, having thought about it a little longer. ‘The hostages are a matter for the higher-ups. You should talk to them. It’s their operation. We are not employed to think about stuff. We are wolves.’ In any case, he had to go. Every evening at dusk he drove in a convoy of taxis down the mountain to the nearest Indian paramilitary base at Vailoo, thirty minutes away, where he would spend the night in a bunker, drinking Old Monk rum with the soldiers and listening to the thwack and whizz of home-made mortars flying overhead. His new incarnation as a government killer had cost him dear. The Tiger had lost count of the number of relations, friends and neighbours who wanted him dead.

  The Tiger’s gory grip on the forests and foothills east of Anantnag explained why the Indians had been able to gather so many sightings of the al Faran party in this area – the ones that had been leaked to the press and became coloured pins on Roy Ramm’s composite map. Contrary to what the Indian government was saying publicly, it had ears and eyes in villages at the previously hostile top end of the district, informers paid to work its beat, and gunmen to act on the intelligence, tipping the balance of power towards New Delhi. This change would force Sikander into a corner, the Squad concluded. They needed to move fast to secure a deal before he panicked. The key could be the renegade intelligence networks. If they extended across other hilly areas above Anantnag, and the Squad could get them to work for them, the task of hunting al Faran, or communicating with it, would be that much easier.