This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Five

  * * *

  A CHRONICLE OF KASHMIR

  I

  THERE WAS A distinct chill in the air in Delhi on the morning of 31 December 1999, and it wasn’t due to the wintry weather alone. A little over a thousand miles away, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the lives of 190 Indians on board the hijacked Indian Airlines plane, IC 814, were hanging by the thread of a decision that would come to haunt the Indian government and the then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh for years to come. Singh was getting ready to escort three dreaded terrorists, who had just been released from prison in Jammu and Kashmir to Afghanistan in exchange for the safety of the passengers and crew. The mood outside the high-security Indian Air Force-managed technical area of Delhi airport (where journalists were being kept at a safe distance) was tense.

  It was then that I spotted a battered Maruti van approaching the gate. As it slowed down for security checks at the multiple barriers that had been set up, I discovered that it was carrying food for the officials inside. I used the few seconds available to plead with the driver to let me hop on. Sitting at the back between astonished food vendors and boxes of squishy sandwiches, I managed to make my way in past security. I reached the aircraft just as Jaswant Singh was climbing the steps of the Boeing 737. Eight officials from the intelligence agencies and the foreign ministry were already on board. Next to the plane was parked a jeep. Inside were the three terrorists, their faces completely masked.

  I soaked in the details. It was a week earlier, on 24 December, that IC 814 was hijacked and the conditions set for the release of the passengers. The identity of the men had not yet been officially released. Brajesh Mishra—who was both principal secretary to the prime minister and the national security adviser at the time—would tell us who they were only after the plane was airborne. By this time the journalists outside the gate had begun calling every high-ranking bureaucrat they knew to protest my presence inside the security perimeter. Mishra made an anxious call to my bosses.

  Determined to take my chance, I implored the minister to let me accompany him to Afghanistan, offering to leave my camera behind if that made taking me along more viable. I begged, I tried everything I could to somehow climb those steps to the aircraft with him. But in his firm yet gentle baritone he told me I must leave. Minutes later, Maulana Masood Azhar (who in less than two years would plan the attack on the Indian Parliament, mentioned in the previous chapter), Omar Saeed Sheikh (who would go on to kidnap and decapitate journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002), and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar (or ‘Latram’ as he was known in the Kashmir Valley where he had three dozen murder cases registered against him) were taken out of the jeep. They were the last to emplane. In many ways, their flight to freedom would, in the months and years to come, change the very nature of insurgency in the Kashmir Valley.

  ■

  ‘The minute we gave in, India became a soft state,’ an apoplectic Farooq Abdullah, who was chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir during the hijacking of IC 814, would tell me later. He had phoned L. K. Advani, the then home minister, to vehemently oppose the release of the terrorists. ‘Yeh desh ke saath gaddari hai (This is a betrayal of the nation),’ he told Advani. Farooq’s impression was that Advani himself was not comfortable with the decision but if that were the case, Advani did not let on. Threatening to resign, he told the state’s governor, Girish Saxena, that he could not continue as chief minister if the men were released from Jammu’s Kot Balwal prison on his watch. ‘Hindustan ka janaaza niklega (This is as good as taking out India’s funeral procession),’ he shouted at the governor. Finally, A. S. Dulat, India’s RAW chief at the time (and Farooq’s golfing buddy) was dispatched to the state to convince the chief minister that this was the only way to save lives. It was five hours before Farooq relented. But not before giving them a dire warning. ‘We were already weak; now we are finished.’

  So began a new and bloody phase of militant violence in Jammu and Kashmir. Four months later, a seventeen-year-old student from downtown Srinagar, Afaq Ahmed Shah, the quiet, somewhat reclusive son of a teacher who had dreams of becoming a doctor, drove a stolen red Maruti laden with explosives into the high-security barrier of the army headquarters in Badami Bagh, blowing himself up at the entry gate. It was the very first suicide attack in the Valley and Masood Azhar’s recently launched terror outfit—the Jaish-e-Mohammed—was quick to own responsibility. Previous ‘fidayeen’ squads who stormed security installations employed a hit-and-run strategy, leaving themselves a fighting chance of making it out alive. The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which had first unleashed these attacks, stopped short of endorsing suicide as a battle tactic because of the disapproval of taking your own life in Islam. But when Afaq blew himself up, he became the Valley’s first human bomb, forfeiting the option of survival the moment he accepted the mission. Masood Azhar, now ensconced comfortably in Pakistan, was back in business.

  On Christmas day that same year, the Jaish ordered another young suicide bomber to strike at the army barracks in Srinagar. This time, when the bomb exploded, six soldiers and three Kashmiri students returning home for Eid were killed. The Zarb-i-Momin, a weekly mouthpiece for the Jaish, eulogized the twenty-four-year-old bomber from Birmingham, Mohammad Bilal, and called him a ‘martyr’. This was proof that the attempt by the militants and their sponsors to internationalize the Kashmir issue by locating it within the larger global ‘jihad’ was beginning to make headway. The homespun separatist insurgency of the late eighties and early nineties was moving firmly into the control of foreign hands, simultaneously transforming in nature from the political to the religious. Over the next few years, in graveyards across the Kashmir Valley, I would see tombstones commemorating ‘fighters’ not just from across the border in Pakistan or Kalashnikov-rich Afghanistan, but also from as far away as Sudan and Libya. With the conflict now lurking in the deep shadows of global terrorism, it was often impossible to isolate the enemy.

  Reporting from the state in those years—my lifelong obsession with Kashmir began in the mid-nineties—was to live from crisis to crisis until the only thing your mind could play back was a constant barrage of violent or threatening memories. Curfew at the onset of dusk, silent, empty streets, the silhouette of a suspicious soldier who yelled at you to identify yourself in the gathering dark, the crash of explosions shaking you violently from your sleep, buildings burned to the ground to smoke out terrorists, dismembered limbs and shattered bodies strewn on the cratered ground, the flat report of pistol shots and the rattle of AK-47s mingling with the keening of the bereaved and the screaming of the wounded—the only constant about everyday life at the time was brutality and death. Morning after morning I would run out of the hotel room, often still in my pyjamas, because a grenade had been thrown into a crowded bazaar or an improvised explosive device had been triggered to blow up a military convoy or because paramilitary forces had opened fire on a village procession. So accustomed did I become to daily trysts with violence and tragedy that it was the relative ‘normalcy’ of Delhi that would disorient me whenever I came home.

  Strangely, the great beauty of India’s most spectacular state only reinforced the depth of its relentless suffering. The undulating hills, the blaze of the saffron fields, the apple orchards and the walnut trees, the luminous blue of the sky, the water turning to green translucent ice on the Dal Lake, the poetry of the chinar’s changing colours—all this splendour made the absence of tranquillity all the more poignant. The horror of militancy on the one hand and the monumental mistakes and violations by the state on the other left many ordinary Kashmiris imprisoned between the battle lines. There is no doubt that much of the terror that ravaged Jammu and Kashmir emanated from across the border, but several grave wounds to the body politic were self-inflicted as well.

  The brazenly rigged 1987 elections spawned a host of secessionist movements and militants. These included Syed Salahuddin, the chief commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, who had contested elections in Srinagar and is said to have won, only to
find his opponent declared victor. His polling agents included Yasin Malik and Javed Mir, who would go on to take up arms, train in Pakistan and found the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Over the years the blunders only multiplied—a result of apathy, misjudgement, denial and, sometimes, wilful arrogance in the responses of successive governments to Kashmir’s unresolved problems. A slew of fake encounters, abductions and disappearances, the notorious rise of armed counter-insurgents (or Ikhwanis as they were locally known), the absence of visible or swift justice in cases of blatant human rights violations—all these added to the emotional alienation of the Valley’s inhabitants from Delhi.

  II

  ‘We were Kashmiris,’ says the opening page of the autobiography of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, written from prison in 1935. Two hundred years earlier, Nehru’s Kashmiri ancestor, Raj Kaul, a famous Sanskrit and Persian scholar had migrated from the mountains to the plains. The Kauls adopted the surname ‘Nehru’ after the family took a home by the edge of a ‘nahar’ or canal. Nehru’s formative years may have been moulded by Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, where he was born, and later Harrow and Trinity in England, where he was educated, but the son of Motilal and Swarup Rani Thussu, held his Kashmiri Pandit ancestry close to his heart. After spending a summer there in 1940, he felt the inexorable pull of the Valley. ‘Kashmir calls [you] back, its pull is stronger than ever, it whispers its fairy magic to the ears. How can they who have fallen under its spell release themselves from its enchantment?’

  In 1946, soon after Mahatma Gandhi had pressured Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani to withdraw from the race for Congress president—even then, it was known that the chosen leader would also be independent India’s first prime minister and Gandhi’s preference was clear—Nehru decided to travel to Kashmir to support his friend Sheikh Abdullah who was, at the time, being held in prison by Maharaja Hari Singh, the then ruler of the state.

  Nehru had rallied behind Abdullah’s Quit Kashmir Movement to replace the Dogra royalty with a popular government. It was not the most opportune time to offend the maharaja. Only the princely states had the option of not going under the surgical knife with which Sir Cyril Radcliffe would make multiple incisions in the heart of undivided India, and Maharaja Hari Singh had not yet decided whether Jammu and Kashmir would stay with India or Pakistan. But Nehru was undeterred by the possibility of antagonizing the king. Defying a ban to enter the state, Nehru travelled to Kashmir and was arrested and sent back at the border.

  A year later, just two weeks before independent India’s ‘tryst with destiny’, its prime minister-to-be was still fixated on Kashmir. ‘Between visiting Kashmir when my people need me there and being Prime Minister, I prefer the former,’ Nehru said in a letter to Gandhi. Sardar Patel would later describe some of Nehru’s interventions in Kashmir as ‘acts of emotional insanity’. Kashmir can have that effect on you.

  A month later, in September, the prevaricating Maharaja Hari Singh made an offer of accession to India for the very first time. Nehru stunned him by making the deal conditional on the release of Sheikh Abdullah from jail. The maharaja refused.

  Finally, in what would become Pakistan’s classic modus operandi for decades to come—sending well-armed infiltrators into Indian territory and then denying their existence—on 22 October 1947 thousands of Pathan tribesmen, backed by the military in Rawalpindi, invaded Kashmir, looting, pillaging and capturing vast tracts of land, including Muzaffarabad and Poonch. Launched from Abbotabad (where sixty years later Osama Bin Laden would be captured and killed by the Americans), the militia invasion was code-named Operation Gulmarg. It would be Pakistan’s inaugural proxy war in India. The details of the operation were revealed by Major General Akbar Khan whose job it was to plan the covert incursions. In his book, Raiders in Kashmir, Khan confirms that he prepared a blueprint for battle titled ‘Armed Revolt In Kashmir’ which was planned as early as late August 1947, just after the British had played midwife to the birth of the two nations.

  Within two days of the invasion, as the militia took control of Baramulla and was marching towards Srinagar, panicked telegrams from Hari Singh began to arrive in Delhi appealing for troops. On 26 October 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession to make Jammu and Kashmir a state of the Indian union.

  By now, the Pakistan-backed marauders were just seven kilometres short of Srinagar’s airport. Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw—India’s most celebrated soldier who was then a young colonel in the Directorate of Military Operations—made a presentation to the Cabinet, arguing that Kashmir could be lost forever if troops were not rushed in. In Manekshaw’s recounting, Nehru still dithered. He was concerned about world opinion and wondered aloud to his colleagues if it might not be wiser to first consult the United Nations. An indignant Sardar Patel, already exasperated with Nehru’s sentimentalism about Kashmir, snapped, ‘Jawahar, do you want Kashmir or do you want to give it away?’

  ‘Of course I want Kashmir,’ Nehru snarled in reply.

  On the morning of 27 October 1947, Dakotas from the No. 12 Squadron of the Indian Air Force, along with dozens of planes requisitioned from privately owned companies, airlifted the 1st Battalion of the Sikh Regiment from Delhi’s Safdarjung airport.

  The newly born nation’s army would spend the next fourteen months waging war against a people who had until recently been countrymen. More than 1,000 soldiers of the Indian Army and 1,990 men of the Jammu and Kashmir state forces died in battle. However, despite the best efforts of the limited force that had been rushed to take on the intruders (several battalions of the army had to be held back to defend Punjab and military operations in Hyderabad), nearly 37 per cent of the original area of Jammu and Kashmir could not be retrieved. Muzaffarabad and Giligit-Skardu fell into Pakistani hands.

  ■

  Since its stormy entry into the Indian union, multiple political protagonists have emerged that hold the key to the state’s future. There are the Valley-based parties like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the Congress—a national party that has some presence in both Jammu and the Kashmir Valley—and the BJP, which has never held a seat in Kashmir but has always been rooted in Jammu. There are also the small Ladakh-based parties that remain unconnected to the larger dispute but see their future within the Indian union. And finally, there are the separatists primarily represented by the Hurriyat Conference—disparate players, with different ideologies all in pursuit of an elusive peace.

  III

  ‘For God’s sake we are not asking for jihad like some of these Hurriyat fellows. I don’t bluff people, I don’t lie.’ Farooq Abdullah spoke as always with a rhythmic cadence, his voice rising and falling with dramatic effect. It was July 2000, and we were sitting on the sprawling lawns of the chief minister’s residence in Srinagar just after he had steered a radical resolution for autonomy through the Jammu and Kashmir assembly with a stunning two-thirds majority. The report prepared by his party, the National Conference, asked that the state’s autonomy be restored to its pre-1953 position when New Delhi only had control over three areas—defence, external affairs and communication. ‘There is no turning back now,’ he thundered with a flamboyant flourish, typical of him.

  As a member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and an ally of Vajpayee, Farooq’s autonomy gambit had thrown the centre into a predicament. What he was asking for went against the grain of the BJP’s core ideology. Other, more extremist, partners in the coalition, like the Shiv Sena, were already asking for Farooq to be dropped from the NDA. BJP members had worn black bands during the autonomy debate in the assembly and tried to shout him down in protest. Farooq thumped the tables and shouted back. ‘We are not Pakistani, we are Indian. What we are asking for is within the Indian Constitution.’ Was he just play-acting, I asked him. Surely he knew that the RSS and the BJP were never even going to consider the proposals? ‘Let the BJP decide, do they want to be leaders or followers,’ he shot back.

&
nbsp; What was striking was how, in so many ways, history was repeating itself.

  In August 1953—the year that Farooq wanted to turn the clock back to—his father, Sheikh Abdullah, was stealthily dismissed and thrown into jail for several years on charges of sedition in what came to be known as the Kashmir Conspiracy Case. Though the orders to sack Sheikh Abdullah as Wazir-e-Azam (prime minister) came from Karan Singh, Maharaja Hari Singh’s son and heir who had been appointed the Sadr-e-Riyasat (president) in 1952, Nehru supported the decision. His intelligence chief had persuaded the Indian prime minister that the leader he saw as a fellow secular nationalist and called his ‘blood brother’ was now working against India’s interests.

  ‘From a position of clearly endorsing the accession to India, he had over the last few months moved into an entirely different posture,’ wrote Karan Singh, who had ordered Sheikh Abdullah’s removal.

  Just a year earlier, in July 1952, Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah had signed what had come to be known as the Delhi Agreement. They had agreed on a detailed set of terms that gave Jammu and Kashmir special status, including vesting the residuary powers of the legislature with the state and not the centre. But now all communication between them had broken down.

  ■

  In a 1948 speech to the United Nations, Sheikh Abdullah, the most formidable political leader the state of Jammu and Kashmir had ever seen, made a blistering defence of the accession to India. Lashing out at Pakistan for sending its raiders into the state, the self-styled ‘Sher-e-Kashmir’ (Lion of Kashmir) roared, ‘I had thought all along that the world had got rid of Hitlers...but from what is happening in my poor country I am convinced they have transmigrated their souls into Pakistan... I refuse to accept Pakistan as a party in the affairs of Jammu and Kashmir. I refuse this point blank.’ Two years later, however, Sheikh Abdullah had begun to question the credentials of Indian secularism and lament what he saw as economic discrimination against Muslims in the newly born republic.