The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  But for both elections to run smoothly, the militancy had to be kept tamped down and the voters marshalled in New Delhi’s favour. ‘When the election opens, our job is to get the vote out,’ Alpha explained to his men over plates of steaming rice, mutton gravy and sour walnut pickle. ‘Village by village, we are going to march people into the polling stations with our guns in their backs.’ He claimed they had been paid by Congress to keep the countryside calm and get the vote out, with cash also coming from Rao’s local political partner in Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference. Alpha bragged that between them the two parties had stumped up two crore rupees (£400,000), and that the mission had the blessing of some political heavyweights, including Rajesh Pilot, Minister for Internal Security, whom Alpha claimed to have met. ‘We are going to give you what you want, whatever the cost,’ Alpha said he told Pilot, to which the Minister was said to have responded, ‘Together, we’ll free Kashmir.’

  At the top of Alpha’s pre-election priorities, he told his commanders, was breaking Hizbul Mujahideen. The Kashmiri insurgent group he had once fought for had in the past four years become Rao’s biggest headache, transformed by Pakistan’s spy agencies into a major force in the valley. Lavished with Islamabad’s matériel, HM had opened its own press agency, a women’s brigade, and five divisions of several thousand militants each that savaged the Indian security forces, calling for Kashmir to be united under Pakistan and culling any militants who said differently. Although HM units had taken a drubbing in the towns of south Kashmir like Anantnag as a result of the renegade programme, it was still strong out in the countryside. Alpha now instructed his men to redouble their efforts to winkle HM’s cells and arms caches out of every remote village.

  The Squad’s agents also reported that Alpha intended to participate in the elections personally, forming his own political party that would, of course, be backed by Congress. He could see that a career based on betrayal had a lifespan of moments, whereas becoming the chief of his new People’s Patriotic Front might secure him many comfortable years to come.

  The Squad was baffled. Nowhere in any of these discussions of ‘priorities and duties’ was there any mention of al Faran, of cornering Sikander or of finding Don, Keith, Dirk and Paul, which New Delhi was saying were the local priorities. Previously Alpha’s men had at least channelled intelligence on the kidnappers to their handlers, bursts of detailed information that the Squad had tapped into. Why was he focusing elsewhere, and why had his men made no attempts at ambushing the kidnappers, even though they were obviously aware of their every step?

  Worried and puzzled, the Crime Branch Squad sought advice from their superiors in a report that went something like this: Freeing the Westerners would be a good-news story that would benefit everyone, especially the government, which could use it to show that Kashmir was under control. ‘And everything is tilted against Sikander and al Faran, who have demonstrated that they want out. The renegades could finish them off, but instead they are, inexplicably, holding back. Alpha has now been reassigned other duties.’ Why was everyone ignoring al Faran? Why was there no talk of winning the hostage crisis?

  The questions went unanswered until the end of November, when one of the Squad’s agents in Shelipora engineered a candid admission from Alpha’s most prized commander, a heavy-set, hard-drinking Kashmiri who is known to this day by his presumptuous call-sign, Bismillah – the Islamic shorthand for the opening phrase most commonly used in every Muslim’s spiritual life: ‘In the name of God the merciful and compassionate.’ According to the Crime Branch file, Bismillah was, despite his name, personally responsible for the deaths of ‘a colossal number’ of Kashmiri villagers and militants, and had acquired a reputation as ‘Alpha’s chief strongman’.

  Like most renegades, Bismillah had joined the insurgency in 1989. He had fought with HM before joining Alpha’s new Muslim Warriors, jumping with Alpha again when the Indian security forces had brilliantly engineered their mass surrender in 1994. ‘These days only greed and power move him,’ the Squad wrote. Most nights, Bismillah sat in his silo-like bungalow in Shelipora, completely enclosed by high corrugated sheeting, its doors protected by sandbags and its roof converted into a machine-gunner’s nest, holding court, slugging back army-ration Whyte & Mackay whisky from a bottle gripped between stubby, nail-bitten fingers. ‘Often he is drunk by 7 p.m.,’ the Squad’s agent reported. ‘Then he starts playing cards, cheating his colleagues out of their money, or simply robbing them.’

  At the end of one long night of gambling and drinking, the fate of the Western hostages had finally come up in conversation, and a stony-faced Bismillah had asked the Squad’s agent whether he was curious to know why the renegades had never caught Sikander. The agent had shrugged, pretending to be uninterested, and Bismillah, keen to share his secret, had told him, ‘It’s because Alpha has signed a secret ceasefire with Sikander, an agreement that predates the kidnapping.’

  The police agent was stunned, and struggled to retain his composure in the half-light of the smoky, candlelit room. If Bismillah’s extraordinary claim was true, it meant that the men who should have been hunting al Faran were actually in league with it, and were also in the pay of New Delhi, which raised worrying questions about the Indian government’s role in all of this.

  ‘We became brothers of sorts,’ Bismillah, who still lives in Anantnag district, recalled. ‘We turned a blind eye to their affairs. We stopped hunting them. And Sikander kept away from us.’

  This revelation shocked Sadiq’s detectives. A deal between the renegades and Sikander was the last thing they had expected. They needed to confirm the existence of this pact before breathing a word about it. Being Kashmiris, raised on conspiracies, they believed it was quite likely true, and they wanted to know who was behind it: ‘We had all played the Game,’ said one of them who analysed the statement, ‘and we knew it had no rules. But this pact was politically explosive.’

  If the agreement between Alpha and Sikander was genuine, then Alpha’s handlers in the security forces, the police STF and even the intelligence agencies were all potentially implicated in Sikander’s activities too. Were they a party to the kidnapping? The more the Squad learned about this case, the more dangerous it looked. The police wanted the hostages free, and their own careers saved. They did not want to shine a bright torch into the rotten cavities that underpinned the Kashmiri state.

  There was another possibility. Men like Bismillah and Alpha had become manipulative thugs who took advantage of their government backers, unleashing a reign of terror over Kashmiri villages in the knowledge that they could do exactly as they pleased, without fear of reprisal or arrest. In engineering this truce with Sikander’s Movement, there was a possibility that they were freelancing, dusting off their old militant contacts to make a profit or create some kind of advantage. The renegade–al Faran ceasefire might have nothing to do with the authorities at all.

  Finding out would involve stealth and discretion.

  The Squad went back to their agents within the renegade network and its informers close to the Movement, fishing for anything that could help clarify the nature of the pact. What came back were worrying claims from multiple sources that the police STF, backed by a faction within Indian intelligence and with the knowledge of counter-insurgency specialists of the Rashtriya Rifles, had known about the deal from the very beginning: in fact it had been brokered at their suggestion, having first been mooted in the late summer of 1994.

  The idea had originated with the security forces, it was said, after the state-inspired killing of the cleric Qazi Nisar in Anantnag in June 1994, blame for which had been falsely foisted on Sikander’s Movement by HM, leading to a war between the two militant outfits. In Anantnag, where HM’s role in the cleric’s assassination eventually came out into the open, residents had turned against the group, ending its domination in the town, much as the Indian intelligence agencies had hoped.

  Bismillah recalled the fallout: ‘But HM remained a brutal forc
e in the countryside, so our commanders and their security-force handlers insisted that throttling HM should remain our prime focus.’ The Indian security forces had an idea. ‘Now that HM was weaker, they suggested we form an alliance with HM’s main enemy, the Movement, so that we could finish them off rather than fighting each other. “Don’t worry about Sikander,” the STF and intel guys told us. “Use him to crush HM. We’ll mop him up and the Movement later.”’

  The logic of a truce between all the sides that stood to benefit if HM was neutered was familiar to anyone who played the Game: My enemy’s enemy is my friend. HM’s killing of Qazi Nisar had incensed Sikander, who was intent on taking revenge. The government wanted HM culled so it could begin to prepare for elections in Kashmir. Alpha wanted money, and given enough he would do anything, including wooing the Movement to help annihilate HM. But how could Sikander, a loyal, principled mujahid, be befriended when Alpha stood accused of having betrayed Kashmir and the militancy? Renegades were traitors, while Sikander remained true to the cause.

  Many years later, still drinking, gambling and killing, protected around the clock by a dozen hard-bitten Kashmiri gunmen, Bismillah recalled how Alpha’s connection to Sikander had been rekindled to bring him into the renegade fold. ‘They shared a radical background. Alpha and Sikander started off together in the J&K Students Liberation Front, before joining the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time and crossing the Line of Control for training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. After that they returned to Indian Kashmir, with Sikander recruited by the Movement while Alpha flip-flopped to the government side. They were adversaries, but still Kashmiri brothers who even talked to each other on the VHF set.’

  In September 1994, Alpha got a message to Sikander outlining a secret offer: if he took part in a new front against HM, the renegades would stop hunting him and the Movement. The security forces would back off too. The timing was crucial, Bismillah said. ‘Sikander was in a tight spot, chased by the Indian security forces, and bushwhacked by HM, with the top tier of his organisation jailed: his emir Masood Azhar, his military commander the Afghani, and his pre-eminent field commander Langrial.’ Sikander could see the advantages to gaining protection by coming under Alpha’s umbrella. ‘We just had to push him into it by sweetening the pact,’ remembered Bismillah. ‘That winter, Alpha was told by his STF, army and intelligence handlers to pass weapons and explosives to the Movement, with which Sikander could better pound HM. The intel guys said it would work in their favour in the end.’ They traded fighters, too. ‘We sent him a few of ours as a vote of confidence. He sent us a handful of his, so that we were bound to each other.’ It was a Trojan horse, with information passed from Alpha’s men within the Movement to Indian intelligence, who were now able to see right inside Sikander’s outfit.

  The Squad realised that the timing made the Sikander–Alpha ceasefire deal even more controversial. It had been negotiated shortly after Kim Housego and David Mackie’s release in the summer of 1994, and was probably in place during the bungled kidnap operation mounted by British student Omar Sheikh in New Delhi that October. There was no doubt it had been up and running well before this current hostage crisis, and all the way through Rajinder Tikoo’s failed negotiations.

  While there was no suggestion that Alpha was directly implicated in the al Faran kidnapping, it was likely that his pact with Sikander had provided the Indian security forces with a vital portal into the al Faran camp from the very first day that Don, Keith, Paul and John Childs were seized in the Meadow. Was this why they had been so quick to locate al Faran in the remote Warwan, and pin it down there for eleven weeks, before following it all over Anantnag district with pinpoint sightings in every village? But why hadn’t they used the pact to rescue the hostages? Kashmir was a swamp, the Squad concluded. And as they contemplated these riddles, wondering if they should walk away before getting sucked in any further, everything fell to pieces.

  On the first frostbitten day of December, with the pine forests above Anantnag heavy with snow, the thin wisps of smoke emerging from the canopy the only evidence that anything out there was alive, the Squad received another message from inside fortress Shelipora: al Faran had given up the hostages.

  They were gone. ‘The rope has been passed on,’ were the words the source used.

  Astounded, the Squad relayed a report up the line that went something like this: ‘Al Faran are out of it. The kidnappers have traded the hostages with an unidentified third party. Don, Paul, Keith and Dirk are no longer travelling with the Turk. Sikander’s whereabouts and that of the al Faran party are unknown. Hostages last seen heading for Lovloo.’ This was the village where the Squad had found the Tiger and their chase for al Faran had intensified.

  After tracking the hostages for six months, getting to grips with Sikander and al Faran, working out how the renegades fitted into the complicated picture, unearthing the secret pact between Alpha and Sikander, the Squad had been cast back to square one. There was not a scintilla of information about who now held the hostages, where they were, or even that they were still alive. Mushtaq Sadiq and his ten-man team despaired while they pondered why the hostages had not simply been freed, with everyone coming out as a winner.

  When the news reached Kashmir police headquarters in Batamaloo, Srinagar, the Squad were showered with questions that they could not answer. But they stood their ground. The source was unimpeachable, they said, and also pointed to recent statements made by al Faran itself. After unsuccessfully seeking the help of the separatists of the Hurriyat Conference in mediating a peaceful resolution, the kidnappers had hinted at what would happen: ‘Until today we have faced a lot of difficulties ourselves and kept the four tourists as our esteemed guests.’ ‘Until today’, they had said, suggesting that meant ‘but not for much longer’.

  As the Squad contemplated a whole new, exhausting round of negotiations with a new and as yet unidentified kidnap group, an act of savage bloodletting slowed them down. Agent MMS, the brave young constable Mushtaq Sadiq had sent to infiltrate al Faran in the Warwan, was hauled out of a sewer in downtown Anantnag, killed and gutted, with a note pinned to his bloodied shirt denouncing him as a traitor.

  Then the Indian Army struck too.

  Late on Monday, 4 December, Kashmiri journalists were called to a hastily arranged press conference at the army’s headquarters in BB Cantt, Srinagar. Whenever Badami Bagh called, the Press Enclave ran. Shri Hari Haran, the army spokesman who took the rostrum, appeared to be in a good mood. The Rashtriya Rifles had just concluded a major operation, he said, and after an intense firefight involving several thousand men, a cell of battle-hardened militants had been shot to pieces in the paddy just beyond the village of Dabran, five miles south of Anantnag. A map was passed around, on which Dabran was circled. The gun battle had blazed for seven hours, during which one civilian had unfortunately died, but three foreign militants had also been killed, with two captured alive. A picture was handed around showing several blood-spattered cadavers lined up on the ground, dressed in army-style coats over kurta pyjamas. The army had also recovered a large cache of heavy weaponry, Haran continued, showing photographs of six battered AK-47s, several machine guns, two high-powered VHF radio sets, a sack of grenades and coils of ammunition belts.

  A current ran through the room as the journalists whispered among themselves. Everyone knew that Dabran was Sikander’s native village, and that for the past twelve months its residents had been forced to undergo a humiliating cordon-and-search operation every Wednesday evening as punishment for its most notorious son. Was the Movement’s southern commander Sikander among the dead, someone asked. No, said Haran emphatically. The three men killed were foreign fighters. The two taken alive were Kashmiri militants, but they came from Doda, in the state’s south, and were currently being interrogated. The journalists did not need to see a picture this time, as they knew what Haran meant: beatings, electrocution, cigarette burns, praying for death, with families left to wander between army camps searching
for their missing loved ones. The press pack left to file identical brief reports. These sorts of encounters, even with this number of fighters involved, were run of the mill, and rarely made headlines.

  Five days later, on 9 December, the army called the journalists back to BB Cantt for a significant update. One of the three militants killed in the Dabran gun battle had been positively identified as Abdul Hamid al-Turki. The journalists sat up. Al Faran’s famed commander, the Turk, a man who had had a reputation as one of the most austere and unpredictable mujahids, the kidnapper who had personally beheaded Hans Christian Ostrø, was dead. This was a real story. Army spokesman Haran beamed as the assembled journalists worked themselves up into a lather of questions. If the Turk, who had been in day-to-day charge of the hostages from day one, was dead, then al Faran was surely scuppered. What about the hostages? What could the army say about their location? Haran shrugged. The hostages were still missing. But he could confirm that two senior al Faran fighters, Pakistani nationals Abu Khalifa and Nabil Ghazni, who newspaper men identified as members of the original al Faran team, had died alongside the Turk in the paddy. Four other unidentified men had escaped. Large amounts of cash, bogus passports and several ‘partially damaged’ Japanese SLR cameras had been recovered from the bodies, along with a standard field communications kit: two Morse keypads, a Chinese-made antenna, Japanese-made headphones and a VHF radio set.

  What about the hostages, someone asked again. They had not been found, Haran replied. However, one of the captured militants had cracked: either the hostages had been abandoned ‘somewhere in the high ranges’, or they had been ‘handed over to some local militant group’. Either way al Faran had got rid of them before they were pinned down in Dabran. Haran had one more headline. The captured militants had admitted to being part of the group that burned down Charar-i-Sharief in May, a confession that finally placed the army in the clear over one of the most controversial incidents of the entire insurgency.