by Adrian Levy
The renegades would not take orders from Crime Branch officers without being told to do so from above, so the Squad set off in search of the Tiger’s boss, Abdul Rashid, a thirty-two-year-old former government employee in Anantnag’s weights and measures department, hoping that he would either have the clout to make a decision, or could spill some useful intelligence. Like the Tiger, Rashid had joined the militancy in 1990, becoming a district commander in the Muslim Brotherhood before secretly defecting to the government side in 1994, when his new Indian handlers gave him a call-sign: the Clerk.
No longer welcome in his home town of Guri Draman, a bucolic village whose name means ‘colt grass’, the Clerk had sought sanctuary among the Indian paramilitaries in Vailoo, a two-street village of mercantile farmers, close to an ancient arched stone bridge over the Breng River. Everyone in the village loathed him. Stories were whispered of how one day he had ordered one of his men to pluck a neighbour’s baby from her house, and plunge it into a freezing water butt, holding it under until it stopped kicking, because its mother had given a bowl of drinking water to a bleeding prisoner he had had hog-tied to his jeep.
The Squad found the Clerk easily enough, since he had made so much money from his renegade activities that he had built himself a mansion, protected by imposing black iron gates and guarded by heavily armed Indian paramilitaries. Now, the Crime Branch detectives were held at those gates while guards checked their IDs, relaying their details to some distant controller over a state-of-the-art high-frequency radio set. Whatever he did for them, the state was clearly guarding the Clerk well. Finally they were given the nod, and the Clerk, sitting on his wooden veranda, beckoned them over, sipping from a cup of Lipton, but offering nothing to the members of the Squad, a deliberate act of discourtesy that would be understood by all Kashmiris, for whom the offer of tea was a customary greeting, like a handshake in the West, or even a kiss.
The detectives could see that the Clerk was a different proposition to the Tiger. Handsome, dressed in jeans and a crisp shirt, he appeared sophisticated and calm, although if only half of what they had heard about him was true, he was far more cruel than his lieutenant in Lovloo. When he was asked about al Faran, he became hostile. ‘Whatever my boys find is passed up the line to the Rashtriya Rifles,’ he said. His family, who today still live behind the big black gates in Vailoo, came out to listen. One of them recalled: ‘He told the visitors he was answerable only to his army handlers, just to keep things simple. If express permission was given by the higher-ups he could cast his mind back. But he had no such orders from the Indian Army or intelligence.’ The Clerk said he was too busy nowadays to talk to policemen: ‘Kidnappers and foreign hostages are not my business. That’s further up the pay scale. I have only one task here. We have instructions to eliminate HM in Anantnag, wiping them out, leaving no trace, by the winter’s end.’ With that he stood up abruptly and was gone.
Faced with the renegades’ reluctance to talk about the al Faran operation, the Squad knew that they needed to find someone senior enough to be able to assist them without having to seek authorisation from the higher-ups. This was something of an outside possibility, as they were a secret force that in these early days the government wanted to remain obscure. The policemen worried too that they were dabbling in a shadowy world, which they had entered without permission or invitation. That was perilous in Kashmir, where curiosity often got people killed.
Leaving the wilds of Lovloo and Vailoo, the Squad headed down the Sosanwar Hills towards Anantnag, through an undulating landscape of unmade roads and silent pines. Village boys beat the walnut trees by the side of the road with long bamboo poles to bring down the autumn crop, and the Squad’s jeeps crunched over the broken branches. Occasionally they passed an isolated army camp or STF checkpoint, marked out by red-and-white fencing and bounded by sandbags, sentry posts and barbed wire. Empty beer bottles jangled from the fences, and signs declared ‘Army Helpline’, with a mobile telephone number scrawled beneath them. They wondered how many locals dared ring that number. ‘Make 1995 A Year With No Human Rights Abuses’ read a hand-painted sign just outside Achhabal, the site of a legendary Mughal garden designed in the seventeenth century by Noor Jehan, the wife of Emperor Jehangir. Once it had been a popular picnic destination for all races and creeds, but these days the grass was jaundiced, the fountains dry.
Several hours later, their journey prolonged by roads fractured by heavy military vehicles pounding along them, the Squad eventually reached Anantnag. Militants once controlled the town, and the security forces had had to be careful whenever they ventured beyond police lines. But now, in October 1995, everywhere the Squad turned there was a renegade outpost, from which locals said rose the ferrous smell of blood. A sprawling wooden house once owned by Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) in the Janglat Mandi neighbourhood had been transformed into a massive interrogation centre. These days no one went near it unless they were dragged in by their heels, neighbours said. The renegades had another such place in Kadipora, Anantnag’s hectic market, where above a lintel beneath the veranda someone had scrawled words that remain there today: ‘We are proud to be Indians. Get them by their balls, hearts and minds will follow.’ Kashmiris who had become Indians for gold, the renegades did as they liked, and had set up their HQ in another illegally occupied Pandit mansion beside Mehndi Kadal (Henna Bridge), brazenly close to the central Saddar police station. Outside the building, the turncoats squatted under anti-grenade netting, and were even guarded by khaki-clad officers from the volatile police Special Task Force, whose bullet-pocked white Gypsy jeeps were prominently parked in front to show who was in partnership with whom. The STF was now almost as unruly as these Kashmiri irregulars, the Squad noted.
None of the mercenaries would talk to Crime Branch. The local cops admitted that they were not in control of them. One officer described how a particularly vicious renegade commander had taken up residence inside Anantnag’s Police Superintendent’s office, from where he held court with his feet up on the desk, making it impossible for anyone to investigate the six hundred or so killings his men were accused of carrying out: their victims included the town’s chief medical officer, a former member of the state assembly and a well-loved schoolmaster. It was the same in other towns too, the Squad heard. A police source in the Anantnag control room told them about a renegade called Fayaz who was known to have personally killed more than a hundred Kashmiris who may have been militants, or their distant relations, neighbours or friends, a kill rate verified by the RR. Now, Fayaz walked the streets of his home village ‘like a king’, and ‘even policemen looked down’. ‘Whatever Fayaz wanted he got, apart from Naseema, the most beautiful girl in the village.’ When she turned him down, he had her abducted and raped until she became pregnant. ‘To prove his power, he then went after her sister too.’ The distraught family contacted the police. ‘The cops took the details, and then rang Fayaz, who charged into the village market. There he produced the eight-months pregnant Naseema, stripped her and shot her repeatedly in the belly before a large crowd, shouting, “We are in charge, and no one can touch us. This is what you get when you fuck with us.” Naseema with her unborn child died. Her sister is still with the renegades.’
In six years of war, Kashmiris, inured to bloodshed, had never known terror like this. The Squad worried that there was nothing they could offer the renegade leadership of Anantnag to get them to work for them. They were the creation of the army and the intelligence agencies, a pragmatic and dangerous arrangement that made life on the ground easier for the embattled Indian security forces. If the backers of these renegades discovered that their hard-won contacts, oiled with bottles of whisky and stacks of rupees, were being utilised unsanctioned by Kashmiri Muslim police officers, the payback was potentially lethal. Twice in the past five years the police had been disarmed by the Indian security services when they had faced each other down over disagreements.
The Squad had already suspected they had been set up to fail in this
inquiry. Now, probing the renegades, they felt even more vulnerable. For several days they watched, and discovered that suitcases of government cash were being delivered to the Civil Lines area of Anantnag, where most officials lived. From there the bags of cash were sent into the hills above town.
The detectives followed the money, and discovered its destination was an inconsequential village an hour south-east of town, close to historic Mughal Achhabal. When they arrived in Shelipora, they found the small grid of mud-walled buildings surrounded by living willow fencing and orchards was now striated with freshly dug trenches and bunkers crowned with razor wire. The houses were draped in camouflage netting and fortified with jute sandbags, their windows and balconies taped against blast damage and screened off with tall sheets of corrugated metal to repel volleys of incoming rocket-propelled grenades, as small clusters of militants from HM made regular, but so far futile, attempts to smash their way in.
Shelipora was a bristling fortress. Indian armoured vehicles came and went, with masked gunmen from various government paramilitary agencies riding shotgun, sporting bulletproof vests and cradling automatic weapons. Here, tooled up and dug in, they discovered, was the headquarters of the most powerful pro-government militiaman in the entire district, a man who oversaw everything from the perimeter of Anantnag town to Mardan Top. His name was Azad Nabi, but out in the field he was known by his call-sign: Alpha.
Born Ghulam Nabi Mir, Alpha had once been a ‘Constable Driver’ with the 7th Battalion of Kashmir’s Armed Police, another wing of state security deployed to tame the valley. In 1989 he had deserted and crossed the Line of Control to train as a militant, enlisting with HM and returning to fight the Indian security forces with vigour. Soon he became an HM district commander, before defecting to a breakaway faction called the Muslim Warriors, eventually becoming its chief. This second defection meant he had to fight for survival on two fronts, against India and his erstwhile comrades in HM, who were furious at his disloyalty.
The intelligence services had reached out to Alpha in 1994, offering him sanctuary from HM and arms with which to fight his former brothers. This triggered one of the most ambitious intelligence operations in the valley, the defection of Alpha’s entire band of 450 warriors, who surrendered en masse at a secret ceremony on a parade ground, watched by Kashmir’s Inspector General of Police, Paramdeep Singh Gill. Alpha’s renegades had then been sent to north Kashmir to harass HM. They were credited with two hundred kills there before being redirected to Anantnag, picking Shelipora as their base. Here they had linked up with the Tiger and the Clerk to become India’s premier attack dogs in south Kashmir, raping, killing and boozing, running all of the renegade networks in the countryside. Collaborating closely with the police Special Task Force, the RR and Indian intelligence, they specialised in operations that the state could deny, also developing a round-the-clock interrogation programme to keep the general population cowed that was renowned for its brutality and indiscrimination. Alpha was the fountainhead for everything that happened in the countryside, and his proximity to the authorities was visible for all to see. He rode around Shelipora in a bulletproof police STF Gypsy, and was protected by STF bodyguards. He boasted that he ‘earned more than a cabinet minister in New Delhi’, and his fighters received regular wage packets from the state: three thousand rupees (£60) per month for a rank-and-file mujahid, four thousand (£80) for a company commander and six thousand (£120) for a battalion commander.
The Squad had reached the top of the renegade tree. They decided on a dangerous tack. In a highly sensitive operation, they attempted to infiltrate Alpha’s Shelipora fortress and his district’s renegade network, turning those on the bottom rungs into informers and placing their own people, former militants who had the right pedigree, inside Alpha’s units. These sources wriggled, eavesdropped and recruited people who Kashmiris call nabuds, a slang term derived from the local word for ‘sugary’, meaning someone who could be enticed to give up little snippets of information when sweetened by cash: the poverty-stricken or put-upon, the greedy or ambitious.
Gliding like honey through hamlets and small market towns, these nabuds courted others, creating a network within the renegade hierarchy that generated reams of intelligence, none of which Ramm and co. would ever see, but that took the police Crime Branch inquiry to another level. As they had hoped, they began receiving countless reports about al Faran, generated by Alpha’s spies in the countryside, who saw everything. By the end of October the Squad were aware of sightings of the kidnappers in Hapatnar and remote Brah, in Asharjipora village and Anantnag itself. A report was dispatched, along these lines: al Faran is now completely exposed. The hostages are alive. The kidnappers are hot-footing it around, out on a limb. ‘They are exhausted, desperate for a deal, and they will break soon.’
No direction came back from the security forces. But the Squad sensed that if only they could develop their intelligence faster, reducing the lag between receiving the name of a village and raiding it, they could bring this kidnapping to a positive conclusion, and quickly. Whenever they converged on a hideout al Faran was ahead of them, sometimes fleeing only moments before they arrived. In one case half-filled teacups had been left beside a fire that was still glowing, flat breads warming on the stones, and a packet of cigarettes just cracked open, the foil half pulled off.
However, by early November, despite numerous close calls, the Squad had got no nearer. The detectives were also stewing over one undeniable fact: whether it was Alpha’s warriors or the Clerk’s new Brotherhood in Vailoo or the Tiger’s thugs in Lovloo, the progovernment forces ran everything and saw everything. The countryside India publicly claimed to have lost control of had in fact been brutally battened down. This raised one serious question. The Squad sent a report up the line, something like this: If we own the countryside, and wherever al Faran treads it can be seen, how do Sikander’s boys continue to evade the renegades and remain at large?
There was something profoundly troubling about the landscape above Anantnag.
EIGHTEEN
Chor-Chor Mausere Bhai (All Thieves are Cousins)
In the last week of October, Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne took a vote. As far as they could see, nothing was happening. Al Faran was silent, the Indian authorities too. The women all needed to leave India. Julie and Cath missed their families and friends, and Jane was desperate to get back to some kind of regular life. The autumn term was under way, and she could not keep the elementary school where she worked hanging on indefinitely. Don’s work also needed to be sorted out. And they had all had enough of sitting around, made to feel useless and pretending to be tourists.
Their collective decision to go was not just based on what they were missing, but also on a growing belief that they could achieve much more outside India. In Britain, the USA and Germany they could lobby their governments to intensify the pressure on the Indians, with Jane planning to use her brother-in-law Don Snyder’s political connections in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. All of them agreed that too much time was passing. ‘Can it be possible that one time so long ago I was writing Day 25, Day 53, Day 67 … How many more will I have to write?’ Jane pondered in her journal. She and the others wrote a parting statement: ‘It has been 114 days … for all that time we have waited anxiously for news of their well-being, prayed for their safe return to us. We have now decided to return to our homes to seek the support of our families and to discuss with them … what is happening in India.’
Before they left New Delhi, they were all called in by their embassies. The search would continue, they were told, but such was its sensitivity that it could be derailed by any ill-judged comment, even from the other side of the world. They should all refrain from talking to the press. Jane agreed. Her greatest worry was that by leaving India they would be cut out of the diplomatic communication loop. One of the best things about being in the Chanakyapuri compound was that she felt she knew what the embassies knew, and not long after they knew it. The U
S Embassy promised to provide her with a dedicated State Department liaison officer who would call her regularly, daily if necessary. The British High Commission agreed to arrange something similar for Julie and Cath. The Indian Home Ministry reassured the women that they were making the right choice by leaving. Officials confided to them that, for reasons that were not explained, the ‘threat to the hostages’ lives had receded’. What did that mean? None of them could decide.
Before they knew it they were saying goodbye at the airport, trying not to feel as if they were quitting, although that was all they could think about. They boarded their flights unsure of when they might be back, or if they would ever see each other again.
On 26 October, as New Delhi disappeared beneath the autumn smog, Jane thought how she and Don should have been making this homeward journey three months back, their rucksacks stuffed with gifts and snapshots, their heads filled with stories to share with friends. Instead, she was returning with an album of harrowing photographs that charted the descent of five smiling figures in newish trekking gear, weathering some bad luck but with a great adventure story to tell, to four, despondent bearded wraiths.
Cath’s suitcase, originally packed for a six-week adventure, now bulged with paperwork. In her hand luggage was a bundle of Paul’s holiday photos: Julie, Keith and Cath laughing as they struck out along the path from Pahalgam in T-shirts and shorts; Julie and Keith chatting beside their tent just moments before their lives were changed forever. Recovering some possessions she and Paul had left behind on the houseboat, Cath had found the postcard Paul had written but never got round to sending: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, It took us 30 hours to get here and I (oops!) we are now staying on a houseboat for £3 a night. I’m sitting on the roof of the houseboat writing this to you … The houseboat owner Bashir is taking us on a trek tomorrow to Kolahoi Glacier with two British people and a Canadian. It should be fun! Love from Paul.’ Now she would have to deliver it to Bob and Dianne Wells personally.
