The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Handed over to some local militant group. The journalists could not get back to the Press Enclave fast enough. ‘Indians Kill Leader of Kidnap Group’ ran the first wire story from AFP. As the day wore on, the headlines got worse: ‘Western Hostages Dumped by Captors’. And then: ‘Worry Rises for Hostages Seized in India’. Woken by a phone call from India in the middle of the night, Jane in Spokane got straight on to her liaison officer at the State Department. Reading between the lines, it sounded to her like a rescue attempt gone wrong. In Middlesbrough, Julie’s heart was clattering as she called the Foreign Office. If several of the kidnap party were dead, and the hostages had not been with them, where were their loved ones now, and who was holding them? She could barely bring herself to contemplate Keith, sick and weak after six months in captivity, locked forgotten, inside a gujjar hut, starving as the snow drifted against the door.

  The Indian Home Ministry was deluged with urgent demands from London, Washington and Berlin. The Indian Defence Ministry too. Why had no one been informed a rescue attempt was in the offing? But when General Saklani addressed the press, he made a spectacular backtrack. First, he wanted to make it clear that the Turk and the other militants had been killed in the course of a ‘routine’ cordon-and-search operation, and not during some secret manoeuvre to free the hostages. Second, al Faran had not been destroyed as a result of the Dabran operation: in fact, since the encounter its numbers had swelled. ‘Over a hundred al Faran militants are still guarding four Westerners in the forests of Kokernag in south Kashmir,’ an uncomfortable-looking Saklani said, to the consternation of everyone listening. Around the corner in Church Lane, for once Ramm and co. did not put a pin in their map. How could al Faran be on the ropes, and then suddenly be rejuvenated after its field commander and his deputies were killed? Only a short while back al Faran was beseeching the Hurriyat Conference to get India to the negotiating table, having also tried to get the women back to India in the hope of forcing New Delhi’s hand. And now it was claimed to be resurgent once more. Saklani’s story was nonsensical.

  In response to the mutterings of disbelief in the media and diplomatic circles, the military establishment came out for a second go. A senior Defence Ministry spokesman in New Delhi said he wanted to downplay the intelligence gleaned from the interrogation of the two captured al Faran fighters. ‘They are hard-core militants, and can change their statement any time,’ he said, relegating what had previously been presented by the army as a certainty into no more than a possibility. By day’s end, a government spokesman in Srinagar was claiming that the hostages had just been spotted near the Mughal gardens of Noor Jehan, at Achhabal, six miles south-east of Anantnag. ‘All of the four were visibly healthy,’ he said.

  Al Faran broke its silence. A fighter known to journalists contacted the Srinagar Press Enclave. Praising the Turk as a shaheed, he confirmed that his field commander and two other mujahids had been killed at Dabran, and that two others had been captured alive. He added that the statements extracted under torture were accurate. It seemed that the army had been telling the truth first time around. Then al Faran confirmed what army spokesman Hari Haran had initially told reporters: it was no longer holding the hostages, three of whom had been ‘arrested’ by the Indian Army, while the fourth was ‘missing’.

  If the spokesman was to be believed, this was a hugely significant moment. To a casual observer, the remark that three of the hostages were now in the Indian Army’s hands after six long months with al Faran would have seemed to be fantastic news. But why had the army not confirmed this? Those who knew Kashmir were worried. As far as militants were concerned, the word ‘army’ could also include its proxies, the renegades. Did the statement hint at some kind of murky deal behind the scenes, involving the ungovernable renegades? And where were the hostages now?

  Three Arrested. One Missing. No sign anywhere of Don, Keith, Paul or Dirk. The Press Enclave speculated feverishly about whether al Faran was lying, putting up a smokescreen or embellishing the truth, as it had done on so many previous occasions. Or was the army hiding the truth, the establishment issuing statements and revisions, corrections and addenda that had a whiff of panic about them? Journalists who had covered many surreal events since the militancy first sprung up knew not to rule anything out, including a militant propaganda exercise or a government plot. They knew all too well that Yusuf Jameel had only narrowly survived a sophisticated parcel bomb that an officer in the Indian Army stood accused of commissioning, and that had killed his best friend. To local ears practised in interpreting the conflict in Kashmir, the rapid succession of conflicting official statements suggested there was a dangerous game on somewhere in the valley.

  Watching the army’s clumsy reversals, the Crime Branch Squad had at least felt vindicated that they had got to the heart of the action. Their source in Shelipora had revealed that al Faran had dumped the captives several days before the BB Cantt press conference. Al Faran had hinted at it in their statement after Hurriyat rejected them, the two captured militants had volunteered the information to the army, after which al Faran confirmed it to be true. Now al Faran had put forward an altogether more worrying scenario, one that the Squad had already been contemplating for several days. But the Squad was still left with two key questions, amid the scores of smaller ones. Where were the hostages now? And what had happened to the deal between Alpha’s renegades and Sikander’s Movement that had assured al Faran protection from attacks by Indian security forces?

  While the families fretted, not knowing what to believe, al Faran remained silent. But one week after the firefight at Dabran, the Squad made a breakthrough. Their agent in Shelipora called for a face-to-face meeting. What he had just learned could not be trusted to any messenger. It took days to set up, while the Squad worked out how their man could give his renegade associates the slip and get out of the fortress to talk to them. When he finally emerged it was to make a bold new claim: the hostages were still alive. Alpha, the paid-up government agent and wannabe politician of Shelipora, had personally taken control of them, and was concealing them at an undisclosed location.

  Not knowing whether to be alarmed or relieved, the detectives tried to find out if the renegade commander was doing this on his own initiative, hoping to extort money from the government, or was acting on the orders of his handlers in the Special Task Force or Indian intelligence, as a precursor to a theatrical, headline-grabbing release. Was it all over? Had the Indians finally secured the hostages’ freedom? Or was this the start of something new and particularly cruel? One theory was that the hostages’ freedom was now close. ‘Another was that a monster who was much less predictable than al Faran now had the backpackers in his grip,’ a veteran Squad detective recalled grimly.

  Then, nothing happened.

  There was no public statement from the Governor’s office revealing the triumph of the security forces over al Faran, with the kidnappers tricked into handing over their prisoners. The Squad went back to its source, but the same story came back: Alpha was holding the hostages somewhere high in the frozen Anantnag hills, beyond his domain at Shelipora. The police squeezed all of their agents and sources, securing only one more detail: Alpha had supposedly ‘bought’ the hostages from Sikander for four lakh (400,000) rupees, the equivalent of £8,000, a fraction of the sum Jehangir and Rajinder Tikoo had been negotiating their way to in September.

  The Squad was incredulous: ‘We struggled to get the pieces to fit, but were continually told that Alpha was acting on orders.’ It had been established beyond doubt that al Faran had been ready to quit by the end of October, worried about being trapped in the valley over winter and preparing for a handover. ‘By mid-November, the kidnap party was spent and desperate to go home to Pakistan, giving up the operation,’ the Squad veteran said. With al Faran weakening and Sikander willing to consider any way out, the kidnap crisis was about to come to an end. But then Alpha was contacted by his handlers in intelligence and the STF, with orders to ‘approach Sikander with
a deal’ to keep the crisis rolling.

  The veteran said: ‘Everything pointed to the unthinkable, that some of Alpha’s hard-line government controllers told him to propose to Sikander that he should “take a break”, telling him al Faran “could regroup”. A few of Alpha’s most trusted men, led by the Clerk in Vailoo, would meantime take over the hostages, handing over a financial surety as proof that the captives would not be harmed. At the end of December, Sikander could decide if he wanted the hostages back, to recommence his al Faran operation, and if not they would be released.’ It appeared that there were some in the Indian establishment who did not want this never-ending bad-news story of Pakistani cruelty and Kashmiri inhumanity to end, even when the perpetrators themselves were finished.

  The Squad reported some of its thoughts to its seniors, using these kinds of words: ‘Sikander’s men handed over Paul, Dirk, Keith and Don to Alpha’s renegades in the third or fourth week of November, around the time when the final sightings dried up. Sikander has given up. Al Faran is finished. Embarrassingly, India controls the hostages.’

  Now that they had this intelligence, the Squad looked differently at the army operation in Dabran. They recalled what Bismillah, Alpha’s drunken number two, had related inside fortress Shelipora: that the security forces had, right at the beginning, assured Alpha that when the time came they would ‘mop up’ the Movement and its commanders.

  That time had evidently come at Dabran. The Squad’s agent dug some more, coming up with an outline of events. The firefight had been a straightforward ambush, with the Indian Army intent on eliminating al Faran the minute they had let the hostages go, before they had a chance to get over the Line of Control: ‘Alpha had called the meet with the Turk, suggesting Dabran as a rendezvous, getting the information to the Turk’s men and making it look as if it was Sikander’s idea.’ The Turk had set off thinking he was meeting his commander to discuss their passage back to Pakistan. However, the army had been tipped off and was lying in wait, having staked out the chinar trees surrounding Dabran’s terraced paddy. ‘There was no need for the peace pact any more,’ the Squad concluded. ‘HM were crushed. The elections were pretty much a certainty. And the hostages were with Alpha, the government’s man. All of which made al Faran a mess to be tidied away.’

  The Squad were convinced by this version of events, and passed it on to their superiors. They now fully expected the renegades to go after Sikander too. With him dead, the renegades would have destroyed virtually all of the living evidence of India’s connections to the Movement and al Faran. Apart from Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk.

  In the second week of December, temperatures in downtown Srinagar slid to minus 3°C, which meant it would be deathly cold in the high mountains. On the 10th, a Crime Branch source, also well known to the STF and the renegades, emerged with a possible location for the hostages. According to the Crime Branch file, they were being held in a house in one of two remote twin villages, Mati and Gawran, the last settlements before the treacherous zigzag track up to the icy pass at Mardan Top. Consisting of only a few score stone-and-timber houses a five-hour hard drive from Anantnag, they clung to the Himalayan foothills like limpets on a storm-blasted rock.

  In summer, the upper village was a destination for mujahids, local and foreign, who emerged from the woods to call on families that supported the insurgency. From there, the track carved through the treeline and bled away into steep scree slopes, marking the end of all plant life and the start of the stony higher mountains. Above, white vultures circled, while in the trees black bears coughed and barked. A hairpin path ran through the wild woods, strewn with boulders and criss-crossed with snowmelt streams. It eventually reached Mardan Top, from where the up-and-over into the Warwan could be made by anyone with the inclination and the leg power. In winter, the village was cut off from the outside world for months at a time.

  Below, in the lower village, with its small unmade high street and a dozen shop-houses selling coils of rope, nails, hard biscuits, oil and soap, it was a different story. Since 1994, it had been colonised by the security forces, which used it as a gateway to control the flow of militants descending from the high passes. Several bullet-pocked white jeeps of the STF dominated the entrance to the village, and there was a well-guarded checkpoint, an STF garrison and a lodging house manned by Alpha’s men, who locals said had arrived in late 1994. The police and the renegades had warm shelters, with generators and braziers, and were well stocked with charcoal, food and booze. A cantilevered barrier, weighted at one end with smooth stones fished from the riverbed, blocked the road. No one passed without going through it, and men with rifles and hunting dogs patrolled the fields and woods on either side, day and night.

  Although they had never been there, the Squad knew exactly what kind of place Mati Gawran was: a distant no man’s land, one of Kashmir’s secret killing grounds, where stories of atrocities committed by militants or, as often, by the security forces (or their paid proxies), were occasionally reported in the pages of Greater Kashmir but never in the Times of India. Serial rapes, punishment beatings, interrogations, humiliations and deaths – everyone understood that the crimes would never be investigated. The Squad knew that the scrubby hazelnut groves scattered around Mati Gawran’s lower reaches and the woodlands around its upper parts would be pitted with soft earth mounds, the undulating evidence of hundreds, possibly thousands of killings, bodies dumped in unmarked graves, a legion of Kashmiri civilians who had fallen victim to Alpha’s men or their partners in the Indian security forces, who had become accustomed to processing their prisoners without even a nod to the law.

  It was a grim place for the hostages to end up. Cruelty had turned the local populace mute. The Squad sought guidance from the higher-ups, and were granted permission for their informer to be sent back to Mati Gawran immediately. He drove south-east of Anantnag, through the Sosanwar Hills and into thick snow. After four hours he reached Vailoo, with its arched stone bridge over the Breng River. He passed the Clerk’s fiefdom and those black iron gates that concealed a mansion built on blood money, and the Indian paramilitary base where the Tiger hung out at night, anaesthetised with rum. These days, countless families stood around outside, pathetic huddles of women and children petitioning for the return of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers who had vanished. On went the informer, slipping and sliding in his battered Tata Sumo jeep along the pitted road into the mountains, the snow beaten into slush by convoys of military vehicles. Eventually he reached the turning for iced-over Lovloo, where in summer the Tiger sat in his garden, crushing walnuts as he took confessions from men who prostrated themselves in his garden of daisies, their last view in this life being of the dirt at his feet.

  Sliding down the other side, the Squad’s source drove on, between terraced paddies and poplar trees, weaving from army camp to STF picket, towards Larnoo. In summer, a carpet of green pasture and wildflowers rolled from here into the forests, but now every village was hunkered down for the winter, the inhabitants sheltering behind felt-curtained windows, blankets pinned over wooden front doors. Many of them, no doubt, caressed laminated photographs of missing loved ones: Nazir Ahmed Deka, a vendor of perfumes; Ghulam Nabi Wani, the cloth hawker; Ali Mohammed Padder, small-time government employee; Abdul Rehman Padder, the village carpenter. And scores of others: Hassan, Imtiaz, Rashid, Javid – cobblers, shepherds and poultrymen who now existed only as passport pictures that had been pinned to hoardings, doors and trees. They were so numerous that from a distance these images of the missing looked like stained glass.

  The agent drove on, passing Gudraman, the scene of many violent clashes between militants and government-paid gunmen, until the drivable road reached lonely Mati Gawran. Arriving at the cantilevered barrier, he introduced himself at an STF picket in the lower village, where he was greeted with Lipton tea and embraces. Known by the police and Alpha’s men, he was waved inside a nearby house, half covered in snow and guarded by a heavily armed group who lounged in the back of
an armoured Gypsy. Inside, ‘Alpha’s men sat around a fire, drinking from a quart bottle of Honeybee brandy, playing cards’. He exchanged greetings, and said he was tracking fugitive militants who were known to have come over the top. And then, as he went to go out of the back door, saying he needed to urinate, he saw them, just as he had been tipped off that he would: a group of weary, white-faced figures, huddled together in a corner under blankets: ‘No one had tried that hard to hide them. I stared and stared. There is no doubt in my mind, it was them, though I don’t know how many exactly. At least three? Maybe four. With long beards and matted hair, they were shivering in thin, dun-brown pherans, hugging kangri pots [braziers]. But then someone called me and I had to go back to the card game.’

  How did the hostages seem, the Squad asked. ‘Exhausted, resigned and empty.’ He searched for the right words, or an image. ‘They looked like bears,’ he said after a long silence.

  This man was one of their best agents: reliable and practised. Like bears. The Squad wrote it into the file. They believed his story. Having dispatched a report up the line, they were told to go to Mati Gawran immediately. They left Srinagar in the third week of December, beneath a smudged, snow-bearing sky. There was much to think about on the tortuous journey of bumps and skids, twists and turns. Taking the right fork after Vailoo and following the riverside road, the once livid-green waterway now sluggish with ice, they turned left at Badihar to reach Iqbal Town, passing through the mourning village of Larnoo, before finally spotting the glimmer of burning braziers beside the cantilevered barrier that marked the outskirts of Mati Gawran.

  It seemed peaceful enough. The river chuntered, trees crackled and hawks whistled high above. The Squad found the house beside the STF checkpoint, exactly as the informer described it. The door was bolted from the inside, and fresh snow was pressed up against it. Kicking it in, they rushed inside, lighting it with their torches, only to find the back door wide open, gusts of snow spilling across a concrete floor littered with empty cigarette packets and Honeybee brandy bottles. Having searched the house and found nothing significant, they knocked on the doors of neighbours and shopkeepers. No one seemed capable of recalling who had until recently occupied the building – as if, in this tiny tick of a village, it was possible for a group of strangers to pass unnoticed.