THE LOST REBELLION KASHMIR IN THE

NINETIES
UPDATED EDITION
manoj joshi
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First published by Penguin Books India 1999

Published by Penguin Random House India 2019

Copyright © Manoj Joshi 1999, 2019

Foreword copyright © Amitabh Mattoo 2019

Photographs by Meraj-ud-din except as otherwise mentioned.

All rights reserved

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by
him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for
the same.

ISBN: 978-8-184-75263-2

www.penguin.co.in
 For my father
Lt Col. Tara Datt Joshi of the Rajput Regiment who
served with 1st Kumaon (Paras) through the siege of
Poonch in 1947–48
 Contents

Foreword
Introduction, 2019
Introduction, 1998
List of Abbreviations

1. Losing the Mandate of Heaven

2. The Valley Aflame
3. Fanning the Flames
4. Fighting the Fire
5. The Pakistani Offensive: India, Kashmir and Doda
6. The Tide Turns
7. Hazratbal and After
8. American Interlude
9. Endless Night
10. Lost Rebellion

Conclusion
The Aftermath

Photo Inserts
 Foreword

The troubles in Jammu and Kashmir have produced a small library of books
in the three decades since their onset. Propagandists, pamphleteers and
scholars alike have probed almost every aspect of the Kashmir ‘question’.
But like many other enduring conflicts, the discourse on Jammu and
Kashmir is one of contested claims, where there is no one truth but several
competing narratives.
In many ways, the history of Kashmir is like the Kurosawa epic film
Rashomon. There are many honest narratives, but no single authentic
version. Every bit of Kashmir is deeply challenged: the land, the people, the
politics and—above all—the events that have shaped its destiny. Every
single significant happening in the Kashmir Valley over the last seventy-odd
years has countless versions: each account has its own devoted following—
blindly attached to and believing that their understanding alone is the final
truth.
Added to this are the myopic policies of the governments in Delhi and
Islamabad that will not declassify even seventy-year-old records on
Kashmir lest they compromise national security. In a world, then, where
scholars are treated like infiltrators and state propaganda machineries seek
to construct a grand discourse that will suit their tactical ends—while
genuine intellectual subversives risk being eliminated or totally
marginalized—can real history-writing have a chance?
Not surprisingly, much of what has been produced on Kashmir,
especially in the last three decades, is drivel. I have a personal collection of
about 1500 books and pamphlets published during these years, and, save a
handful, all of them would be most useful on a cold winter Kashmir
evening, generating warmth in a bonfire. The exceptions are those that seek
to reconstruct histories before 1947, those that look for sources outside
South Asia or rely primarily on subaltern (and oral) sources. Indeed, the two
most outstanding recent contributions to Kashmir’s historiography began as
doctoral dissertations in American universities and imaginatively used a
combination of British imperial records in London and the unpublished
manuscripts and private papers of Kashmiris.
Can, then, the story of the precise manner in which the insurgency was
organized by the militants and the strategies used by the Indian security
forces in the 1990s be narrated in any great depth or with a fair degree of
objectivity? Manoj Joshi’s magisterial book proves that with understanding,
determination and a mix of sources it is possible to craft such a narrative.
Indeed, Joshi’s is the first detailed account of the full scale of the militant
operation and the Indian state’s response to what was probably the strongest
challenge faced by it since 1947. Fluently written, in a style that combines
the reader-friendly approach of a journalist with the understanding of a
military historian, The Lost Rebellion, despite the exhaustive details, makes
for fascinating and gripping reading. It was originally published in 1999
and the new edition brings us up to date with the latest developments.
Although there are rarely any attributions, the book has quite obviously
relied heavily on the ‘confessions’ of captured militants and their
‘debriefing’ by Indian security and intelligence agencies.
The anecdotal asides in the book are particularly engaging. Consider this
one about Robin Raphel, the former American assistant secretary for South
Asia, who quickly became the bête noire of the Indian establishment for her
stand on Kashmir:

Her calls on India to reduce human-rights abuses and ‘clean up your act’ in
Kashmir or ‘get your act together’ hit a raw nerve.
The mandarins of South and North Block did not want to hear this
message, not from an American and that too a woman. IB officials tapping
her line added spice to this by reporting to their masters the not-very-
complimentary terms in which they were referred to by Raphel.

Raphel has not changed very much. A known friend and lobbyist of
Pakistan, these days she is helping Washington negotiate with the Taliban.
And while Joshi does identify and narrate instances of civil-rights violations
by Indian security forces, he seems to ultimately suggest that they were
inevitable in what was a singularly ‘dirty’ war.
However, The Lost Rebellion is principally about the uncivil war in
Kashmir rather than the deeper roots of that violence. And Joshi does draw
a distinction between the professionalism of the Indian Army and the
insensitive approach of agencies like the Border Security Force.
Moreover, behind the military-history garb and the no-nonsense ‘guns
and ammo’ approach, The Lost Rebellion is ultimately a reflection of the
Indian state: hard on the surface and liberal at the core. This is reflected
particularly in many of the passages in the concluding chapter, including
this one: ‘Pakistan’s neurotic obsession with Kashmir has been matched by
New Delhi’s singular inability to forge a policy that is more effective in
anticipating developments, sensitive to human rights and consequently
more attuned to winning back the hearts and minds of the Kashmiri
Muslims of the Valley.’
Ultimately, then, the original book seemed to suggest that the Indian state
had shown its hard face to the Kashmiri people in the 1990s, and that it was
now time to start the process of healing to ensure that the scars of the ‘lost’
rebellion are well and truly erased. Sadly, that never happened.
The first edition of this book was completed at the end of 1998 and
published in early 1999. In the troubled recent history of the state, 1999, as
Joshi pointed out, was a watershed of sorts. Having more or less crushed the
rebellion and having conducted the state assembly elections in 1996, the
Indian state hoped that it could, over time, restore normalcy in the state.
What was required was a sustained reaching out to the people of the state.
That never happened.
 Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee did
recognize the need to address the alienation of the people of Jammu and
Kashmir, but for a variety of reasons their most imaginative initiatives were
short-lived. Today, however, in the garb of national interest, ad hocism,
bureaucratic inertia and plain ineptitude are the hallmarks of New Delhi’s
approach to a once-again sinking Jammu and Kashmir.
This new edition is a profound and wise book, and Joshi goes beyond the
tactical concerns of the Indian state. It is a book that must be read by every
concerned Indian citizen.
Professor Amitabh Mattoo
Former adviser to the chief minister of
Jammu and Kashmir
 Introduction
2019

This book was completed at the end of 1998 and published in early 1999. In
the troubled recent history of the state, that year was a watershed of sorts.
Having more or less crushed the rebellion, and conducted State Assembly
elections in 1996, the Indian state hoped that it could, over time, restore
normalcy in the state.
But that was not to be. Because Jammu and Kashmir is not entirely a
domestic issue. Pakistan, like it or not, looms large. In this case, Rawalpindi
(the headquarters of the Pakistan Army) launched a high-risk military
operation in Kargil. The result of this, and of the India–Pakistan tussle in
the period 1999–2003, was that violence once again hit the state. That cycle
of violence has waxed and waned since then, but never really ended.
Twenty-odd years have passed since this book was written, and it is not
possible to simply ‘update’ it, even to correct errors or mark the movement
of the characters. Yet, the period the book covers remains the key to
understanding the persistence of the rebellion. Pakistan, of course, plays a
role here, but the deep domestic roots it developed arose from the violence
in the 1989–99 period, something that needs to be understood and dealt
with. I have attempted to provide a view of those developments through an
extended section on the aftermath up until the middle of 2018.
 Many of the actors who played an important role in the 1990s are still
around and, in their own way, affect the situation. There is Mohammed
Yusuf Shah—Syed Salahuddin—the chief of the Hizbul Mujahideen and
head of the United Jihad Council in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir; the
original rebels: Azam Inquilabi, Yasin Malik and Shabir Ahmad Shah;
Javed Ahmed Mir, the erstwhile one-time Amir-e-Jihad, Syed Ali Shah
Geelani; the mirwaiz, Maulvi Umar Farooq; Professor Abdul Ghani Bhat
and Maulana Abbas Ansari.
Masood Azhar, who managed to get out of an Indian jail, remains a
baleful presence, as does the Lashkar-e-Taiba chief, Hafiz Muhammad
Saeed. A militant of even older vintage, Hashim Qureshi, an associate of
Maqbool Butt, is still around, now living in Srinagar and still facing legal
proceedings for his role in the hijacking of the Indian Airlines aircraft in
1971.
Of course, many of the actors are dead or retired, while some, like
Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, are in jail in Pakistan. Mast Gul and many
other Pakistanis have since created mayhem in Pakistan as well. Many foot
soldiers of the insurgency are dead, others have spent long years in jail and
have since been released, while the Pakistanis, like Nasir Mehmood
Sodozey and Nasrullah Mansoor Langaryal, were quietly repatriated along
with scores of their compatriots.
Then there are the puppet masters of the Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate of Pakistan, presumably with an entirely new generation of
officers, but who are no less active than they were in the past. With the
failure of the armed rebellion and the inability of Islamabad to sustain it
through Pakistani militants, Islamabad’s position on J & K has changed.
Today, there is little talk of merger, or azadi. Instead, Pakistan insists it is
only around for the ‘moral and political’ support and to ensure that the
people of the state get the right to self-determination.
The Indian Army remains in the state in substantial numbers, primarily
directly on the borders, with the Rashtriya Rifles operating inland. Instead
of the Border Security Force, the heavy policing in the urban clusters is
now done by the Central Reserve Police Force. However, the Jammu and
Kashmir Police, which had recovered its elan by the late 1990s, remains the
key through which militancy is kept in check.
There is, of course, Governor N.N. Vohra, whose connection with the
affairs of the state was perhaps the lengthiest among officials. He was the
Union defence secretary between 1990–93, the home secretary between
1993–94, interlocutor for J & K affairs between 2003–08 and was the
governor of the state till 23 August 2018. Former divisional commissioner
Wajahat Habibullah has been reincarnated as the head of the
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
Politicians never really retire, so there are quite a few of them still
around, but they are no longer in the driver’s seat: Farooq Abdullah,
Ghulam Nabi Azad, Saifuddin Soz, Yusuf Tarigami, Murli Manohar Joshi
and L.K. Advani. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose policies
shone so much light into the dark night of the ongoing Kashmir crisis,
passed away on 16 August 2018. The Americans are also gone. There was a
time when separatist leaders were directly dealt with by American officials
and ambassadors in Srinagar, New Delhi and even Washington DC. After
9/11, the American interest in Jammu and Kashmir has waned.
Some things have remained sadly static—the unsettled situation, the
deaths, disappearances, arbitrary imprisonment and torture. So, too, remains
the condition of the Pandits in their camps in Jammu. Efforts at getting
them to return have foundered on the uncertain security conditions of the
state, notwithstanding periods of seeming normalcy.
Here I would like to acknowledge the generosity of my publishers,
Penguin Random House India, in bringing out this new edition. I would like
to thank Amitabh Mattoo, who needs no introduction in matters Kashmiri,
for being kind enough to write a foreword for the book.
Finally, I would like to thank my family—my daughters, Saba and
Manya, who are now grown-up young women, my son-in-law, Daniel
Bruce, and my granddaughter, Lila Joshi-Bruce, who came into the world
two weeks ago. My deepest gratitude, of course, goes to my spouse,
Mandira Mitra: she’s the rock to which I am anchored.
15 September 2018
New Delhi
 Introduction
1998

Anywhere up to 50,000 Indians have died in riots, ethnic strife, insurgencies

and foreign wars in the 1980s and 1990s. This book is a record, howsoever
incomplete, of the events that have occurred in the vale of Kashmir in the
last nine years, which have, according to official figures, taken the lives of
some 20,000 people so far.
The book is not a journalistic memoir, since I visited Kashmir only
fleetingly in the past few years. It is, at one level, part of a wider study of
India’s ‘million mutinies’ that began with a monograph I wrote for a British
journal on the terrorist movement in Punjab in 1993, as well as another for
an American publication on the LTTE’s activities in India in 1995.
Somewhat more ambitious, this is a narrative, based largely on secondary
sources, of the Kashmiri rebellion that began as a call to azadi, or freedom,
in 1989, but was, within a year, transformed into a jihad whose goal was to
merge the state with Pakistan. Today it could well be called a ‘proxy war’
being fought by Pakistan’s intelligence services against India. I was
motivated to write this book because I feel that we are all too ready to
sweep major events like the terrible years in Punjab in 1984–93, the Sri
Lankan intervention or the anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh pogroms under the
carpet and pretend they never happened. A nation that forgets its past is
condemned to repeat it, but what of a nation that does not know of its past?
 Despite India’s good record in managing its incredible mix of ethnic and
religious minorities, its instrumentalities have often dealt with them with
unnecessary force and brutality. The chain of responsibility flows from
political leaders who have neither the time nor the depth to handle
situations as they rise, to the Indian Administrative Service babus whose
arrogance is only matched by their ignorance of the ground realities they
deal with. Military and police commanders who are ultimately responsible
for allowing ill-prepared and poorly equipped forces to handle tasks they
were not supposed to handle cannot be absolved from their share of the
blame.
But the Indian security forces’ record on this score is nowhere as bad as
that of, say, Serbia in Bosnia, Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet and
Xinjiang or Pakistan in relation to the Bengalis and Baluchis, with the
governments in question relying exclusively on the military option. Had
that been the case in India in 1989– 90, downtown Srinagar could have
been razed in the belief that everyone killed or driven out was anti-Indian,
Dealing with insurgency situations is not easy: the excesses committed by
the supposedly well-trained US special forces and their Italian and
Canadian equivalents during their Somalian sojourn point to some of the
difficulties in trying to get armies to make peace.
Unlike certain countries, India has not taken recourse to altering the
demography of a region to control a recalcitrant ethnic or religious
minority. It is not simply a matter of whether or not this tactic would have
been successful, but of the intent. From the outset, a strong liberal streak in
the Indian state has remained determined to maintain the unique diversity of
the country, a policy that has, in my opinion, given enormous dividends.
The state of Jammu and Kashmir, as has often been pointed out, is not a
homogeneous entity. Even the portion under Indian control has a
bewildering range of religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. The rebellion
that this book speaks of has, in the main, afflicted the vale of Kashmir and
the Muslims who reside there, speaking the Kashmiri language. They are,
numerically, the largest group of people residing in the 222,870-sq.-
kilometres state, but are confined largely to the valley, which is an area
comprising 170 kilometres by 80 kilometres.
I incurred a number of debts, writing this book. Some cannot be
acknowledged since they involve serving officers in the Army, intelligence
services and the Indian Police Service. I would like to emphasize that most
of this was on an individual basis. Institutionally, most of these
organizations were not supportive; they were not against the project, simply
uninterested since many of them believe that they know all the answers.
The responsibility for whatever appears in this book is all mine. But, given
the Rashomon-like situation accompanying incidents of war and bloodshed,
there is bound to be error and exaggeration, for which I would like to
apologize in advance. I wish to express my thanks to Meraj-ud-din, who has
been kind enough to let me use his photographs. Meraj’s professional
coverage of the rebellion is a chronicle in itself. The book could not have
been completed without the love and support of my wife Mandira and our
two children, Saba and Manya, who bore the imposition on their time with
fortitude and good cheer.
 List of Abbreviations

AFP: Agence France-Presse

AFSPA: Armed Forces Special Powers Act
ANE: Anti-national element
APHC All Party Hurriyat or Liberation Conference
BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
BJP: Bharatiya Janata Party
BPRD: Bureau Police Research and Development
BSF: Border Security Force
BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party
CBI: Central Bureau of Investigation
CEC: Central Election Commission
CFL: Ceasefire line
CIA: Central Intelligence Agency
CID: Crime Investigation Department
CPI(M): Communist Party of India (Marxist)
CRPF: Central Reserve Police Force
CTBT: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
DCP/DC: Deputy Commissioner
DGP: Director General of Police
DIG: Deputy Inspector General of Police
FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation
FIR: First Information Report
FOD: Field Ordnance Depot
GOC-in-C: General Officer Commanding-in-Chief
GOI: Government of India
GPMG: General-purpose machine gun
HF: High frequency
IAF: Indian Air Force
IAS: Indian Administrative Service
IB: Intelligence Bureau
ICRC: International Committee of the Red Cross
IED: Improvised explosive devices
IIM: Islami Inquilabi Mahaz
IOC: Indian Oil Corporation
ISI: Inter-Services Intelligence
ITI: Indian Technical Institute
JCO: Junior commissioned officer
JD: Janata Dal
JKAP: J & K Armed Police
JKIF: Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front
JKLF(A): JKLF (Amanullah)
JKLF: Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front
JKSLF: Jammu and Kashmir Students’ Liberation Front
JLR: Joint Resistance Leadership
JUUI: Jamiat-ul-Ulema-Islam
KAC: Kashmiri-American Council
KJF: Jammu and Kashmir Jehad Force
KLA: Kashmir Liberation Army
KLC: Kashmir Liberation Council
KLF: Kashmir Liberation Front
LI: Light Infantry
LIC: Low-intensity conflict
LMG: Light machine-gun
LRP: Long-range patrol
LSE: London School of Economics
LTTE: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
LU: Liaison Unit
MARCO: Marine Commando
MG: Machine gun
MHA: Ministry of Home Affairs
MI: Military Intelligence
MJF: Muslim Janbaz Force
MLA: Member of Legislative Assembly
MUF: Muslim United Front
NC: National Conference
NCLU: Northern Command Liaison Unit
NICO: Non-initiation of combat operations
NSC: National Security Council
NSG: National Security Guard
OGW: Overground workers
OIC: Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
PDP: People’s Democratic Party
PL: People’s League
PMO: Prime Minister’s Office
POK: Pakistan-occupied Kashmir
PPP: Pakistan People’s Party
PSA: Public Security Act
PUCL: People’s Union for Civil Liberties,
QRT: Quick Reaction Team
RAW: Research and Analysis Wing
RI: Rigorous imprisonment
ROP: Road-opening party
RPG: Rocket-propelled grenade
RR: Rashtriya Rifles
RSS: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
SAARC: South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
SAFTA: South Asian Free Trade Area
SATP: South Asia Terrorism Portal
SBI: State Bank of India
SF: Special Forces
SHO: Station house officer
SIMI: Student Islamic Movement of India
SKIMS: Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences
SMHS: Sir Maharaj Hari Singh Hospital
SOG: Special operations group
SPO: Special police officer
SSP: Senior Superintendent of Police
STF: Special task force
TA: Territorial Army
TADA: Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act
TEHK: Tehreek Hurriyat-e-Kashmir
TJI: Tehreek Jehad-e-Islami
UJC: United Jehad Council
ULFA: United Liberation Front of Assam
UMF: United Muslim Front
UMG: Unified machine gun
UNCIP: United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan
VHF: Very high frequency
 1
Losing the Mandate
of Heaven

Almost everyone now accepts that a malevolent spirit was unleashed in the
Kashmir valley following the death of Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah on 8
September 1982. The relationship between his son and successor Farooq
Abdullah and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began to sour almost
immediately. By 1983, there was a full-fledged war between the two parties
that advocated Kashmir’s accession to India and practised secular politics.
At the same time, desperation and militancy entered the decades-old
efforts to overthrow the Indian yoke by small, marginalized groups of
religious extremists and youth leaders who were left rudderless following
the dissolution of the Plebiscite Front.
That year the Army and the Border Security Force (BSF) was repeatedly
called out to quell violence, and curfew was imposed on occasions in
Srinagar and various towns of the state. On 15 August, when Chief Minister
Farooq Abdullah was taking the salute at the Srinagar stadium, a bomb
exploded; injuring six persons, including four soldiers. Two weeks later
there was another blast in the India Coffee House. In November, a bomb
exploded in the compound of a judge of the High Court. A more potentially
serious incident was averted when a bomb was discovered and defused at
the Palladium cinema. At the end of the year, Union Home Minister P.C.
Sethi claimed that there were six training camps for terrorists in the state.
The origin of the problems seemed to lie across the border in those parts
of the Jammu and Kashmir state that came under the control of Pakistan in
1948–49, called Pakistan Occupied Kashmir or POK in the Indian lexicon,
and Azad Kashmir locally. But the real fountainhead of secessionism
seemed to be in England where a large community of Kashmiris, mainly
from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir, resided
There were, of course, also strong domestic currents of dissidence. They
led up to the Plebiscite Front, set up in 1955 by supporters of Sheikh
Mohammed Abdullah, then under detention by Indian authorities. Till the
Sheikh’s accord with the Government of India in 1975, his supporters,
grouped in this front, broadly favoured independence.
Another important stream led to political supporters of the hereditary
Mirwaiz of Kashmir, at that time, Maulvi Mohammed Farooq, whose
political position, it was said, was as changeable as the climate in the vale.
As Srinagar’s leading cleric, Maulvi Farooq occupied this hereditary office
by the grace of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, erstwhile chief minister of the
state. But he was also the ideological inheritor of the mantle of his uncle
Maulvi Mohammed Yusuf Shah, who had fled to Pakistan in 1947 and who
had been the leader of the Muslim Conference and the ‘Islamic’ political
opinion in the state in the 1930s and 1940s, in opposition to the ‘secularists’
who swore allegiance to Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference.
Across the western border, defined by a Line of Control (LoC), lay
Pakistan, which believed that gaining possession of Kashmir was essential
for the flowering of its nationhood. Twice in the previous decades, it had
taken recourse to arms to ‘liberate’ the state and failed both times because
of the lack of enthusiasm in the valley’s Kashmiris for merger with
Pakistan.
In 1983, though in the midst of the American-sponsored jihad against the
Soviet-backed Afghan regime in Kabul, the thoughts of Pakistan’s supreme
leader Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and his Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lt Gen.
Akhtar Abdul Rehman seemed to be on the east, where across several
ranges of mountains lay the vale of Kashmir.
Standing in their way, as it were, was the Indian state, a combination of
the Union government at the Centre, and the state government in Srinagar.
India had been led through most of the years since Independence by Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and then his daughter Indira; they traced their
ancestry to Kashmir.
In Srinagar, despite lengthy periods of detention of its patriarch in the
1950s and 1960s, political supremacy rested in the hands of the Abdullah
family. For six years after Independence and another six years before his
death, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah had been the prime minister and chief
minister of the state, respectively. As the leader of the National Conference
in 1947, he had been the single most powerful political entity to have
assisted the state to become part of the India Union. From the time the state
became a part of India, and till his death, the relationship between the
Sheikh and the Nehru-Gandhi family was one of conflict and cooperation,
of war and peace.
Though the voters punished Indira Gandhi for taking recourse to
authoritarian means during the Emergency, her return to power in 1980 did
not mean that she had become any wiser. She was belligerent and
determined to swat her enemies before they undid her. Lending tone to her
new administration was her unruly younger son and chosen heir Sanjay
Gandhi.
After Sanjay’s death, in mid-1980, she became lonelier and more
suspicious, dependent on the bureaucracy rather than her political
colleagues who, by now, were little more than sycophants. Her control over
her party was now uncontested, even if it appeared that her hold over the
country was slipping.
In Srinagar, the Sheikh was equally determined to retain his dominance.
He had anointed his son Farooq as his political heir by inducting him as
health minister. But he had entered into a new phase of confrontation with
the Centre on the issue of the Resettlement Bill. Under its provisions,
anyone who had been a state subject before 14 May 1954 had the right to
return to Kashmir if he or she swore allegiance to the Constitution of India.
This touched off a furore in Jammu where it was alleged that it would
facilitate the return of thousands of anti-Indian elements from Pakistan.
Actually, the real worry of those who opposed the Bill was the manner in
which it would complicate the issue of refugee property which had, in most
instances, now acquired new owners.
But before the situation could reach a point of no return, the Sheikh
passed away in September 1982. In good Indian style, Farooq was
immediately appointed chief minister, and Indira Gandhi began to work on
ways of squeezing him to get into a coalition with the Congress in the
coming assembly elections in the state.
The relations between the Sheikh and Panditji had been cordial and even
familial. Brought up in this environment, Farooq was so close to Indira
Gandhi that he called her Mummy. Despite Nehru and Indira’s high-
handedness, in 1977 the Sheikh offered to have his wife vacate the Srinagar
seat to enable Mrs Gandhi to contest and return to parliament. In the 1980
general elections he instructed Farooq to campaign for Indira’s Congress
party.
But in this battle of wits with Indira, the headstrong Farooq made several
mistakes. He went to Amritsar in mid-November 1982, talked to the Akalis
and issued a statement that spoke of their common battle against the Centre.
He also met Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who told him of the need for the
minorities to stick together. Notwithstanding her own party’s role in
boosting the extremist Bhindranwale, Mrs Gandhi was not very happy at all
this.
In March 1983, Farooq visited Delhi and held talks with Mrs Gandhi
about the coming elections. She demanded an alliance and Farooq resisted.
He realized that to concede seat-sharing could have been fatal for the
National Conference’s fortunes, if not identity. He tried to deal with
‘Mummy’ through compromise. The Assembly passed the Resettlement Bill
and then allowed it to go to the Supreme Court for reference regarding its
constitutional validity.
But Mrs Gandhi persisted. Finally, it was decided that Rajiv Gandhi,
neophyte politician and someone who could relate to Farooq in terms of age
and attitude, would negotiate. An appointment was made for Farooq to meet
Rajiv. But when the time came, there was no sign of Farooq. This was the
final straw and Mrs Gandhi was not someone who forgot easily.
 In the June 1983 elections, Mrs Gandhi stormed the state in her
characteristic style of a punishing schedule of endless meetings through
helicopter hops. Faced with this challenge, Farooq showed his political
mettle. He made up with the family of his political rival Mirwaiz Maulvi
Farooq, who had been a consistent votary of plebiscite, and in the process
again raised the suspicion of hawks in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the
home ministry, so influential in the corridors of power in New Delhi.
The two Farooq’s alliance won; actually, it swept the valley and picked
up eight seats in Jammu, where the Congress secured twenty-four seats. But
the no holds-barred campaign vitiated the Gandhi–Abdullah relationship. It
propelled Farooq into the battle against Indira across the country, while a
vindictive Mrs Gandhi plotted revenge with her advisers, Makhan Lal
Fotedar and Arun Nehru, determined to teach the errant ‘son’ a lesson.
Farooq’s seemingly rash actions suddenly began to appear to be part of a
wider development, the rise of regional opposition to the Congress. Earlier
in 1983, the Telugu Desam and Janata Party had come to power in Andhra
Pradesh and Karnataka, respectively. Telugu Desam leader N.T. Rama Rao
began promoting a non-Congress alliance and invited top Opposition
leaders to a conclave in Vijayawada in May 1983. Farooq was an invitee
and he went. This was bad enough from the point of view of New Delhi; but
then Farooq did something more. He called the assembled leaders, all
committed to defeating Indira Gandhi in the general elections, for another
session later in Srinagar.
The general elections in India were still a year away, in 1984, but Indira
and India had gone into the election mode. It was clear to most observers
that she was going to lose the elections. But neither Mrs Gandhi nor Farooq
withdrew from the precipice. While Farooq revelled in his role as a national
opposition politician, Mrs Gandhi’s lieutenants, Kashmiri pandits like Arun
Nehru and M.L. Fotedar, were cultivating Ghulam Mohammed ‘Gul’ Shah,
Farooq’s brother-in-law.
The October 1983 opposition conclave in Srinagar was a red rag to the
Congress bull. Being the target of attack, Indira Gandhi could hardly have
been expected to appreciate that for the first time it appeared that Kashmir
was a part of national politics. She did not, and awaited the opportunity to
strike. In the meantime, a steady propaganda barrage was unleashed about
the anti-national activities in the state.
Later that month there was another effort to extend emotional integration
of the state with India. A one-day cricket match between the West Indies
and India was staged in Srinagar. However, the match turned out to be a
fiasco. In a planned move, pro-secessionist and fundamentalist elements
realized what a useful platform the occasion could be and they set out to
disrupt it by raising pro-Afghan mujahideen and anti-Indian slogans and
waving Jamaat-e-Islami flags. The West Indies were cheered and the
Indians booed and pelted with stones and refuse. At one level, it was the
kind of hooliganism that had occurred in Kanpur and other Indian cities.
But with Mrs Gandhi determined to finish Farooq, her propagandists made
full use of the event, charging that under Farooq’s rule, Pakistani flags were
being waved in Srinagar.
It became clear that it was a war to the finish. Congressmen in the state
accused Farooq of all sorts of wrongdoing and anti- national activities. Then
came the charge that terrorist camps were operating in the state. Obviously
a case was being built up for Farooq’s dismissal. In Patna on 4 January
1984 Indira Gandhi herself declared that the Centre would not tolerate anti-
national activities in Kashmir and that the state government seemed unable
to curb them.
While there was a self-serving element in the Congress charges, and its
own activities were disturbing peace in the state, forces hostile to India
were making their appearance. The bitter quarrel between the two pro-India
parties, the National Conference and the Congress, provided them the
chance to enter, and they did.
Through the winter of 1983–84, Gul Shah schemed with Arun Nehru and
Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, and gathered his supporters at an alleged rate of
Rs 3 lakh per MLA, with the assistance of a generous dose of money from
Delhi. But there was a problem. Governor B.K. Nehru, a Gandhi family
relative, was too upright to countenance a constitutional coup, So Nehru
had to be transferred by sending him to Gujarat. He was replaced by
Jagmohan, the loyal civil servant who had gained notoriety for his civic
demolitions in New Delhi during the Emergency.
The defection of twelve National Conference MLAs and one independent
was done in the true style of a coup with the defectors reaching Raj Bhavan
two hours before sunrise on 2 July 1984 even while a special contingent of
the police arrived in an aircraft from New Delhi. Farooq was clearly taken
aback. He could have still made peace with Mrs Gandhi, but he was brash
and egotistical. By the evening, Jagmohan had dismissed the Farooq
ministry and installed another led by G.M. Shah, which included all thirteen
defectors.
Farooq was not the only target. On 16 August, in a similar operation, the
Governor of Andhra Pradesh Ram Lal dismissed the state Chief Minister
N.T. Rama Rao, claiming that he no longer held the legislative majority. In
this case, the instrument was N. Bhaskara Rao, a protégé of NTR. However,
this experiment did not last out the year and the legitimate government was
reinstated.
On 3 June, the Indian Army launched an assault on the Golden Temple to
root out Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed acolytes. Operation
Bluestar traumatized Punjab, but what happened in October–November
rocked the entire nation. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh
bodyguards, and this was followed by Congress goons heaping retribution
on the Sikh community in the cities of northern India, principally Delhi,
killing thousands of innocent people.
Indira Gandhi’s martyrdom probably gave the Congress its breath of life
because her son Rajiv was able to ride a sympathy wave which converted
what was, arguably, a lost election, into a spectacular sweep that gave him a
majority such as no other prime minister had till then.
Through 1985, Rajiv sought to learn his job on the run even while
making peace in Punjab, Assam and Mizoram. There was little time for
Kashmir. There were other hurdles such as Arun Nehru, Rajiv’s cousin, who
had been appointed minister for internal security, and Mufti Mohammed
Sayeed, the chief of the state Congress party. The two were good friends.
While the former felt that Farooq ought to become chief minister on his
terms, the latter wanted the chief ministership for himself.
Things did not improve till Nehru was demoted and removed from his
powerful position. The first step was taken only in early 1986 when the
Shah ministry was dismissed. Then, Mufti was taken out of the reckoning
by being inducted into the Union Cabinet as minister for tourism.
But Farooq was not reinstated, Jagmohan was asked to establish
governor’s rule while Rajiv once again tried to persuade Farooq to contest
the assembly polls as an ally of the Congress. The package offer was sixty
per cent of the seats for the National Conference, forty per cent for the
Congress.
Farooq finally relented, even though it meant reversing his popular 1983
platform and losing credibility in the process. On 2 November, the Farooq–
Rajiv accord was announced and on 7 November 1986 the Assembly was
‘revived’. Farooq was elected chief minister of a coalition government of
the National Conference and the Congress, but on the same day the
Assembly was dissolved, as per the accord. Farooq’s erstwhile ally,
Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq was left high and dry. He had warned Farooq
against cosying up to New Delhi, but he stuck to his alliance and was given
two seats for the coming assembly polls.
On 21 April 1986, the United Muslim Front (UMF) was born under the
leadership of Maulana Abbas Ansari, combining various Islamic parties and
groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Ummat-e-
Islamia of Maulvi Qazi Nissar, also known as the Mirwaiz of southern
Kashmir, Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat, and other more militant elements who
wanted to overthrow Kashmir’s composite culture and replace it with the
now fashionable fundamentalist variety of Islam.
This grouping sought to channel the popular discontent of the people
against New Delhi and Farooq into support for an Islamic platform. They
were helped in the process not only by Kashmir’s economic backwardness
but the sharp rise of revivalist Hindus who were demanding the demolition
of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
 In September that year, Qazi Nissar defied Jagmohan’s order banning
sale of meat on Janmashtami, the birthday of Lord Krishna, by ritually
slaughtering a sheep. He was arrested and the UMF banned, but it was soon
replaced by the Muslim United Front (MUF). The Qazi, who was to be
gunned down by militants later, remained ambiguous about his commitment
to India. But there were others in the alliance, like Syed Ali Shah Geelani,
whose sympathies for Pakistan were not masked.
The National Conference–Congress electoral alliance swept the polls in
what people say was a rigged election. Despite enormous popular support,
manifested by thirty-one per cent of the votes, the MUF managed to win
only four seats, the rest going to the Congress–National Conference
alliance. The MUF received enormous public sympathy since most
observers believed that the polls had been rigged.
The rise of the religious right and the MUF should have rung alarm bells
in Delhi but it did not. The reason was that the Congress party had lost its
ideological moorings and secularism had become merely a slogan and a
posture.
In some form or the other, religion had played an important part in the
politics of Kashmir. To a considerable extent this was because in an Islamic
society it is always difficult to separate religion and politics. But another
reason was that Kashmir, especially the vale of Srinagar, had, prior to 1947,
been an overwhelmingly Muslim area, ruled by a Hindu king.
The seeds of orthodox Islamic politics were planted in the state in 1942,
with the founding of the Kashmir branch of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a year after
the organization had been founded by Abul Ala Maudoodi. The origins of
the organization go back to the reform efforts of the Islamic ulema or
teachers, spanning more than a century. However, while the mainstream,
banded under the Jamiat-ul-ulema Hind (organization of Islamic teachers of
India) formed part of the freedom movement, Maudoodi, erstwhile editor of
the Jamiat journal Al Jamaat, opposed both the nationalists and the pro-
Pakistan movement.
The Jamiat-ul-ulema Hind’s ideology was moored in the ideas of the
professors of South Asia’s most important Islamic seminary, the Dar-ul-
Uloom at Deoband in Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh. The
conservative Deobandis, led by Maulana Mehmood-ul-Hasan and his
disciple and colleague Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madni, had just before
World War I declared India to be a Dar-ul-Harb, calling on the faithful to
undertake a jihad against the British. But both had been influenced by the
national movement and advocated a united India where all communities
could live in peace. In 1945, a splinter group, Jamiat-ul-ulema Islam, split
and backed the cause of Pakistan. In 1947, confronted with Partition, the
Deoband theologians issued an edict, declaring that notwithstanding the
creation of Pakistan, India was a place where Muslims could live in peace,
terming it Dar-ul-Sulah.
But Maudoodi was not willing to accept this. He advocated the idea of
the Nizam-e-Mustafa, a system ruled the way he thought Prophet
Mohammed would have wanted, namely, through the rigorous application
of the tenets of the Koran. An opponent of national divisions, he envisioned
an entire world living in accordance with the Shariat and the Sunnah, so, in
his view, India had to be a Dar-ul-Harb, where Islam had to prevail through
jihad.
With Partition, the Jamaat split, Maudoodi migrated to Lahore and the
Indian branch came under the influence of the nationalist Deobandis. It
accepted and even lauded the secular ideal as a means of preserving
minority culture. It focused on education and social uplift of the
community. Though the Nizam- e-Mustafa remained its ideal, the means to
achieve it was not jihad but dawat, or preaching and persuasion.
The Pakistani branch headed by Maudoodi, on the other hand, became
active in what can be called Islamic politics, beginning in the 1950s with
the instigation of riots against the Ahmadiya community. It played an
important role in the campaign against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then in
supporting the military regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.
The Jammu and Kashmir branch of the Jamaat was set up at Shupian by
Maulvi Ghulam Ahmed Ahar and Syed Shahabuddin and others. From the
outset, it aligned itself with Maudoodi’s idea of creating a Nizam-e-Mustafa
in Kashmir. Through much of the past forty years, the Jamaat of Kashmir
has steadily built up its strength through a host of social and cultural
activities such as running schools or institutions for religious instruction. In
the 1970s, Arab money began to come in to back these activities which
rivalled, if not exceeded, the efforts of the state in the education sector.
Over time, it built up strong pockets of influence across the state, especially
in downtown Srinagar and the apple-growing area of Sopur.
Since the mid-1970s, its dominant political leader has been Syed Ali
Shah Geelani, who has made no bones about his support for the merger of
the state with Pakistan. This did not stop him from participating in the state
assembly elections and serving as a member of the Assembly in 1972, 1977
and 1987. The outfit and its youth wing Jamiat-e-Tulba, which was set up
by Sheikh Tajamul Islam and Dr Ayub Thukar in September 1977,
denounce any aspect of secularism and make it clear that they are against
India and for accession with Pakistan.
The Jamaat has not been as popular in the valley as it has hoped to be.
The reason for this is that Islam came to the valley through the influence of
the Sufis, whose tradition is disdained by the Islamic purists of the Jamaat.
In 1979 when Bhutto was hanged by Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime, there
were riots in the valley, focusing anger on the Jamaatis because of the
support that the Pakistan Jamiat-e-Islami gave Gen. Zia.
The Jamiat-e-Tulba formed the core of the Jamaat’s agitational politics in
the late 1970s and 1980s. Its leaders Islam and Dr Thukar did several spells
in jail, for agitating against the sale of liquor in the state and for the cricket
match fiasco.

The Youth Revolt

The battle between the Abdullahs and the Nehru–Gandhis was a conflict of
kings and princes, in which the people scarcely mattered. They carried on
the grind of daily existence and were expected to salaam the ruler, and
when needed, hail him. They provided the cannon fodder for mass
demonstrations and public protests, but they were strictly the hoi polloi. As
everywhere, they were in the main young, students, youth without jobs or
under-employed youth, mainly city-bred and educated.
It was this lot that had constituted Sheikh Abdullah’s massbase in the
1930s and 1940s and the National Conference’s People’s Militia in October
1947. They were the ones who took to the streets when Abdullah was
arrested, or when he came back free, riding in triumph through Srinagar. In
the 1950s and 1960s they were part of the Abdullah–inspired Plebiscite
Front led by Mirza Afzal Beg and the demonstrators in the crisis over the
lost Hazratbal relic in 1963.
The Holy Relic agitation led to the emergence of a number of youth
groups, the most prominent among them being the Students and Youth
League led by Abdul Rashid Kabuli and the Young Men’s League, affiliated
to the Plebiscite Front. However, when the Sheikh signed an accord with
the Government of India and disbanded the front, some of the more militant
members were stunned at what they saw as a betrayal.
But it was not only politically active leaders who sought the allegiance of
the youth. Pakistani intelligence services, which had begun planning in
1964 for Operation Gibraltar (the covert assault on Kashmir by Pakistani
irregulars that led to the Indo- Pakistan war of 1965), could not but have
seen them as an ideal pool of agents and saboteurs. But these were years
when the Indian intelligence network in the valley was alert and effective,
and more often than not, able to nip any subversive activity in the bud.
According to journalist Zafar Meraj, one of the first instances of
militancy exhibited by the youth in the state was in 1968 when a group
from the Gandhi Memorial College tried to steal rifles from the National
Cadet Crops armoury at Islamia College in Srinagar. This group and the Al
Fateh, an organization that came up in the late 1960s, were linked to the
Plebiscite Front. The group came to light following a bank robbery in 1971.
Some 250 persons, including its leaders Ghulam Rasul Zahgeer, Nazir
Ahmed Wani and Mohammed Altaf Khan, were arrested across the state
and sixteen were actually charged with sedition, with the indefatigable
Mirza Afzal Beg defending their case.
 Police officers were able to obtain through interrogation, the details of
the links and training that were provided to the forty- odd activists by
Pakistani officials across the border.
In jail the organization split in two, with Zahgeer leading the pro-
Plebiscite Front group and Wani a rival faction.
After the Abdullah–Indira Gandhi Accord, the Zahgeer faction was
rehabilitated with government jobs while the other faction became the
People’s League and its main platform became opposition to the accord.
Besides Wani, its members included Khan who took the alias Azam
Inquilabi, and Hamidullah Butt. In the 1970s, Shabbir Shah was the
president of its Anantnag district unit.
Another stream of activists, grouped around the Jammu and Kashmir
Liberation Front (JKLF), had its origins in the Plebiscite Front as well. In
1964, an Azad Kashmir branch of the outfit was established with Abdul
Khaliq Ansari, a Mirpuri, as its president and a retired major of the Azad
Kashmir Forces, Amanullah Khan, a resident of Baltistan, as its general
secretary. (He is not related to Amanullah Khan who is the current chairman
of his faction of the JKLF.)
The following year, on the eve of Operation Gibraltar, this group gave
birth to the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front. One of its
leading members, Mohammed Maqbool Butt, hailing from a village near
Tregham in Kupwara district, had a somewhat murky career, crossing the
ceasefire line frequently, and for a time working as a journalist in Peshawar.
Other members were Amanullah Khan, Dr Farooq Haidar, Latif Khan and
Hashim Qureshi.
After the failure of Operation Gibraltar, the group scattered, and Khan
and Qureshi went abroad to live in Britain, supported by the influential
Mirpuri community, running what was now the JKLF.
Butt returned to the valley and in 1968, he was arrested for the murder of
a state Central Intelligence Department officer, Amar Chand. He was tried
and given the death sentence, but he managed to escape and once again
crossed the ceasefire line (CFL) to Pakistan.
 Butt had a long and eventful stay in Pakistan. He was involved in another
enigmatic affair—the hijack of the Indian Airlines aircraft Ganga in 1971
by Hashim and Altaf Qureshi (they were not related). This event was
ostensibly orchestrated by Kashmiri nationalists owing allegiance to Butt,
Haidar and their Front, but it helped India justify a ban on air traffic
between West and East Pakistan in the crucial months leading up to the war
for the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.
In the 1980s, with Maqbool Butt in Delhi’s Tihar jail, the JKLF’s
leadership was in the hands of a small dedicated band led by Amanullah
Khan, Hashim Qureshi in Europe and Dr Farooq Haidar and Mohammed
Muzaffar, who operated from Azad Kashmir. It was not an easy existence,
and with Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference going strong, it
appeared that they were pursuing the proverbial will-o’-the-wisp. Some
lived off doles from the Azad Kashmir government, others off donations
from the influential Mirpuri Kashmiri community in the UK. Some, though
not all, were on the payrolls of intelligence agencies, in most cases
Pakistan’s, but in some important instances, India’s.
On 3 February 1984 some of these activists, calling themselves the
‘Kashmir Liberation Army’ (KLA), kidnapped Ravindra Mhatre, a mid-
level Indian diplomat in Birmingham. They demanded one million pounds
sterling and the release of a number of political activists including Maqbool
Butt. The latter had been re-arrested in 1976 for a bank robbery and retried
for his earlier crime, the murder of the CID officer, a process that began in
1981. His case had gone up the judicial system and at the time he was on
death row, awaiting confirmation of the sentence after the failure of all his
appeals.
Without waiting for a reply, Mhatre was killed and his body discovered
on 6 February. Five days later, on 11 February, the Indian authorities
completed all the legal formalities and executed Maqbool Butt. The alacrity
with which the execution took place was a clear message that New Delhi
saw this as a retaliation for the KLA or JKLF’s crime.
With Maqbool Butt’s execution, the situation went from bad. to worse.
Blasts occurred in Anantnag, Kashmir University, Srinagar, the Sopur bus
stand and at the house of N.K. Ganjoo, the judge who had originally
sentenced Butt to death. According to Governor Jagmohan, the blasts were
suspected to be the handiwork of Shabbir Shah’s People’s League.

By 1980, the failure of the state had become manifest in all areas: economic
development, literacy, public health and politics. But the situation was no
different elsewhere. No state in the Union was favoured, and even those
which had done relatively well, like Punjab, felt that they had been
discriminated against. Not surprisingly, while the older generation had by
now got used to the situation, the younger had not, and was ready to fight
and protest.
For the youth of Srinagar, the grass appeared greener on the other side of
the Line of Control. In contrast to the ostensibly weak and self-serving
leaders in India, they saw the moustachioed Zia-ul-Haq manfully leading
the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s support for
Khalistani extremists and such episodes as the 1986–87 crisis over Exercise
Brasstacks by the Indian Army seemed to show the Pakistani leaders’
toughness.
The radicalization of the Islamists led to the founding of groups like the
Ansar-ul-Islam in mid-1987. Among its founders was Ali Mohammed Dar,
an assistant sub-inspector of the J & K Police, whose influence led his
cousin, Mohammed Ahsan Dar, a teacher in a school run by the Faleh-e-
Aam Trust, to set up the group. Among its members were Hilal Ahmed Mir,
who later took the name Nasir-ul-Islam, Mohammed Ramzan Sofi aka Gen.
Abdullah and Ghulam Rasool Shah alias Imran Rahi.
The elections of 1987 appeared to be a watershed of sorts for those who
had been influenced by the Islamists. They went into elections with great
hopes, backing the MUF. Several of the protagonists who later showed up
as militants cut their teeth in these elections. Maulvi Mohammed Yusuf
Shah, the Jamaat-e- Islami candidate who lost in a controversial race from
Amirakadal constituency in Srinagar, was later to become Syed Salahuddin,
the supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen. One of his counting
agents, Mohammed Yasin Malik, went on to command the JKLF. Another
activist, Ejaz Dar, who was shot dead in late 1988 while attempting to gun
down Kashmir police officer A.M. Watali, was also a counting agent for
Salahuddin, and he had been reportedly roughed up by goons owing
allegiance to the National Conference.
Much has been said about how the rigged elections of 1987 transformed
the situation. As with elections in the rest of India, and perhaps a little more
so, there may have been booths in individual constituencies where rigging
occurred. But it is unlikely that it happened across the board. Indeed, the
outcome of almost all the constituencies indicated that the National
Conference got substantially lesser number of votes as compared to the
previous elections. However, it got more than its opponents.
But, in politics as indeed in life, what matters often are perceptions rather
than the truth. Most of the young people who had participated in electoral
politics for the first time had gone in, as most candidates do, convinced of
their victory. The outcome was naturally disappointing, and having taken up
the charge of rigging, they convinced themselves that it had been the major
factor in their defeat, not the National Conference’s well-oiled election
machinery.
The events in the valley from 1983 to 1987 could not but have been
watched with great interest across the border in Pakistan. Though Gen. Zia
and his colleagues were preoccupied with bringing the war in Afghanistan
to a successful conclusion and fabricating a nuclear device, there could be
little doubt that for Zia and Pakistan, possession of Kashmir was the major
national goal.
There is sufficient evidence to show that through the early 1980s,
Pakistan had begun recruitment and organization of the valley’s Kashmiris
to destabilize the state. But despite the relative ease of trans-border
movement, this activity was nowhere near as substantial as that of the Sikh
terrorists in Punjab. However, the turmoil of 1987 looked promising. With
the Soviets on the defensive in Afghanistan, the American alliance restored,
and a nuclear capability in place, Islamabad now contemplated another
attempt to wrest Kashmir from India.
 A biography of former ISI chief Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rehman, titled Fateh
(Victory), and written by Haroon Rashid, mentions that the author of the
‘liberation plan’ was Gen. Rehman himself. According to the book, the
planning for the operation was begun in 1984, and it was to climax in a
1991 uprising. Maulana Sadruddin, the amir or leader of the Kashmir
Jamaat, met Zia-ul- Haq and was asked to launch an agitation against Indian
rule. On the other hand, in an article in the Azad Kashmir publication,
Jehad-e-Kashmir, in December 1992, Maulana Abdul Bari, who became the
amir of the Azad Kashmir Jamaat, declared that his outfit, with
encouragement from Gen. Zia played a major role in fostering militancy in
the state. He said that before a clandestine visit to the valley in 1980, he met
the Pakistani president and Khawaja Masroor Hassan, the director of the
Pakistani Intelligence Bureau, and held talks with them.
In the valley, he met Ayub Thukar, Maulana Syed Masoodi, Maulvi
Farooq, Mirza Afzal Beg and other leaders, but, according to Bari, they
were not interested in azadi. Then, he had a secret meeting at Ajas village,
close to Srinagar, with the then amir of the valley Jamaat-e-lslami, Maulana
Sadruddin, and discussed various ideas for an armed liberation movement.
However, the next day he was arrested and deported via Amritsar.
Actually the truth was somewhat different: Maulana Sadruddin did visit
Pakistan in 1983 and held talks with Gen. Zia and Gen. Akhtar. But he
demurred in implementing a plan that required the Jamaat to send people to
Azad Kashmir for training. According to Indian intelligence reports, the
Maulana made it clear that he was not prepared to let Kashmiris die for the
sake of merging the state with Pakistan. Maulana Abdul Bari’s is probably a
self- serving account, coming as it does in a year the Hizbul Mujahideen,
the Jamaat’s tanzeem or militant arm, was riding high. Actually, the
Pakistanis soon realized that the Islamists had very little appeal in the valley
and the only viable vehicle for rebellion had to be the pro-independence
JKLF. According to Rashid, Gen. Rehman and his colleagues realized that
unlike Afghanistan, the ISI would not be able to get too many people to
train, so a different plan was made, which involved training small groups of
leaders who would, in turn, train the others back in the valley.
 The ISI, steeled by the Afghan war, was not the callow military
intelligence unit which had sent in hundreds of trained personnel across to
an unprepared Kashmir in the August of 1965. Systematic planning was
undertaken from 1984 onwards to locate, train and equip all those against
Indian rule, and to allow the situation in Kashmir to ripen so that the fruit
would fall of its own accord into Pakistani laps. Generals Zia and Rehman
had no intention of precipitating things in the valley even while Soviet
forces remained in Afghanistan and the danger of a joint Indo-Soviet pincer
existed.
Pakistani planners realized that given Kashmir’s singular character, a
lesson painfully learnt in 1965, it would be better to use the JKLF, rather
than obviously pro-Pakistan elements like the Jamaat. More important,
international support for Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan would be
acceptable only if it was clearly demonstrated that Indian rule had been
loosened by a ‘national liberation’ struggle, and accession had come about
through the act of a ‘revolutionary’ or ‘national’ movement thereafter.
Towards this end, in May–June 1984, the ISI called the JKLF organizing
committee, consisting of Hashim Qureshi, Z.H. Ansari, Dr Farooq Haidar
and Rashid Hasrat for a series of meetings. Qureshi, the chairman of the
committee, and Ansari insistently argued that the independence of Kashmir
was the only cause they would support. Qureshi penned the account of the
meeting in the Srinagar weekly Chattan, which was later translated into
English by O.N. Dhar in the Statesman.
According to Qureshi, ‘We talked and held discussions for three months
and just as we had begun to think that the Pakistani military negotiators
were perhaps beginning to appreciate our viewpoint, they had a surprise in
store for us. In the final round top officials told us in clear terms that all that
we the (JKLF) ought to concern ourselves with should be to get young men
from across the border and hand them over to any of our military posts.
These young men, we were told, would be taken care of by the military,
trained by it and sent back.’ Qureshi continued, ‘All four of us in the
negotiating committee, namely, myself, Dr Haidar, Rashid Hasrat, and Z.H.
Ansari, felt infuriated and told the military officer in no uncertain terms that
we are not agents but revolutionaries. We cannot be your agents and nor can
we fetch agents for you.’
The Pakistanis were, however, not in a hurry. Soon, opportunity came
their way in the form of Amanullah Khan who had been living in exile in
Britain. Indian government pressure had failed to persuade the British
government to revoke his visa in the wake of the Mhatre killing. He was
arrested and tried under the Explosives Act of 1983, though he was
acquitted a year later in September 1986. Then, in typical Solomonic style,
the British deported him to Pakistan three months later.
Amanullah arrived in Pakistan on 15 December 1986 with few options
but to accept whatever the Pakistanis had on offer. The ISI handled the
opportunity with great skill. They did not insist that he serve their plan, but
provided assistance to him to first capture the JKLF organization. He
challenged Hashim Qureshi in the election to the post of chairman and was
helped by the ISI to defeat him. Qureshi later said that after this, the
Pakistani authorities harassed him to the point where he left Pakistan and
took refuge in Amsterdam. He also charged that the other members of the
committee later compromised with the Pakistani authorities and, as was
evident from events, collaborated with them as well.
For his part, Khan felt that he had little option but to accept the Pakistani
offer, which offered a chance that the Kashmiris would be able to make a
bid for independence. As Khan told Zahid Hussain of Newsline, a monthly
magazine of Karachi, ‘. . . we actually started political planning in 1986 and
continued till the end of 1987 . . . and it began in July 1988’. The official
date of the uprising is 31 July 1988. This is the date that marks the Pakistani
‘capture’ of the Kashmiri azadi movement spanning over thirty years.
Just as Pakistan had been the conduit of the covert American war against
the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Azad Kashmir government became the
vehicle of planned insurgency in India. Support of the insurgency by Azad
Kashmir, the rump of the former Jammu and Kashmir state, vested it with
credibility as well as a ‘plausible deniability’ of Pakistan’s involvement.
Since 1985, the Pakistani government began openly appropriating money
for the ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. While Pakistani leaders claimed that they
offered moral and political support to the uprising, Azad Kashmir leaders
like Sardar Mohammed Abdul Qayoom Khan, Sardar Sikandar Hayat Khan,
Mumtaz Rathore, Capt. (retd.) Mohammed Sarfraz Khan and others made it
clear that their support for the ‘freedom struggle’ was not confined to just
words.
The role of the government was to organize a system to disburse money
to the JKLF and other militant groups coming in. They also provided
buildings and other infrastructure required for the training. The actual
process of welcoming, processing, training, paying and sending back the
militants was undertaken by the JKLF’s personnel, principally vice-
chairman Farooq Haidar, Rashid Hasrat and Raja Muzaffar.
Initially, the cautious Pakistanis had Azad Kashmir personnel handle
every aspect of the valley’s Kashmiri rebellion, using Liberation Cell 202
and later the so-called Refugee Management Cell. However, the unexpected
scale of the enterprise’s success compelled them to intervene to take charge
of the entire affair.
While every ISI chief, beginning with Gen. Akhtar, has been involved in
the Kashmir operation, the main role has been played by three brigadiers:
Farooq Ahmad, who is also known as ‘Numan’, Mohammed Salim Khan
and Tariq alias Mustafa.
Numan is assisted by a number of sections: Col. Mehrajuddin aka Col.
Assad, apparently of Kashmiri origin, in charge of the political cell, and
Col. Murtaza Gilani, handling, training and cross-border operations from
Kotli towards Jammu. Col. Riaz and later Col. Salim handled launching
command or the section which undertakes difficult infiltration jobs, with the
help of Maj. Tariq, Maj. Baloch, Maj. Mir and Maj. Aftab. Assad’s name
cropped up repeatedly in accounts of militants who went across the border
in 1988 as the person who received them and took them for training to the
Illaqa-e-Gair camp.
All these names may be real or assumed. Over eight years, personnel
have changed. Some like Col. Riaz alias Sumail, subsequently served a stint
as a military attache to the Pakistan embassy in Saudi Arabia; others
undoubtedly served in similar assignments elsewhere. Some are involved in
supervising the activities of Hizbul Mujahideen or Harkat-ul-Ansar; others
are responsible for special hit squads which operate from within these
groups on direct orders from the ISI. Yet others send in terrorist squads
across the LoC for specific missions.
Over the years, Indian intelligence has identified some five brigadiers
and eleven colonels working out of the ISI headquarters in operations
connected with India. In addition, there have been nine officers involved in
training militants, and another twenty field officers in Muzaffarabad and
other points of infiltration.
In the field, the ISI also maintains an extensive presence of camp
instructors, launch specialists and counter-intelligence agents. The division
of responsibility is territorial with officers of the rank of major posted at the
LoC and more senior officers at Muzaffarabad, Sialkot, Kotli and
Athmuqam and Kel.
Over time, the ISI has become more visible in the camps. From 1990
itself, the fiction of a Kashmiri freedom struggle ended when the ISI
abandoned the JKLF and began backing only pro-Pakistan parties. As the
Indian response intensified, the ISI also stepped up the quality of the arms
being supplied and the training provided. According to the authoritative
Jane’s Intelligence Review, 1989–90 were the years of the AK-47
Kalashnikov (actually, the Chinese copy called Type 56) and the pistol,
again a Chinese copy of the famous Soviet Tokarev. In 1990, large numbers
of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the RPG-7 (Chinese Type 69), began
to show up as well as the Chinese stick grenades, at the same time when
such grenades found their way to the Afghan mujahideen.
In 1992–93, the Soviet RPD light machine-gun came in along with the
heavier and more effective RPK and, by 1994, the PK or Pika machine-gun.
Around this time, the Soviet-made Dragunov sniper rifle, the 5.54mm AK-
74 assault rifle, the AKR Krinkov submachine gun and the rifle-mounted
BGS-15 40-mm grenade launchers showed up.
Simultaneously, training is also provided in the use of explosive devices:
Maj. Ibrahim, reportedly trained in the US, taught the science of making
what were called improvised explosive devices. Some militants have been
taught the use of ‘sophisticated explosive devices’, though on occasions
these were fabricated in Pakistan and sent across.
Another important element in the training has been the use of wireless
communication such as radio sets, encrypting techniques and radio security.
Equipment has ranged from the common walkie-talkies to the sophisticated
frequency-hopping and burst- transmission radios.
Maj. Abbasi and Maj. Raja Sarwar Khan are among those who taught
militants the computer-based data mode system for wireless
communications.
An instructor, Maj. Akhtar, provided specialized training in anti-aircraft
operations. Undoubtedly, some of the mehmaan mujahideen, guest militants
or mercenaries, have had experience in such operations in Afghanistan, but
so far the militants have mounted no serious challenge to Indian aviation
activities in the valley. Analysts have pointed out that unlike Afghanistan,
the mujahideen were not able to use the so-called stand-off weapons such as
multi-barrel rocket launchers, to engage Indian forces from a distance. This
is due to the peculiarities of the situation where the only infiltration possible
is by a person on foot, often through extremely difficult terrain which also
limits the volume of what can be brought in. At one point some obsolete
60mm mortars were sneaked into the valley, but were seized just before an
attack was to be launched on the Avantipur airfield. There is another
political calculation—if the level of weaponry provided begins hurting
India, it could lead to a cross-border response touching off a larger conflict.
After 1990, while Indian authorities were keen to prevent any movement
across the LoC, Pakistan was interested in all traffic, except that of Indian
intelligence agents. This required coordination between the Pakistani field
intelligence units of the ISI and the militant groups. People leaving the
valley were provided coded slips which they presented at the first Pakistani
Army post they came to after crossing the LoC. They were then taken to
transit camps and debriefed for any casual tactical intelligence which could
be of interest to the Pakistan Army. Thereafter, they were turned over to
their respective groups.
 The controversial elections of 1987 were followed by a wave of police
searches and arrests of leaders of militant protests in the valley. Having
failed to achieve their objective through the ballot box, many youth sought
other means across the LoC. Among them was Abdul Hamid Sheikh who
was about twenty-one years old when he went across the LoC through the
Kupwara district in February 1988.
He was taken to an ISI training centre and taught how to use an AK-47
and given the basic drill in throwing grenades. He returned to the valley in
April and began organizing a small group, along with Mohammed Yasin
Malik, to carry out subversive activities in the valley. The key members of
the group—Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Ahmed Mir ‘Nalqa’
and Yasin Malik—became known as the HAJY group from the acronym
created by the first letters of their names. Malik first went across the LoC in
May and he too was trained to use a gun. He returned the following month.
In the meantime, another group consisting of Abdul Ahad Waza, owing
allegiance to the People’s Conference, and Farooq Ahmed Malik had been
across to Pakistan to procure weapons and explosives in June and was
responsible for the blast at the Srinagar Telegraph office on 31 July 1988
marking the formal onset, according to the JKLF, of the Kashmiri uprising.
The blasts touched off a police operation that led to even more militants
crossing the border for training and sanctuary. Among those who went in
August were Ashfaq Majid Wani and Mohammed Abdullah Bangroo, who
were received by Col. ‘Assad’ of the ISI. The two stayed in Pakistan for
nearly a year. They were given the usual ten-day training to start with and
later, a special commando course.
Mustaq Ahmed Zargar, alias Latrum, offers perhaps a typical profile of a
militant. He came from a middle-class family residing in Gani mohalla near
the Jama Masjid in Srinagar. His father was a goldsmith who later ran a
photo studio. After finishing high school, Latrum began his own craft shop
for moulding and polishing copper and brass vessels at Naidakadal, in the
heart of Srinagar.
Latrum’s career as a militant began one day in 1984 when he was
arrested by the police on some frivolous charge and jailed for a short time.
In jail, he met People’s League activists Zahoor Ahmed Shaikh and
Mukhtiar Ahmed Sofi, who convinced him that his plight was part of a
wider Indian repression in Kashmir. Four years later, on 1 August 1988, he
met Shaikh at a shop in Lal Chowk. Latrum was by now even more of a
supporter of war against India, and it did not take Shaikh long to convince
him to cross the border for weapons’ training. Ten days later, accompanied
by a friend, Irfan-ul-Hassan, and Zahoor Shaikh, Latrum set off from the
Batmaloo bus stand for Kupwara and from there to Tregham.
Here they were put up in a safe house, owned by Ghulam Nabi Butt,
brother of the luckless Maqbool Butt. Next morning, while Shaikh returned
to Srinagar, the other two began their arduous trek, accompanied by a guide.
It took them the rest of the day and the whole night to cross the LoC and
reach Athmuqam.
From there, they were taken by car to Raja Muzaffar’s house in
Muzaffarabad, where they spent the night. On that very day, they were
asked to take the pledge in Kashmiri and Urdu: ‘Both India and Pakistan are
our enemy. We have to make Kashmir independent and achieve the right of
self-determination.’
The following day, they left in a bus accompanied by a minder for Dr
Farooq Haidar’s house in Rawalpindi. Here they met Amanullah Khan and
the fourth member of the Pakistan- based JKLF leadership group, Rashid
Hasrat. Khan delivered his motivational talk: Kashmir must be independent
and that he had high expectations from the youth of the valley.
Next day, the ubiquitous Col. Assad arrived, driving a jeep, and took
Latrum and Irfan to the Illaqa-e-Gair camp, some seven hours away. The
camp was essentially a protected area with three tents, of which one was a
kitchen. An instructor, ‘Aziz’, who kept an eye on his wards, lived in one
tent and the two trainees stayed in the other. Another instructor, ‘Rashid’,
lived elsewhere, but was at the camp through the day. For the first five days,
‘Aziz’ and two other instructors taught the two the basics of AK- 47s, light
machine-guns, pistols, how to disassemble and assemble them and how to
lob grenades and lay explosives. The next three days there were sessions in
target practice in which each fired thirty rounds of a pistol, 550 rounds of an
AK-47, and threw two grenades.
After the conclusion of this training, the two went back to Raja
Muzzaffar for a briefing and a pep talk, and later to Athmuqam for return on
August 28, through the same route that they had come, involving an
arduous trek across the LoC to Rashanpora in Kupwara district. Their
weapons were taken away by their guide at this point and deposited with
Ghulam Nabi Butt at Tregham, to be collected later. Eighteen days had
elapsed since they had left.
In his last briefing, Latrum was instructed to keep his weapons safely
hidden away and resume his normal activity in Srinagar. Their job was not
to undertake armed action at this stage, but to recruit youngsters to create a
reserve of trained mujahideen that would fight the jihad in a coordinated
fashion when the time came.
Three days after his arrival, Latrum went to Tregham to ask Ghulam Nabi
Butt for the weapons. He was told to go back and wait for two days and
then meet Butt at the Batmaloo bus stand. He did so, and the weapons, two
AK-47 rifles and eight magazines wrapped in a gunny sack, were handed
over to him.
Mohammed Yasin Bhat of Nagin Bagh, Hazratbal, was born in a poor
family and could not go to school. Instead, he began helping his family by
working as a salesman in Gulshan Carpets in Srinagar. Later, he began to
travel to Bombay and other cities selling shawls.
In the summer of 1984, he met Azam Inquilabi, chief of the Mahaz-e-
Azadi (MeA), who recruited him as a fund-raiser for his outfit. At the time,
the MeA was the more active outfit in the valley, and Inquilabi a respectable
name. However, a couple of years later the JKLF made its appearance in the
valley, and a friend of his, Ashfaq Majid Wani, became its Srinagar chief
and Bhat switched his allegiance.
In December 1988, Bhat along with Wani and Noor Mohammed Kalwal
went across the LoC via the Kupwara area with the help of Yusuf, a guide
from Kupwara, and two others who had come from across the border from
Athmuqam. During their four-month stay, mainly in Muzaffarabad, they did
visit Rawalpindi and met Dr Haidar and Amanullah Khan, who gave them
pep talks and encouraged them to recruit more people for the ‘liberation’
struggle.
Wani had been there earlier and had been trained in the use of firearms.
Now, Bhat and Azam Inquilabi, who had come separately, were taken to the
Illaqa-e-Gair camp and given ten days’ training in the use of arms and
lobbing grenades. The same ‘Aziz’ and ‘Rashid’ trained them as they had
taught the other group.
The trio—Bhat, Inquilabi and Kalwal—returned to the valley in April
1989, crossing the LoC in the Poonch sector, and thereafter going to Jammu
and catching a bus for Srinagar. Each was armed with a pistol, six grenades
and some explosives. Bhat was appointed area commander of downtown
Srinagar and asked to begin working for his outfit. Somehow the police was
quickly on his heels but he escaped to Bombay and from there to Goa,
where ‘a friend of a friend’ called Gracy helped him with money to pay his
way to return home.
At this time, in 1988, the JKLF was clearly running the show. Even
Jamaat activists went through the JKLF mill. For example, Manzoor Ahmed
Malik of Dolipora in Kupwara district, a Jamaat activist, crossed the LoC
on 1 May 1988 and met Raja Muzaffar and Amanullah Khan in
Muzzafarabad before being taken to a training centre and returning with
arms and propaganda material. In August, he went across again, staying a
while in the Dudhnial post. But while returning, he was arrested.
Till the actual outbreak of the rebellion, the Indian intelligence and the
police seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was happening. In fact, in
October 1988, Irfan, Latrum’s friend, had motivated two youngsters to go
across the LoC. He took them to Tregham to hand them over to Ghulam
Nabi Butt. However, while making the crossing, these boys were arrested
by the Army and the interrogation provided leads to Butt who, too, was
arrested. The police now came looking for Irfan and Latrum in Srinagar, but
they had gone underground. It was around this time that the police began
looking for Yasin Malik, Hamid Sheikh, Javed Ahmed Mir, Ashfaq Majid
Wani and others on their list who, they knew, had been trained by the
Pakistanis. Evidence that the police knew what was happening also came
from the raids in Bombay in pursuit of Bhat. The police succeeded in
arresting Farooq Malik and Waza who had organized the bomb blasts in
July 1988.
A strong leader and effective governance could have made a difference,
but Farooq Abdullah had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. His quirky
style of governance, combined with factious quarrels within his party and
between the National Conference’s coalition partner, the Congress, led to a
drift. But Farooq alone could not be blamed. All of India appeared to be
drifting towards a state of crisis. The Bofors corruption case paralysed the
Rajiv Gandhi government, and the Sri Lankan adventure distracted it
from focusing on internal matters. And even if it wanted to, issues like
Punjab were nearer home to New Delhi and more pressing.
There was a qualitative shift in the nature of violence in the second half
of 1988 when, for the first time in recent years, specific attacks, six to be
precise, were, reported on security forces and instances of explosions and
arson went up to a total of 142 for the year. On 15 August, the anniversary
of India’s independence, there were clashes between the police and
demonstrators in the downtown areas of Srinagar, resulting in injuries to
both the police and the protestors.
Two days later, the crowds were out again, this time protesting against
the death of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and ISI chief Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rehman in
the mysterious aircrash at Bhawalpur in Pakistan. So intense were the
feelings that the next day, the police had to resort to firing, killing four
demonstrators and instituting shoot-at-sight orders.
The most dramatic event occurred on 18 September 1988 when Ali
Mohammed Watali, DIG (Kashmir range), was attacked. Watali had been
the police officer responsible for recovering the first batch of AK-47s from
militants earlier that year. As a result of the attack, police pressure increased
dramatically. Three of the assailants, Hamid Sheikh, Maqbool Ilahi and
Hilal Beg, crossed the LoC and took shelter in Pakistan. Ahsan Dar, who
had returned after training in June, was arrested but managed to escape in
March 1989 from the hospital where he was being treated for injuries. Eijaz
Ahmed Dar was killed in the crossfire outside Watali’s house. Dar became
the first martyr of the rebellion. Thereafter, 18 September, the day he died,
became yet another occasion for protests.
By early 1989, the Kashmir pot was boiling for all to see. The year began
with serious communal clashes in Jammu on 13 January, requiring the
Army to be called Out. Beginning with the routine protest on Republic Day
on 26 January, tension snowballed with demonstrations marking the
Maqbool Butt anniversary on 11 February, called by the JKLF, the People’s
League and Abdul Ghani Lone’s People’s Conference. The very next day
came the unexpected flashpoint—Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman
Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, that had, in fact, been published in mid-1988.
Though the Government of India was quick to ban the book, protests
erupted, across Kashmir, and the next two weeks saw clashes between the
police and the demonstrators, with several persons being shot dead in police
firing. Later that year, the passing away of the Imam itself was to become
yet another occasion for protest.
In view of Zia and Rehman’s death and the ‘well developed’ situation in
the state, Pakistan took the decision of stepping up the movement’s tempo.
A council of war was held sometime in March–April 1989. The top valley-
based leaders of the JKLF, the HAJY group, met their Azad Kashmir
counterparts and ISI officials.
In early April, the JKLF group decided to raise their profile in Srinagar
and disprove charges made by the National Conference activists that they
were Congress agents. The forum chosen for action was the Friday namaz
at the Jama Masjid, where on any similar occasion 30–40,000 people
gather. As soon as Maulvi Farooq finished the prayers, the JKLF boys
dispersed amongst the crowd, and raised slogans—Islam zindabad and Hum
chahten hein azadi, azadi. Holding their AK-47s aloft, they told the crowd
that they would prove that they were not Congress agents. The excited mob
followed them to a point near the Khanyar police station and the militants
opened fire on the building. The police returned the fire, and the militants
made their escape in the resulting melée.
 The same day, the same group with 200 followers went near the
Nowhatta police station and did the same thing. They were not aiming at
any policeman, but at the station building, the symbol of Indian rule.
On April 4, following the arrest of Ghulam Mohammed Shah, father of
Shabbir and Mohammed Syed, the MLA, there was tension in Anantnag.
But while in police custody, he suffered a cerebral stroke and died. This
action led to an explosion of anger in Anantnag. State cabinet minister P.L.
Handoo’s house was set on fire and the rioters torched some other public
buildings, compelling the authorities to call out the Army.
In just one week in May, according to Governor Jagmohan, there were
fourteen bomb blasts and six cases of firing, killing four persons. There was
an attack on a tourist bus returning from Gulmarg, a clear sign that things
were indeed poised on the brink. There was also a four-day bandh called by
the People’s League and the JKLF, which saw clashes between the police
and the youth owing allegiance to these groups.
Jagmohan’s term came to a close on 11 July and on that day, Gen. K.V.
Krishna Rao, the former chief of Army staff who had been appointed
governor, took the oath of office. Rao, a former governor of the troubled
Manipur state in the North-East, was seen as a hardline solution to the
state’s drift towards anarchy.
But the militants’ answer came two days later. Early morning on 13 July
1989, as a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) bus was changing over
personnel on duty, it came under sustained firing, resulting in the death of
two constables and serious injuries to ten. Four innocent passers-by lost
their lives as well. The JKLF said a few days later that it had carried out the
attack and would carry out more in the future.
As a result of this action, the police decided to carry out a major search
operation across the city. On 15–16 July, curfew was imposed so that the
police could carry out the sweep. It was in one of these searches that Irfan-
ul-Hassan was arrested, and the two rifles that he and Latrum had got were
seized. The militants retaliated with bomb blasts in the Magarbal area and
in Karan Nagar, and called for bandhs against police excesses.
 To add to Farooq’s headaches, his Congress allies were playing up. In
April he reshuffled his Cabinet to increase the Congress representation.
Ghulam Rasool Kar was one of the new appointees. But this only upset
Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, who quit the party and defected to the Janata
Dal.
The tempo of protests quickened in August, when Pakistan’s
Independence Day on 14th August was celebrated with fervour, even as a
complete strike greeted India’s Independence anniversary the following day,
which was extended to a blackout that night. There were several bomb
blasts to mark 15 August and in the clashes with police over sixty persons
were injured. Since Zia’s death anniversary was around the corner, the
militants called for continuous bandhs lasting till 17 August. On that day, to
mark the event they hijacked a bus, emptied it of passengers and blew it up.
A few days later, on 21 August, Mohammed Yusuf Halwai, a block
president of the National Conference from Zainakadal, was gunned down in
broad daylight by masked militants on motor cycles, while walking on the
road at Kalashpora. He lay bleeding slowly to death on the pavement, but
no one dared to help him or take him to hospital. On his body, the militants
had left a cloth with the words KLF emblazoned on it.
On the 8 September anniversary of Sheikh Abdullah’s death, the shift in
the paradigm in the valley was apparent for all to see. While the National
Conference celebrated with a meeting at the heavily guarded mausoleum of
the Sheikh near Hazratbal, the militants were celebrating it as a day of
deliverance. There was a near-total strike in Srinagar and other towns of the
valley, and effigies of the late Lion of Kashmir were burnt. That night there
was a blackout as people refused to turn on the lights. In the face of the
paralysis of the state administration, the success of each attack or
demonstration or hartal was viewed as a victory, which, in a sense, it was.
Six days later, as Tika Lal Taploo, the fifty-eight-year-old advocate who
was a leader of the Kashmir unit of the BJP, was coming out of his house in
Chinkara Mohalla of Srinagar, two young men approached him, shot him
dead and sauntered away. The killers had studied his routine and knew
when he would be walking from his home to the bus stop. A press note,
issued later, declared: ‘We will kill all those who say that Jammu and
Kashmir’s accession to India is irrevocable.’
The crescendo of violence did not seem to let up. The anniversary of the
‘martyrdom’ of Eijaz Dar on 18 September became an occasion for a burst
of activity by the JKLF. At Nawakadal, two grenades were thrown on the
police, resulting in injuries to ten personnel. All markets remained closed,
and prayers were recited in his memory in mosques. Violence also broke
out between the police and protestors in several other Srinagar localities.
When the government was finally goaded into acting, it succeeded on 27
September in arresting Shabbir Ahmad Shah near Ramban across the
Banihal with the help of central intelligence agencies. The valley erupted.
Besides a total bandh in Srinagar and other major towns, a number of public
buildings were torched. Five persons died in police firing and several were
injured.
Fear paralysed the administration. Government officials, including the
district magistrates of Srinagar and Anantnag, refused to sign Shabbir
Ahmad Shah’s warrant of detention. According to Jagmohan, the state’s
advocate general refused to appear in court to represent the state. Fear had
become all pervasive.
On 4 November, in an act that symbolized the erosion, if not elimination,
of the Indian ability to govern the valley, N.K. Ganjoo, a retired sessions
judge who had sentenced Maqbool Butt to death, was shot by three
terrorists in the Hari Singh High Street, a busy road in the Civil Lines of the
city.
In November 1989, general elections were held across the country. They
took place in a climate of turmoil relating to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s
call for a shilanyas (foundation laying) ceremony for a temple for Lord
Rama to be built at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. In the Muslim-
dominated valley, it could not but have added to the sense of alienation
from the rest of the country. From jail, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, who had been
elected chairman of the People’s League after the expulsion of Farooq
Rehmani, gave a call for the boycott of elections in the valley, which was
supported by all secessionist outfits, especially the JKLF.
 To enforce the boycott, the JKLF planted a bomb in a state roadways
passenger bus on 16 November. The explosion, as the bus was entering
Shupian, injured twenty-four persons, five seriously. Initial claims were that
the bus was being used to transport troops. The same day, another blast was
set off in a PWD office in the Chadoora locality of Srinagar. Both were part
of the anti-election campaign.
So tense was the situation that the Congress and the National Conference
were unable even to campaign. A piquant situation arose when Mohammed
Shafi Butt of the National Conference was declared elected unopposed as
no one dared to contest the polls. In the run-up to the elections, there were
bomb blasts across the state, one in Mujahid Manzil, the headquarters of the
National Conference in Srinagar.
Militants ordered a general strike on polling day, 22 November, and a
blackout at night. Just five votes were cast in all of Sopur, the hometown of
Ghulam Rasool Kar, the Congress party chief and a member of the state
Cabinet. Not a single vote was cast in Baramula. The situation in other
centres was no different; the total polling for the Baramula constituency,
from where Saifuddin Soz was elected, was estimated to be about one per
cent. Attacks on police personnel were stepped up.
Any close observer could have foretold the outcome of the poll in the
valley’s constituencies though there were not too many who could have
predicted the extent of support that the boycott had commanded. What may
not have been easily forecast was the mixed outcome of the election
nationally. While the Rajiv Gandhi government that had so wilfully ignored
the Kashmir situation was defeated, he was succeeded by a weak Janata Dal
government headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, supported by the leftist
bloc and the BJP.
The new government was inherently unstable, not just because it was
supported by two opposing political groups. Its biggest problems were the
individual egos and ambitions of its leaders, who lacked experience of
governance and were soon swept up in a tide of powerful political forces
that generated enormous strains in the country.
 Kashmir was affected in several ways. First, amid the political turmoil in
Delhi, Kashmir was ignored or used as a political football. The changes in
central leadership were reflected in changes, in the local government, which
detracted from effective administration. However, the more immediate
impact was the appointment of Mufti Mohammed Sayeed to the powerful
post of the Union home minister in New Delhi.
The Mufti, a long-time Congressman, had defected to the Janata Dal on
the eve of the general elections. Why Prime Minister V.P, Singh decided to
appoint the Mufti as the home minister is best known to him. Perhaps the
calculation was that the appointment of a Muslim as home minister would
help calm the situation and convince minorities of the new government’s
goodwill towards them. But it was no secret that the former Union minister
of tourism was very much a player in Kashmir politics, and his choice as
home minister would have a catalytic impact on the situation. And it did,
but not in the way that V.P. Singh intended, or for the good.
In the late afternoon of 8 December 1989, as Dr Rubaiya Sayeed, the
Mufti’s daughter, came out of the Lal Ded hospital where she worked as a
physician, she was followed into a mini- bus by five young men. As the
crowded bus emptied out its passengers and headed for the last stop towards
her home in Nowgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar, they suddenly got up
and showed the driver a gun, ordering him to drive on to Natipora with
Rubaiya. There, the terrified young woman was ordered into a blue Maruti
car and driven off to Sopur, to the house of Javed Iqbal Mir, a state
government junior engineer. Accompanying her were top JKLF leaders
Yasin Malik, Ashfaq Majid Wani and Ghulam Hassan. The driver of the car
was yet another government official, Ali Mohammed Mir, technical officer
in the State Industrial Development Corporation.
Later that afternoon, a JKLF spokesman called the office of the daily
Kashmir Times to announce that its ‘mujahids’ had kidnapped the hapless
doctor because they wanted the release of their compatriots Hamid Sheikh,
under arrest since November in a hospital in Srinagar, Sher Khan, Javed
Ahmed Zargar, Noor Mohammed Kalwal and Mohammed Altaf Butt.
 After two days, Rubaiya was taken to the house of Mohammed Yaqoob, a
petty businessman. This safe refuge had been arranged through two other
businessmen, Zaman Mir and Abdullah, who had links with the JKLF.
The public reaction was one of shock. The Mufti’s opponents were
gleeful at his predicament. The people in the valley remained mute, not
willing, or afraid to condemn the militants. Middle-class Indians, whether in
the valley or elsewhere, sympathized with the Mufti’s family.
This was no abduction related to an affair of the heart, or even a criminal
act, but a serious challenge to the might of the Indian state. However, media
reactions, Mufti’s colleagues, friends, relatives and well-wishers soon made
the incident into a family tragedy rather than an issue of the kidnapping of
the daughter of the Union home minister of India by a gang of terrorists.
Farooq, still the chief minister, was not in the country when the
kidnapping occurred. He had left for England, en route to the US,
apparently for medical treatment. While some say he was in a state of
depression, his supporters say that an ECG anomaly compelled him to seek
special advice from Dr Denton Cooley in the US. The police chief was told
by the central authorities not to take any action that could scare the militants
into killing Rubaiya. Had the government taken a hard line, it could have
converted the kidnapping of a young, innocent girl into a campaign for
combating the ideological sway of the terrorists. Maulvi Farooq called for
her release as indeed did the state Jamaat-e-Islami and the Shahi Imam of
Delhi’s Jama Masjid, Syed Abdullah Bukhari. Quite a few Muslims,
including the valley’s Kashmiris and Pakistanis, felt that this was not the
‘Islamic’ way of doing things.
Farooq, who had returned post-haste from London, was aware of the
consequences of a tame surrender. He opposed the release of even one
prisoner. Abdul Majid Wani, Ashfaq Majid’s father, had more or less told
him that the ‘boys’ were ready to let Rubaiya go. They had first tried to
negotiate a compromise to exchange her for Hamid Sheikh alone, but
failing in this, they were veering around to freeing her unconditionally.
Within the government at New Delhi, however, the pressure for
accommodation with the terrorist demands became unbearable and all
concern about the propriety, or even wisdom, of negotiation with terrorists
melted away. In typical South Asian fashion, all kinds of mediators
appeared, promising all kinds of things. Some were well-meaning while
others like Dr Abdul Ahad Guru, Srinagar’s leading cardiologist and
Professor at the Sher-e- Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS),
was also a member of the JKLF’s Supreme Command Council and saw
himself as an éminence grise of the rebellion. A Cabinet committee
consisting of Arun Nehru, I.K. Gujral and Arif Mohammed Khan had now
entered the picture and took the decision to release the five.
A desperate Mufti, on the lookout for any mediator, now sent another
intermediary, Justice M.L. Bhat of the Allahabad High Court and a former
judge of the J & K High Court. Bhat was close to the Jamaat, and his
information that the government was ready to release the prisoners stiffened
their resolve. Abdul Majid Wani become incommunicado.
Farooq stubbornly stood his ground till he received a call from Prime
Minister V.P. Singh in the early hours of the morning of 13 December,
requesting the release of the terrorists. He still demurred. On the morning of
13 December, cabinet ministers Gujral and Khan and IB chief M.K.
Narayanan landed in Srinagar and drove straight to Farooq’s house. After
hearing Farooq’s views, they made it clear that they had instructions to ask
for the release of the prisoners. After ordering his officials to make a record
of this conversation, Farooq drafted a fourteen- page letter to the governor
and the president outlining everything that had transpired.
Then, he okayed the release of the five. On the same day at 3 pm, the
militants were released in Rajouri Kadal, near the Mirwaiz Manzil,
headquarters of the Awami Action Committee. A huge, excited crowd
gathered to welcome them and they were taken in a procession through the
streets of Srinagar. A few hours later, at 7 pm, Rubaiya was released. In the
meantime, the released militants had vanished to pre-selected hideouts.
Sounds of celebration were still resounding through the streets of
Srinagar when the ministers responsible for this craven surrender prepared
to return to Delhi. They could not have missed the sight. Several cars of
officials going to see them off were stopped by jubilant crowds, demanding
contributions for the celebration. Processions and protests gained even
greater popular support, till it now seemed that the whole valley was for
azadi or independence. This sentiment was unwittingly given a boost by the
overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. In one week, 16–22 December, the
once mighty edifice of the Romanian Communist Party just came apart,
with its megalomaniacal leader caught and executed on 25 December. The
event was viewed on Doordarshan by the fascinated audience of the valley,
who drew their own conclusions.
The humbling of the Government of India boosted the morale of the
militants as nothing else could have. The JKLF had been involved in
terroristic activity for the past two decades, planting bombs, hijacking
aircraft and the like, but this was the first time it had demonstrably taken on
and bested the mighty Government of India. For the disaffected valley
Kashmiris, primed by years of propaganda, this was heady brew.
 2
The Valley Aflame

With this tremendous victory behind them, the militants moved fast to
capitalize on it. First, they needed money, and so two banks were targetted.
On December 20, the Union Bank of India on Residency Road was looted.
The next day, a security guard at the Allahabad Bank was shot dead in an
attempted robbery.
On Christmas Eve, two policemen were killed and seven injured in a
bomb blast. On Christmas Day, a J & K Armed Police constable was shot
dead in Khanyar locality. A deputy superintendent of police, O.N. Wattal,
was shot and injured in Kashmir University. On 30 December, Sub-
Inspector Mustafa Qadri was killed and a deputy superintendent seriously
hurt.
Violence spread to the other cities as well. On 14 December, the Army
had been called out in Sopur following incidents in which a person was
killed and more than a hundred persons, including police personnel, injured.
Curfew was imposed in various towns: Baramula, Anantnag, Shupian and
Sopur on different days the following week.
The new year began with an ominous spurt of activity. Three key IB
officials were killed—R.N.P. Singh in Anantnag on 3 January, Kishen
Gopal in Badgam on 9 January and M.L. Bhan in Nowgam, on the outskirts
of Srinagar, on 15 January. On 12 February, T.K. Razdan, also an IB
official, was travelling in a minibus when it was stopped by militants who
singled him out and shot him dead. They rifled his pockets, took out his
official ID card, and laid out his body on the street in Gowkadal, in
downtown Srinagar. Terrified relatives did not even claim the body, which
was cremated by the CRPF.
The identity of these IB officials, while not broadcast, was known to a
number of people, local police officers as well as their ‘contacts’. Thus by
early January, the IB, perhaps the best informed outfit in the valley, lost its
entire field leadership. It would take a year or more for it to be restored.
While the earlier incidents including Rubaiya’s kidnapping appeared to be
amateurish, these were not. The pattern of killings was the same: precise
information and a swift strike.
For the Pakistani officers and planners and their JKLF collaborators who
had so assiduously worked towards the end, the situation in Srinagar
appeared like a dream come true. Young persons were coming across the
border in droves, and the Kashmiris in the valley who had refused to heed
the call for a liberation war in August 1965, were actually leading it now.
Farooq’s days were numbered. He had, in any case, been irrelevant for
some time now, and New Delhi’s insistence on handling the Rubaiya case
had not only dissolved the authority of his government, but soured his
relations with the new government as well. To compound his problems, as
chief minister his interlocutor in the central government was Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed, a long-time political antagonist.
As if to emphasize his irrelevance, the Centre decided to replace
Governor Gen. K.V. Krishna Rao with Jagmohan. This was the person who
had, in his view, conspired with Gul Shah and brought down his
government in 1984.
Much controversy surrounds the decision to send Jagmohan back as the
governor to the state. Once again, the ultimate responsibility for the
decision rests with the then prime minister, V.P. Singh. He was not unaware
that the appointment of Jagmohan would trigger off Farooq’s resignation.
Indeed, it would appear that the prime minister was not averse to this
development. The strongest pressure for the removal of Farooq came from
the BJP, and in view of perceptions of Jagmohan’s closeness to the majority
community, V.P. Singh may have taken the decision as a sop to the party. If
so, it was another bad decision.
 Before becoming governor in 1984, Jagmohan was better known as a
small-time Gandhi family courtier who had earned ‘fame’ for civic
demolitions during the Emergency. He owed his elevation to governorship
to his efficient and loyal execution of the commands of Indira Gandhi,
whether they be the organization of the Asian Games in Delhi or the anti-
Farooq coup in Srinagar. It was during his tenure that he, perhaps
inadvertently, emerged as a champion of sorts for the Kashmiri Hindus
because of the reform and refurbishment of the Vaishno Devi shrine and
actions such as the ban on the sale of meat on the occasion of Janmashtami.
The reality was that he was like most bureaucrats somewhat unimaginative
and opinionated, convinced that he had all the answers to a situation. In
1990, he simply lacked the experience and skills needed to fight what was
soon a full-blown insurgency.
Governor Rao resigned on 14 January and four days later, the
government announced the appointment of Jagmohan as governor. At
midnight on 18 January, he was awakened by a phone call from Foreign
Minister I.K. Gujral and summoned to a crisis meeting at Home Minister
Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s house. He was asked to take up his new
appointment post-haste, which meant that very day. Later that morning, he
left for Kashmir aboard a BSF aircraft.
Farooq had apparently been aware of the thinking in the government and
had come down to Delhi to meet Rajiv Gandhi. He had taken the view that
since Jagmohan’s appointment was, in any case, a prelude to the imposition
of governor’s rule, it would be better if he resigned first, which he did on
the midnight of the 18th, after a meeting of his state Cabinet.
The new governor landed in Jammu around noon and took his oath of
office that evening. There was the usual confusion, and also an inauspicious
signal—both the Congress-I and the National Conference boycotted the
function. Almost immediately thereafter, he was briefed by the Northern
Army commander Lt Gen. Gobinder Singh about the seriousness of the
situation in the valley. The new governor had wanted to go to Srinagar on
the 20th, but weather conditions prevented his departure.
 However, another deadly drama was unfolding in Srinagar. The first act
was initiated by the state’s top police officers, Director-General of Police
J.N. Saksena and Inspector-General of the CRPF ‘Tiger’ Joginder Singh. To
‘welcome’ the hardline governor, they instituted the long-awaited
crackdown with searches in Guru Bazar and Chota Bazar areas on the
morning of 20 January and detained some 250 youths for interrogation.
That same morning when Saksena arrived in Jammu from Srinagar to brief
Jagmohan, he did not mention the searches or their possible fallout. Perhaps
he had misjudged the situation.
Needless to say, the exercise was carried out with the usual CRPF
roughness, with people being pushed, slapped and kicked around. The
Kashmiris had taken this for a long time, but the mood had now changed.
The youngsters had guns and were organized, and they saw the police
action as the last flicker of a dying candle. Instead of dampening the ardour
of militancy, it provoked a massive reaction. Throughout 20 January,
organizers fanned out across the city and from that evening, massive
processions took to the streets demanding azadi, and chanting ‘Death to
Indian dogs’ and ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ (God is great).
Through the night, as the loudspeakers from mosques repeated the
message, panicky Kashmiri pandits, who felt that they were the target of
mobs, desperately called relatives and officials in Jammu and New Delhi,
pleading for help. Jagmohan and his new security adviser Ved Marwah, in
turn, contacted the top police officers in the city, urging them to act, but
there was no response. Indeed, as Marwah observed, ‘Some of the senior
police and administrative officers played the vanishing trick.’
The next morning, Jagmohan and Marwah took the first flight into
Srinagar. For a couple of hours officials in North Block in Delhi, housing
the ministry of home affairs, were panic- stricken as they could reach
neither the district magistrate, nor the director-general of police. There
seemed to be no Indian authority in Srinagar. They contacted the northern
command headquarters in Udhampur and instructed Gobinder Singh to
prepare the Army for intervention.
 At that point in time, under heavy escort, Jagmohan drove to Raj Bhavan,
skirting the main city. It was a cold day and only a few groups of people
gathered to watch the procession go by. Jagmohan realized that the situation
had unalterably worsened. No fawning police officers had greeted him at
the airport; indeed, most of them seemed to have made themselves scarce.
Even the CRPF appeared confused and the usual roadside security
arrangements seemed to be absent.
That message was driven home to him at Raj Bhavan where there was no
electricity. The governor and his aides sat shivering with cold in his office
in their overcoats, caps and scarves when they were joined by Lt Gen.
Mohammed Ahmed Zaki, Srinagar corps commander. The state was on the
verge of disintegration, and now only its last instrumentality—the armed
forces—could help.
Fortunately for India, the man commanding the Indian Army’s 15th
Corps was a cool professional soldier, a Hyderabadi Muslim who had
served the Army with distinction. The courageous and deeply religious
officer was fated to play a major role in the affairs of the state in the coming
years,
There was little to discuss. Jagmohan formally requested the Army to
take whatever means necessary to bring the situation under control. The die
was cast. Curfew had already been declared, but no one was observing it.
The Army’s job was to obtain compliance. Eight companies of the Army
were hurriedly formed, to fan out, and beef up the CRPF and the BSF, so as
to enforce the curfew, and in the words of Jagmohan, reassert the authority
of the state.
After a night of exhortation, armed militants had begun to fan out and get
people out of their houses and onto the streets. Processions began to move,
accompanied by the blaring of loudspeakers ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ and ‘azadi’—
and an unending fusillade of anti-Indian slogans and demonstrations against
the Indian authority. They were probably unaware of the changed resolve of
the state. At several points across the city, Army personnel confronted
thousands of excited Kashmiris, who were convinced that azadi had come.
Among them were a sprinkling of armed militants. Who fired first and
when is a moot point, but at Gowkadal, Lal Bazar, Tulsi Bagh, Safa Kadal
and Hawal, the Army warned the mob to disperse and then began to shoot at
them. Officially, twelve people died in what is called the ‘Gowkadal
massacre’. Other estimates put those dead in the firing variously at thirty-
eight and hundred. Whatever be the number, under the hail of fire, the
crowd wilted and broke.
All fingers were crossed for the next day. A providentially heavy
downpour, added to the shock of the Army’s response, kept the crowds
home. A qualitative shift had occurred. Previous cases of firing had been
isolated events involving one or two armed militants and the police, with a
few deaths through either direct firing or in crossfire. But this time, a mass
of people had been involved.
The underground leadership had wrested the initiative and all that the
authorities could do was to react. On 22 January, a rumour was spread that
four J & K Armed Police (JKAP) constables had been shot by CRPF
personnel and that their bodies had been brought to the police lines. In the
charged atmosphere, scores of JKAP personnel in uniform and with their
weapons marched towards the police control room, some shouting the
militant slogans, ‘Hum chahten hain azadi, ‘Indian dogs get out’. The DGP
and other senior officers were on the verge of ordering the Army to disarm
them. Already, a small section of the Army in the control room had taken up
position. At the last minute, at the urging of Ved Marwah, Saksena and the
commandant of the JKAP officials went out to negotiate with the rebellious
policemen.
Thereafter, a delegation was sent to the control room to talk to Marwah
who sensed that there was more to the issue. He asked them about the
bodies and their identity, kith and kin to whom relief had to be given.
Slowly it became apparent that no one in the delegation knew who had
died; neither apparently did anyone in the crowd. The whole story had been
concocted with a view to laying the stage for what officials say was a plan
to spark the final uprising.
The next day near the Rawalpura bus stand, a score of unarmed Indian
Air Force personnel waited for an IAF bus to take them to Srinagar airport
where they worked. Four or five JKLF terrorists on a motorcycle and a
Maruti jeep drove up and
began to fire at them at close range. Four of them, including Squadron
Leader Ravi Khanna, died instantly under the hail of bullets; ten airmen
were injured, some seriously. All this happened within fifty metres of a
JKAP picket, with eight men equipped with rifles.
According to Jagmohan, the JKLF’s plan was to deliver the coup de
grace on 26 January, Republic Day. It happened to be Friday, the first since
the 21 January events, and the militants’ plan was to collect a million or so
people at the Idgah prayer ground by giving a call for special prayers for the
‘martyrs’. Because of restrictions on the movement of people, instructions
were to be given to collect them in small groups and then, after the prayers
and slogans, conduct a dramatic ‘Independence’ ceremony in which the
Indian flag would be burnt and an ‘Islamic’ flag hoisted. All this would
happen before foreign journalists who had been asked to come to Srinagar
to witness something ‘special’.
Jagmohan ordered a pre-emptive curfew from the afternoon of the 25th
and made it clear it would be enforced, even in the narrow by-lanes of the
city. Through the night and next morning, the militants using loudspeakers
from mosques exhorted the people to challenge this order, but after the
experience of the 21st, no one was willing to take chances and instead, the
militants at the last moment, changed tack and imposed what they called
‘civil curfew’ for that day. The ‘crowd’ was never to return except after
Maulvi Farooq’s assassination and funeral in May. The long insurgency had
now begun.

Going Across and Learning to Fight

For the new insurgent, as for the old, the first challenge lay in going across
to Pakistan for training and weapons. Between 1949 and 1972, the Indo-
Pakistan border in Kashmir had been defined by a CFL. The Simla
Agreement of 1972 had transformed its nomenclature to a 740-kilometres
LoC, an act designed to implicitly lay the basis for its conversion into an
international border.
Given the ‘fog’ of war, the ceasefire order based on looking at maps in
Delhi, may have left a line that the Army could defend against an attack by
regular forces, but it was not, and perhaps could never be, proof against
infiltration,
As a ceasefire line it followed neither geographical features nor custom
and, barring a few instances, it did not allow itself to be shaped by
negotiation. The main reason for this is the terrain. From the ranges into the
valley descend several thickly- wooded gallis or nars, which have been
used by Gujjar shepherds to ascend the high pastures. These have proved to
be ideal routes for infiltration. In some areas Pakistani forces held the upper
reaches of a mountain slope and the Indians the lower; in other cases, their
positions were reversed. The division also worked in another way in that in
some cases the western portion of a nar belonged to Pakistan and the
eastern to India.
The demography of the LoC is also varied. In the north, it moves along
high ranges, almost uninhabited on both sides, but frequented by Gujjar and
Bakarwal shepherds. As it twists southwards away from the Kishenganga,
parallel to the Pir Panjal, the mountains, between 5000–9000 ft., are
cultivated through terracing and the population density increases. On either
side live people who are mainly non-Kashmiri Muslims.
Movement across this LoC is not a cakewalk. Unlike the 199-kilometres
stretch that is an accepted international border, the Indian and Pakistani
armies police the border. But while in the north there is no ‘eye-to-eye’
contact because of the daunting terrain, in the portion between Tithwal and
the plains of Chhamb, small arms fire has been almost routine, particularly
in the Poonch-Rajauri sector, even in the ‘normal’ years.
The uprising in the valley in the winter of 1989 barely gave the
Pakistanis across the border any time to get over their surprise. Where there
had been militants trickling out in ones and twos, young men began pouring
in by the tens and even hundreds. Most estimates of trained militants in the
valley in 1989 vary between 200 and 500. But with people pouring in,
Pakistani officials decided that the cardinal need was to build on the
momentum of events rather than wait to train these youth over any length of
time.
While some of the crossings were spontaneous, most were organized
affairs. The Pakistani authorities already had a network of young leaders
they had trained in 1988–89, with whom they were familiar. It was the task
of these people to organize the groups and guarantee that those sent were
not Indian agents. More often than not a leader or a trusted subordinate who
had already done the crossing once and who was familiar with the Pakistani
or JKLF authorities would accompany a group. In other cases, the group
leader would carry a coded slip from a leader, which would be recognized
by the ISI official concerned.
There emerged a number of specialized agents, called launch
commanders, living in areas on both sides close to the LoC. Some on the
Indian side were in wireless communication with the ISI across the border
and were not more than a night’s march across the LoC. In Tregham, the
family of Maqbool Butt, particularly his brother Ghulam Nabi Butt, were
well-known for their activities as was Zahoor Bhat. In the Kupwara area,
the launch commander was Majnoon Khan. In Haihama, it was Farooq
Ahmed Khan, alias Nisar Khan of Babapora, who had been working at the
job since 1986.
Most of the early guerrilla training camps were proximate to the LoC: the
ones at Athmuqam, Dudhnial, Kel in the north, and the clutch of camps
around Muzaffarabad. Later, the camps were shifted across Pakistan to the
North-West Frontier Province, near Rawalpindi, as well as the areas of
Afghanistan that were run by the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—
Khost, Cheherabagh, Tremangal and Jalalabad. The best known camp, the
Illaqa-e-Gair (forbidden area), is part of an Army cantonment on the road
between Islamabad and Attock.
Pressure on Pakistan by US Deputy National Security Adviser Robert
Gates in 1990 resulted in the shutting down of thirty-one camps. But as
Gates admitted later, many of them were functioning even after a year.
Closing camps, opening new ones, relocating them constantly were tactics
to prevent infiltration and the possibility of cross-border strikes by Indian
commandos. The shift to the North-West Frontier area was also a means of
convincing those being trained that they were either in Afghanistan or were
being trained by Afghani personnel. In the past five years, Indian authorities
have been able to pinpoint over a hundred camps, of which five in
Afghanistan were reportedly shut down by the Taliban because of their
connection with Hekmatyar. They were later reopened under the Harkat-ul-
Ansar.
Since the JKLF was the main vehicle for the uprising, the early camps
were run by the JKLF group of Raja Muzzaffar, Rashid Hasrat and Dr
Farooq Haidar. Hasrat and Haidar operated from the Rawalpindi area, and
their camps and safe houses were there. Raja Muzzaffar ran a camp
opposite his residence in Muzaffarabad. However, those involved in the
training were ISI operatives, often from the Azad Kashmir area. The ISI
controlled the supply of weapons to the groups since arms were provided
only at the last stage, usually at a Pakistani Army post near the LoC.
The pro-Pakistani elements, aided by the Jamaat-e-Islami, later
established their camps near Muzaffarabad as well. Maqbool Illahi, before
returning to the valley in 1993, was in charge of the Ayubia camp. Ghulam
Mohammed Sofi coordinated several camps—three in the Muzaffarabad
area at Magri, the so-called Farooq camp at a school building near the office
at Madina market in Muzaffarabad, and another near the Jama Masjid at
Abbotabad in Pakistan. Mohammed Ashraf Dar, an early commander of the
Hizbul Mujahideen, ran camps near the Medical College as well as Dhok
Gujral near Rawalpindi.
Likewise, other groups like the Tehrik Jehad-e-Islami, which was linked
to the People’s League but later merged with the Hizbul Mujahideen, the
Muslim Janbaz Force, Al Umar Mujahideen, or the Muslim Mujahideen set
up and ran their own camps at various locations in Azad Kashmir. Another
set of camps were run by the ISI itself. These, like the Gazi and Musa
camps in Garhi Dupatta area, or the Match Factory in Muzaffarabad, have
been used to train hardcore agents who pose as members of various militant
groups. A fourth series of camps were set up under the aegis of Islamic
fundamentalist groups like the Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The Lashkar’s camps were in the Kunar province of Afghanistan.
When insurgency began, training tended to be elementary, spanning just
about a week to ten days and involved learning the use of AK-47 rifles,
pistols, throwing grenades and laying
explosives. Trainees were shown how to take apart a rifle or a pistol,
clean it and put it together again. Later, the course was increased to two and
a half weeks and the syllabus was upgraded to include the use of RPG-7,
light machine-guns as well as techniques of concealment, camouflage,
reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
Those with leadership potential and with some level of education were
given lengthier training which involved the use of Dragunov sniper rifles,
setting remote-controlled explosives and booby traps, basic combat
communication using walkie-talkie sets, rock climbing, jungle survival and
so on. In the early 1990s, some of the select were also given ‘battle
inoculation’ or training in actual combat alongside the Afghan mujahideen
in operations in Afghanistan.
Since 1993, training became lengthier, going up to six months and even a
year. Since many of those trained have been Pakistanis, there is no fiction to
maintain; so they are sometimes trained alongside Pakistani Army soldiers.
Emphasis is now being laid on better physical standards, needed for combat
in the Himalayan heights, where the militants are currently grouped.

A Bend in the Jhelum

In August 1988, a month after the JKLF’s launch of its ‘war of liberation’,
the ISI directorate reportedly convened a meeting with the Azad Kashmir
Jamaat-e-Islami chief Abdul Rashid Turabi and the head of the pro-Pakistan
Tehrik-Jehad-e-Islami, Muzaffar Ahmed Shah, who had come across the
LoC. The subject of discussion was the means by which the movement
could be directed towards Islamizing the liberation war and in the process,
promoting merger with Pakistan.
 They were aware that the J & K Jamaat was not too enthusiastic about
the armed struggle. But as soon as the 400,000- strong crowds came out
into the streets, braving bullets for the sake of ‘azadi’, a militant wing led
by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Ghulam Nabi Nowsheri and Mohammed Yusuf
Shah was able to pressure its colleagues to jump into the fray. They
immediately sent emissaries across the LoC to contact their Pakistani
colleagues and through them, the ISI.
A strategy was shaped with the help of Rashid Turabi and the Pakistani
Jamaat headed by Qazi Hussain Ahmed for the J & K branch of the outfit to
take over the struggle. As a first step, the valley’s Jamaat called in militants
with Jamaat affiliations or an ‘Islampasand’ attitude, such as Maqbool
Illahi, Mohammed Ashraf Dar and Mohammed Ahsan Dar. They were also
able to rope in some like Hilal Beg, Javed Ahmed Shalla, Mohammed
Abdullah Bangroo and Hilal Ahmed Mir aka Nasirul-Islam in Srinagar, who
were unhappy with the dominant HAJY group of the JKLF. The ISI, too,
assisted by steering some of these militants towards the J & K Jamaat by
providing them funds as well as ready access to training and weapons.
Hilal Beg and Shalla set up the Jammu and Kashmir Students’ Liberation
Front (JKSLF) while Ashraf Dar, Master Ahsan Dar, Illahi and Abdullah
Bangroo set up the Al Badr. Later, at the suggestion of the Pakistan Jamaat,
this was renamed Hizbul Mujahideen and Master Ahsan Dar was appointed
its leader.
Ghulam Mohammed Sofi alias Saifi and Mohammed Ashraf Saraf were
sent across to Muzaffarabad in January 1990 as the valley’s Jamaat
representatives. Mohammed Ashraf Dar and Maqbool Illahi went across to
the LoC to establish training camps, while Ali Mohammed Dar and Master
Ahsan Dar, operating in village Chak Seri, near Pattan in Baramula district,
sent them young mujahids for training.
Pakistan and the Azad Kashmir Jamaat also provided the Hizbul
Mujahideen with links to Afghan groups such as the Hizb- e-Islami of
Afghanistan, through which the Hizb boys could receive good training. The
Jamiat-e-Tulba, the Jamaat’s youth wing in Pakistan, also began to provide
trained cadre to the Hizb. In fact, in the early phases of the movement, the
Pakistani Jamaat’s youth wing, Jamiat-e-Tulba’s leaders such as Syed
Saleem Gardezi, Sarfaraz Masood and Arshad Hussain Bukhari infiltrated
into the valley to help guide the movement.
The ISI was building other links too. Beginning with the political protests
against parliamentary elections in 1989, Hilal Beg began to recruit a new
cadre of committed militants. He met Yasin Bhat and persuaded him to
cross the LoC to seek funding for the new JKSLF.
In February 1990, with the rebellion in full swing, Bhat crossed the
border along with Altaf Qureshi and two other boys, taking the Uri–Boniyar
route. He met Amanullah Khan and Col. Assad and asked for the latter’s
support for launching his boys across the border.
By now Pakistan had already shifted tack and was beginning to squeeze
the JKLF. Assad made it clear that the SLF, which was also known as the
JKSLF, would not get support since it was close to the JKLF. It took Bhat
considerable effort to convince the colonel that there was no relationship
between the two.
In all likelihood, Assad was putting on an act since Hilal Beg was already
in the process of creating a core group which operated exclusively under
Pakistani instructions.
The Al Umar Mujahideen group was founded when Mushtaq Latrum was
spurned by leaders of the JKLF’s HAJY group. As he recounted later, when
the list for releasing hostages in exchange of Rubaiya came up, he
suggested the name of his associate Irfan-ul-Hasan. However, Ashfaq Majid
Wani and Javed Ahmed Mir not only rejected it but passed derisive
comments about the fighting qualities of Latrum and his friend.
Along with Shabir Ahmed Bayaroo, Lateef Muzaffar Sofi and Shaukat
Bakshi, Latrum walked out of the JKLF on 13 December 1989. However,
Bakshi returned to the JKLF. The initial impact of the group was negligible
as it had just a couple of AK-47s and two pistols. Besides shooting unarmed
National Conference leader Farooq Ahmed Khan in the leg, their two
operations were hit and run raids in which they emptied their magazines
into CRPF bunkers to little or no effect, in early January 1990.
 Mushtaq Latrum decided to go across the LoC to seek aid. A group
consisting of fifteen youths, between twenty and twenty- five years old,
mainly from Srinagar and most of them with some education, got onto a
Kashmir government motor services bus on February 9 and drove all the
way to a deserted roadside near Kupwara, from where they caught another
bus to go to Zahoor Bhat’s residence in Tregham, close to the LoC.
Next evening, with a guide, Rahmatullah Ahmed Shah, the group walked
to Haihama on foot and then carried on across to the Pakistani side of
Shalubatta forest and camped in the house of a Gujjar shepherd. From there
the group reached Dudhnial and established contact with the Pakistani
Army camp. Here, the local commander put them onto a bus from Chalapul
near Muzaffarabad, from where Latrum sent Rahmatullah Shah to contact
the Pakistani ISI.
Given the stream of persons coming across, the ISI official was not too
surprised, Maj. Tariq arrived, heard out Latrum and his estrangement with
the JKLF, and having looked at his clippings of the Srinagar Urdu
newspapers about the activities of the Al Umar group, immediately set them
up in a vacant house which he decreed to be the office of the new outfit.
Latrum was given Rs 5000 to get the office and a kitchen going. Three
days later, Tariq came and took the boys away for training to the Illaqa-e-
Gair camp. The return journey began on 2 June when they set off by bus to
Lipa. Here two guides joined them and they were issued their weapons.
They carried twenty- six AK-47s, with 200 rounds for each weapon, two
light machine-guns with ten loaded magazines, thirty hand grenades, ten
walkie-talkie sets and two pistols. The next day they began their two-day
journey across the LoC and crossed near Satkuchi in the Handwara area.
At Satkuchi, they contacted Ghulam Hassan Waza, an ISI operative
working with the Hizbul Mujahideen, and deposited their weapons with
him. The boys infiltrated back to Srinagar in twos and threes. Before
leaving Muzaffarabad, Tariq gave Latrum Rs 20,000. The guides got Rs 300
per militant. The boys received Rs 200 each.
To say that the sudden rise of the gun culture altered the dynamics of
Kashmiri politics would probably be an understatement. But the systematic
manner in which practitioners of ‘normal’ politics were attacked and
eliminated points to a design, a ruthless calculation, if you will. By
physically liquidating those who were deemed to be structures of Indian
rule, the militants wanted to create a vacuum that they alone could fill.
All political formations, be they anti-Indian, pro-plebiscite or pro-Indian,
had to adjust to a reality where the AK-47 was the arbiter. The manner in
which the existing political equations were
altered can be seen from the way in which the Jamaat, never particularly
popular in the valley, suddenly became a major force, courtesy the gunmen
of the Hizbul Mujahideen. Other formations scrambled to deal with the
situation. With Shabbir Shah in jail, the People’s League found things
difficult. Fortunately for them, they had a man of exceptional calibre,
Firdaus Ahmed Baba aka Babar Badr, a resident of Jammu. He had come
under Shah’s influence in 1987 and in 1989, he crossed the border in
August and met the ubiquitous Col. Assad. He was given the usual training
and returned to the valley in January 1990. In May, he was appointed chief
commander of the new Muslim Janbaz Force, a tanzeem (militant group)
which was linked to the People’s League (PL) of Shah. Activists of the
PL(S) who crossed the border and sought Pakistani help were directed by
the ISI to join this force, in which they were involved with people who were
ideologically close to them.
Similar pressures saw the creation of the Al Barq, a tanzeem linked to the
People’s Conference of Abdul Ghani Lone. In 1990, in the first flush of
militancy, four boys who had links with the Allah Tigers and had returned
from Azad Kashmir as Hizb members, killed Sheikh Abdul Jabbar, a former
minister of the National Conference government and a relative of Mushtaq
Ahmad Shah, and after his death, Shah and his family went to Sheikh’s
house to condole with his family. The Hizb elements resented this and put
up posters warning Mushtaq Ahmad not to go there again.
Around this time, Syed Yusuf Naseem aka Tajmul Islam was having
problems with the upstart militants. He had contested the 1987 elections on
a People’s Conference ticket from Kangan. Worried over the rise of the
Jamaat, he decided to set up his own formation. He sent Bilal Ahmed Khan
aka Lodhi, who was a lawyer and a member of the executive committee of
the People’s Conference, across to Azad Kashmir where he established
contact with the then president of Azad Kashmir, Sardar Abdul Qayoom
Khan, who directed Maj. Tariq to take care of them.
The ISI deputed Abdul Rashid Qureshi and Mushtaq Khan, former JKLF
members, to become the core of the new Al Barq. A transit camp was set up
in Chelapindi, near Muzaffarabad, to recruit youth who had come across the
LoC. Later it concentrated on Gujjar youth from Bandipur.
Mushtaq Ahmed Shah, who was later to take the code names of Muazam
Ali and Shaukat Bukhari and become the outfit’s chief commander, decided
to sign up with Tajmul Islam who sent Shah for training to Azad Kashmir in
September 1990, along with sixteen other boys. They went to Srinagar and
were lumped with another group of Allah Tigers and Hizb activists.
Walking north, beyond Kangan with the help of three guides, they
eventually landed at a Pakistani post at Khanabal. From here they were
taken for training to Skardu and later to a camp at Domel.
The multiple groups came up because of the pre-existing fault lines in the
valley’s politics that divided the People’s League or the People’s
Conference from the Jamaat-e-Islami, in addition to personal biases. The
ISI had its own reasons for encouraging them. One was the need for
security. They realized the brutal truth that if one member of the group was
captured, it was almost certain that he would be tortured and reveal the
names of others in the group. So to prevent a domino effect, several groups
were created to ensure security.
The second, perhaps more important, reason was to have the levers to
control the movement of the members and ensure that no single group or
leader became known or well-established since that could pave the way for
either a political force capable of dealing directly with India, or establishing
its own authority over Kashmir, leaving Pakistan out in the cold.
The Character of Conflict
War often appears to be an attractive policy instrument. Like the sword that
cut the Gordian knot, it resolves problems quickly. But the reality is that
once begun, it is almost impossible to predict the outcome of events.
When the Kashmiri militants determined on war in the winter of 1989,
they were swept away by the logic of Kashmir’s recent history and the
enormous sense of empowerment that the AK-47 gave to the young who
otherwise felt powerless in the face of poverty or venality and
misgovernance. To some, the promise of the Nizam-e-Mustafa seemed to
come much closer.
But when the die was finally cast, and no one is clear by whom—the
underground leadership in the valley, their controllers in Pakistan, the
incompetent Indian authorities or by the sheer force of circumstance—it
took the conflict to a nasty, brutish action–reaction cycle which has since
characterized it.
On 7 February, a company of the 91st BSF battalion was deployed at Lal
Chowk in the heart of Srinagar. Suddenly there was a loud blast and the
edgy pickets, thinking they were under attack, began to fire
indiscriminately. Two civilians were killed and two injured. There were no
militants around, since it wasn’t a real blast.
To avenge this act, the militants stalked the nearest BSF camp. The next
day at about 8.00 in the morning, Constable Dorje Tamang was on duty as
the office runner when he was asked to buy some vegetables. He asked Bir
Bahadur, another constable doing quarter-guard duty, to accompany him,
and they stepped out of the camp and walked across to a shop some
hundred metres away from the main gate of the 79th BSF battalion’s
headquarters. Militants had been lying in wait and as soon as they sighted
the two BSF personnel, they drew out their guns from under their pherans
(long shirt-like woollen overcoat) and sprayed them with bullets and
vanished into a by-lane. Not surprisingly, they hit the shopkeeper Abdul
Majid Sheikh as well.
 The sentries of the battalion were shocked, but, fortunately, they were
stoic Gurkhas who did not retaliate because all they could see were civilians
running helter-skelter, looking for refuge. The two constables were taken to
the Bone and Joint Hospital at Barzulla, but were declared dead on arrival,
as indeed was the poor shopkeeper.
Till the events of 21 January, the people who had died had been directly
involved in the conflict: those Kashmiris who were killed because they
were seen as symbols of the state, or militants hunted by the security forces.
Now, as the conflict intensified, the number of bystanders killed began to
increase.
On 1 March at Zakura, some twenty kilometres from Srinagar, a
procession started pelting stones on an Army truck in which personnel of
the 222nd Heavy Mortar Regiment were travelling.
Some persons attempted to snatch away the arms of the soldiers and in
panic, or out of anger, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd killing eight
persons. Here, the fault was clearly that of the Army personnel who were
later given an official reprimand by their corps commander.
The next incident, tragic though it was, provoked considerable
controversy. Two school buses carrying thirty-seven children were returning
from the school premises in Srinagar’s Badamibagh cantonment to
Sharifabad cantonment. The buses, specially run by the Army for their
school-children, routinely brought children from Barzulla, Hyderpora and
Peerbagh to the Army Public School. The buses were escorted by two Army
vehicles with armed personnel, under the command of a junior
commissioned officer.
At Rawalpura, near the bypass road to Batmaloo, this convoy ran into a
group of demonstrators travelling in buses, vans and trucks. They blocked
each other’s path and the traffic was halted; tension arose. These were not
ordinary times and the processionists, seeing the Army buses, redoubled
their anti-Indian slogans and pelted the buses with stones.
According to the Army personnel, some people in the crowd began to
instigate their companions to attack the buses. With a bunch of terrified
school-children in his charge, the junior commissioned officer in command
of the convoy ordered the escort to fire a single volley at the processionists,
killing nine people, dispersing the mob.
The issue became controversial because the New Delhi-based Committee
for Initiative on Kashmir accused the Jagmohan administration of
concocting the story about the school-children, arguing that all J & K
schools had been closed by a government order which extended winter
vacations till 15 March. The committee, which apparently relied on
interviewing locals, did not know that the Army runs its own school system
that follows a national timetable. On the date in question, the Army Public
School in Srinagar was certainly functioning, though it was later shut down.
Whatever be the case, in the two incidents seventeen people were killed and
scores injured and maimed in unfortunate circumstances where it is not easy
to apportion blame.
The worst example of the unimaginative or, rather, ad hoc solutions used
was the indiscriminate and indeed punitive use of the institution of curfew.
For want of something better, unfortunately, it soon became an
instrument for combating insurgency. Day after day the authorities would
impose curfew and search certain areas. Economic life came to a standstill,
but it did not really prevent the militants from operating. The curfew
brought enormous hardship for the people and played an enormous role in
hardening attitudes against the authorities. After a while people began to
believe that it was being used as an instrument of collective punishment
against the Kashmiri community.
The task of the security forces was not easy. Neither the BSF nor the
CRPF had ever handled a situation like this. The BSF’s task was to patrol
the Indo-Pakistan border, a job it did with indifferent distinction. The CRPF
was the Union government’s storm trooper, ready to smash heads and
disperse crowds of largely unarmed agitators. But here they were
confronted not only with a population that uniformly despised them, but a
band of insurgents who had the support of the people. In a hit-and-run
attack, they could bring to bear more effective firepower on a picket with
AK-47s than the constables had at their command with their SLR semi-
automatic rifles or .303 rifles.
 The militants had another unusual advantage—the pheran that all
Kashmiris wear almost throughout the year. Voluminous enough for a
folded AK-47, it provided camouflage for militants who moved near a
picket, mingling with the people. They tossed a grenade, fired and vanished
into the side-lanes. When the police fired back, they often hit innocent
bystanders, generating more sympathy for the ‘cause’ than for the
authorities. On 9 May, a grenade was tossed at a CRPF picket which also
got a burst of AK-47 fire. After some initial confusion, the police retaliated
from their bunkers, and when the dust cleared, seven civilians had been
killed and sixteen wounded.
But such ambushes were a high-risk strategy for the militants as well.
Having seen the pattern of security forces’ movement, the JKLF area
commander Ashfaq Majid Wani decided that the best time to strike was
early in the morning when the BSF constables were sent out of their camps
to man the main police stations in the city. At about 7 a.m. on 30 March, a
truck carrying the personnel of the 75th battalion from their camp to the
Soura police station was ambushed near the Mirzakamil-Alamgiri bazar.
The militants’ bullets hit constable Lakhpat Singh and Lance Naik Birya
Bhagat. Then, just as Wani was about to blow up the whole truck, the
grenade he was readying to lob exploded in his hand, killing him instantly
as well as a bystander. The rest of the group fled. The BSF personnel were
evacuated to the military hospital at Badami Bagh, but Lakhpat Singh
succumbed to his injuries. Birya Bhagat was taken to the All India Institute
of Medical Sciences in Delhi, where he recovered.
Wani’s loss was a great one for the JKLF. He had been a major player in
the Rubaiya kidnapping and other incidents, and the manner of his death
pointed to both the lack of experience as well as, possibly, dearth of
available cadre for the JKLF.
Pattern of changing militant attacks shown by the people they killed
between January and August 1990
 After the events of January 1990, the nature of militant activity changed.
The business of attack, counter-attack and killing became much more
purposeful and deadly. The militants now moved beyond the symbols of
state, which would have still kept them within the bounds of the term
militants, and began to commit terrorist actions. That is, kill unarmed non-
combatants.
The targets of militant violence followed a logic of sorts. In addition to
the security forces and representatives and symbols of the Indian State, they
targetted Hindu Kashmiris or pandits, and political figures who did not
espouse separatism or violence, indeed almost anyone who was not for
them.
The most striking event was the gunning down of the director of the
Doordarshan centre in Srinagar, Lassa Koul. The state- controlled TV
station, beaming its programmes from a tower atop the Shankaracharya
Hill, is a major eyesore for the valley’s secession-minded Kashmiris. While
its fare of Bombay-films driven programmes are lapped up, as they are in
Pakistan and northern India, its political message is not at all welcome.
As per the national pattern, while a lot of the programming is direct from
New Delhi, a significant portion of it is locally generated. There had been
many complaints from Indian authorities that militants and their
sympathizers had infiltrated the Doordarshan set-up in Srinagar, and
managed on occasions to give TV coverage to the militants. For their part,
the militants fulminated against Doordarshan’s ‘distortions’.
Koul’s death in mid-February was no casual incident. It was carried out
by the JKLF on orders from Amanullah Khan himself. In their effort to
show that things were normal, many brave non- Kashmiri officials and
executives stayed on in the valley. Scared but resigned to their
circumstances, some sent their families away, hoping somehow that they
would not attract the attention of the militants.
Prominent among these were two persons—H.L. Khera, general manager
of the biggest state-owned factory belonging to the Hindustan Machine
Tools, and Prof. Mushir-ul-Haq, vice- chancellor of Kashmir University. In
a coordinated action on 6 April, both were kidnapped. The JKLF was
involved in the operation, but, as it turned out, Pakistani intelligence
officials were pulling the strings. Haq and his special assistant Abdul Ghani
Zargar, were abducted together on 6 April. They were killed on the 10th.
Similarly, Khera was kidnapped and killed.
Their killers, Salim Zargar alias Fayaz, Mushtaq Ahmed Sheikh and
Shalla were among the various young men who had crossed over to
Pakistan via Uri in December 1989 and January 1990, and returned after
nearly a month’s training in a camp near Muzaffarabad. Fayaz was detached
from the group and sent to an intelligence safe house near Rawalpindi
where he was briefed by Tariq, an officer whose name recurs in the
interrogation of captured militant leaders. They were provided arms and
ammunition and came back to India through the Chakothi route. Both Salim
and Mushtaq were arrested a month or so later.
The killings generated enormous dismay among the supporters of
militancy within the valley because Prof. Haq was a Muslim and Zargar, his
special assistant, a Kashmiri Muslim.
There were some intriguing elements. On 9 April, Amanullah Khan
announced at a press conference in New York that the hostages had been
executed, a day before they had actually been. As a result of this faux pas,
he was asked to leave by the US authorities. But even that was not the most
mystifying element of the tragedy.
 On 20 April, the Rawalpindi office of the JKLF issued a press note which
admitted that while it had been part of the kidnapping operation, orders to
execute the hostages had been given by the ISI Brig. Imtiaz in the name of
Amanullah Khan, even while Khan was being told by a Pakistani diplomat
in New York that the hostages had been executed without consulting him;
and all this a day before they had actually been killed.
The JKLF acknowledged that the kidnapping of Mushir-ul- Haq, Abdul
Ghani Zargar and H.L. Khera had been carried out jointly by the Hizbul
Mujahideen and itself. But it said that it had done so under the threat that its
failure to participate would compel the ISI to cut off aid. It had agreed ‘on
condition that no harm would be caused to the hostages’. The JKLF
condemned the killing of Mushir and Abdul Ghani, but not Khera; indeed,
the statement itself acknowledged that it had argued that Khera alone be
kidnapped.
Though the JKLF had participated in the operation, the real work had
been done by Hilal Baig and the Jammu and Kashmir Students Liberation
Front or JKSLF. In April 1991 this outfit was to Islamicize its name to
Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen. It became clear that the JKSLF was working
directly at the behest of the Pakistani authorities. Later, it became known
for killing so-called mukhbirs or informers as well as for trying to foment
terrorist activity across the country, beyond J & K. The Ikhwan also played
a prominent role in the next phase of the insurgency. This was the
systematic campaign of intimidation and assassination, launched against all
non-militant political activists.
The principal targets were past and present leaders of the Congress and
the National Conference, but the other parties, notwithstanding their
insignificant presence in the valley, did not escape. Terrorists shot dead
even retired and reclusive politicians as retribution for past sins.
The party that bore the brunt was, of course, the National Conference. Ali
Mohammed Bachroo, a district-level leader of the National Conference,
was shot dead in a busy street on 13 March and a placard left on his body,
asking people to spit on it. On 23 March, the body of Anwar Khan, a
National Conference activist, was found hanging from a tree in Tangmarg in
Baramula district, A note pinned to the body said that he had been executed
by the Hizb for being a CRPF informer. The story of Sheikh Abdul Jabbar, a
former minister and retired National Conference activist, is no different. He
was dragged out of his house in Lar village near Srinagar on 18 April and
executed, allegedly for having disapproved of terrorist violence at a private
meeting.
A worse fate befell Mir Ghulam Mustafa, who had been involved in the
negotiations to free Rubaiya Sayeed. He had been a member of the Muslim
United Front and was a highly respected figure in the state. But on 23
March, while driving home to Badgam, he was kidnapped by militants of
the Hizbul Mujahideen and tortured for two days. Then, four militants
pinned him down and Mohammed Abdullah Bangroo, the deputy chief of
the outfit, strangled him with a piece of rope. His body was found hanging
from a tree in Lakshmanpora near Batmaloo.
The killings went on. The gunning down of Mohammed Din Gujjar in
May 1990 was a historical footnote. Living a retired life in Tangmarg,
Baramula, Mohammed Din had been the man who had alerted the
authorities about the infiltration of the Gibraltar forces in August 1965.
There was a rash of killings of pandits: Satinder Kumar and Swarup Nath
were killed on 4 May and on 16 May, Bhushan Lal Kaul, Bansi Lal Zutshi,
Makhan Lal Raina, Brij Nath Kaul, his wife and sister. Other Hindus—
Surinder Kumar, Ratan Lal and Omkar Nath—were executed after being
tortured by the JKLF; ordinary Muslims were also killed: Sikandar and
Fatima Shah in Sopur, Mohammed Ali Rathar and his son Mohammed
Shafi in Raithan, Badgam. The list went on. Chuni Lal Shala, an inspector
of the J & K Police, was ordered out of a bus and beaten to death by the
Allah Tigers. Sheikh Mohammed Mansoor, former National Conference
MLA, was murdered.
Later in the year, this orgy of violence even claimed Maulana
Mohammed Syed Masoodi, one of the Kashmiri participants in the Indian
Constituent Assembly in 1947–1949. By 1990, this old associate of Sheikh
Abdullah was eighty-seven, half-blind, infirm and ailing. On 13 December
1990, a group of armed men, calling themselves members of the Hizbullah,
dragged him out of his house and executed him.
Other political party leaders, retired or otherwise, did not escape.
Octogenarian Abdul Sattar Ranjoor, though formally general secretary of
the Communist Party of India’s J & K unit, was no longer active in politics.
But in March 1990, a group of militants forced their way into his house and
shot him dead. The same fate was reserved for Ghulam Nabi Butt, a former
Congress MLA.
Other targets were security forces’ personnel and ordinary people,
suspected of working for the authorities. On 23 March, Ghulam Hassan
Tabassum, a deputy superintendant of police, was shot dead outside his
residence, and a government executive engineer Ashok Misri was shot and
mortally wounded in Peerbagh. The JKSLF claimed responsibility for both
actions, describing Misri as an IB informer.
Earlier, in March, the Hizb had executed two imams from a mosque near
Shupian town. Abdul Aziz and Ayub Ali Qashi hailed from West Bengal.
The Hizb claimed it had tried and executed the two under Islamic law for
spying for the intelligence services. Their bodies bore signs of torture and
were discovered near Veil village on 11 March.

Attack on the Pandits

The relationship between Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent is a
subject in itself. Even more complex is the relationship of the two
communities in the Kashmir valley.
Unlike the rest of the country where Muslims fancifully claim descent
from Turkey, Arabia or Iran, Kashmiri Muslims do not deny their Hindu
origins. The dress, language, culture and even surnames point to their Hindu
ancestry.
But there is a chasm, going back to the time of the Dogra rule, when a
religious minority, the Hindus, ruled majority Muslims. In this situation,
Kashmiri pandits flourished, but this in many ways was the story of the
Brahmins, or for that matter, the Kayasths, elsewhere in India, even in the
service of Muslim kings and emperors. In twentieth century Kashmir,
because of their small numbers, they stood out. Most of them were ordinary
folk, like their Muslim neighbours. In the 1947–1990 period, as a minority
in the state ruled by Kashmiri Muslim chief ministers, it is they who felt
marginalized.
Before 1947, they were seen as the instrument of the autocratic Dogra
rule, and after accession, with Indian rule. Though independence and the
tourist boom created great potential for the Kashmiri Muslim youth, the
burgeoning population gave the impression that the poor and the Muslim
had gained little. In fact, some of the ‘best and the brightest’ of both the
pandit and the Muslim communities left the valley and migrated. They still
left behind the resentments, most will agree, but there was no hatred going
back decades or even centuries.
There has been much controversy over the fleeing of Kashmiri pandits
from the valley. Given the litany of killings, rapes and executions, it is
difficult not to see why the community fled en masse to Jammu and Delhi,
beginning February 1990. But the feeling of fear did not come in 1989 or
1990; that had been there earlier, because of the periodic riots and
demonstrations in which militant organizers made it clear that they saw the
Kashmiri pandits as an element that had to be ‘cleansed’ from their region.
While some saw it as a matter of settling old scores, others saw it as
condign retribution for the community that had always supported the rulers.
As in the case of Punjab in 1947, not a few eyed Kashmiri pandit property,
and saw the advantages of scaring them off the land in the name of religion.
This fear psychosis reached a fever pitch in 1989 and 1990, when
demonstrators jeered at Hindu neighbours, though they did not attack them.
The assassination in 1989 of N.K. Ganjoo and Tika Lal Taploo, or even
of Lassa Koul, can be explained away as political murders. But another
pattern of intimidation emerged with the rise of militancy. Pandits began
receiving threats via phone or letters in 1989. O.N. Sharma, a travel agent,
received a hand- written letter in Urdu in September, ordering him to leave
the valley by 27 September, failing which, he and his family would be
killed. He complained to the police, but little came of it. He was again
threatened, this time verbally by some young men. He left on 2 October
1989, his family following him in February 1990.
In December 1989, Joginder Nath, who taught at the Radha Krishna
School in Srinagar, found his name, along with three other teachers, pasted
on a noticeboard in the school by the Allah Tigers. They were told to quit
the valley since they were agents of the intelligence services. Nath
immediately left for his family house in Anantnag and stayed there.
However, even there he was accused of being a government agent and he
fled the valley in June 1990.
Others like Satish Tikoo, done to death on 2 February, were not so
fortunate. Satish was a social activist and leader of sorts. That morning
when two Muslim youths whom he knew called at his home in Habbakadal,
his sister, suspecting something, told them that Satish was not home. Satish
was somewhat annoyed, unwilling to believe that he was under threat when
his sister reported her suspicions to him. He stepped out of his house to look
for the men, and in an instant shots rang out killing him on the spot.
This was just the beginning. On 23 February, Ashok Qazi, a field officer
of the state agriculture department, was shot in the legs and left on the
roadside for an hour before the terrorists put him out of his misery by
shooting him dead. A week later, it was the turn of Navin Saproo, a
telecommunications engineer, who was shot dead in Kanikadal, Srinagar,
On 27 February, twenty-year-old Tej Kishen was taken away from his house
in Badgam and later, his body, bearing signs of torture and beatings, was
found hanging from a tree.
A more gruesome fate awaited B.K. Ganju, a telecom engineer and
Srinagar resident. He was first told that his name figured in a list of persons
to be killed. In the ensuing days, he and his family suffered in apprehension,
not knowing what to do.
On the night of 18 March, their phone rang incessantly, but they let it
ring, not daring to respond. In the morning some persons knocked at the
door, claiming they had ‘urgent work’ with Ganju. Too scared to respond,
Ganju called the police for help, even as two militants broke into the house.
Ganju ran to the roof of the house and hid in a drum used for storing rice.
The intruders searched the house and not finding him, left. But they
returned, apparently on a signal from a watching accomplice outside, who
had spotted Ganju. They went up the stairs to the roof and pumped the drum
with bullets, Ganju’s blood soaking the rice. Two years later, after
interrogation of a militant, the police found out the names of the two killers
—Javed Ahmed Shalla and Mohammed Yasin Bhat. They belonged to what
became one of the most virulent tanzeems—the Ikhwan-ul- Muslimeen.
Ganju’s assassination was followed by the killing of P.N. Handoo, an
assistant director in the state information department, and A.K. Raina of the
department of civil supplies. Eighty-five- year-old Radha Krishen of Karan
Nagar was dragged out of his house in early April and kicked about the
neighbourhood before being shot dead. Motilal Pandit was kidnapped from
his home in Tankipora and his headless body was later found in a jungle
near Kupwara.
Worse befell Sarwanand Koul, a retired headmaster and well- known
poet who used the pen-name ‘Premi’. A student of Kashmiri culture and
language, ‘Premi’ had not heeded the call of those who suggested that he
leave his house in Shali village in Anantnag district for his own safety. On
the night of 30 April, three armed men appeared at his door and demanded
that the sixty-seven-year-old poet and his twenty-seven-year-old son,
Virendra, go to their camp to answer ‘some questions’. Some neighbours
did try to protest, but quickly acquiesced when the militants swore that the
two would be unharmed. No one bothered to tell the police. Two days later
their bodies were found twenty kilometres away, with limbs and fingers
broken and eyes gouged out.
In May, attacks on the pandits intensified across the valley. In Baramula,
two young men, Satinder Kumar and Swarup Nath, were taken away from
their homes, and later, their bodies bearing marks of torture, including burn
injuries, were found. In Kulgam, militants kidnapped Bhushan Lal Kaul, an
engineer in the public works department. Later, his body was found with the
eyes gouged out. Bansi Lal Zutshi had sent his family away, but he stayed
back to look after his house. On the night of 23 May, militants barged in,
tortured him, hacked his body and dumped it in a gunny bag. In Badgam,
Makhan Lal Raina, working as a medical assistant in a government college,
was asked to ‘accompany’ the militants for questioning. Later, his mutilated
body was recovered.
Not a few Kashmiri pandits believed that if they led their lives quietly
without involving themselves on either side, they could create an island of
normality. One such person was Prof. K.L. Ganju, a popular teacher at the
Sopur Agricultural College, who was sure that since he had harmed no one,
no one would harm him. But in early May, when he, his wife Prana and
cousin Pista were having dinner, four terrorists ordered them out and took
them near a mosque on the Jhelum river. Ganju was shot and died instantly;
Pista, who was hit on his heels, dived into the river and swam to safety. The
fate of Mrs Ganju was worse she was raped and later killed.
Having lived together for decades, the average Muslims in the valley
were not particularly happy about the killings of the pandits. On occasion
they remonstrated with the militants, but they did little else. Militants
accused many Kashmiri pandit state government officials of being
‘mukhbirs’ or informers of the intelligence agencies.
Rape was part of the militants’ attack on women. In March 1990, the wife
of BSF Inspector M.N. Paul, was abducted, raped for several days and her
limbs broken before she was killed.
Sarla Bhat, a resident of Anantnag, worked as a nurse at the Shere-e-
Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), Soura, Srinagar. She was
kidnapped by JKLF militants from the nurses’ hostel. On 18 April, her
bullet-riddled body was found with a note claiming that she had been a
mukhbir. A post-mortem showed that she had been raped several times
before her death. In the case of Bhat, it is believed that she heard a
conversation between a wounded militant and a doctor during the course of
her duty, which could have exposed the latter’s collusion with the terrorists.
This resulted in her terrible punishment.
In May, in Shupian, Brij Nath Kaul, his wife Ratna and sister Sunita were
abducted. The women were stripped and molested and later raped, Brij Nath
Kaul was made to watch this and then clubbed to death. The women’s fate
was even more gruesome: they were done to death by being dragged behind
a jeep.
G.K. Muju was a lecturer at the Medical College in Srinagar and a
working committee member of the Kashmiri Pandit Conference. In
February 1990, Muju was told that his name had been seen in hit lists
pasted by the militants in some mosques in the city. The following month,
his family went through a number of harrowing incidents: people throwing
stones at his house, mysterious phone calls, and so on. On 6 March, Muju,
his wife and children left. However, his eighty-year-old father, a retired
teacher, and his seventy-five-year-old mother stayed behind. On 6 July,
some intruders entered the house and brutally knifed the old couple to
death. Nothing was taken away from the house.
By the middle of the year some eighty persons had been killed with great
brutality, and the fear psychosis had its effect from the very first killings.
Beginning in February, the pandits began streaming out of the valley, and
by June some 58,000 families had relocated to camps in Jammu and Delhi.
One of the charges against Jagmohan is that he encouraged the Kashmiri
pandits to migrate. However, his security adviser, Ved Marwah, has said
that the real reason for the pandits’ migration was a feeling that they had
been abandoned by the administration when Jagmohan, beset by pressures
from V.P. Singh and Rajiv Gandhi, left Srinagar and sulked in Jammu.
Efforts to prevent the migration came to naught. The governor’s own
policy measures may have contributed to it, but inadvertently, not
deliberately, as charged by bodies like the PUCL. The governor was
confronted with a situation which demanded some action. He did not have
the security forces to protect every pandit in the valley. In addition, he and
the administration were besieged by appeals for help from the
understandably panicky pandits. On the advice of his officials, he ordered
the establishment of special camps where the pandits could be protected. In
addition, the administration declared that Kashmiri pandit government
servants would receive their salaries wherever they were, a factor that
encouraged migration but was not its primary cause.
 But to extrapolate that these measures were the cause of migration, rather
than the militants’ brutality, would be a gross travesty of truth.
Unfortunately, the problem got entangled in the politics of the time, with
the BJP espousing the pandits’ cause and the Janata Dal and Congress
ignoring it. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Union
government headed by V.P. Singh, keen on shoring up its Muslim support
base, shamefully ignored the exodus and played down the plight of the
pandits. In an article in the Times of India, Harish Khare rightly blamed the
entire ‘secular establishment’ for turning ‘its back on the Hindu migration
from the valley’. Indeed, its most extreme arm, the PUCL, went out of its
way to skew testimony to prove that Jagmohan had engineered the
migration, ignoring the brutual rapes and killings that preceded it.

Government at Sea
The Janata Dal government had been born in crisis and never seemed to be
far from one throughout its eighteen-month tenure. V.P. Singh had neither
the time nor the inclination to pay attention to Kashmir. Confronted with
difficult situations, he took resort to symbolism, such as appointing former
atomic energy chief Raja Ramanna as defence minister when confronted
with evidence that Pakistan had crossed the nuclear threshold. Appointing
Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, a Kashmiri Muslim as home minister, and
sending Jagmohan as governor followed this pattern.
The national political leadership had not quite grasped the magnitude of
the events in Kashmir, or perhaps they had and did not care. Rajiv Gandhi
in the Opposition, now felt it necessary to attack Jagmohan, a person who
had been a courtier, and that too a minor one, of his mother. In part, he was
egged on by Farooq who was now his ally.
Jagmohan decided to play his own game and he had the local authority to
play it. One of his first independent actions was to dissolve the suspended
state Assembly on 19 February. His calculation was born more out of fear
that it would be revived and Farooq would be foisted on him. So without
informing the home minister or the prime minister, he issued the
notification.
This action caused dismay in the Union government and Prime Minister
V.P. Singh. After this, Jagmohan found himself the lightning rod for the
whole Kashmir mess. On the one hand, he found the Mufti, with his friends
Arun Nehru and Arif Mohammed Khan, involving themselves in Kashmir
affairs, and on the other, Rajiv Gandhi and Farooq Abdullah unleashing a
campaign of, what he believed was, sustained calumny against him.
In mid-February, Jagmohan made what many observers term a tactical
mistake. After his success in enforcing prohibitory orders on 26 January and
11 February, the anniversary of Maqbool Butt’s hanging, he began to relax
the restrictions on processions. Jagmohan had by now developed what he
believed was an accurate assessment of the situation and he was determined
to work along its logic. As he wrote later: ‘I wanted to provide a relaxed
atmosphere in which the accumulated steam of the past could be let off, and
larger numbers of people could approach me directly with their grievances
and suggestions. Secondly, I wanted to weaken the hold of the fanatics and
fundamentalists, and also of the pro-Pakistani groups by facilitating the
ascendancy of those elements in the J & K Liberation Front who had the
latent disposition to be moderate and whom I could subsequently tackle to
accept my idea of securing real freedom for the Kashmiri masses, within the
larger framework of the Indian Constitution.’
Jagmohan had simply not grasped the nature of the uprising and the
forces it had unleashed. Even the execution of this policy was faulty. It sent
all kinds of confusing signals to the police, the militants and their
supporters. The pro-secessionist J & K Bar Association lawyers began the
trend of taking processions to the UN military observers’ group’s office,
joined later by militant groups such as the Dukhtaran-e-Millat. By late
February such demonstrations became a regular feature. Since the state
Assembly had been dissolved, the National Conference, which had so far
been dormant, also pitched in, focusing its attack on Jagmohan and
accusing him of mishandling the Kashmir situation.
 It were these kinds of processions that led to two incidents of firing by
Army personnel in Zakura and Rawalpura, leading to the deaths of eighteen
persons and injuries to many more on March 1. Tension again mounted and
the terrorist upsurge intensified.
To aid these efforts, as it were, V.P. Singh decided to rule Kashmir
through a committee, a blunder if there ever was one in handling a crisis
situation. His seven-member advisory committee was, to compound it all,
an all-party affair. Led by Deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal, it arrived in
Srinagar with just eight hours notice, on 9 March. Its laudable goal was to
show that national concern over events in Kashmir cut across party lines,
but its end consequences were to deepen the problem of administering the
state.
Among the members of the team were Railway Minister George
Fernandes and Law Minister Dinesh Goswami. Leading the Congress
contingent was Rajiv Gandhi. Among the other Opposition leaders were
Jaswant Singh of the BJP and Biplab Das Gupta of the CPI(M).
The group succeeded in alienating the governor and raising the
temperature of the valley by a few more degrees. As soon as the people got
wind of the team’s composition, an unceasing barrage of slogans
demanding ‘azadi’ and screaming, ‘Indian dogs go home’, rent the air.
All through Rajiv Gandhi did nothing but needle Jagmohan. Forgetting
his and his party’s role in making a mess of things in the state, he berated
the governor (who had no prior intimation) for not being present at the
airport to receive the deputy prime minister. If this was not all, he took issue
with Jagmohan for making Devi Lal sit to his left, an apparent breach of
protocol. All this took place in the presence of a plane load of media
personnel who had come in from Delhi.
In the meantime, George Fernandes was operating on his own,
establishing contacts with people close to the militants in Srinagar, like
Abdul Ahad Guru, the cardiologist-militant adviser of the JKLF, and Mian
Abdul Qayoom, the lawyer and Jamaat- e-Islami activist.
The tragi-comic farce did not end there. At a press conference after the
governor’s briefing to the all-party delegation, Goswami inadvertently
declared that the government was ready to hold talks with the militants.
Coming at a time when the home minister was saying the opposite, it left
the Kashmir administration, if not the militants, bewildered.
Rajiv Gandhi and his group did not leave unscathed. A group of
supposedly friendly Kashmiris were brought in to meet them but the group
turned hostile and began raising slogans ‘Indian dogs go back’ and ‘We
want independence.’ They charged Rajiv with having set up the corrupt
Farooq administration. To the chagrin of the onlookers, even the hotel staff
joined in the slogan shouting.
The delegation returned on 10 March but George Fernandes stayed
behind. The next day Jagmohan was informed by Mufti Mohammed Sayeed
that the Union Cabinet had decided to appoint a minister for Kashmir affairs
at the Centre, to be assisted by two or three advisers. The following day an
announcement was made in New Delhi.
Later it became known that the person chosen as minister would be
George Fernandes, and among the members of his advisory committee
would be Surinder Mohan of the Janata Dal, Ghulam Rasool Kar of the
Congress, Kedar Nath Sahni of the BJP, Saifuddin Chaudhury of the
CPI(M), M. Farooqi of the CPI and P.L. Handoo of the National
Conference.
In those days, George Fernandes was not particularly known for his skills
as a crisis solver, leave alone one as complex as the insurgency now
gripping Kashmir. In addition, he had a flair for dramatic and unrealistic
actions that scarcely met the requirements of the job and, indeed, the
gravity of the situation.
No one knows what V.P. Singh was trying to achieve by appointing
Fernandes to the job. It was perhaps an unstated move to reach out to the
rebels. But it was also, as Jagmohan rightly believed, like having two
generals command a front. In fact, taking into account the home minister,
three. Its inevitable consequence was to divide the Kashmir bureaucracy,
already riven with dissensions, even further.
V.P. Singh and the Indian political class wanted to believe that the
happenings in Kashmir were just like the crises and tribulations India had
faced elsewhere, and correct political ministrations would quickly solve the
problem. In their scheme of things terrorists who had brutalized the
Kashmiri pandits and gunned down innocents were nothing but ‘misguided
youth’ who could be brought back to the national mainstream. In view of
the active Pakistani participation, they were wrong. There was a covert war
going on in the valley, and India had no choice but to fight it with the
weapons that the militants had chosen—guns.
By the end of March it became clear that the country’s higher
management of the Kashmir crisis was dysfunctional. With the Union home
minister sulking in the sidelines, affairs were being handled by a governor
in Srinagar who could not see eye to eye with the Union minister for
Kashmir affairs, George Fernandes. Their problem was their sharply
differing views on handling the crisis. The radical George Fernandes
believed that the Kashmir mess was a result of the wrong policies of the
Union government and the venality of the local elite. To resolve the
problem it was necessary to bypass the old order, which meant the National
Conference and the Congress, and negotiate with the ‘boys’ of the
militancy.
Governor Jagmohan, on the other hand, saw the whole thing as a
manifestation of sedition promoted by Muslim fundamentalists which had
to be crushed by force. At one of the meetings, as Fernandes recounted, he
tried to propose ways and means of restoring economic activity by
promoting the marketing of apples. But Jagmohan opposed it because he
believed the orchard owners were Muslims and the orchards sheltered the
terrorists.
By criticizing the governor’s administration for needlessly extending
curfews and imposing economic hardship on the populace, and doing so
publicly, Fernandes was undermining Jagmohan’s authority at a critical
juncture.
As Union Cabinet minister in charge of Kashmir affairs, Fernandes had
authority without responsibility for the foremost problem—the insurgency
in the state. Indeed, in some important instances, he prevented action
against some of the overground leaders of the insurgents such as Dr Guru.
On 30 March, after Ashfaq Majid Wani died accidentally, the JKLF wanted
to make his funeral a big occasion. But existing restrictions prevented this.
The police were asked not to implement their orders, allegedly at the
instance of Fernandes.
Jagmohan may not have been the best person for the job, but there is little
doubt that he did what he did with great sincerity and zeal. Besides his
inaccurate assessment of the situation, his biggest problem was the
inadequate instrumentalities at his command. The widespread support for
militancy by the Kashmir elite generated a cycle of distrust between the
administration and the Kashmiri Muslim personnel of the government. The
administration’s actions to sideline some of the officials, the J & K armed
police, only enhanced the problem.
Some Kashmiri Muslim officials, through their own inclination, were
supportive of militancy. Others were aware of what it meant. They may
have lived in safe enclaves, but their relatives and friends did not. So not a
few Kashmiri Muslim officers made their peace with the militants.
Likewise, quite a few J & K Police constables and officers actively
collaborated with them. The police chief, J.N. Saksena, who ought to have
played a key role in trying to prevent this was an outsider; a joint director of
the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi, he had spent the previous twenty years of
his career away from field police work. He was not experienced in the kind
of situation which he had been thrust into.
Like everyone else, Saksena was working in a difficult situation. But,
unlike some, he did not comprehend that the instrumentality that he
controlled was, and is, the key to ending any insurgency. Had he been able
to use a section of the local police, a lot of pain could have been avoided for
everyone in the ensuing years. Instead, the J & K Police went into deeper
and deeper depression. In incidents across the state, its personnel were
humiliated, beaten, and in some cases shot by what were their brother
agencies, the CRPF and the BSF.
Another segment that failed Jagmohan to a greater extent than he failed it
was the Kashmir bureaucracy. Large chunks of the junior civil servants
were militant sympathizers, if not militants themselves. Beginning with the
Rubaiya case, to the assassination of Mushir-ul-Haq, the complicity of the
local bureaucrats was evident. Bureaucracy did not mean just the engineers
and babus, but the teachers at the university and colleges and the doctors at
SKIMS. It also meant persons like Dr Guru, who was in the top echelons of
the JKLF.

The Death of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq

While New Delhi blundered, the killings went on. One-third of the persons
killed in 1990 were political activists belonging to the non-fundamentalist
and secular formations such as the National Conference, the CPI, the
Congress and the Janata Dal. Most were victims of the Hizbul Mujahideen
and ISI-sponsored groups such as the Ikhwan.
This was undoubtedly part of a grand design to eliminate all traces of the
older political order in the state and wipe the slate clean as it were. Having
seen the movement rise to such heights, ISI officials now began to worry
that something could go wrong. Pro-Indian forces like the National
Conference and the Congress had been neutralized. One other major force
remained. The hereditary Mirwaiz, Maulvi Farooq, had been a thorn in the
flesh of India for a long time. But he had also shown that he could, on
occasion, do a deal with New Delhi. He was, after all, an ally of Farooq
Abdullah against the MUF in the late 1980s. When the rebellion broke out,
the Maulvi had not been particularly helpful. Indeed, he had challenged the
Jamaat’s effort to take control of his hereditary seat as the imam of Jama
Masjid. However, he had not hesitated to condemn what he charged were
excesses of the Indian security forces. The ISI decided there was little point
taking chances. On the morning of 21 May, three young men walked up to
the Nagin residence of the Mirwaiz. They managed to convince his
secretary that they had come by appointment and were ushered into the
inner room where the Mirwaiz awaited them. There they shot him, fatally
wounding him, and fled. Within half an hour of the news, thousands of his
supporters came out into the streets and streamed to SKIMS.
 The government and the police were stunned. DGP Saksena visited the
institute and realized the mood of the gathering crowd, as had the person in
charge of Srinagar’s security, Inspector- General of Police M.N. Sabharwal.
They could have either withdrawn the police and let the procession wreak
whatever havoc it chose or enforced curfew orders strictly. Instead, both left
without issuing any clear orders. Confronted with this administrative
paralysis, the gathering began to march towards the Idgah burial ground.
As the emotionally charged crowd moved towards the Idgah, the police
suddenly woke up and declared curfew in the entire area. No one was told
how this curfew would be imposed, or who would manage the situation on
the ground. It was left to the hapless CRPF pickets to deal with the
situation. In Rajouri Kadal, as the frenzied procession approached a picket
with nine CRPF jawans, the latter began to panic and as soon as the mob
drew near, the commander and his men escaped with their weapons.
But when another CRPF picket, guarding a camp near Islamia College,
saw the main procession coming towards the other end of the bridge at
Hawal, they had no clue as to what was happening. They had apparently not
heard of the Maulvi’s death. The commander of the picket, afraid of being
overwhelmed by the mob, ordered his men to fire. In the ensuing melée,
anywhere up to fifty people may have died. It was even said that some of
the bullets from the CRPF firing hit Maulvi Farooq’s coffin.
In September, the police made a breakthrough with the arrest of Ghulam
Nabi Sofi alias Bitacheeni, a resident of Kash Mohalla. Piecing together the
story from his confessions, the police were able to determine what
happened. The Mirwaiz was killed on the instructions of the ISI, operating
through a shadowy formation called the Green Army, headed by
Mohammed Abdullah Bangroo, a top Hizb functionary who had strangled
the respected Mir Mustafa in March.
The Green Army consisted of Hizb extremists who worked under direct
ISI orders. Among its members was Hilal Ahmed Mir alias Nasir-ul-Islam,
who later dissolved the organization and renamed it the Jamiat-ul-
Mujahideen.
 The main culprit, Bangroo, was shot dead in an encounter on 18 June,
less than a month after the assassination of the Mirwaiz. The elimination of
the Maulvi removed from the scene the only person who had the credibility
to speak for the valley’s Kashmiris at that juncture.
The killers foresaw that once Farooq was eliminated, the hereditary
office would fall on the slender shoulders of Omar Farooq, the Maulvi’s
sixteen-year-old son. And while religious obeisance as the Mirwaiz would
be his on assumption of office, it would be a decade or more before he
could hope to command the political authority of his father. To make it clear
that he had heeded the message, on 30 May, speaking to a large audience,
Farooq roundly denounced India and Indian rule, and has since played the
role of coordinating the political attack on India.
Had the government of the day skilfully managed the situation, the
assassination of the Maulvi could have been used to turn the situation
around since few in the valley believed that Indian authorities were behind
his assassination. Instead, the massacre at the funeral led to a deepening
crisis in the state, costing Jagmohan his job. He was recalled on 24 May and
replaced by Girish ‘Gary’ Saxena.
Whatever may have been the merits of pinning the communal label on
Jagmohan, it had one tragic consequence. From March onwards,
intelligence officials had been warning the authorities, that the Mirwaiz was
a potential target of the militants. Indeed, Maulvi Farooq, who was not
unaware of this, himself sent word through emissaries that preventive
detention may not have been unwelcome. However, Jagmohan refused to
act, arguing that were he to arrest the Maulvi without any provocation, he
would be dubbed anti-Muslim.
Everyone must take the blame for the confused and contrary handling of
the affairs of the state in the first six months of the rebellion when effective
handling could have turned things around. But in all fairness, the list should
begin from the top. Beginning with Farooq and Rajiv Gandhi, V.P. Singh,
Devi Lal, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, Jagmohan, DGP Saksena, and moving
down to the civilian officials, Cabinet Secretaries T.N. Seshan and V.C.
Pandey, Union Home Secretary Shiromani Sharma, State Chief Secretaries
Moosa Raza and R.K. Takkar, Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Mahmud-
ur-Rehman and all extra-constitutional persons such as I.K. Gujral, Arun
Nehru, Arif Mohammed Khan and George Fernandes.
Collectively, they played wonderfully into the hands of the Pakistani
handlers who had so carefully stoked the fires of militancy. It was these
men who now fanned its flames.
 3
Fanning the Flames

The first six months of the conflict revealed that there was no coherent
response to the crisis. Since there was no strategic assessment of the
situation, there could hardly have been a plan to deal with it. Were the
events in Kashmir a proxy war launched by Pakistan or an uprising of
frustrated ‘misguided youth’? Or was it a struggle for ‘freedom’? How
serious was it? Was force the answer, or negotiation? If the latter, who was
one to talk to? If not, what sort of time-frame was needed to suppress it and
what were the kind of military or police forces needed?
The prime minister in New Delhi was the boss and he did not lack civil
servants and officials in the home ministry, IB, Research and Analysis
Wing, and the Army headquarters, to obtain a professional assessment.
Since he was in a predicament, it would have been understandable had he
called in senior leaders of other political parties to protect his flanks, and
then given a consensual strategic directive to the man in the field,
Jagmohan.
Instead, Prime Minister V.P. Singh resorted to political grandstanding by
first appointing a Kashmiri Muslim as home minister, then a person
reportedly close to the BJP as the governor. He then undermined both of
them by appointing a minister for Kashmir affairs, and all of them were left
to fend for themselves. The argument was that the government had inherited
a bad situation and was doing its best to deal with it.
But, in retrospect, at least, things could have been different had New
Delhi and its man on the field looked at things differently. The obvious
problem seems to be the slowness with which New Delhi reacted even
when it decided that it would crack down and crush the rebellion by the use
of the police and the Army. It actually took a year to actively involve the
Army in counter-militancy operations. The BSF’s strength in the valley was
built up piecemeal even as the J & K Police and administration came apart.
Jagmohan was not lacking in self-esteem in respect of his own patriotism
and intellect, and so he set his own course. By the time he left, the course
had been locked into a direction that shaped the character of the Kashmir
conflict in the coming years. To bring back an alienated people into the
national mainstream, Jagmohan scarcely needed the CRPF and the BSF—
at least, what they had become in their Kashmir manifestation. What he
could have used and did not have, were seasoned, disciplined forces, of the
type the CRPF later raised as the Rapid Action Force, with adequate crowd
control training and equipment. Kashmir was the ideal place to use a water
cannon, yet, while several of them were available in the airports of the state,
none was ever used to control crowds and demonstrators.
His successor Girish Saxena saw his task as fighting a proxy war, but he
needed seasoned and trained troops. Because it was obvious to all that the
guerrillas fighting for Pakistan had the support of the people, separating the
two required surgical precision, not the butcher’s stroke. Nothing short of
forces trained to the level of the Army’s para commandos would have
sufficed for the task. But in the summer of 1990, all this would have been
asking for the moon.
By 1990–1991, militancy consolidated in Srinagar, expanded to the
countryside. Using the funds and guns that the Pakistanis made available to
them preferentially, the Hizbul Mujahideen became the main militant group
in the valley. Its efforts were boosted by the quality of its commanders—
Master Ahsan Dar, Mohammed Ashraf Dar and Maqbool Illahi—as well as
the network of the Jamaat-e-Islami across the valley. The JKLF, steadily
squeezed by arrests and starved of funds, remained confined to Srinagar,
where its popular appeal had not dimmed. But the heart of the uprising
remained in Srinagar. In its urban sprawl half-a-dozen militant groups felt
secure enough to vie for ascendancy. The ISI encouraged all of them, its
only condition being that they maintain a relentless pace of attack on Indian
security forces. By July 1990, Mushtaq Zargar’s Al Umar Mujahideen was
fifty-five strong with just fifteen rifles, having lost one cache in a security
forces’ sweep. Zargar sent another group under Shabir Ahmed Bayroo
across the LoC which returned with some new recruits from among the
Kashmiri boys in the camps in Azad Kashmir. Thirty boys returned with
twenty-five assault rifles, machine-guns, four pistols and thirty grenades.
But Shabir demanded that he be given a senior appointment in the Al Umar.
When Zargar refused, he walked out to form the Al Umar Commandos
taking his group of thirty men and the weapons.
As a result of this, Zargar sent Manzoor Ahmed Ganai, later known as
Nayeem-ul-Haq, across the border in December 1990 to ensure that Shabir
did not usurp the Al Umar’s goodwill with the ISI. In February 1991,
Nayeem returned with thirty boys through Kupwara, all armed with AK-47s
and carrying some additional weapons like machine-guns, rocket launchers
and grenades. Nayeem returned to Azad Kashmir in April 1991 to man the
Al Umar office there since the ISI wanted a permanent representative for
coordinating action. The Al Umar was further strengthened in April 1991
when Jamshed Khan heading a small tanzeem of the Al Madad Yadgar Ali
joined them, bringing sixteen AK-47s and a large quantity of ammunition.
With Nayeem in Muzaffarabad and Mushtaq Zargar in the valley, the Al
Umar began to function smoothly. Every two weeks, groups of four-five
boys were sent across the border and in July, the first lot of fifteen recruits
returned. By the end of the year, Nayeem had sent back some hundred
militants each armed with an AK-47 and eight light machine-guns.
Being in the main in Srinagar, the Al Umar’s activity was providing
security to the Jama Masjid area, the headquarters of the Awami Action
Committee to which it was linked. Its operations were mostly assassination
and kidnapping.
In May 1991, Mohammed Shafi Mir, ex-MLA and National Conference
member, was shot dead in his residence in Lal Mazar by Mansoor and Altaf.
He was on the hit list since he had not resigned from the Assembly in 1990.
In June, Ghulam Kandroo, the Hazratbal area commander of the outfit, shot
dead Hissam-ud- din Bande, a former MLA, as well. In September, as per
Mushtaq Zargar’s instructions, Sham Sheikh Sadiq was shot dead by
Kandroo. Sadiq was a cousin of Farooq Abdullah and a former member of
parliament and was, once again, killed at his house in Hazratbal.
But things were not always smooth sailing. Arrest and detention were a
regular risk. In July 1990, when Muzamil was arrested and following his
interrogation several Al Umar hideouts raided, the outfit lost nineteen AK-
47s, two light machine-guns, ten walkie-talkie sets and two pistols, the bulk
of its armoury. In April 1991, Jamshed Khan was arrested by the BSF
within a week of merging his group with the Al Umar, but none of the
substantial cache of weapons he had brought with him were seized. In
March 1992, another seizure led to the loss of two LMGs, two AK-47s,
thirty-six pistols and two rocket launchers belonging to the Watalkadal-
Safakadal units of the Al Umar.
There were movements of personnel among militant groups as well. As
soon as Javed Shalla was released in August 1991 and resumed command
as the number two man of the Ikhwan, military adviser Khurshid Ahmed
Bhat aka Khalid Javed was upset and in February 1992, walked over to the
Al Umar in the same capacity along with five acolytes. In protest, Khalid
Mumtaz, the Srinagar district commander of the outfit, crossed over to the
JKLF along with twenty-five of his followers. At the same time, Lala Mir,
an area commander of the JKLF, came over to the Al Umar with ten ‘boys’
and their weapons. Such action led to inevitable tensions between groups,
leading to clashes resulting in several deaths.
Within the organization also tension rose between Khalid Javed and
Mushtaq Zargar. At the end of April, an issue related to the disciplining of
one of the area commanders led to a scuffle between the two. As a result of
this, Javed was disarmed and expelled from the Al Umar.
By 1991, the JKLF may have had setbacks but other militant groups had
established themselves in Kashmir, especially in Srinagar and its environs.
A profile of the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, formerly the Jammu and Kashmir
Students Liberation Front in early 1992, looked like this: there was a central
body coordinating with the ISI and organizing the training of personnel in
Azad Kashmir. In addition, there were operatives, in the main in Srinagar
where most of its support came from.

Central Body

Chairman Hilal Ahmed Baig

Deputy Chairman Javed Ahmed Shalla
Chief Commander Mohammed Yasin Bhat
Deputy Chief Commander Sajjad Ahmed Kenoo
Military Adviser Shabbir Ahmed
Publicity Chief Altaf Qureshi
Chief Organizer Niyaz Ahmed Niyazi aka Mitha Sofi
Public Relations Rafiq Shaheen
Intelligence Chief Mushtaq Haji

This central body presided over district units which included district
commanders, advisers, etc. for the Srinagar, Baramula, Anantnag, Pulwama,
Budgam and Kupwara districts. Srinagar, being the base of the outfit, also
had sector commanders for Soura, Safakadal, Down town, Nishat and
Amira Kadal areas. In addition to this, there were seven regiments in the
main in the Srinagar area, each comprising ten to fifteen militants. The total
strength of the outfit around this time was about 1,500 personnel of whom
some 500 had been trained in Pakistan. The arms holdings were about 400
AK-47s, eight to ten universal machine- guns and five rocket launchers.
The Ikhwan was paid about Rs 1.5 lakh per month by the ISI, in addition
to the roughly similar money it extorted and obtained through other means.
This was used to pay salaries at the rate of Rs 300 per month for a foot
soldier, Rs 500 for a sector commander, Rs 2000 for a district commander,
Rs 3000 for a military adviser. The salary of the higher commanders was
not fixed. The recurrence of many of these names later in this book points
to the effectiveness of this group, particularly its leader Hilal Baig.
In early 1991, Indian authorities managed to arrest two couriers for the
Hizb. Letters on their persons, as well as the activities of one of them,
related to money laundering, gave them an enormous amount of
information about the manner in which the Kashmir militancy was being
run.
Three of the letters were written by Hizb supreme commander Maulvi
Yusuf Shah alias Pir, and Syed Salahuddin, at the time in Pakistan, to
Master Ahsan Dar, and the fourth by Ghulam Mohammed Mir, a leading
Hizb commander, to Ali Mohammed Dar alias Burhan-ud-din Hajazi, the
deputy supreme commander of the outfit and the chief of the ISI-sponsored
United Jehad Council in Muzaffarabad.

1. (Recovered from Ashfaq Hussain Lone in New Delhi on 25 March 1991)

Jenab Master Saheb,

Aslam Aleikum,
As per the orders of our patron, I would have come to you personally but
due to some exigencies, I am sending this letter to you. Your attention is
invited to the following points suggested by the Patron:
1. An amount of Rs 2 lakhs twenty thousand is being sent through Ashfaq
Saheb. The money has been arranged by Salahuddin.
2. In Pakistan, all the agencies are having their faith in Hizbul Mujahideen
only but their idea is that the party should go in for some systematic and
planned big actions.
3. Javed Mir (JKLF) has taken an oath that he would cooperate with Hizbul
Mujahideen and would fight for Islam and Pakistan. You may keep it a
secret yet as he would give a press statement to this effect on his return.
4. Arrangements have been made for standard training and sophisticated
weapons. But it may take some time.
5. Have procured wireless set for communication.
6. Jamaat-e-Islami has arranged the funds. The problem is how to carry it.
Salahuddin Sahab may get it along. The problem is how to carry the
amount. Some permanent arrangement will have to be worked out soon for
the same. In case you are in need of money, you may borrow the same from
someone. We would repay him soon.
7. More concentration should be on Srinagar. Please send the
members/workers from undergoing training immediately after the routes are
through. Srinagar deserves more attention.
8. Srinagar as well as far-flung areas deserve more attention both from
organizational as well as action point of view.
9. Please mobilize the members of Jammu and its surrounding areas
immediately for despatching them to undergo training.
10. There is need to own the supporters of Ghulam Hassan Lone in
Kupwara.
11. The group of Nasirul Islam needs to be suppressed and eliminated.
12. Due care of the protocol to Abdul Majid Dar of the TJI (Tehrik Jehad-e-
Islami). He should be encouraged so that he does not feel disinterested.
India is going for polls and it is just possible that they may try to hold
elections in Jammu and Ladakh. So please arrange for a statement from
Hizbul Mujahideen asking people not to participate in elections. Also please
arrange for action both in the valley and in Jammu so that people are scared
and would not take part in the elections.

In separate handwriting—

Dear Masterji,
Enclosed letter may be treated as special and considered
thoughtfully.
Wasalam, Salah-ud-din Syed
Sd.
Pir

2. (Recovered from Bashir Ahmed Mir of Lassipora, Pulwama, when

caught near the LoC with thirty-six exfiltrating activists on August 14,
1991)

Respected Ali Mohammed Dar Saheb,

Asalam Aleikum,
As per the responsible persons of Mujahid groups, the guides leave them at
Haihama without handing over charge to responsible persons. They are
made to suffer. They were paid Rs 500 each for pocket expenses. At
Kalaroos, the group was apprehended by the different people and they took
away the money from them. It is, therefore, requested that the guides should
be instructed and ensure that before they leave the group of mujahids, they
should be handed over to some responsible persons. There is urgent need
for explosives and ammunition. You will send two packets of explosives
through each mujahid and additional 200/300 rounds. In addition, if guides,
labourers bring ammunition and explosives, it will be better if they hand
over to our responsible mujahid.
The shortage of rocket and rocket boosters and grenades have put us in
great difficulty. We are doing the work by purchasing each round for Rs 12
to Rs 15. Other items are not available here because the KLF and Al Umar
has dominated the market due to sound financial position. I have talked to
the responsible persons of Kupwara and Bandipur and have agreed to
provide as much mujahids for bringing ammunition. It is requested that you
will send them back without any delay.
Note: Please try to send LMG guns through each group of five boys, as we
need it urgently.
Sd/Shams-ul Haq (Ghulam Mohammed Mir)

3. (Recovered from Abdul Aziz Dar after his capture in Srinagar on 16

September 1991)
Respected Masterji,
Aslam Aleikum,
With grace and kindness of God I am trying to solve problems. I submit a
few suggestions and it is imperative to work on the same.

1. It is necessary to pay more attention to the stability of Hizbul Mujahideen

than merely expanding it. You have to ensure that only highly motivated
persons are inducted as office bearers from grass-root levels to the top and
insulate the party from infiltrators.
2. & 3. Cooperate with other tanzeems, particularly the MJF and Al Umar.
United Jehad Council is to be strengthened. Confrontation with other
tanzeems, particularly KLF, should be avoided.
4. Selected youth from Jammu province and Srinagar in groups of 20 each
should be sent here for training. It is necessary. For the time being do not
send youth from other districts. Border crossing has become very dangerous
these days. Hence send recruits in groups not exceeding 20, that too, under
the supervision of an expert guide.
5. Send a group of office bearers of the Jamaat who are underground. After
training here they would be inducted to take over the overground leadership
of the Mujahideen. However those already working there should not be
sent.
6. Necessary steps have been taken to remove shortage of ammunition in
Kashmir valley. You should send trained youth, particularly belonging to
Kupwara and Lolab area. They will be given enough ammunition. We are
also making alternative arrangements.
7. Nasir has returned, a disappointed person. Ajmal has decided to dissolve
Green Army and join Hizb. We have owned him here. It is necessary to
befriend and own his workers in Srinagar. Nasir group is to be neutralized
at all costs.
8. The merger of Hizb and TJI needs to be strengthened. Hon. Abdul Majid
Dar and his associates need to be treated with respect and cooperation.
Naikoo is maintaining a separate identity of TJI,
9. In Kupwara district give special cooperation to the followers of Lone
Sahib and try to own them. I had sent Abu Javed on some special mission. I
have come to know you have put him on some other jobs as it is important.
Kupwara and Srinagar deserve more attention.
10. You should constitute a separate ‘Logistic cell’, so that weapons
despatched are handed over to them. For this purpose Saddam Sahib was
already nominated from here.
11. Inshallah, all problems will be solved.
Salam from all, particularly Rahi sahib.
Sd. Pir
4. Also recovered from Abdul Aziz Dar in September 1991

Respected Shams-ul-Haq sahib,

Good wishes.
How can people, who are scared of talking over the telephone, fight the
present-day jihad?
I have always maintained contact with my men on the telephone. The
weakness in Srinagar cannot be overcome, till 200 recruits are sent here on
a priority basis. I do not know how Allah has paralysed the office bearers of
Srinagar. Use force and coercion to send boys from Srinagar to this place.
In Jammu send as many young men as possible, from Rajouri, Poonch,
Banihal and Doda. In this regard contact Masterji for finances. To restore
communication required things have been despatched. Additional weapons
have been procured and required ammunition has also been despatched.
Efforts are on to restore permanent channel. Kupwara has considerably
weakened. Take special care of this sector.
Full cooperation should be extended to Abdul Majid Dar to strengthen
Hizb.
Salam,
Sd. Pir

The last three letters written in mid-year and a little later point to the
organization’s success in establishing itself. The problems being discussed
are practical ones—shortage of ammunition, inadequate weapons, problems
of infiltration and exfiltration.
As a good manager, he was immediately able to see the problems of the
rapid expansion of the outfit and called on Dar to stabilize the tanzeem
rather than expand it. It is in this context that he gave his call for Jamaat
office-bearers to be sent across for training to take over the overground
leadership of the Hizb. Clearly, the Maulvi was running a sophisticated
political movement, not just a bunch of gun-toting thugs.
But Salahuddin’s focus was clear—the main battlefield would be
Srinagar and Jammu. The boys of Lolab and Kupwara were in the main
seen as carriers of ammunition and weapons. The need for a special logistic
cell was part of the solution. But, these were still problems of an outfit in its
growth phase and as he notes at the beginning of the letter, ‘I am trying to
solve problems.’ The letters reflect not only the state of play in late 1990
and 1991 but also the difficulties being faced by the Hizb in establishing
itself. Clearly, the JKLF and even the Al Umar appeared better organized in
the valley despite the Hizb’s links with the Jamaat and its valley-wide
network.
They also reflect the level of free play between various tanzeems and the
approach of the ISI towards them. The Pakistanis were operating in a
cautious fashion, taking a social Darwinist approach and allowing groups to
rise and fall, without providing anything more than some money, training,
arms and ammunition at the border, and facilitation in crossing back to
India. Their main focus was to back an outfit, any outfit, that was able to,
by the force of arms or otherwise, bring about the merger of Kashmir with
Pakistan.
Salahuddin’s letters also hint at the emerging conflict between the Jamaat
and the Hizb on the command of the gun. The letters refer to the ongoing
struggle with the Green Army splinter group that Mohammed Abdullah
Bangroo and Nasir-ul-Islam had created. But they do not speak of a larger
problem that hit the organization when Master Ahsan Dar, the chief askari
or military commander in the valley, resisted the efforts of the Jamaatis to
direct the gun. The result was the expulsion of Dar from the Hizb in
October 1991. Later, the Hizb was to charge Dar with having siphoned off
as much as Rs 20 lakh of its money. But Dar’s expulsion was in part due to
personality clashes and in part to the classic conflict between the ‘party’ and
the ‘gun’. When the party, in this case the Jamaat, did not have the gun,
they depended on experienced cadres like Dar to lead the way. But once
established, it wanted to validate its political supremacy, which was
resented by the holders of the gun, in this instance Dar. But according to
Dar’s supporters, there was another reason for the conflict. Sometime in
1990 or 1991, he ordered the execution of Muzaffar Mir, the son of the
local Jamaat chief in Anantnag, for having had a young couple killed to
settle a personal score.
Charges of misappropriation of funds were levelled against him to wipe
out his influence among the Hizb cadre. In fact, Ahsan Dar was kidnapped
and held by the Hizb for a couple of days. To counter these allegations and
to prove that he was as good a mujahid as any, Dar announced the
formation of the Mujahideen Islam in June 1992.
The death of Mohammed Ashraf Dar, the Hizb divisional commander, in
an encounter with the Army in October left a vacuum in the Hizb
leadership. In November, Salahuddin, the political commissar as it were,
became the chief of the askari wing. Shah, a maulvi and political activist,
now became a military commander. He had been the erstwhile amir-e-zila
or district chief of the Jamaat in Srinagar. He had been one of the candidates
who, it was said, had been edged out of an electoral victory in 1987 through
what critics charged was outright manipulation. In Pakistan in 1990–91,
Shah took the code names Pir, which means a saint, and Salahuddin, after
the great Arab general who defeated the Crusaders.
As number two, the Hizb leadership decided to send back in another of
its top cadres in Azad Kashmir, Mohammed Maqbool Illahi. He had started
off as a JKLF activist and had been one of a group that had visited Azad
Kashmir for training in October 1988 and returned in March 1989. At this
time he switched to the Hizb. His hagiographers said after his death that he
had fought alongside the Afghan mujahideen for a couple of years, but that
seems unlikely, though it is possible that during his Pakistan visit and his
defection to the Hizbul Mujahideen, he may have been part of the first
batch of Hizb personnel to get special training in the Afghanistan camps.
Whatever be the case, he was one of the best Hizbul Mujahideen
commanders and had made five or six trips between the valley and Azad
Kashmir, leading out recruits for training and returning with trained
personnel and weapons. At the time of Mohammed Ashraf Dar’s death and
Ahsan Dar’s expulsion from the outfit, he was in Azad Kashmir and he
returned in the winter of 1991 with Salahuddin.
 Having coped with the spontaneous rising of 1990, the Pakistani handlers
made heroic efforts to promote unity among the various militant groups
through 1991, even as they sought to sideline the JKLF and boost the
abilities of the Islampasand groups that openly favoured merger with
Pakistan. An important internal decision was to prevent the criminalization
of militancy and get the militants under the leadership of political elements.
While the proliferation of tanzeems was a useful device to prevent their
being wrapped up by Indian counter-insurgency operations, they were also a
headache in terms of management. The always factious Kashmiris made
things even more difficult.
Many tanzeems had no political background and the suddenness of
events in December 1989 had left many politicians, even those against
India, stranded without links with the new power structure of ‘military
advisers’, ‘area commanders’ and the like, essentially a bunch of youngsters
who had learnt the power of the gun.
It was left to the ISI to enforce some order in their functioning. They
decided to compel a marriage of convenience between the tanzeems and
various political outfits such as the People’s League, the Muslim
Conference, the Awami Action Committee, the People’s Conference and so
on. In the new scheme of things, each of them was to maintain an office in
Muzaffarabad and become the nodal point without whose permission
tanzeems could neither lay their hands on the ISI money nor on the
weapons.
In April 1991, to operationalize this, the ISI called a meeting at its
headquarters in Islamabad, presided over by ‘Sarfaraz’, reportedly number
two in the organization. The JKLF was pointedly excluded. The main
decision of the meeting was that all the organizations would work under the
guidance of the Tehrik Hurriyat-e-Kashmir (TEHK), which was a political
body, along with a complementary outfit, the Muthaida Jehad Council
(United Jehad Council) to unite the militant groups. Both outfits had been
set up earlier in 1990 but were not functional.
Dominated by the Jamaat-e-Islami, the head of the TEHK was Ashraf
Saraf, a malevolent character completely controlled by the ISI, though
ostensibly a Jamaati. His dislike of Mushir-ul- Haq contributed to the
hapless VC’s murder. He was formerly a temporary lecturer in Baramula
Government College. Among the group’s other members were the Islamic
Student’s League, the People’s League of Farooq Rehmani, Muslim
Conference, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, the Islamic Jamiat-e-Tulba, Muslim
League, Pasadaran Islam, the Jamiat-e-Ahle-Hadis and the Tehrik-e-
Mujahideen. The United Jehad Council’s (UJC) chief was Tanvir Bhat, also
known as Tanvir-ul-Islam, and later it transpired that he was Ali
Mohammed Dar, Ahsan Dar’s cousin, who was also known as
Burhanunddin Hajazi. Here all the Islampasand tanzeems—the Ikhwan-ul-
Muslimeen, the Hizbul Mujahideen, the Al Jehad, the Harkat-ul-
Mujahideen, the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, and the Al Barq—were represented.
While the TEHK was a political and propaganda arm, the Jehad Council
was the fighting wing via which coordination among the militants and
between them and the ISI was effected. ISI officials Colonel Shaukat and
Brigadier Farooq Ahmed aka Numan used its office premises as their own
branch office for micro-managing the Kashmir insurgency.
Whenever someone wanted to set up a new outfit, he had to get the
approval of the TEHK and the UJC. In 1991, when Nasir- ul-Islam wanted
to set up his own tanzeem, he crossed the border and had detailed
discussions with Brigadier Numan and other ISI officials, as well as Sardar
Abdul Qayoom Khan who pushed through the approval for his tanzeem, the
Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, over the opposition of the Jamaat and the Hizb. The
ISI was clear: neither ideology nor religion nor sentiment could be allowed
to stand in the way of their goal, accepted by almost all Pakistanis as the
national dream. As a result of the approval, the tanzeems were provided
with over Rs 33 lakh in the next two and a half years.
Other smaller outfits were also set up to cater to different sensitivities.
One of these was the Kashmir Liberation Council (KLC) which the ISI
wanted as a front for the militant outfit which it had specially created, the
Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, run by Hilal Baig. In fact, Baig was made the amir-
e-alla or chief of this outfit. According to one report, H.N. Wanchoo and
Qazi Nissar Ahmed had agreed to be members of the KLC. One aim of the
organization was to persuade the Kashmiri pandits to return to the valley.
However, this outfit never quite got off the ground at the time. Later, it
resurfaced under the leadership of Maulana Abbas Ansari.
A glaring absence from these councils was that of the JKLF. Since the
actual outbreak of the rebellion, the ISI had begun to systematically deprive
the JKLF of weapons and money, but it could not easily starve it of its
deep-rooted influence in the heart of the insurgency—Srinagar.
All manner of tactics were attempted. One was to sully the JKLF’s image
among the valley’s Kashmiri populace by entangling it in the killing of
Mushir-ul-Haq. The Hizb may even have betrayed its leaders to the police.
In the winter of 1990, they allegedly tortured Javed Ahmed Mir to compel
him to declare his allegiance to Islam and Pakistan. In fact, Salahuddin
expected Mir to make an announcement to the effect in Srinagar after his
return from Azad Kashmir in March 1991.
However, when Mir returned, he was unchastened. In a clandestine press
briefing to the Srinagar press in April 1991, Mir retailed a story of
harassment, detention and torture on the part of the ISI, all for the goal of
getting him and the JKLF to cooperate with the new ‘big brother’—the
Hizbul Mujahideen.
It was easier to form these unity committees than to implement them on
the ground. Despite their dislike for India, militant groups continued to fight
with each other. One problem for the groups was the changed social and
cultural ethos that militancy had brought to Kashmir. The ‘commanders’,
‘military advisers’ and the like came from varied backgrounds. Yasin Bhat,
chief commander of the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, was a carpet salesman with
little or no formal education; Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, chief of Al Umar
Mujahideen, had studied till Class IV and ran his own business polishing
copper utensils. Many of the gunmen had criminal backgrounds.
In the 1987–1989 period, the movement was led by persons who
understood the ethos of politics, even if they espoused a militant rhetoric
and tactics. But by 1991, much of this leadership was being or had been
arrested, detained or killed. The prosperous middle class had slowly drifted
away as was evident from a Hizbul Mujahideen press release of 1992 that
warned doctors against migrating, declaring that its intelligence wing had
collected the names and addresses of 300 doctors ‘who had decided to go to
foreign countries in their greed to earn wealth’.
The lack of control resulted in rape, extortion and kidnapping by armed
young men who could not quite be classed as militants. But the more
serious development was the incidence of rape. In early 1991, a Muslim
girl, Zarifa, daughter of Mohammed Sultan who lived in the Hakbara area
of Baramula, was forcibly married to a militant. The family had resisted
pressure to the point where the girl and her brother were made captive by
the militants and the hapless brother Bashir Ahmed killed in the process.
Through the year, across the valley, every month there were two to four
incidents of rape and assault, accompanied sometimes by murder,
attributable to these mujahideen. While Kashmiri pandit women were
targets, the victims also belonged increasingly to the Muslim community.
With the proliferation of groups and their criminalization, the Srinagar
press that had hailed militancy in 1990 and willingly published ‘press
statements’ and ‘advertisements’ of the militants, also came under attack. In
November 1990, a powerful explosion damaged the printing press of the
daily Aftab in the Gowkadal area of Srinagar, causing extensive damage. In
October 1990, the Srinagar Times was the focus of a number of attacks that
included bomb blasts in the house of its editor and arson in the editorial
offices, causing grave damage.
In 1991, the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, one of the more virulent Islampasand
groups, began bullying the Srinagar media. In March, it threatened those
papers which advocated a solution to the Kashmir dispute on the basis of a
‘give and take’ policy. In May, it banned the publication of any statements
by Farooq Abdullah and Ghulam Rasool Kar.
On 23 April, two boys clad in pherans went to the office of Al Safa and
asked for the editor Mohammed Shaban Vakil. The manager directed them
to a cabin where the editor was working. Soon, there were sounds of
gunshot and the two boys ran out and escaped from the building. When
Vakil’s scared colleagues entered his office, he was dead, with seven bullet
injuries in his body.
 Under Vakil, a native of Sopur, the Al Safa had given more than adequate
coverage to the militant movement and its groups. However, he had not
hesitated to criticize the more unsavoury acts of the militants. Those who
killed him were obviously not happy with him.
All this was undoubtedly distressing to the political leaders of the
‘freedom movement’. But most of them were in detention. In a statement
from jail, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, had
criticized the killing of Mushir-ul-Haq and denounced the tactic of
kidnapping. Later, after his release in April 1992, in an interview to a
Kashmiri paper he said, ‘Freedom fighters should make it sure that nothing
is done that would tarnish the image of our movement.’
The jailed Ikhwan leader Yasin Bhat riposted that his outfit was not
involved in kidnapping but ‘hostage taking’, something that was permitted
in Islam. In any case, he reminded Geelani, that those who criticized the
Mushir-ul-Haq assassination for damaging the movement, ought to ask
themselves about ‘the damage caused to the movement due to the planned
murder of Shahid-e-Milat (martyr of the nation) Maulvi Mohammed
Farooq.’ It was not as if the Pakistanis would underwrite everything.

Keeping the Pot Boiling

Gradually, Kashmir settled down to ‘normality’, as far as this was possible.
There were periodic hartals, curfews, cordon-and- search operations,
ambushes and counter-ambushes, and, of course, killings. But life went on.
Petroleum products, consumer goods and food came in from the plains of
India to the Kashmiri markets, just as carpets and handicrafts reached the
shops in Delhi, Bombay and even distant Kathmandu. Buses plied on the
roads, banks and post offices functioned, people married, gave birth and
died in the natural course. Government employees continued to attend
office, in most cases with the protection of the police. This led to a curious
revival of tourism, with hardy Europeans finding Kashmir to be a bargain.
The, devastated tourist industry was only too glad to receive any visitors
they could.
 For the handlers of insurgency on the other side, this was not a
particularly good sign. Insurgency had to be somehow sustained, and so
began a new phase of high-profile kidnappings. The main actors in this
drama were three outfits with close links to the ISI—the Muslim Janbaz
Force (MJF), the Hizbullah and the JKSLF, the outfit that had kidnapped
and executed Vice-Chancellor Mushir-ul-Haq and H.L. Khera the year
before. Earlier this organization had links with the JKLF, but on 28 April
1991 it split with its main faction under Hilal Baig and changed its name to
Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen.
The first victim was Shabnam Lone, the daughter of Abdul Ghani Lone,
the jailed leader of the People’s Conference. Her kidnapping by the MJF
was part of an intra-militant clash and she was released after two days.
On 27 February 1991, Nahida Imtiaz, the daughter of National
Conference leader Saifuddin Soz, was kidnapped outside her house in
Chanpora area of Srinagar. The pregnant Imtiaz was held by terrorists for
over a week and released only on 8 March in exchange for Shakeel Ahmad
Khan, a criminal-turned-terrorist. Shakeel was later arrested in Delhi just
before he and his Ikhwan associates were planning to launch a number of
terrorist attacks.
The MJF began a new trend—that of kidnapping foreigners. Two
Swedish engineers, Johan Jansson and Jan Ole Loman, who were working
with the Uri Hydel Project were the MJF’s targets. While returning from a
skiing trip to Gulmarg, they were kidnapped by a group of seven militants
on the Tangmarg road near Baramula on 31 March. They were released four
months later on July 6 after prolonged negotiations between the Pakistan-
based MJF leaders and their relatives in Pakistan. However, the story they
gave out was that they had escaped from their abductors from a remote
location in the mountains.
Later that year, Antonio Silva, a French engineer working for the Dul
Hasti project in the Kishtwar area, was kidnapped by the Al Fateh group
and held for three months and released at Kulgam in January 1992 in
exchange for jailed militants.
 While these kidnappings ended without any harm to anyone, a more
serious development took place on June 26 when a group of Israeli tourists
were attacked and one of them killed in an attempted abduction. Despite the
Islamist twist that the uprising had taken, Srinagar had become a popular
destination for Israeli tourists.
A group that called itself the Pasdaran-e-Inquilabi Islam (Defenders of
the Islamic Revolution) rounded up eight tourists, seven Israelis and one
Dutchman, from a houseboat near the Saidakadal. While two women were
freed, the men were tied up and taken away in a boat. After rowing for two
hours, they were marched for another twenty minutes before reaching a
house. Fearing execution, one of the Israelis, Hagay Kaspi, snatched away
an AK-47 from the hands of one of the kidnappers and turned it on the
captors. In the ensuing melée, two of the kidnappers were killed and three
Israelis wounded, one of them, Erez Kahana, mortally. Another, Yari
Yitzaki, ran towards the city and was captured again, this time by the JKLF,
which released him unconditionally a few days later.
The most serious abduction took place on 28 June 1991. K. Doraiswamy,
a senior official of the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), was inspecting an oil-
storage depot at Zewan, twelve kilometres from the city, when masked
militants of the Ikhwan kidnapped him in one of the two taxis that had been
hired by the IOC. The group wanted the release of Javed Ahmed Shalla who
had been involved in the killing of Haq and Khera.
The government’s handling of the Doraiswamy affair brought out its
clumsiness in dealing with such situations. Contact had been established
between the Ikhwan and the state government. When the administration
took a tough line, and there was widespread condemnation of the
kidnapping, the militants appeared to soften. There was a chance that he
would have been released unconditionally.
However, New Delhi suddenly decided to intervene in the form of
Communication Minister Rajesh Pilot. As soon as the militants realized
this, they again hardened their position. The governor agreed to trade four
militants, but not Shalla, for Doraiswamy. They released the militants
before securing Doraiswamy’s release. While the released militants
vanished, the red-faced government waited in vain for Doraiswamy to turn
up. At this stage, it established contact with Dr Guru. Government officials
Wajahat Habibullah and Mahmud-ur-Rehman were told to bring the
militants to be released, including Shalla, and reach a particular dak
bungalow near Srinagar. They arrived there accompanied by Dr Guru. But
when they set off for the pre- arranged assignment, they were told that a
curfew was in force in part of the area they had to go through. So they
returned to the dak bungalow.
They now received a message to go to another place deep in a forest. As
they rode deeper into the jungle, the two officers, though in a bulletproof
car, were somewhat apprehensive. But Guru reassured them and told them
that nothing would happen. Suddenly, two militants stepped out and flagged
down the car. Then, accompanied by them, the car went into a side road.
There, a number of militants surrounded the cars and embraced their
released colleagues.
After a while, Doraiswamy was brought out, and along with him,
Habibullah, Rehman and Guru returned to Srinagar on 20 August. The next
day, Rajesh Pilot arrived at Srinagar to announce the release and hold a
press conference.
Doraiswamy was lucky to get away. It was not Guru but the ISI that
wanted him left unharmed because of the negative publicity it had got in the
case of Haq and Khera. Instructions had been given to release him when an
appeal was made by Azad Kashmir Prime Minister Sardar Abdul Qayyum
Khan, so as to show Pakistan in a good light.
On 13 August, S.L. Khosa, branch manager of the New India Insurance
Company, was kidnapped, again by Ikhwan militants from his office. He
was released three months later in exchange for Nissar Ahmed Jogi. On 9
September, Hizbullah militants kidnapped K.C. Gupta, senior manager at
the Punjab National Bank in Srinagar, from his office. He was held till the
end of the year, when he was finally exchanged for the district chief of the
outfit. The bulk of kidnappings, it later transpired,
was the handiwork of the ‘Israil regiment’ of the Ikhwan, headed by
Mushtaq Ahmed alias Israil Khan, who was the intelligence chief of the
outfit and was later killed on 1 May 1993.
Inspired by the success of the Ikhwan in the Doraiswamy case, the Al
Umar too took to the practice of kidnapping. Their first victim in September
1991 was Tassaduq Ahmed Dev, brother-in-law of Union Minister Ghulam
Nabi Azad. He was kidnapped in Srinagar and despatched to Anantnag to be
held by the district commander there, till he was exchanged in January 1992
for some militants. A week later, a deputy superintendant of the J.& K
Police, Puran Anand, was abducted, but he was rescued by the Army in
December.
The Al Umar now began to focus on teachers and doctors and kidnapped
Prof. R.S. Sharma, the head of the physics department, and Prof. R.K.
Sharma, head of the chemistry department, in the Jammu and Kashmir
University. They were taken from their office by Ghulam Kandroo and
‘military adviser’ Shabir and sent to Anantnag. Later that month, S.N. Dhar,
a doctor at the Chest Diseases Hospital, was kidnapped and also sent to
Anantnag. Negotiating through businessman Nazir Ahmed Siddiqui and his
wife Haseena, Mushtaq Zargar was able to obtain the release of seven
militants belonging to his outfit. When he was arrested in May 1992, the Al
Umar tried to get him released the same way, but the authorities refused to
negotiate. There was, however, one major success against such kidnappings.
In October 1991, the Army was able to rescue former Kashmir minister
Khemlata Wakhlu and her husband Dr O.N. Wakhlu from the hands of their
Hizbullah captors. Mrs Wakhlu had been the tourism minister of the state
and an active politician since the early 1970s.
The Hizbullah had been one of the more virulent groups of fanatics in the
valley. Its leader Mushtaq Ahmed Butt had Islamicized his name to
Mushtaq-ul-Islam. A resident of Kashi mohalla in Batmaloo, he entered
politics as a follower of the People’s League. He had increasingly become a
religious fanatic, espousing the need for a Nizam-e-Mustafa as a solution to
Kashmir’s ills.
He was ideal material for the ISI. When he went across the LoC to
Muzaffarabad, he was encouraged to set up his own group, the Hizbullah.
Believing in assassination and extortion, the group concentrated on keeping
the Kashmiri Muslims in line. But, on 17 June 1991, their leader was
captured. They decided on a major kidnapping to obtain his freedom. So the
Wakhlus were abducted from their home in Buchwara on 4 September
1991.
Now began the Wakhlus forty-five day ordeal in which the militants kept
shifting them from one house to another, sometimes two houses in one day,
and eventually out of Srinagar to a remote village near Zalapur in Baramula
district.
The Hizbullah demanded the release of nine of its militants including its
chief Mushtaq Butt. To publicize their case, nine days after the abduction,
they took a Washington Post correspondent to see them and describe their
plight. But the government refused a deal.
Acting on information, the 56 Mountain Brigade deployed as many as
three battalions—the 6 Maratha Light Infantry, the 22 Grenadiers and the
5/4 Gurkhas. They marched through the night to surround the village where
the Wakhlus were being held. The militants first sought to separate the
hostages to increase their chances of escape, but that option was closed as
the security forces cordoned them off. Army officials with megaphones
called on the militants to surrender, and after a tense stand-off lasting a
couple of hours they did, releasing their hostages to the Army.
Others were not so lucky. On the night of 6 June, Al Umar Mujahideen
militants kidnapped two Kashmiri Muslims working in the BSF, Saifuddin
Mir and Mohammed Ambar. They were held in Srinagar and tortured and
on 20 June, at two separate places, explosives were tied to each of them and
detonated, blasting the hapless men to shreds.
On 23 June, a day before the Israelis were kidnapped, three young
probationers with the Life Insurance Corporation, P.S. Shekhar, V.S. Tiwari
and A. Tappoo decided to take advantage of the fine summer weather and
visit the Nishat gardens. Militants suddenly appeared and ordered the trio to
follow them to the vacant house of a pandit. Here, they were tortured and
later the entire house was set ablaze, killing Tiwari and Tappoo.
Shekhar was rescued with serious burn injuries.
 While the success of the militants in obtaining the release of their
comrades was often publicized, what was often not apparent was that the
government did draw a line somewhere. What its reasoning was is not clear,
but perhaps it had to do with the assessment of the individual in question or
New Delhi’s erratic ways. Many of the kidnappings and the subsequent
murder of the hostage were linked to a refusal by the government for a
trade- off. Through 1991 and 1992, great efforts were made to obtain the
release of Yasin Bhat, the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen chief, as well as Mushtaq
Latrum. But the government demurred. One tragic fallout of this was the
murder of Nazir and Haseena Siddiqui, a prominent Srinagar couple, who
served as a go-between in some of the negotiations. On the night of 16 June
1992, as they lay sleeping in bed, gunmen pumped bullets into both of
them, killing them instantly.

BJP and Ekta Yatra

By the end of 1991, there was one positive development in the situation.
India had a reasonably stable government at last. While it was technically a
minority government, the Congress had numbers on its side as well as a
seasoned leader in the person of P.V. Narasimha Rao. But the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) was snapping at the Congress’ heels. Fortunately for
Rao, the BJP was at this time led by Dr Murli Manohar Joshi who had
succeeded Lal Krishna Advani as the president of the Hindu chauvinist
party.
There was little love lost between the pompous Joshi and the suave and
articulate Advani who had been forced to relinquish his presidency because
of the party’s constitutional requirement. There was a feeling as well,
among savvy political observers, that the shadowy RSS, whose cadres
occupied key positions in the BJP, favoured the hardline Joshi, who retained
a lien on his job as professor of physics at Allahabad University. His mentor
there had been senior faculty colleague Rajendra Singh or Rajju Bhayya,
who is currently the chief of the RSS.
 Through the cynical and dangerous exercise of whipping up the feelings
of majority Hindus in northern India in favour of a temple for Lord Rama in
Ayodhya, Advani had taken the party from the margin to the political
centre-stage with 124 seats in parliament after the 1991 elections, the
highest tally in its history. His political vehicle was the ‘Rath Yatra’, a
journey across the country in a motor car done up as a chariot.
Temperamentally mercurial and thin-skinned, Joshi had an acute
inferiority complex in relation to Advani. So when Advani had done his
Rath Yatra, Joshi decided on an even more grandiose Ekta Yatra to cover
the entire length of the country. The journey for national unity, as he
planned it, would begin at Kanya Kumari and end with a dramatic hoisting
of the national flag at Lal Chowk in the heart of embattled Srinagar.
Confronted with this situation, the government in New Delhi did what
other governments in New Delhi do: it called for a meeting of the National
Integration Council, a toothless body that holds meetings where chief
ministers of states, Union government leaders and invitees gather to
bemoan the state of the nation and suggest ways to promote national
integration.
A meeting of the council was held in November 1991 and another on 31
December 1991. The second meeting had a certain historical value since the
document prepared for the meeting had a position paper by the home
ministry, outlining its assessment of the situation in the state.

Introduction

1. The country is facing one of the gravest threats to the national unity and
integrity in Jammu and Kashmir due to the security situation created by
terrorists, of whom thousands have been trained and armed across the
border since 1988.
2. The other matter of serious concern is the feeling of alienation among the
people in the Kashmir valley. Alienation had surfaced in the Kashmir valley
in earlier years also when demands of plebiscite for self- determination
were raised by certain political elements and sections of the people.
However, this time the difference is that a high degree of militancy has been
injected into the planks of Islam and freedom [. . .]
10. The common people are totally disillusioned and fed up with the
activities of militants and no longer believe that ‘azadi’ can be achieved
through violence . . .’

Things, however, did not quite work the way the BJP’s new leader had
hoped. When the band of fellow travellers and fanatics reached Delhi, it
became clear that instead of uniting the country, the Ekta Yatra had
succeeded in uniting the militants in the valley. A challenge to militancy,
and that too by a Hindu chauvinist party, awakened new fears of ‘Hindu’
India. All the militant groups gained from this, but the greatest gainer was
the nearly moribund JKLF.
From Kanya Kumari in early December 1991 to Punjab on 23 January,
the yatra was uneventful. In Punjab, however, terrorists struck as a group of
yatris were driving down the National Highway to Jammu. Near the town of
Phagwara, eight terrorists dressed in police uniforms, flagged down buses
carrying the yatris, and as they slowed down, they opened fire, killing four
and injuring twenty-seven. The toll may have been higher had it not been
for a police guard that returned fire.
But this was only a forerunner of things to come. The next day, on 24
January, a bomb exploded in Srinagar during a high-level meeting in the
office of the director-general of the state police, J.N. Saksena. BSF
Inspector-General Ashok Patel, CRPF IG M.K. Singh, Kashmir Range IG
V. Aievalli and DIG Rajan Bakshi and Saksena were discussing the security
arrangements for the yatra.
The impact of the bomb, hidden in the rafters of the roof, knocked
everyone unconscious except the redoubtable Patel who stumbled out of the
room, only to find that all the J & K Police personnel had fled. He
summoned his own bodyguard who helped rescue the other police officers
from the now blazing wreck. The double shock brought home to the BJP
leadership the limits of political theatre. When the state administration
offered them an airlift to Srinagar with a stage-managed flag-hoisting
ceremony, they tamely agreed. Leaving the bulk of the crestfallen yatris
behind, the leaders were taken in a helicopter from Udhampur to Jammu,
and from there by an IAF AN-32 to Srinagar.
The flag-hoisting ceremony at Lal Chowk on Republic Day lasted twelve
minutes and even this had an element of farce when the BJP’s own flagpole
on which Joshi was hoisting the Tricolour snapped and he had to make do
with the administration’s flag and the existing flagpole. The sound of the
yatris singing ‘Vande Mataram’ was, according to some of those present,
drowned out by a cacophony of gunfire that the militants unleashed across
the curfew-bound city. The Army’s strict curfew could not prevent people
from gathering near the Idgah, the ‘martyrs’ graveyard’, and burning the
Tricolour and shouting slogans.
The Ekta Yatra and the blast at the DG Police’s office helped restore the
militants’ morale and enabled insurgency to gain a second wind in 1992.
The spectre of a vast Hindu mob, since that is what Joshi promised he
would bring, to hoist the Tricolour in Lal Chowk undoubtedly scared the
average Kashmiri in the valley and helped restore the fraying consensus
over insurgency.
More important from the militancy’s point of view was the attack on the
DGP’s office. The credibility of militancy, shattered by the arrests or deaths
of various leaders such as Yasin Malik, Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani,
Mohammed Ashraf Dar, Mohammed Abdullah Bangroo, Ashfaq Hussain
Lone, Mushtaq Latrum and Javed Ahmed Shalla, was restored by an attack
which suggested that the reach and ability of the militants were unimpaired.
P.V. Narasimha Rao’s accession to the prime minister’s office in June
1991 meant little in terms of the everyday governance of the state, nor did it
have any impact on the conduct of anti-militancy operations. But it did have
an effect on foreign diplomacy, notably in relations with Pakistan. In
February, in what had become an annual ritual, rhetoric was stepped up in
Pakistan to coincide with the ‘Maqbool Butt Martyrdom Day’ on 11
February. Frustrated with the manner in which Pakistan had squeezed them
out of the militancy in the valley, the Pakistan-based JKLF leadership
decided that the time had come to take on the Pakistani leadership with a
march across the LoC, to give heart to their beleaguered compatriots in the
valley.
By now western powers led by the US were engaged in a more
complicated manoeuvre of getting India and Pakistan to lock up their
nuclear option in a bilateral agreement. As part of this move, Pakistan
Foreign Secretary Shahrayar Khan disclosed in a meeting with the media in
Washington on 7 February 1992 that Pakistan possessed the ‘components’
of a nuclear weapon.
Unable to avoid the pressure, India now got set to engage western powers
in a wide-ranging dialogue on security. To test the ground, as it were, New
Delhi delivered a démarche to the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council, warning that any attempt to cross the border could have
serious consequences. Understanding the gravity of the situation, western
countries pressured Islamabad to block the border crossing.
About 40,000 marchers from Azad Kashmir made their way to the
Chakothi border post. Here they were met by personnel of the Pakistan
Army or the Punjab and Frontier Constabulary. Confronted with what he
termed ‘uncontrollable fervour’, the brigadier in charge, Abdul Qadir
Baloch, ordered his troops to fire. Seven people were killed there and
another five elsewhere along the LoC. Among those killed was Raja Sajjad,
the eighteen- year-old nephew of Raja Muzaffar, a top JKLF leader.
Behind the tough action of the Pakistani authorities was realpolitik. The
march had, after all, been called by the JKLF. Having sidelined the outfit in
the valley, the Pakistanis were in no mood to allow them to gather strength
by actions like crossing the LoC by force. Almost all the political forces,
ranging from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Islami Jamhuri Ittehad
(Islamic Democratic Alliance) to Benazir Bhutto’s PPP and Azad Kashmir
Prime Minister Sardar Abdul Qayoom Khan condemned the march.
In Srinagar on 11 February, the JKLF got women and children to lead the
demonstrations and hoist its flags. Fortunately, the security forces had clear
orders: Don’t shoot, use the lathi, if necessary. Javed Ahmed Mir was in his
element. With the JKLF riding high after a long time, he was all confidence
and bluster. Dressed in dark trousers, jacket, dark glasses and beret, he
looked the archetypal urban guerrilla as he twirled a .32 automatic around
his finger. He addressed a press conference, declaring that while Pakistan
and India were both enemies, the JKLF would tackle the latter first.
The JKLF’s support among the people in Srinagar remained a sore issue
with the Islamists. This was not surprising in view of the efforts being made
by groups like Allah Tigers, Dukhtaran- e-Millat, Hizb-ul-Nisa to promote
‘Islamic conduct’ among the population. Members of these groups often
attacked women or girls who, in their view, were not adequately clad. The
Dukhtaran took out a full-page advertisement in the Al Safa paper, urging
all Kashmiri women to observe the ‘Islamic Code of Conduct’. This
included the use of the Makina, an Iranian-style dress to cover their heads
and bodies, abstaining from plucking eyebrows, avoiding the use of facial
make-up and nail polish or wearing jewellery.
Interestingly, the Hizb, backed by the maulanas of the Jamaat, was more
sensitive to public opinion and called on the various Islampasand groups to
desist from using force to push the Nizam-e-Mustafa. The reason was that
while they espoused the Islamist ideology, the goal of these organizations
run by the ISI was to ensure the merger of the state with Pakistan. In this,
the quarrel between those who wanted purdah and those who did not was a
counter-productive diversion, more so for the Punjab- dominated Pakistanis,
where women certainly did not accept such orthodoxy.
With the leadership problems settled and its new leaders in the valley, the
Hizb decided that 1992 would be the year they would make their mark. In
February, after careful planning, the Hizb staged a clandestine parade in
downtown Srinagar. Present on the occasion were both Salahuddin and
Illahi; the message given by their presence was as much a warning to the
authorities as to the JKLF. The challenge was somehow to channel the
Kashmiri enthusiasm for the JKLF, which stood for independence, towards
an outfit whose stated goal was, as Illahi put it echoing Jamaat founder
Maulana Maudoodi, a ‘theodemocracy’.
To add muscle to their outfit, the Hizb began to induct some foreign
militants into the valley. These mehmaan mujahideen, as Syed Ali Geelani
was to term them later, were drawn from the huge pool of fundamentalist
Muslims who had congregated in Pakistan to fight the Afghan jihad. There
were people from Bahrain, Sudan and Afghanistan to start with, and they
were mainly linked to the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Their value was twofold. First, they were battle hardened, and second,
they were standing proof for the Kashmiris that their cause was resounding
in the Muslim world. For the ISI, their value was in stiffening the Kashmiri
militants who had not proved as redoubtable in battle as they had hoped.
Sending a sprinkling of these trained persons, it was hoped, would benefit
the overall mujahideen performance. In a gesture that brings out the unique
nature of the Kashmiri rebellion, their presence was announced by a good
public-relations exercise in which correspondents of the Afaq were given an
exclusive interview in Sopur in September 1992. Here, Akbar Bhai, an
honorific for Akbar Qureshi of Afghanistan, opined that the Kashmiri jihad
was much tougher than the Afghan affair but that in the end it would
prevail. Also present was Ibne Masood of Sudan, a student of civil
engineering and a member of the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen in his native
country, though a Hizb activist now, specializing in making and, laying
mines. In a statement carefully pitched at the Kashmiri gallery, he declared
there were more than 6000 foreign mujahideen readying to enter the valley.
The reason why they were in the valley, Aqueel alias Abdul Rehman of
Bahrain declared, was because India was the centre of kufr, or infidelity,
and required a jihad to cleanse it. Rehman, who was said to have been from
a rich Bahraini family, was to die in an action against the Army two months
later, on 11 November at a place near Wadwan in Badgam district.
The militant groups understood the value of the mehmaan mujahideen in
impressing the population at large. For this reason, when four of them died
in an encounter with the security forces near Rishi Gund in Kupwara, the Al
Barq did not hide it. In an advertisement in the Srinagar Times, put out by
its ‘publicity department’, Tajmul Islam declared that the ‘martyrdom’ of
Abu Khalid, Abu Mohammed, Abu Mohammed Sharif and Malik Ali had
cost the Indian Army dearly. According to him, an entire platoon of the
Indian Army had been wiped out, including a captain, two junior
commissioned officers, five non-commissioned officers and nineteen
jawans.
The effort to make the Hizb the primary vehicle of the rebellion was
anathema to other mujahideen groups which had come up in the 1990–91
period. In 1991, there were several instances of Hizb activists snatching
away weapons of other groups. Another tactic was to lure away their cadre
with the promise of money.
To counter the Hizb, in March 1992, the Ikhwan presided over a meeting
to get the JKLF and the Al Umar to sort out their differences. The meeting
took place at the house of a businessman who owned the Chinari transport
company in Srinagar. At the meeting they agreed that there would be no
more attacks on each other and that the arms snatched away by members of
one organization from another would be returned.
The building tension between the JKLF and the Hizb resulted in a
number of clashes. The flashpoint was reached on 16 July 1992 when the
central office of the Jamaat in the Batmaloo area of Srinagar was set ablaze
by a mob of JKLF supporters. On the same day, another library run by the
outfit in the Maisuma area was also torched. To stir up emotions, the Jamaat
accused the JKLF of setting ablaze copies of the Quran, the Hadith and rare
works of Islamic literature.
The Hizb charged that the actions were the result of a conspiracy between
the Indian government and the JKLF and that the latter had been hijacked
by Farooq Abdullah. It said that the Front was now split in two, with one
wing playing the role of an Indian stooge; among those prominent in this
regard, they charged, were some ‘pro-government doctors and engineers
involved with the JKLF’, undoubtedly a veiled reference to Dr Guru.
That was not all. In August 1992, Mohammed Maqbool Malik, vice-
president of the Anantnag unit of the JKLF, was killed by gunmen clearly
identified with the Hizb. But this was a two-way street. In the same month,
Ghulam Mohammed Rathore, a Hizb activist, was killed by some unknown
militants after being abducted from his village, Sagipora, near Kupwara.
The next month, in a clash with the Al Jehad, the Hizb lost four militants in
the Pattan area. In Wattargam, Sher Khan, another Hizb leader, was killed.
In Wagoorah, the wife and children of the district Jamaat chief were
assaulted. The Hizb retaliated two months later by beating up the Al Jehad
district chief, Rustam Jehangir, in Wagoorah. Leading the Hizb squad was
Syed Salahuddin, the outfit’s chief.
The Ikhwan being an Islampasand outfit ought to have had better
relations with the Hizb but did not. In mid-1992, some Ikhwan activists
were killed in a clash in Badgam. Then in early November several militants
in Bandipur were killed in what Ikhwan activists said was cold-blooded
murder. It was a continuing process of action and retaliation.
Clashes between the Hizb and the Al Barq seemed to have a history of
sorts. In November 1991, Hizb militants abducted four locals in an area
near Ganderbal because the villagers were not permitting the Jamaat to
preach at the local mosques. In retaliation, Al Barq members kidnapped the
amir-e-tehsil, or the area head of the Jamaat, Ghulam Ahmed Sheikh, from
Chattargul village. The Hizb was forced to release the men. Around the
same time Hizb activists ambushed the Al Barq number two leader, Amjad
Khan, and his bodyguards in the Kupwara district and killed them. Al Barq
chief Syed Tajmul Islam charged that the Hizb wanted to eliminate all other
organizations, capture power and then arrive at a ‘compromise with India’.
The Hizb countered that the Al Barq was receiving instructions from
‘politicians and military officials to sabotage the present movement in
Kashmir’.
The leaders of the two outfits were aware that such incidents could only
benefit the security forces and attempted to stop the rift. They asked people
in the Lar Ganderbal area to set up a local ‘jihad council’ with
representatives of all tanzeems of the area. Qazi Abdul Rashid of the Jamaat
was made its head and Haji Abdul Rashid Qureshi, a relative of Tajmul
Islam, became the Al Barq’s representative in the council.
This local ‘jihad council’ functioned for a few months, mediating
disputes, collecting money from various government departments for
distribution to the militants and so on. However, trouble broke out when the
Al Barq realized that the clever Jamaatis were undermining them. They
began to mutter that the council too was biased in favour of the Jamaat and
started ignoring its orders. In retaliation, the Hizb gunmen shot Haji Abdul
Rashid in June 1992 and tension rose to an even higher pitch.
The Al Barq was, however, evolving into a more sophisticated tanzeem.
In early 1992, it realized that it could not challenge the might of the Hizb
with its own Kashmiri cadre. So links were forged with Afghan mujahideen
groups, especially the Hizb-e- Islami and the Jamiat-e-Islami (Afghanistan).
The first batch of these mujahideen entered India in May 1992, though the
Indian authorities confirmed their presence only after the Army had killed
four of them in a clash in Reshigund on 26 September 1992.
Al Barq was also under better political management since the People’s
Conference leader Abdul Ghani Lone was released in April 1992 from jail
along with other top non-militant leaders— Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Qazi
Nissar and Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat. This move coincided with the United
Jehad Council’s directive that coordination of the militant groups required
more effective control from the more seasoned politicians. Since the bulk of
the Al Barq leadership was from the People’s Conference, it was decided
that Abdul Ghani Lone would be its chief patron, or that it would function
as the militant wing of the People’s Conference.

Funding the Militancy

Lone decided to play ball with the ISI. Soon, the Pakistanis found a way to
provide him some ‘incentives’. In May, according to Mohammed Anis, a
former Congress-I functionary who was arrested in July 1992, the first of
several ‘hawala’ payments was delivered to him through his daughter
Shabnam, a lawyer in the Supreme Court. The money came through a
hawala operator, Sasi Kumar Agarwal of Chandni Chowk in Delhi. In fact,
the police were tipped off about Anis by the IB which had Shabnam Lone
under surveillance. On 27 July 1992, they arrested him just as he was
entering Shabnam Lone’s house. He had Rs 57,000 given to him by
Agarwal for delivery. He told the police he was supposed to have delivered
Rs 2 lakh more later.
 The infusion of cash, as part of the ISIs strategy of ‘politicizing’ the
tanzeems, saw Lone interceding aggressively in the affairs of the outfit,
making appointments, approving expenditure and when inter-group
problems became difficult, talking directly to other ‘patrons’ like Syed Ali
Shah Geelani on matters relating to his tanzeem, the Hizb.
In September 1992, Lone went abroad to the US, UK and Iran,
apparently for medical treatment. In Teheran, according to intelligence
reports, the Azad Kashmir representatives of the Al Barq, an ISI official and
Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, chief of the Markaz-dawa-ul-Irshad, met Lone,
and a new strategy for supporting the organization and providing it with
more fire- power was worked out. Among the important decisions taken
was that the Al Barq would get an infusion of ‘guest militants’ from
Afghanistan through the Markaz’s military wing, the Lashkar-e- Taiba. On
his return to Srinagar, Lone replaced Wasim Bedar, the acting chief of Al
Barq, with Abdul Majid Mir alias Khalid Jibran.
Mushtaq Ahmed Shah, the captured chief commander of the Al Barq,
later told Indian intelligence agencies that thereafter, Lone received Rs 5–6
lakh per month through a courier named Zahoor Watali, who was involved
in some export–import business in Delhi. Linked to this channel was Sajjad
Ahmed Lone, the son of Abdul Ghani Lone. In addition to this, the units of
the Al Barq collected money from local businessmen.
A lot of this money went into the pockets of the leaders. Shah alleges that
Lone siphoned off a lot of money. It is known that when he was arrested in
a Srinagar locality, he had electronic goods worth some Rs 50,000 in his
house.
Information from captured militants, couriers and others revealed that in
1992 alone, the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen received some Rs 8.5 lakh for its
activities through Ghulam Rasool Shah, who at the time represented the
outfit in the TEHK. In September 1993, when Shah aka Gen. Abdullah was
arrested, he disclosed that he had channelled some Rs 33 lakh to the Jamiat-
ul- Mujahideen in the three-year period beginning in 1991 when the outfit
had been founded.
 Another major conduit of funds was reportedly Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat
of the Muslim Conference. Ghulam Nabi War, an activist of the party, told
the authorities that the professor had received Rs 9.8 lakh from the Pakistan
High Commission in Delhi, and had worked out a deal to receive even
larger sums of money to be channelled to various tanzeems.
Other organizations supplemented the funds they received by extortion.
The Ikhwan, according to arrested militants, obtained a lot of its funding
from local businessmen. The Khyber Cement Co. in Srinagar donated Rs 5
lakh to start with, and gave a regular stipend to it. Kashmiri carpet dealers
in Delhi bought peace by giving regular levies. Many of them were paying
in support of the cause, but some were doing it for protection.
A key source of money for the Ikhwan was the Jhelum valley Medical
College in the Bemina locality of Srinagar. The story its administrator,
Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, gave out was that they needed protection, He
told the Ikhwan that some people affiliated with the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen
wanted seats in the medical college for their proteges and were harassing
the staff. He gave Yasin Bhat, the Ikhwan commander, a one-time payment
of Rs 5 lakh and promised him regular monthly payments as well. The
college, apparently, needed big protection since it transpired that it had also
paid the Al Umar Mujahideen a one- time payment of Rs 10 lakh. Later, the
police discovered that Sheikh had been an active top-level Pakistani agent
since 1962 and had played some role in the 1965 Operation Gibraltar. He
had been in touch with ISI officials through the Pakistan High Commission.
in New Delhi through most of the 1980s, and in March 1990, he crossed the
LoC to meet Col. Assad in Rawalpindi to chalk out plans for aiding
insurgency. Among his accomplices were Mufti Merajuddin Farooqi, a
former additional advocate general of the state government and a trustee of
the Jhelum valley College.
From 1991, when vigilance on the border was tightened, Sheikh’s ISI
controls began meeting him in Kathmandu, for which they were given Rs 4
lakh. Brig. Farooq Numan, the head of Kashmir operations, flew down
specially to meet Sheikh and Farooqi there. They were paid an additional
sum of Rs 6.5 lakh to hire a shop in the Nepalese capital to use as a safe
house.
On their way back, they were handed over Rs 14 lakh in Delhi for
disbursal to militant groups in the valley, but on 13 February 1992 they
were arrested.
On 25 March 1991, Ashfaq Hussain Lone, a former engineer and now the
deputy intelligence chief of the Hizbul Mujahideen, was arrested in the
Chitli Kabar Mohalla of Old Delhi with a number of high denomination
bank drafts. The police did not know that they had stumbled upon a
complex money-laundering operation of the Hizb, and that they had just lit
the slow fuse of a ‘bomb’ that would rip across the Indian political
establishment in New Delhi in the form of the now infamous ‘hawala
scandal’ of 1996. Following Lone’s arrest, the police also picked up
Shahbuddin Gori, an Uttar Pradesh Muslim belonging to Rampur district,
who was an ISI agent posing as a student at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University. Gori had organized visas for twelve Kashmiris to go to Pakistan
for guerrilla training in October– November 1989. In February 1991, he had
gone to Pakistan where he had met Salahuddin who gave him a letter for the
Hizb chief in the valley, Master Ahsan Dar, as well as $10,000 to give to
Ashfaq Hussain Lone, the deputy chief of intelligence of the outfit. While
there, Gori also learnt that Dr Ayub Thukar of the World Kashmir Freedom
Movement had earlier sent Rs 16.3 lakh through another courier to Lone.
However, when Gori returned, intelligence agencies had got wind of his
activities. They kept an eye on him, and when Lone came down from
Srinagar to take the money and the letters, they arrested both of them. From
Lone, the police recovered bank drafts worth Rs 15.5 lakh, payable to
twenty-two people in Kashmir in addition to Rs 50,000 in cash and a draft
of Rs 1 lakh he had in his own name.
From Gori and Lone, the trail led to two hawala agents— Shambhu
Dayal Sharma alias Guptaji and Moolchand Shah of Bombay. Sharma’s
interrogation led to the arrest of S.P. Jain and his now infamous diaries
listing payments made by him to a cross-section of top Indian politicians
and bureaucrats.
 The hawala transaction remained the most durable means of funding
militancy. Despite the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) efforts, till
1997 hawala operators were able to ensure that large sums of money
reached the Kashmiri rebels from sources abroad. This took increasingly
sophisticated turns, aided by the climate of corruption and laxity in the
country. In one instance, detailed by the Kashmir police in late 1997, money
from Dubai, ISI-controlled outfits like the Kashmiri American Council, and
Syed Salahuddin in Pakistan, was channelled to major wholesale dealers in
Mumbai and Delhi who, in turn, supplied goods to wholesalers in Srinagar.
These goods were sold and their proceeds passed on to Abdul Gaffar Sofi
and Assadullah Ganai of Pattan who handed it over to Mohammed Khan,
the Hizb’s divisional commander in north Kashmir.
Sofi, a long-time Jamaat activist, was the head of the Kashmir Medical
Trust as well as the Muslim Welfare Society and had also set up a shawl
export company to justify his visits to the Gulf region. In another case,
Ahmeduallah Nahami of Lal Bazar, Srinagar, who was the finance chief of
the Tehrik-ul- Mujahideen (TuM), revealed that he had collected a total of
Rs 24.5 lakh from Pakistan through ‘hawala’ transactions in Delhi of which
Rs 4.5 lakh was for the Al Jehad Force, then receiving money through the
TuM.
In tandem with this traditional, if illegal, financial instrument militant
funding also came through its modern counterpart—the bank. A Frontline
magazine expose by Praveen Swami in September 1997 showed how
‘proxies and dummy bank accounts [were used] to harbour illegally
obtained funds’. On 4 May, according to Swami, a 20 Grenadiers search
party found Abdul Ahad, a Srinagar shopkeeper, with 12 bank drafts worth
Rs 5,95,000 issued in favour of a Sopur company, Riyaz & Co. This
account was held by Riyaz Ahmed Lone who was actually an employee of
Kamraz Rural Bank. Further investigations revealed more drafts, together
totalling Rs 11 lakh. All had been purchased against cash on 24 April, and
were valued at Rs 40– 50,000, though one was for Rs 3 lakh. Abdul Ahad
told the Army that the drafts were handed over to him by the Jamaat’s office
chief, Qazi Ahadullah, and Ghulam Mohammed Bhatt, elected Jamaat’s
amir in late 1997. He said that this transaction was a routine means of
giving money to Jamaat sympathizers.
Both the police and the Army handled the situation in a curious fashion.
While Bhatt was arrested, there was no reference to the seizure of the drafts
of Riyaz Lone. Indeed, the Army claimed he was absconding while Swami
found him working at his appointed desk in the bank. He told Frontline that
he had indeed received the drafts on behalf of the Hizbul Mujahideen unit.
Another instance of the use of regular banking channels by the
secessionist leadership was the proxy account held by Majid Dar for his
neighbour Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone, Swami’s investigation
showed that large sums of money began to be deposited or withdrawn from
the account from October 1994 onwards, peaking in the summer of the
following year. Dar claimed that all his admissions were made under duress
and that the money deposited, specially large sums of Rs 8.5 lakh, Rs 13
lakh and Rs 14 lakh, were collected from the middle-class Rawalpora
residents for reconstructing the Charar-e-Sharif. However, as Swami points
out, he was stumped when asked to explain how the public collections came
to neat round figures! Neither was he able to show that all the money he got
was paid thereafter to the Charar-e-Sharif Alamdar Fund set up by the
Muslim Auqaf Trust. The Central Bureau of Investigation has charged that
vast sums of money were received by the Hurriyat leadership. In a formal
case registered in April 1997, the agency said that Syed Ali Shah Geelani,
Abdul Ghani Lone and Maulvi Abbas Ansari had accepted money from
abroad in contravention of the Foreign Contributions Registration Act. The
first information report against Geelani says that he received some Saudi
Rial 2 million (Rs 19.2 crore) in addition to Rs 10 crore from the Kashmiri-
American Council (KAC), both through hawala channels in Delhi, for the
Charar-e-Sharif reconstruction fund, through his son-in-law Altaf Shah aka
Fantosh.
The same charge-sheet also listed complaints against Lone for receiving
money from Ghulam Nabi Fai, the exiled valley Kashmiri who runs the
KAC, and against Ansari for collecting money from the Kashmiri and
Pakistani expatriate communities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, allegedly for
rehabilitating Kashmiri Muslims affected by militancy.
The CBI charged that these leaders not only received money in violation
of rules, but also siphoned it off for their personal use. However, as Swami
points out, the investigations have been indifferent and in some cases,
downright incompetent. So far, there has been little to prove this charge,
which is obviously a spin provided by the authorities to discredit militancy
and its leaders, based in some instances, on the interrogation reports of
captured militants. But there can be little doubt that the flow of money from
abroad has been a key factor in sustaining militancy in the state.

Human Rights Abuses and the Use of ‘Excessive

Force’
But while great success was achieved in seizing weapons, restoring
intelligence operations and capturing militants, there were disquieting
trends that appeared to be running unchecked. Among these was what can
euphemistically be called the use of ‘excessive force’. But in reality it was
nothing but the use of arbitrary force.
It manifested itself in incidents that went beyond collateral deaths
resulting from militant-security forces encounters. On 6 August 1990, for
example, a BSF patrol in the Mashalli Mohalla in the Hawal area of
Srinagar was attacked by a grenade thrown at it, accompanied by firing. An
officer of the BSF was injured and the militants had, as usual, run away.
Two hours later, the BSF returned in force, stormed seven houses of the
area, their guns blazing. Ten people died, among them a seventy-year-old
and a seven-year-old child while two houses were gutted.
The build-up of the problem could be seen in an official checklist of
complaints against the security forces sent to Delhi:
FIR No. and Date Details
Police Station
90/90 28.7.90 CRPF personnel beat JKAP men with
Kothibagh rifle butts and injured two constables.
97/90 18.8.90 One Bashir Ahmed Khan s/o Ghulam
Kothibagh Hassan r/o Fatehkadal injured by CRPF,
teeth broken.
49/90 M.R. 29.1.90 CRPF persons injured namazis entering
Ganj Ziarat Aishan Saheb.
34/90 M.R. 20.4.90 Army personnel stole Rs 2000 from house
Ganj of Chaudhry Mohammed Shafi during
search at Naidakadal.
34/90 M.R. 3.3.90 CRPF 79th Bn entered shrine of Qosi
Ganj Saheb at Alikadal, injuring namazis.
79/90 M.R. 25.7.90 CRPF 67th Bn Picket at Zainakadal fired
Ganj on Ifthikar Ahmad Mir and Ghulam
Rasool, killing the former.
49/90 29.6.90 Ghulam Ahmad Dar s/o Mohammed
Parimpora Ibrahim Dar, r/o Qammerwari,
complained that BSF personnel had
outraged the modesty of his wife.
96/90 11.4.90 During a search operation, Army
Shergarhi personnel stole two gold rings and Rs
3000 in cash from the house of Raja, w/o
Abdul Wahab.
45/90 7.3.90 In the old Channpora area, CRPF
Sadar personnel of the 24 Bn, under the charge
of one Sub-Inspector Pillai, looted cash
and jewellery and attempted to outrage
the modesty of women.
57/90 6.8.90 BSF personnel killed a few persons in
Nowhatta their houses by bullets besides setting
houses on fire.
63/90 17.8.90 In the Gojwara area, CRPF personnel shot
Nowhatta dead one Mushtaq Ahmad Hajam who
was the imam of a mosque.
65/90 27.6.90 In Sumkajbal, Khanyar, CRPF shot dead
Khanyar one Ghulam Rasool Kalla, a butcher, in
his shop and injured another person who
also succumbed to his injuries later.
92/90 16.4.90 One person named Abdul Razak, s/o
Sadar Mohammed Kamal r/o Meerwa, passed
the custody of 26 Rangers Regiment c/o
56 APO. His post-mortem report
confirmed the cause of his death.
51/90 17/18.5.90 During the night, a BSF naka fired at a
Dooru bus in Badasgam carrying a marriage
party and one person died. Ladies
travelling in bus reportedly raped.

DGP Saksena who had to deal with these complaints tried his best to act.
In the case of the old Chanpora incident, he personally investigated it and
found the CRPF party guilty of looting, though not of rape. He ordered a
compensation of Rs 20,000 and ensured that the personnel concerned were
‘severely reprimanded’. But in other instances, an inquiry was promised
and nothing happened. There were other controversial incidents. These
related to charges that in retaliation for ambushes and attacks, security
forces, mainly the CRPF and the BSF, were setting whole neighbourhoods
ablaze.
On 8 July, the CRPF was charged with setting several houses on fire and
killing several civilians in the Odina and Vattamgam villages near Srinagar.
On 11 August, the Army was accused of massacring people and burning
twenty-eight houses in Panzipora near Tregham. On the same day, in a
village in Anantnag, the CRPF was accused of torching twenty-one houses
and shooting the local Imam.
On 18 September, residents of Arampora in Sopur claimed that in a
crackdown, three persons had been shot and the neighbourhood torched,
resulting in the destruction of seventy houses. A fireman later checked into
a local hospital with gunshot wounds allegedly inflicted by BSF personnel
who had set the area ablaze.
 The most devastating incident was in Handwara on 1 October. Following
a grenade attack on one of their patrols, a BSF platoon, entered the town
and began shooting indiscriminately. Later, locals alleged, they set a row of
houses ablaze, resulting in thirty- six houses and 200 shops being gutted
and twenty people losing their lives. While in a few instances there are
some witnesses who clearly seem to have cooked up a story, in the case of
the Handwara affair, the witness accounts appear credible in describing how
the BSF personnel first set a Muslim religious trust building ablaze with
kerosene and then a hotel and other buildings. Fire brigade personnel who
arrived there were ordered off and there were reports that a J & K Police
constable who called on the BSF to desist was shot dead as well.
The incident that earned the force great infamy was one that led to the
rape of Mubina Gani. On May 17, after her marriage, she was travelling in a
bus on the Anantnag–Kokernag road to her husband’s village. At a BSF
naka at the Badasgam cross-road, the bus either refused to stop or was fired
at by the BSF, resulting in the death of one person and injuries to six. The
bus was halted, and Mubina and her maid were abducted and later raped by
the BSF personnel.
The case created a great furore. The BSF was first inclined to hush it up,
but it had become an international cause celebre. As a result of the staff
inquiry and court martial, two constables were sentenced to five years’
imprisonment and dismissed from service, and two head constables
punished with forfeiture of seniority and reduction in rank.
There were serious charges against the Army as well. The Army firings
of 1 March in Srinagar had already generated a lot of controversy, when
another erupted over the kidnapping of Yusuf Jameel, the correspondent
from the Telegraph of Calcutta who was also a stringer for the BBC. Some
time in May, an Army picket at the LoC caught a militant infiltrating back
to the valley. On his person were a number of phone numbers, including
that of Zafar Meraj, a journalist, and Jameel. Upon interrogation, he told the
authorities that he had been asked to contact the two in case he had any
problems.
 This touched off a train of events that became a major source of
embarrassment for the authorities. On 2 June 1990, Jameel was placed
under arrest by Maj. Hawa Singh and Second Lt Saksena. Blindfolded and
bound with another person he was taken to the border town of Uri on 3
June. Here he was interrogated by the commanding officer of the unit, Lt
Col. Bhanwar Singh, about Meraj and the number of times Meraj had
crossed the LoC. Jameel told him that to the best of his knowledge, Meraj
had never done so.
Later, Col. Singh talked to someone in Srinagar and informed him that
Jameel was innocent. That night, at 11.30 pm, he was taken in a jeep to
Baramula and released. He was given Rs 50 and he returned to Srinagar,
arriving at 3 pm on 5 June; subsequently there was a court of inquiry into
his case. No details are available as to its outcome, but it is believed that the
three officers were officially reprimanded.
The Army’s attitude towards charges of excesses was by no means
always so lenient. But its perspective was quite different from that of
civilian statutes. For example, while custodial deaths did not result in the
tough punishment they may have deserved, cases of stealing, rape and
molestation were awarded exemplary punishment. In the case of the FIR
filed at the Shergarhi police station, Lance Naik Anil Kumar Singh was
given three months rigorous imprisonment for stealing a gold necklace. His
officer, Second Lt S.S. Chauhan, who stole Rs 8,800 during the same
cordon operation, was cashiered and given seven years rigorous
imprisonment. Not only were the sentences tougher than under civil law,
they were also awarded within two years after the far swifter procedure of
the Army Act.
There are other instances where the truth depends on which side you are
on. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch (Asia), also
known as Asia Watch, on 1 October 1992 the Army conducted search
operations in Bhakihaker village near Handwara. The operation began at 9
a.m., and ended a few hours later. As the troops left the town, an Army
vehicle was attacked by militants. In response, the troops entered the village
of Batekote and shot dead ten residents and burned down several houses.
Jabbar M., a farmer, recounted to Asia Watch’s representatives how his sons
Akbar and Mahdi and two other workers who were grading apples, were
caught by the Army personnel, taken to a stack of rice and then shot dead.
Other residents gave similar testimony regarding the deaths of others.
The official version is that while involved in a cordon and search, the
Army personnel came under fire from militants and one soldier was killed
and two injured. The militants disengaged and fled, but were intercepted by
another Army column. The militants fired at them with rocket launchers,
and as a result the paddy and the houses caught fire. ‘During the exchange
of fire, ten civilians including three women also died.’
Asia Watch challenged the official version since the location of the place
where the villagers were killed and the houses burnt did not quite tally with
the version provided by the Army unit. The Kashmir Times, a paper not
known to be friendly to the militants, sharply criticized the official version,
noting: ‘To make false statements, as the officials do by claiming that ten
villagers were killed in cross-firing is not only to condone the excesses
committed by the security forces but also to add fuel to the fire . . .’
But while the Army appeared reluctant to act in cases of ‘excessive
force’, it was quite strict on issues like molestation and rape. In Panzagaon,
on 9 June 1990, it was charged that Shameena, wife of Ali Misgar, was
raped by Army personnel during a search of the village by a group of the
9th Field Regiment led by a junior commissioned officer (JCO). A court of
inquiry was quickly constituted and it determined that the woman had been
molested though not raped. The JCO was severely reprimanded for
conducting a search of the village without proper authority. Lance Naik
Niranjun Kumar was dismissed from service and sentenced to six months in
prison.
In another instance, on 11 October, two Army officers on deputation with
the National Security Guards, Captains V. Chityal and R.K. Singh, were
accused of raping Laura Lambie, a Canadian tourist. Lambie said that she
was abducted by the officers, taken near a camp and gang-raped.
Subsequently, an identification parade was held, and the victim identified
the perpetrators. Both the officers were court-martialled, cashiered and
sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment for their action.
These officers got off relatively lightly; later punishment for rape became
draconian. In March 1993, Gunners Gurmail Singh and Amrik Singh were
given six months RI and dismissed from service for molesting a woman in
Achura in Baramula district. In May, in another incident, Gunners Rajpal
Singh, Dharamvir Singh and Avinash Kumar Singh were dismissed from
service and sentenced to two years RI for the same offence.
The toughest sentence was visited on a territorial Army unit, four of
whose soldiers were accused of rape by a woman in the Zainakot Industrial
Area of Srinagar. As soon as the charge was made, the whole battalion was
paraded and the woman identified her assailants. Within three months the
court-martial proceedings were over. Havaldar Subrata Kumar Das, Naik
Shymal Kumar Das, Naik Mohammed Shauz and Sepoy Pinhi Dey were
given ten years RI and dismissed from service. In addition, their company
officers were given a severe reprimand for ‘failure to exercise control over
subordinates’.
If anything, punishments for rape and molestation of women got tougher
in 1994. Gunners Rangiah and Ranjit Singh were given twelve years RI and
dismissed from service for raping a woman in Mirgund area of Baramula
district. This time the court- martial took a little over a month, between 17
June when the incident occurred to 25 July, to inflict the punishment.
Given this trend, the instances of rape were drastically reduced. The last
punishment awarded was in May 1995 when Naik Harbhajan Singh and
Sepoy Gurtej Singh of the Rashtriya Rifles (RR) were given ten years RI
each for a case of gang-rape in Qazigund near Srinagar, and in November
when Sepoys Mukhtyar Singh and Raj Kumar, also of the RR, were given a
similar sentence for another case in Lurao Jagir. The colonel of this unit and
a major were severely reprimanded for ‘failure to exercise effective
command and control’.
However, the more serious set of charges related to torture by the security
forces in order to extract information from the captured militants. The
problem was that there were no trained interrogators available. ‘Sustained
interrogation’ meant beating a suspect till he talked. In war-like situations,
almost all forces in the world use threat, third-degree and torture to obtain
information fast. During a patrol or out in the field, the question of
professional interrogation does not come in.
Asia Watch has recounted the case of Mohammed Akbar S., a farmer
from Chak Seri, near Pattan. Akbar was alleged to be related to Hizbul
Mujahideen chief Mohammed Ahsan Dar, and the BSF and Army personnel
who were looking for him, twice caught Akbar and tortured him. In May
1990, he was beaten and kicked around. Then he was taken to a camp in the
higher secondary school at Pattan. Here he was beaten and interrogated for
four days. Then he was taken to what became Papa I, the interrogation
camp near the Old Airport of Srinagar. The treatment was repeated, but
despite this Akbar maintained that he had no knowledge of militancy or
Dar’s whereabouts. After twelve days he was released, with his thumbprint
taken on a blank sheet of paper.
On 19 November, he was again apprehended, this time by the Army. He
was again beaten, and chilli powder dropped into his eyes. He was
transferred to an Army hospital and thereafter back to Papa I after his
injuries healed. He was released on 3 December, following the same
procedure of imprinting his thumb on a blank sheet of paper.
Latif, a shopkeeper in Kupwara, was arrested in a crackdown in Sopur.
Along with several others, he was kept in the detention centre and beaten
with lathis. Then came the roller treatment with an iron roller being pushed
across his thighs with two soldiers sitting on it on either side. After that
came electric shocks to the genitals. Obviously Latif had nothing to tell the
BSF interrogators, so he was released after the bruises healed.
Asia Watch has detailed the case of Muzaffar Ahmed Mirza, a teacher of
Arabic, who was arrested on 4 October 1991 in Tral village, four kilometres
from Srinagar. He was beaten and electric shock applied to his genitals.
Then a rod was inserted into his rectum and pushed through to his chest. He
was found by the roadside the next day and taken to the Medical College
where surgeons attempted to repair his rectum and then carried out surgery
to repair the damage to his liver and chest. But he died within two weeks
because of complications arising from his injuries. Before Mirza died, he
detailed his torture to the international press, and Eyewitness TV filmed his
testimony (but the programme was later censored).
There was another category of cases, the so-called ‘disappearances’.
While the government maintained that it was not responsible for many of
those listed by human-rights groups, there are several to which the
government response itself indicates culpability.
In the case of Mohammed Maqbool Butt, his father Habibullah filed a
habeas corpus petition on 22 August 1990. Four years later, in a response to
an Amnesty International report, the government confirmed the petition and
the continuing investigations and stated that the ‘inquiries made in the
matter so far have not yielded any results’.
But the case is quite open and shut. On 21 July, Maqbool and his friend
Naseer Ahmed were picked up by the CRPF from his aunt’s house at
Machwa. That evening at about 6 pm, he was brought to his house, escorted
by the paramilitary personnel in a Gypsy jeep. They made their way to a
cowshed where they seemed to be looking for something which they could
not find. Maqbool’s parents and a number of locals crowded around,
petitioning the jawans to let him off. But the police officers bundled
Maqbool back into the Gypsy and took off with him, after covering him
with a white sheet.
Naseer, who was released, told a court that he and Butt were classmates
at the Khalisa High School and were walking along the road on the way to
the latter’s aunt’s house when a jeep approached them and they were asked
to get in. They were taken to the interrogation centre at Hari Niwas where
they were questioned by turns. Both were thrashed and then separated. He
never saw Maqbool again.
Habibullah Bhat took Naseer with him to meet DGP Saksena and
narrated the whole story to him. The DG promised action, but nothing
happened thereafter. The hapless Habibullah, hoping against hope, visited
all the jails in the state, including the one at Udhampur, but to little avail.
Another case, also of August 1990 vintage, related to Javed Ahmed
Ahanger, son of Ghulam Nabi Ahanger. On the night of 17 August, he was
sleeping at his uncle’s house in Dhobi Mohalla in Batmaloo. That night the
National Security Guard (NSG) conducted a search of the house. Curiously,
there were two persons of the same name there. Javed’s cousin was also
‘Javed Ahmed Ahanger’ but his father was Ali Mohammed.
Both were taken away, but later the cousin was released. A masked
informer told the NSG personnel that Javed was not a militant. Thereafter,
the only witness to the fact that he was in the custody of the NSG was
another jailed militant, Shaukat Ahmad Khan. He told the High Court that
he saw Javed being beaten up by three officials of the NSG—‘Katoch,
Dinesh and Gupta’. According to him, Javed was taken towards Pari Mahal.
Parvena Akhtar, Javed’s mother, petitioned the court and stated that as a
result of a dharna, she was allowed to meet Thakur Jaswant Singh, the DIG
(CID), who told her that her son was injured and was in the Badamibagh
Military Hospital and would be released in two or three days. When this did
not happen, she went to DG Saksena who said he would try and help her
and provided her with a vehicle to go to the hospital. But the poor mother
could not find Javed.
Frantic, she now approached Mohammed Shafi Bhat, member of
parliament, who accompanied her to Jaswant Singh. He assured her that her
son would be released soon. The hapless mother did not give up; she did the
rounds of the DGP’s office and the military office again, but never found
Javed. Nor did anyone else. In its response to Amnesty International in
1994, the government gave a one-line statement: ‘A case has been
registered in the concerned police station and is under investigation.’
There is a certain poignancy in the ‘disappearance’ of Syed Mohammed
Basharat Shah, a student of Aligarh Muslim University, who was travelling
in a tonga or a horse-driven carriage from Sopur to his village Dangerpora
on 12 October 1990. A CRPF patrol halted them near Warpora and arrested
the tongawallah Sonaullah Hajam and a farmer Sultan Sofi, Basharat Shah,
Ghulam Rather and Shabir Mir. They were blindfolded and taken to a camp
on the Sopur-Bandipur road. They were kept there for three days,
interrogated and beaten and then taken to another CRPF camp, apparently
near Doabagh, where they were kept for seven days. It was in this place that
Basharat died, sometime in the night. The other persons were then taken to
the Old Airport Interrogation Centre near Srinagar.
In the subsequent inquiry in 1991–92, by the district magistrate of
Baramula, the CRPF declined to produce the commandant, Kewal Krishen,
and the deputy commandant, K.S. Pandey, who were in charge of the 50th
Battalion at the time. Later, it said that both had retired. The CRPF also
tried to wriggle out of the charge by claiming that they had in fact not
carried out any patrolling at the time. But when asked to produce their
deployment/ movement register, they claimed that no such registers had
been maintained by them.
These cases were just the beginning. In the ensuing years, as the battle
got more desperate, so did the techniques of illegal arrest, detention, torture
and execution. Meting out such treatment to people you consider your own,
or at least hope to win over, is rank folly. Leaving aside humanity,
realpolitik demanded that in the prevailing conditions, and in view of the
need to win back the alienated populace, there be no needless violence. But,
unchecked by the central authorities, the situation drifted towards torture.
The justification was that it was providing results in terms of the capture
of militant leaders. Other militants turned against their organizations,
betraying compatriots. Some of them were released with a view to using
them as intelligence assets, but their erstwhile compatriots made short work
of them. Actually, not being hardened fighters, the Kashmiris were, more
often than not, all too willing to spill the beans. The capture of a leader did
not end the matter since he was soon replaced.
The Army was not entirely lenient in cases of custodial deaths. In many
cases, ‘severe displeasure’ was entered into the record of the officers
concerned, meaning that their careers were effectively over. In July 1990,
the commander of a Rajput unit, along with a major and a captain, were
punished this way for injuries received by a militant during interrogation. A
colonel of a Jammu and Kashmir regiment and two other officers got the
same punishment for an incident in which a militant died in custody a year
later.
 In 1992, an officer of the RR was tried for the death of Nazir Ahmed
Bhat of Safaiyya village and after a protracted trial given a ‘severe
reprimand” in 1996. A similar punishment was meted to officers of a Jat
regiment for the death of Abdul Majid Sheikh in custody in February 1995,
within six months of the incident.
Pressure by human-rights groups, however, has ensured that leniency in
such cases is not automatic. Second Lt N. Vidya Sagar of a Territorial Army
(TA) battalion was given three years RI in March 1996 for the custodial
death of Khizir Mohammed Akhoon of Soitang, Srinagar, in December
1994. Naik P. Madhu and Guardsman R. Sudesh Kumar were given a two-
year sentence for the same case. In 1990–91, some check was provided by
certain officers like the Army corps commander, Lt Gen. A. Zaki, who was
a strict disciplinarian and did not tolerate any excesses. As corps
commander and later as adviser, Zaki was a common sight in his greatcoat,
standing by, quietly supervising a cordon-and-search operation.
Such an example inspired other Army officers as well, and to the extent
possible, the top brass insisted on keeping an eye on all major operations, a
factor that often added to their being targetted through remote control blasts
or sniper rifles. Their presence certainly helped keep down the incidence of
human- rights’ abuse. But it is also a fact that senior officers could not be
everywhere and that all senior officers were not like Zaki.
Torture and rape are traumatic incidents and naturally generate great
emotion and anger at the perpetrators. Duly reported in the media,
especially across Kashmir, concocted cases were used by militants to
motivate their cadres and demoralize the security forces through political
pressure. Two incidents in 1991–92 suggest that the militants were not
above concocting cases with the help of pro-militant officials and medical
personnel.
The most serious was the so-called Kunan Poshpora episode. On 23
February 1991, the 4th Rajputana Rifles of the 68th Mtn Brigade carried out
cordon-and-search operations around the villages of Kunan and Poshpora,
which are about five kilometres from Tregham and ten kilometres from the
district headquarters, Kupwara. An allegation was later levelled that at
night, while the men had been herded outside, the soldiers of the regiment,
in the presence of their senior officers, raped anywhere between twenty-
three and a hundred women.
A police case was registered in the Tregham police station and the deputy
commissioner went to the site on 5 March to investigate. He concluded that
something serious had indeed occurred. The alleged victims were medically
examined on 16 March.
The villagers told Deputy Commissioner S.M. Yasin that the Army had
entered the village at 11 pm and first herded all the menfolk into two houses
for interrogation. While the officers remained there, the soldiers, some of
them with bottles of liquor, entered houses in the village and raped the
women at intervals through the night. They gave the DC the empty bottles
of liquor and showed him the torn clothes of the women.
Divisional Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah was ordered to investigate,
and he visited the village along with the deputy commissioner, the
superintendent of police and the commandant of a BSF battalion on 16
March. While twenty-three women had complained of rape to the DC,
thirty-nine complaints now surfaced. Most apparently did not even cry out
or scream at the time of the alleged incidents. They said that they had been
threatened at gunpoint not to do so. Only one Ms Jana said she had reported
the matter to the officers and had been ignored. The menfolk, who included
retired policemen and teachers, appeared before Habibullah and had no
convincing explanation as to why no complaint had been made to the senior
officers, including the commanding officer of the unit who was present
through the night. They said they did not know what had happened till the
Army columns had left.
The Army’s version was different. It said that a column of 160 men with
nine officers left their camp at 9.30 pm. They established a cordon around
the village by 11.30. The Army had come with prior information and was
accompanied by police constable Abdul Ghani who identified certain
houses which were individually cordoned off and searched. Two AK-47s,
one pistol and some ammunition were seized by a search party, each of
which consisted of eight to nine men led by an officer. The search
concluded by 7.00 a.m., and then the menfolk were asked to assemble near
the mosque. Accompanied by the village headman and other ‘notables’, the
Army groups now searched the other houses. This part of the operation was
over by 9 a.m. No one was arrested, everyone was released, and the Army
column left.
Through this period, as part of the Army’s ‘civic action’ procedure, the
battalion medical officer had opened shop and a number of persons came
for medical check-ups, including eight women. Neither he nor the
commanding officer received any complaints, either from the women or
from the village ‘notables’.
As the Army column readied to leave, the brigade commander also
turned up and met the village headman and other prominent persons,
including the village teacher. Before leaving, the village headman, Abdul
Aziz Shah, two J & K Police constables and Abdul Hamid Dar, the local
teacher, gave a certificate to the unit saying that no harassment had
occurred.
Two days after the event, on 26 February, the village headman
approached the commander of the 68th Mtn. Brigade and told him that
some ‘excesses’ had been committed. Later they went and complained to
the deputy commissioner. On 8 March, an FIR was registered in the
Tregham police station.
On 10 March, the Army deputed Brig. H.K. Sharma, commanding
another brigade, to conduct an inquiry. About a 100 men, including the
‘notables’, were present and they praised the conduct of the operation but
said that some excesses had taken place. The first complaint was that the
houses of some of the J & K Police personnel, some six families, were also
searched and they were treated as suspects.
Then Brig. Sharma asked them whether there were any other complaints.
The headman passed the word around and some thirty women collected.
They were segregated and asked to explain their case before the headman,
the teacher and the police.
Thirteen of them said they had been raped. Two of them said that two or
three persons had raped them; others said that six to eight persons had
assaulted them. None of the women showed any scratches or other marks of
assault. One old cotton pheran was produced as evidence; no woollen
garment, worn as the outermost layer, was produced.
Later, Divisional Commissioner Habibullah conducted his investigation
and concluded that ‘the allegation of mass rape cannot be sustained’. He
pointed out that the number of alleged victims kept fluctuating. There was
no explanation as to why it took the villagers so long to make the
complaint, especially since it appeared that women from every house in the
village would have been victims. There was no complaint against any
officer. The ‘evidence’ of empty liquor bottles was suspect, as he well knew.
No unit of the Indian Army would ever be permitted to go into action with
its soldiers carrying bottles of liquor.
Later, in June, a Press Council of India committee visited the village and
conducted its own inquiry. It said that the evidence offered ‘simply does not
add up’. It added, ‘In the absence of any credible evidence it would appear
to be an invention, a hurriedly contrived piece of dissimulation which
finally broke down under the weight of its own contradiction.’
Another serious charge stemmed from what is known as the Pazipora
‘massacre’. The village is only a few kilometres from Kunan Poshpora. On
10 August, the 6th Rajput Regiment conducted a cordon-and-search
operation in Didikut village. After the operation, the Army personnel said
that as they were returning, they were ambushed by ‘anti-national elements’
in the Pazipora area at about 11 a.m., resulting in injuries to four soldiers
and to their ‘spotter’ or guide who later died. The soldiers launched a
counter-ambush operation that lasted several hours, and then, with the help
of the villagers, recovered the bodies of twelve persons in the fields and
delivered them to the police station at Kupwara. One light machine-gun,
one AK-47 and a pistol were recovered. The operation ended by 2 pm.
However, the villagers had a different story to tell. They claimed that in
this three-hour period, thirteen more people had been killed, whom they
quietly buried later, bringing the total to twenty-five persons killed, fifty
houses razed as soldiers conducted house-to-house searches, and some eight
to ten women raped.
 The Army strongly denied any wrongdoing in the incident. There were
also strong suggestions that the accounts of the villagers were subsequently
tutored. Indeed, the tenor of the reportage on the incident by retired Justice
Bahauddin Farooqi suggested the same. The justice claimed that the
‘jawans were seen carrying bottles of liquor in their pockets . . . 10–15
robust, attractive and healthy women [were] isolated between the ages of 7
years and 50 years. One group of lusty soldiers tore their clothes to shreds
and rendered them nude. A bonfire was made of their garments . . . and
[they] were raped one by one . . .’
Another version of the story in the Illustrated Weekly of India cites a
doctor in the Kupwara District Hospital saying that she had examined the
women a week later and found five women were raped, though the doctor
admitted to the correspondent of the Weekly who met her several days after
the examination that she was yet to write up her report.
The Press Council team did not examine the alleged victims, but they
talked to several people connected with the case and concluded that this
was once again a case of a coordinated campaign to malign the Army in a
sensitive area, where the removal of the Army or the pressure it exerted
would have great pay-offs for the militants.
The results of the investigations were salutary in that dramatic charges of
mass rape receded, though not quite ended. However, as the battle became
harder, deaths in custody, torture and the excessive use of force also
increased. Given the nature of the conflict and the high stakes for all
concerned, real atrocities or concocted ones were seen by both sides as part
of the game. Whether or not you believed in a particular incident depended
on your point of view.
 4
Fighting the Fire

By 1991, the secessionists had to contend with the rising effectiveness of

the security forces and the fact that the Indian state had not collapsed, but
had, instead, decided to give battle. Striking at soft targets such as N.K.
Ganjoo, Lassa Koul, Maulana Masoodi or the CRPF pickets was one thing,
taking on hardened professional paramilitary forces and the Army that were
now coming in, was quite another.
Militant leaders and their Pakistani handlers soon realized that neither by
temperament nor by history were the Kashmiris in the valley quite suited to
the task. In addition, finding cadre willing to do the job, sending them
across the increasingly lethal LoC, training them and sending them back
was a formidable task. The very mountains that enabled an easy crossing of
the border also prevented the movement of heavy weaponry that could take
insurgency to a higher level.
When the uprising took place, the main armed force in the valley was the
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Raised in 1939, it was seen as a fire-
fighting unit that would assist central authorities when the local police
failed. In 1990, 103 of its active battalions, deployed operationally in
companies, were spread across the country. There was caste-related
violence in several states and agrarian and students’ unrest. Communal
violence sparked off by the Ayodhya dispute was at its peak, and the
People’s War Group, a Maoist guerrilla group in Andhra Pradesh, was
active.
The CRPF was mainly engaged in Punjab where the situation was going
from bad to worse. Because of the elections, the valley had a reasonably
heavy deployment, but while it had the training and equipment to deal with
a riot or a small demonstration, the CRPF could hardly have coped with
what happened in December 1989–January 1990. The CRPF is more of an
orthodox anti-riot police force, with no pretensions to being a paramilitary
formation. Its principal virtue for the Indian state is that it is a centrally
controlled force consisting of personnel from all over the country.
The BSF had been created in the wake of the 1965 war with Pakistan.
The manner in which the Pakistani forces had overwhelmed the Chad Bet
post manned by the Gujarat police in the Rann of Kutch had occasioned
rethinking in the government. It was believed that a well-armed and well-
trained force could replace the various state armed police units on the
international border between India and Pakistan. Its peacetime tasks were
defined as promoting a sense of security among people living in the border
areas by acting against trans-border crimes and preventing illegal entry into
India. In wartime, its role was to hold the ground in less threatened sectors
and protect important installations against enemy commando raids.
Leavened with some retired Army personnel, its higher command is in
the hands of IPS officers who have no experience of military duties such as
conducting an assault against strong- points or long-range patrols and high-
altitude picket manning. Nevertheless, being career police officers, they are
good at combating urban insurgency because that often requires sound
police work.
When the rebellion broke out, there were just about 15,000 CRPF and
about 3000 BSF personnel in the valley, whose main task till then had been
to provide security to VIPs and important installations, However, they
learnt counter-insurgency in the hard and unforgiving school of experience.
But though they were quickly seasoned, they were not particularly effective.
One reason for this was their orthodox employment in static checkposts, or
nakas. Supporting such deployments with food and supplies consumed
more than half the available strength of a formation.
The first item on the BSF agenda had been to establish a presence
everywhere in the belief that it would have a salutary impact on militancy
by proclaiming in clear terms that the Indian state had not vanished.
 The pattern of deployment was standard. The basic urban conglomeration
is a mohalla or locality which is linked to other localities by narrow lanes
that can be traversed only on foot or bicycle; or narrow roads where cars,
rickshaws and autorickshaws can barely move. Bunkers were set up at
strategic places like crossroads, bridges and road blocks, or nakas. The
BSF’s presence was also established near the key entry and exit points of
mohallas, and even inside the localities, wherever there was some space
available.
The BSF bunker, a ubiquitous sight in Srinagar and other Kashmiri cities,
was a ten inch by six inch ‘house’ made of bags filled with sand and
covered with tarpaulin and corrugated iron sheets. The whole thing was
strategically draped with camouflage netting to keep out grenades from
exploding on the bunker.
In most places, the bunker was the place of duty as well as living. Meals
and relief came in armed and escorted trucks and jeeps from camps several
kilometres away, which housed the officers. This not only consumed
roughly half a unit’s manpower but provided an opportunity for ambush and
attack. Hurling a grenade, taking a pot-shot at an exposed constable, or
detonating a pre-laid explosive device were the chosen methods of attack.
In the bunkers there was little security, leave along privacy. There were
no consideration for toilets, drinking water, heating or lighting, not to talk
of relaxation after duty hours. Some of the improvised bunkers were cold
and damp and quickly became home to vermin. On duty or while resting,
the constable remained under tension and alert to assaults or sniper attacks.
For twenty-four hours a day, the jawans would stand on guard, uneasily
eyeing the people whose resentment was all too obvious. At any moment,
especially at night, a grenade could come sailing down, accompanied by the
burst of an AK-47, bringing injury and death.
The second step was to seek out the militants. In view of the complete
lack of information in 1990–91, the security forces’ primary mode of
operation was the search-and-cordon system, a process not very different
from that of trawling for fish in the high seas. However, in the ‘sea’ of
crowded Srinagar’s winding back-lanes, it was not very effective and
somewhat risky for those involved in cordoning.
While the checkpoints were well sandbagged and protected and firing on
them was more or less ineffectual, troops moving to and from these
bunkers, or forming a cordon were often attacked, usually by tossing a
grenade and firing a couple of bursts of AK-47.
In retaliation, the security forces would storm the nearest set of houses
where the firing came from. By now the militants would have vanished or
hidden their guns and mixed with the civilians. Frustrated, the police would
verbally abuse the civilians, rough up the occupants of a house, humiliate a
locality by making them clean pro-Pakistan graffiti. If they really got mad
or scared, they would shoot one or two persons dead.
While the officers at least understood the problem and realized that their
mission was to win the people back from the brink of secession, the semi-
literate, poorly motivated jawans did not know any better. The behaviour of
the forces on cordon-and- search operations was based on the presumption
that all the people they were dealing with were the ‘enemy’.
DGP Saksena’s major weakness, if not blunder, was his inability to
revitalize the local police. He was suspicious of the loyalty of the force, and
this was not an easy hurdle to overcome. ‘Saksena destroyed the local
police, not deliberately, but inadvertently,’ said a colleague later.
Saksena had spent the better part of his career in the IB, India’s star
counter-intelligence outfit. Like most counter- intelligence outfits around
the world, the IB’s major failing was to see enemies under every bed. In the
case of Kashmir, this may well have been near the truth at a point in time,
but it did not do justice to the largely loyal elements of the force who were
really looking for leadership.
In hindsight, especially after the experience of Punjab, it can perhaps be
argued that the first priority of the governor and his security team should
have been to revitalize the local Kashmir police by evolving the strategy
that was eventually used— concentrating on non-Kashmiri Muslim police
personnel, weeding out the bad elements, developing checks against
penetration and accepting some risks that they could incur, instituting cash
bounties but giving the local police the lead authority in combating
terrorism.
This was not to be, and the route taken was a bloodier, messier one. The
CRPF was replaced by the BSF, which in turn was willy-nilly converted
into a counter-insurgency force to confront a full-fledged revolt whose
cutting edge was a group of dedicated, well-armed militants. Despite its
presence across the valley, the Indian Army was not really involved in
counter- insurgency operations till 1991. In the urban heart of insurgency, in
Srinagar at least, the Army never did come in, except on occasion to assist
the BSF to blast entrenched militants.
Ashok Patel, who came in as head of the BSF in the valley, tried to work
backwards, as it were, to transform his border police into a counter-
insurgency force. An IPS officer from the Madhya Pradesh cadre, he had a
reputation for toughness and competence. He realized that he had to do the
job with the resources in hand and he set about it quickly.
The force learnt the value of coordinated and routine actions like
establishing ‘road opening’ drills, or anti-ambush tactics, all in the hard
school of experience. Such ‘sink or swim’ tactics exacted a heavy price
from the BSF personnel who died, as well as from the people they killed in
cross-firing, or in panic born out of inexperience.
To reduce instances of collateral casualties and the kind of incidents that
were giving the BSF a bad name, Ashok Patel innovated to strengthen the
BSF intelligence. With the local police more or less ineffective, if not
hostile, the BSF’s efforts at locating militants were like looking for a needle
in the haystack without knowing what the needle looked like. No pictures or
files existed of known militants and the Kashmiri proclivity for similar
names made things even more difficult.
In one case in April 1990 when the police were carrying out massive
sweep operations to locate Mushir-ul-Haq and H.L. Khera, they raided the
house of a businessman, Hafizullah Bhat. Four men were trapped; one of
them tried to escape by jumping through the window to the roof of an
adjacent house and was injured. He was taken to SMHS hospital and after
arresting him formally, the other three were taken away by the police for
questioning. They turned out to be Iqbal Gandroo, ‘military adviser’ to the
JKLF, Javed Ahmed Zargar, one of the militants released in exchange for
Rubaiya, and an unnamed JKLF activist.
The BSF did not know that the fourth person was Yasin Malik. No one
told them. Neither the police in the thana nor the medical staff at the
hospital. In fact, they worked out a scheme to enable his escape. He was
declared in a critical condition and rushed in an ambulance to the SKIMS.
Later, it was said that the injured man had been rescued by his supporters
and had escaped en route.
Confronted with the absence of intelligence, Ashok Patel built up the
BSF’s G-section, which generated intelligence, mainly from interrogation,
and worked on a strategy of letting go the small fish to hook the bigger
ones. He also boosted the capabilities of the BSF’s wireless intercept
operations. In the Indian system, most signals intelligence is run by the
Army. However, for the information to travel from the Army’s Signals
Intelligence Directorate to the BSF in the field would have taken an
unconscionable amount of time, assuming that the Army had by now begun
to even look out for such transmissions.
The BSF set up special G-teams which made swift strikes in downtown
areas to arrest militants, based on intelligence gathered by the G-branch.
Instead of using the usual system of deploying several companies to first
surround a locality, order the men out and search the houses systematically,
these teams of heavily armed men, travelling in covered jeeps, moved
unescorted and on the basis of precise information struck at the house or
location where a militant may be. They were so dreaded that they became
targets of attacks and the militants at one stage issued a general ban on
jeeps, threatening to shoot at them without warning.
This was clearly a dangerous game, a lot of which cannot even be
documented. But personnel of the G-team would often move in hostile
areas, vulnerable to ambush, often carrying out strikes in very small teams,
depending on the word of an informer. But results started coming in soon.
On 22 June 1990, a G-team squad received information that a top militant
was hiding out in a house in Rambagh. Moving in the dark, a team led by
Sub-Inspector K.D. Thakur quietly surrounded the house. But as they
barged in, they were met by a hail of bullets that wounded Thakur and Head
Constable Bansi Lal. However, in the ensuing mêlée, they killed a militant,
injured another and arrested the third. The man who was killed turned out to
be Mohammed Abdullah Bangroo, the former deputy chief of the Hizbul
Mujahideen, responsible for Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq and Maulana
Masoodi’s deaths. This was a signal achievement indeed. The following
month, on July 8, a similar operation led to the arrest of Javed Shalla and
Mohammed Altaf Butt of the JKSLF.
Greater success came on 6 August 1990 in an operation which was
clearly based on prior information. The 75 Battalion of the BSF captured
Malik and his deputy, Hamid Sheikh. In retrospect, at least, it is not clear
whether this achievement was an entirely unmixed blessing. The pro-
independence JKLF was seriously affected, but the main beneficiary was
not the Indian government but the Hizbul Mujahideen which now
established itself as the dominant group. However, this can only be said in
hindsight since till mid-1990 at least, the JKLF had been involved in the
bulk of the armed actions as well as assassinations. So eliminating or
capturing its leadership was a task that could not but be undertaken.
The pattern of fighting between the militants and the BSF became fairly
routine. The BSF would carry out cordon-and- search or intelligence-based
strikes, and the militants would ambush BSF or police parties returning or
going for such strikes in places of their choosing.
Both the militants and the BSF seemed to be learning on the job. The
militants had by mid-1990 in some cases also received good training and
weapons and could execute textbook perfect ambushes which hit the BSF
hard. The manifestation of this was the casualties they inflicted. While in
the six months between January and June 1990, ten BSF men had been
killed and thirty- one injured, in July and August alone the BSF lost that
number.
On 14 August, a date which resonates in Kashmir because it is Pakistan’s
Independence Day, militants ambushed a raiding party comprising an entire
platoon of the BSF’s 75th battalion. Led by Pishora Singh, an assistant
commandant, the team was returning from a pre-dawn raid from
Chandigam. As they approached Khori village, they were attacked. First a
grenade was lobbed at one of the three vehicles in which the team was
travelling and then a fusillade of AK-47 and light machine-gun fire
overwhelmed them. Sub-Inspector Chaman Lal, Head Constables A.C.
Bohra and Jaivir Singh, Constables Brahamanad Yadav and Nand Kishore
were killed instantly. Another four head constables and five constables were
injured, some seriously.
As the BSF force levels increased, the challenge of taking on the
militants in Srinagar and other towns came up. The first move was in
Srinagar where, in August 1991, the BSF’s 69th Batallion moved into the
Rainawari locality that was adjacent to the old town area of the city under
militant control. Here militants had moved into houses of the pandits and
established large strategic areas where they had interrogation centres, arms
depots and even miniature firing ranges. The neighbouring Dal Lake and its
various inlets provided safe means of entry and exit. In fact, most militant
leaders in the area managed to escape through such routes when the
operation began. Later, in December, the BSF moved into another strategic
locality, across the Jhelum from the thickly- populated localities around the
Jama Masjid and Ali Kadal.
The BSF was now in charge of all the main cities—Srinagar, Sopur,
Anantnag, Bijbehara, Bandipur and Baramula. As it built up its strength
from 5000 in February 1990 to 15,000 by the end of the year and 30,000 by
the end of 1992, the bunkers and nakas extended into the heart of the
Kashmiri towns, excepting in Sopur where the situation compelled the main
deployments to be across the Jhelum. The expansion of the bunkers and
nakas was the Indian version of the World War I trench system. Land was
retained painfully and at a high human cost.
The Battle is Joined: The Indian Army’s Operation
Rakshak III
The Indian Army had a unique role in Jammu and Kashmir. Having failed
for reasons outside their control in the larger strategic task of regaining the
entire state in 1948–49, the Army has been left with the practical task of
guarding its borders that are currently defined by the terms of the ceasefires,
in 1949, 1962 and 1971.
For these reasons, there has been a routine, indeed, heavy deployment of
the Army in the state. The 19th Division, headquartered at Baramula, was
looking after the LoC in the northern part of the state and 25th Division at
the western side along Chhamb, Poonch and Rajauri. The 28th Mtn.
Division was oriented towards Siachen and the Chinese border, as was the
3rd Division. The 15th Corps headquartered in Srinagar and the 16th at
Udhampur, came under the operational command of the Northern Army
which was also headquartered there. Later on, there were several shifts. The
8th Mountain Division came from Zakhama in Nagaland to take charge of
the main anti-militancy operations in the valley. It was headquartered in
Sharifabad near Srinagar. At this time the 28th Division was swung
westwards to focus on the northern frontage of the LoC, some 270
kilometres long. The 19th Division was sent a little way south to Gulmarg.
At various times other formations also came in such as the 39th Division in
1993, and elements of the 6th Mountain Division in 1995. But these have
been temporary movements. With the deployment of the Rashtriya Rifles,
there were other modifications.
Maintaining this force is a stupendous task. While some posts are
supplied through the year by air drops from aircraft flying out of
Chandigarh, most have supplies ferried overland, which means everything
from the proverbial matchsticks to vegetables, milk, meat, petrol and
kerosene. The biggest headache is the stocking up in the Ladakh region
which must be done every year by November before the Zoji La pass and
the road link to Srinagar are cut off by heavy snow that lasts till the
following May or June.
Supplies come in on rail to Jammu and are sent in an endless stream of
convoys that wind their way up to the Jawahar Tunnel under the Banihal
Pass and then descend into the Kashmir valley. Bypassing Srinagar, the road
leads to Zoji La, the lowest but meanest of the passes connecting the
highway to Leh, The journey takes a minimum of five days. Driving the
under- powered trucks with no heating, over roads which are frequently in
bad shape and often in foul weather, remains one of the tougher peacetime
jobs of the Army.
In the winter of 1989, worries about the security of the lines of
communication to the posts of the LoC were foremost in the mind of the
corps commander, Srinagar, Lt Gen. Zaki. He had to ensure that the
numerous posts, staging areas, arms dumps as well as his line of
communication remained secure. His second major task was to sharply
enhance the Army’s anti-infiltration measures along the LoC. Being where
he was, he could not ignore the demands of the civilian authorities, but the
Army made it clear that while it was on occasion willing to provide
manpower to cordon areas that the police wanted to search, it was not
involved in anti-militancy operations. What Zaki did not tell his civilian
counterparts was that he just did not have the troops for anti-militancy
operations. Though the presence of the Army is visible across the state,
many of its formations are logistics troops involved in the massive supply
chain leading to the forward posts of the Army.
But what may not have been clear in January 1990 became amply clear
by May, that a major insurgency, the likes of which India had not seen
before, had gripped the vital valley of Kashmir. Beginning with the uprising
in Srinagar, its popular support base had spread across the Kashmiri-
speaking areas of the valley. The militant organizations were being trained
and equipped by Pakistan and paramilitary forces could not cope with them,
especially in the countryside.
The Army could not ignore that it was, first and foremost, in India, as in
any other country in the world, the ultimate instrumentality of the state.
Second, the insurgency in Kashmir was not ‘another’ internal security
situation. It was, in the view of the top brass, a ‘low intensity conflict’
launched by Pakistan and the Indian Army could hardly refuse to give
battle.
Army headquarters had to look at the bigger picture. They had to
anticipate Islamabad’s moves. Would it intervene across the LoC as in
1965? Or could there be a possible thrust of Pakistani regulars passing off
as volunteers from the Haji Pir bulge to ‘liberate’ the valley? Or could there
be a major incursion into Punjab, already reeling from what appeared to be
another Pakistan-supported low-intensity conflict? Could a move be
preceded by a nuclear threat to Delhi, to paralyse Indian decision- making?
If these insurgencies were, as conventional wisdom in New Delhi
claimed they were, a Pakistan inspired and supported ‘low intensity
conflict’, then there was all the more reason not to thin the Army out in
counter-insurgency tasks. The Army, in this logical scheme, ought to retain
its combat deployments and concentrations to deter direct intervention by
the Pakistan Army in the valley’s conflict.
In the larger strategic aspect, at least, there was some relief, since as of
March that year, the Indian Army had completed pulling out its four-
division force from Sri Lanka. But to redeploy these forces would take
several months, if not a year. The consensus was that while the forces could
be used temporarily for Operation Rakshak I and II, they should steer clear
of counter-insurgency tasks. The decision was taken in New Delhi that
while existing deployments would remain where they were, the 8th
Mountain Division would be transferred to the valley from its location in
Nagaland to launch Operation Rakshak III— as the Army calls its anti-
militancy campaign in the valley.
Army deployments normally feature 850-strong battalions covering a
frontage ranging from fifteen to thirty kilometres. Battalion and company
headquarters a kilometre to half a kilometre from the ‘zero line’ are sited in
safe areas, but the unit sections are sited in trenches closer to the LoC,
depending on the defensive potential of a position. Movement to the front
trenches is hazardous and is usually through a maze of interconnected
trenches.
Opposing positions may be between 100 and 300 metres from each other
and the terrain in between is called ‘No Man’s Land’. Because of
infiltration, cultivation till the zero line, the actual dividing line, has been
prohibited by the Indian authorities. But for the opposite reason, perhaps,
the Pakistani side permits cultivation.
Since this line has been built up over the years, its length is a mini-
Maginot line with a well developed system of interconnected trenches and
bunkers, heated by bukharis, in some areas with TVs and other amenities,
and protected by strong-points, minefields and barbed wire. While all this
looks formidable, nature remains mightier than the armies. The terrain
ranges from the towering snowbound highland where movement is possible
only for trained mountaineers, to the lower chain of mountains and spurs
covered with pine trees and battered by the monsoon rains and winter
snows which can, and do, wash away minefields and barbed wire fences.
Such a border is impossible to either mine or fence in its entirety, and
neither can it be effectively policed.
The key role in exfiltration and infiltration across the LoC has been
played by the Gujjar or shepherd community which is spread across north-
western India and populates the high-mountain region in Kashmir. They
belong to both the Hindu and Muslim communities but in Kashmir, they are
exclusively Muslim. Elsewhere, they are nomadic, taking their flocks from
place to place in search of pasture. But in Kashmir, Gujjars have settled
communities on both sides of the LoC, and number some 150,000 in
Kupwara district itself.
Given their knowledge of the mountain trails, they have been used
extensively by intelligence agencies on both sides to maintain information
on the battlefield dispositions of the other side. Their familiarity with the
trails in the Shamsabari or Pir Panjal ranges is unmatched. On the high
pastures they have traditional bahiks or huts with low stone walls and
timber roofs, in which they spend their summer. With the outbreak of the
rebellion, featuring as it did large-scale and, from the Indian point of view,
illegal movement across the LoC, guiding people across became a growth
industry, albeit somewhat hazardous. In the winter of 1989, Gujjar charges
ranged from Rs 200–500 per person. Later, they rose by a factor of ten to Rs
2000–5000. In 1989–90, people crossed in groups of twenty to thirty, and
this number often climbed up to hundreds.
The Gujjars of Kashmir did not join the anti-Indian insurgency of the
Kashmiri Muslims. But they did not hesitate in using their knowledge of the
high mountain trails to make money guiding militants to and from the
border. Mercenary considerations meant that they mainly cut and ran,
leaving their charges behind. When Bilal Lodhi, the Al Barq chief, was
caught in an ambush in November 1991, his Gujjar guide was the first to
run, along with Lodhi’s jackets which had Rs 60,000 in cash.
A somewhat less hazardous but equally lucrative job was to earn money
ferrying guns and ammunition. When groups like the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen
established themselves and began to collect large sums of money in the
valley, they found it more convenient to buy their weapons from Gujjar
suppliers rather than risk their cadre in the border crossing. In 1992,
‘landed’ prices of AK-47s in Srinagar ranged from Rs 12,000–15,000, Rs
25,000 for UMGs, Rs 3500–5000 for pistols and revolvers. The quick-
firing AK-47 consumed an enormous amount of ammunition that had to be
ferried from across the border in boxes of 750 rounds each. The going rate
for ammunition in the valley was Rs 25 per round in the early 1990s.
But a lot of this cost was obviously risk insurance. Soldiers in ambush
cannot distinguish between the guide and the guided, and neither can a
bullet. Equally lethal was the covert war of the intelligence agencies which
paid some of these Gujjars for information, but once they took this path,
their families became hostages to the militants or the authorities, Pakistani
or Indian. There have been instances of entire families having been wiped
out because one or the other agency or group felt that a guide had betrayed
them. The double-cross and the double-double cross have always been the
rule of the game.
While in the late 1980s, individuals or small groups of ideologically
committed activists crossed the border in search of guns and support, the
uprising of 1989 propelled them across in hundreds. But it was only in mid-
1990, when the snows began to melt that the Army began the task of
preventing their return with arms and training.
The Army adopted a simple, three-tiered plan to check infiltration, one
that continues to this day. The main effort is to prevent ingress across the
LoC itself. The second stage is to pick up any persons who have got
through ambushes in a five- kilometre zone where there is curfew through
the night and ‘shoot-to-kill’ orders in force. The third is to carry out cordon
and search sweeps in villages behind this five-kilometre area and detect
militants or those who harbour them, and identify their ‘launch
commanders’ and guides who organize the forays across the LoC along
with their counterparts on the other side.
In 1990, the most intense activity was in the Uri–Kupwara sector where
movement is easy, even in winter. Here while the first tier was the LoC, the
second tier was the Shamsabari range that could extend 15–75 kilometres
away from the border. The third was the ‘depth area’ around Kupwara,
Chowkibal, Handwara and Bandipur, the road-heads from where militants
were funnelled on their way in or out to Srinagar and southern Kashmir.
As the snow in the passes melted, the scene shifted to the Poonch–
Tithwal sector which, via the Pir Panjal ranges, is the shortest way into
southern Kashmir. In this region the Army scored its initial success. In an
ambush in the Khet area (near Mandi in Poonch) they killed forty-two
infiltrators in one operation alone. On 5 May 1990, the Army detected a
group of 130 militants that had crossed the LoC and reached the
Shamsabari range in the forest tracts between Dudhi and Tangdhar, north of
Tithwal. In a series of engagements lasting almost four days, the Army
killed seventy-three persons for the loss of two soldiers. Fifteen of the
group were captured while the others managed to get away.
The large number killed was a shock to the militants who whipped up a
campaign claiming that the militants had been gunned down in cold blood.
In view of the Army’s record in similar encounters subsequent to this event,
the charge seems unwarranted. In fact, the group that was interdicted was
well trained and had, after initial training, even been sent to Afghanistan for
‘battle inoculation’.
In the effort to assist the infiltration process, Pakistani forces raised the
temperature on the LoC by increasing the ‘routine’ cross-border firing. Both
armies were under pressure, one to assist the infiltrators and the other to
stop them. Inevitably this led to an intensification of tension on the border,
which erupted in a serious incident in June when a BSF unit in Machhal
abandoned its position at the LoC in the face of Pakistani firing. Later in
May 1991, Pakistani forces made an incursion in the Kirni sector in Poonch
but were driven back, leaving behind a lieutenant and a soldier who died in
the attack.
When the snows melted after the monsoon, infiltrators seeking safe
routes went up to the higher reaches of the Gurais– Bras area. The terrain in
this region is so daunting that it is just not possible to have the kind of
intense policing that characterizes the LoC in its lower reaches.
Here, the scale of infiltration took on the grandeur of the terrain itself.
Moving on routes northwards, large groups of militants were able to move
back and forth. Coordination on the Pakistani side was done at Skardu and
training was carried out in a string of camps in Kamri, Domel and Kel. This
region may have been in use earlier, but it came to the notice of the Indian
Army after an incident in early September 1990 when an infiltrating group
was travelling in a state roadways bus on the National Highway IA near
Kangan. When asked to stop at a checkpoint, they opened fire and the
security forces retaliated. In the process, some twenty-two people travelling
in the bus were killed, of whom thirteen turned out to be from the Hizbul
Mujahideen. They had caught the bus from the wayside, after infiltrating
through the LoC at a point near the Zoji La Pass.
As a result of this, the Army sent out a number of long-range patrols to
comb the mountain areas around the resort town of Sonamarg. On 18
September 1990, a long-range patrol in a desolate region near Kaobal Gali,
north of Sonamarg, came across a group of armed Kashmiris. It later turned
out that this was one of the four groups of nearly 250 militants returning
from Azad Kashmir.
 Immediately, a massive effort was launched in a vast mountain area
stretching from the LoC to Sonamarg. A series of skirmishes occurred in
Naruwal and Kaobal Gali in the north and along the Leh–Kargil road
between 18 September 1990 and 5 October. When the operation ended,
nineteen infiltrators had been killed and 173 arrested, many after surrender.
The others managed to get away either to the valley or back across the LoC.
The story revealed by the interrogation was a familiar one. The group of
youngsters, many recruited by coercion or threat to family members, had
exfiltrated in mid-August in smaller groups from a point almost due north
of Kangan along the Gadjar nallah. After crossing the Kishenganga, they
were taken to a camp in Gaiteri, housing a total of 500 other recruits. The
instructors were a mix of Afghans, Pakistani armymen and ISI personnel.
The training spanning seven to ten days was rudimentary and the
instructors apparently treated the Kashmiris with considerable contempt.
The plan was to infiltrate them in six groups between September and
October before the snows made movement difficult. The groups detected
were the first three, totalling 250 persons.
Some trainees charged that they had been sexually assaulted and others
said that they had got the impression that they were being used as porters to
ferry weapons and war material to the valley. The Army recovered 187 AK-
47s, eighteen universal machine-guns, twenty-one rocket launchers,
seventy-nine pistols and large quantities of explosives and ammunition. As
winter approached, the Pakistani controllers were in a great hurry to get
across the maximum number of personnel and weapons into the valley. But
the pressure for quick results also meant that the training they provided was
quite inferior. Most of the group surrendered to the Army rather than
fighting it out.
From January till 31 October 1990, when most of the passes to Pakistan
were blocked by snow, the Indian Army made over a hundred interceptions
and killed nearly 400 infiltrators and arrested over a thousand. In the
process, they recovered nearly 600 AK-series assault rifles, sixty light
machine-guns, fifty RPG- 7s, and nearly 400 pistols. By that time eighteen
of its own personnel had been killed and sixty-nine injured. We can only
speculate as to what got through.
This did not check the infiltration and exfiltration. Indeed, till 1993 at
least, large groups of Kashmiri rebels managed to get in and out, if not at
will, at least with relative ease. This became clear when even two years
later, in 1993, the Army was able to detect and capture a group that was
setting off to cross the LoC for Pakistan. Some 130 of a group of 200 youth
were arrested between 4 and 7 August.
The Army interrogated and freed all of them, except three who, it
transpired, had a deeper involvement with the Al Jehad. They found that the
bulk of the boys were from Pulwama. Most came from families of poor
farmers or landless workers, eighty- five per cent of them were between
fifteen and twenty-five years old, and eighty per cent were unmarried.
Almost all of them were poorly motivated and, in fact, Bilal Ahmed, a
leader of the Al Jehad, had promised them Rs 5000–10,000 each as an
inducement. He was not above threatening individuals and families who
appeared disinclined to join up.
But while this group may have consisted of raw and clearly reluctant
recruits, there still remained others with tough and battle-ready individuals.
In November that year twenty-six infiltrators were killed when they were
trapped by the Army after they had entered Kashmir through the Masich
valley between Zoji La and Dras. All the infiltrators were from Pakistan and
highly trained and well-equipped. One was arrested.
The group was spotted at about 5 in the evening on November 12 by a
Gurkha scout, Bhim Bahadur, who was part of a detail accompanying the
commanding officer of the battalion on a visit to the Ladakh Scouts’ post.
They immediately began climbing up the feature and tracked the militants
on the snow, till their footprints vanished into two caves. Suddenly there
was firing from the caves and it was clear that the group had the militants
bottled in.
But this was easier said than done. By now night was fast approaching
and the colonel had just seven men with him. So even while he ringed the
caves with them, returning the fire pouring out, he was organizing the kill.
 Over the next two days, virtually everything was thrown into the battle.
First the Gurkhas tried a direct approach, losing Naib Subedar Dal Bahadur
Rana and Naik Mohan Singh Gurung. When this failed, they tried
firepower, including rocket launchers fired at the mouth of the cave. Then,
on November 14, a helicopter attempted to toss explosives into the cave.
Heavier machine-guns and automatic grenade launchers too were tried, as
well as an attempt to shove high-explosive down the fissures. Nothing
worked.
That evening the Gurkhas once again went into a frontal attack but from
another direction. The militants now attempted to buy time by claiming they
wanted to discuss the terms of surrender, but once again the firing resumed.
Finally, on 15 November, another assault was launched by the Gurkhas,
using fire and smoke bombs. The fire and smoke did the trick; the blinded
militants rushed out and were picked off by the Gurkhas. The following
day, the lower cave where six of the militants were holed up, was also
cleared out.
While all twenty-six died, one was made captive. He had surrendered as
part of a rush by the trapped militants who had probably hoped to kill more
Indian soldiers before what they believed to be an inevitable death. This
remarkable feat was accomplished with the loss of just two Gurkhas.
By 1994 the battle on the LoC had become a dangerous one, fought by
professionals on either side. While military intelligence, the so-called
liaison units, kept their eyes peeled for strangers in a particular area, or set
about identifying ‘launch commanders’ through signals and human
intelligence, the battalion and brigade commanders worked on drills that
would net the militants in the most efficient fashion. Another ‘innovation’
of the Army, permitted after Gen. B.C. Joshi became chief in 1993, was to
allow the forward units to lay their ambushes across the LoC in Pakistani-
held territory. This raised the ante for the infiltrating groups since they
could not be sure at which point they could be hit. Local commanders,
depending on the nature of the LoC, utilized this tactic to sharply raise the
costs of infiltration for the Pakistanis. Indeed, according to one estimate, by
1994, some seventy per cent of the recoveries were being made from what
was technically on the Pakistani side of the LoC. The idea was not to
penetrate too deeply, but depending on the lay of the land, a kilometre or
two. Perhaps even more if para commando forces were operating. There
was just one caveat. No bodies were to be left behind on the Pakistani side
of the LoC.
Despite the risks, sometimes large groups crossed, such as the one in
which Firdous Ahmed of Doda, a Hizbul Mujahideen activist, went across
to Muzaffarabad in April 1994. There were as many as fifty-eight persons
involved, including eight Gujjar guides. The return journey was shorter and
after training at Illaqa-e-Gair, he came back across the LoC in the
Ranbirsinghpura area near Jammu. But mostly the groups were smaller.
Mohammed Shafiq alias Abu Jindal came across with a group of six on
the night of 18 September 1994, crossing the LoC in Bandipur where they
camped in a Gujjar hut for the night. Three of the team of Harkat-uI-Ansar
militants were Pakistani nationals and they were accompanied by
Mohammed Ramzan Bandey who was their guide. Later, they went to
Bazpura in Srinagar and on to Charar-e-Sharief where they played a role in
the fateful developments of 1995.
By 1994, those coming across were no longer the callow youth who had
left in 1990 but hardened militants and mercenaries who had undergone
training equivalent to a soldier’s, along with special mountain-warfare and
commando courses. These better- trained groups, predominantly non-
Kashmiri, were often well equipped, some with night-vision devices and
specialized mountain- climbing gear.
They were assisted by a tight intelligence organization on both sides of
the LoC that contacts guides and organizes activities. Such individuals,
called ‘launch commanders’, equipped with high-powered and sophisticated
radio sets, coordinate operations with their counterparts across the border.
The Army used all its wiles to capture them and, as militant operations
became more sophisticated and tightly controlled, signals intelligence was
used to track them down. In the summer of 1994, military intelligence was
able to locate the Kupwara ‘launch commander’. In an operation code-
named ‘Rabbit Hunt’, a platoon led by 2nd Lt N. Tiwari managed to capture
Majnoon Khan alive. In his house they found two HF radio sets, five AK-
47s and a Dragunov sniper rifle. Later, there were more successes.
But the reality is that nothwithstanding the difficulties, militant groups
still manage to cross the border.

The Army in the Valley

The logical development of counter-insurgency was that the Army would
have to participate in operations in the valley. While the BSF and the CRPF
rooted out militants from the urban centres, the Army would be the other
half of the nutcracker that would deny them the rural areas. In terms of
combat skills and tactics, the Army had the wherewithal to conduct
aggressive patrols as well as assaulting fixed positions where well-armed
militants could be holed out.
Unlike the LoC, the valley presented an entirely different topographical
picture. It is not very big—as the crow flies; from Banihal in the south to
Kupwara in the north may be about 170 kilometres, and from Gulmarg in
the west to Kangan in the east about eighty kilometres.
The valley is extremely fertile. The Jhelum flows through it first
northwards and then bending south-westwards, exits through the Uri gap
into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. On its banks are situated the main towns
—Anantnag, Srinagar, Baramula and Sopur.
Given the rich soil, the valley is thickly populated, with people living in a
series of semi-urban clusters of houses made largely of wood. Though
overwhelmingly Muslim, till 1990, a significant number of Hindu and Sikh
Kashmiris also lived there. The valley is not entirely flat. There are a series
of outcrops called krevan s, the largest being the one upon which the
Srinagar airport is located. These krevans are cut by gullies. Some areas are
not good agricultural land and are wooded. Such a terrain, then, is not
unfriendly to guerrillas and insurgents.
By early 1990, when it became clear to the reluctant Army that they
would have to commit their forces to counter-insurgency operations, they
began a series of deliberate moves towards that end. In May 1990, the 8th
Mtn Division began moving to the valley from its normal location in
Nagaland to take over counter- insurgency operations.
After some wandering, the headquarters of the 8th Mountain were
located at the Sharifabad cantonment. Though a division with two bridges,
its strength was virtually doubled in size by attaching the 1 Sector Rashtriya
Rifles, consisting then of two battalions as well as 87th and 323rd Mountain
brigades.
The 8th Mountain Division launched a number of operations in 1991,
some involving as many as three brigades at a time. The thrust of a series of
early operations, each typically lasting three days to a week, was focused on
the Wullar lake area. Positioned where it was, it formed a funnel of sorts for
militants coming in across the LoC from the Shamsabari range. Equally
important was the goal of securing the Indian Army’s line of
communications, viz., the Srinagar–Leh road.
From here, earlier that year, militants, mainly of the Hizbul Mujahideen
and Al Umar groups, had carried out a number of ambushes of Army
convoys on the Bandipur–Shalateng road. The terrain was said to have a
number of arms caches and was used as a training area as well. Through
1990, the area had been more or less unpoliced, with no BSF or CRPF
picket, nor had the hard- pressed Army units around made any effort to
check militant activities there.
The first was Operation Jeet in the Alusa-Malangam area on the western
bank of the Wullar Lake, between 11 and 17 September 1991, in which
elements of three brigades—the 68, 87 and 323—participated.
In the main, the operation consisted of large-scale cordon- and-search
operations, but seven militants belonging to the Al Hadid battalion of the
Hizbul Mujahideen were killed in clashes and a number of persons
including the battalion commander Shafi Shah arrested. The results were
not bad for the first round as a fair amount of ammunition was recovered.
A month later, the second phase was launched: Operation Vikram. This
covered the eastern bank. The task of the 87th and 323rd Mountain
Brigades was to sweep the area, about 140 sq. kilometres, with terrain not
very different from that found in Operation Jeet. There were some fifteen
large villages in the area, with Hajan, the largest, with a population of
15,000, and Shahgund and Gund Bun having the reputation of being Hizb
strongholds.
The 17th Sikh regiment moved from Sonarwain after it got dark on 10
October. One company established itself opposite Hajan, moving from the
Manasbal camp. At the same time, 19th Rajput moved from the camp, also
at about 8.30 pm, and established cordons to seal off exits to the Wullar
lake. The 9th Mahar battalion moved from the camp and established the
southern part of the cordon around Hajan. This was the 87th brigade’s task.
The other, 323rd, also at Manasbal, sent its 12th Dogra battalion and 22nd
Grenadiers to cordon off Gund Jehangir, Naidkhai and other villages by
establishing positions between the lake and Haigam Jhil.
The next morning both 19th Rajput and 9th Mahar spotted two militants
of Chirangpura village trying to get into boats to escape. They did not heed
orders to stop and were fired upon, with one person dying on the spot and
the other being injured.
At about 10.30 a.m., the 9th Mahar cordon at Vijipur came under fire. A
platoon of the battalion moved to take on the group and in the subsequent
action, two militants along with three AK– 47s were captured. A 17 Sikh
company detained one militant with a pistol, who apparently had recently
returned from Pakistan. In the ensuing days, the villages, marshes and
jungles were combed vigorously. The militants prudently lay low, content to
fire an occasional burst from their AK-47s.
Meanwhile, 12th Dogra and 22nd Grenadiers had moved into Naidkhai
and Gund Jehangir even before sunrise. Through the day, the villagers were
screened and their houses searched. That night 22nd Grenadiers moved off
to cordon Shah Gund and Gund Bun, where one militant was caught by a
spotter, trying to get away. In the search of Kanipur village, one AK-rifle
was recovered. A total of five persons were detained for interrogation.
On 14 October, the armed forces were regrouped for Phase II. The 12th
Dogra was placed under 87th Mountain, and 232nd and the other
Grenadiers battalion pulled out from the operation. The plan was to use the
Dogras and 13th Rashtriya Rifles for the cordon around Hajan, while the
Mahars, Sikhs and Rajputs would search the village. Next morning
screening began. The entire operation, which went on for the next two days,
was thorough. Village ponds were drained by fire tenders, mine detectors
used to locate buried and cached weapons, women police were used to
search the female population and special teams were used to follow up
leads which were often provided by the locals.
By the end of the operation, five UMGs, twenty-six AK- series rifles, ten
pistols and one RPG were seized with their ammunition. In addition to this,
the Army also seized some twenty-one muzzle-loaders, used for hunting
and poaching by the locals. Though illegal, these weapons had not been
seized by the local authorities earlier, but in troubled times, no one could
take chances.
The following month came Operation Deer Hunt. The 323 Mountain
Brigade was asked to search villages Woyil, Baba Khipra and Mohandpora.
Some information had been received that Hizb leaders were expected to
meet there on the night of 3 November. The plan was to pre-empt them and
search the area a couple of hours earlier. Once again the scale of the
operation was massive: the entire brigade was deployed with 22nd
Grenadiers, 12th Dogra and 5/4th Gurkha Rifles.
The operation was marked by intermittent firing by militants, who often
left their weapons behind and melted into the local populace. Finally, one
Hizb activist was arrested, five persons taken away for interrogation, and
some ammunition recovered. Interrogation of the villagers and the arrested
militants revealed that the conference had taken place a day earlier, not in
the villages named but in Chak Seri, which was slightly to the north.
Just a week later, a little to the east from the Deer Hunt area, a cordon-
and-search operation by the 323 brigade of Laridora village led to the
recovery of twenty-five AK-2s, four pistols and thirty-two hand grenades.
As in the case of Deer Hunt, each of the enveloping columns was engaged
by militants during the two- day operation. Five militants died in these
encounters, and among the fifteen arrested was Abdul Salam Rathar, the
chief of the Muslim Janbaz Force and deputy chief of the Pakistan-based
United Jehad Council. Rathar was the Baramula chief of Shabbir Shah’s
People’s League, whose job was to send recruits for training to Pakistan.
The striking feature of this period is the scale of the operations which
used forces in excess of a brigade, and the tactics employed. This was a
period in which the Army had little or no intelligence. The result was that
they were forced to employ these ‘sledgehammer to kill fly’ kind of massive
cordon-and- search operations. But if they did not always succeed in netting
top militants or more guns, they did re-establish in the minds of the
villagers that the Indian state was still around. As the Army settled down,
the flow of information improved. The result was more precise operations
by smaller forces.
Massive cordon-and-searches were not the norm; other forms of
operations were the routine nakas, or roadblocks, ambushes and the ROPs
(road opening patrols). The ROPs were a daily feature to clear road mines
so as to enable normal military movement through the day. This was a
highly risky task, virtually inviting militant ambush. For that reason, they
were carefully planned and coordinated.
Every morning, in designated areas, truck-mounted patrols would move
towards each other, checking the roadside. Their movements were
coordinated by strategically located QRTs or quick reaction teams of
soldiers who were mounted on vehicles, ready to move on call if and when
an ROP came under attack.
This routine action designed to ‘sanitize’ the road was not directed
against villages or anti-insurgent operation. However, on occasion they hit
pay dirt. On 23 October 1991 two companies of the 2nd Jat Regiment
stationed at Mirgund were responsible for the ROP on parts of the Narbal–
Tangmarg and Srinagar– Pattan roads. Another company of the 5/4th
Gurkha Rifles was in charge of the Magam–Tangmarg portion. One of the
Jat platoons involved in the ROPs was bivouacked at Chak Kowus. One of
the Mirgund companies functioned as centralized Quick Reaction Team.
When the Chak Kowus platoon under Subedar Sahi Ram was moving out
on the morning of 23 October at about 8 o’clock, it noticed a group of
persons in a distant grove. As soon as they saw the Army team, they started
to run. The platoon gave chase and opened fire on the escaping group,
injuring one of them. For a while the militants tried to carry their injured
comrade, but after a while they abandoned him, taking his weapon. As they
approached the wounded militant, he threw a grenade at the approaching
soldiers, prompting Hav. Richpal Singh to shoot him dead.
In the meantime, the QRT and the rest of the ROP began to move in to
assist Sahi Ram’s platoon. By now nearly three companies of troops from
the Jats and Gurkhas had arrived and begun to comb the area. The Jats and
Sahi Ram were still on the trail of the militants, who had crossed the
Sukhna nar and were moving towards Sunnur Kalipur and Arat.
The militants now began to concentrate their fire on a wooden bridge
which was the only way across the nar. The Jats forced the bridge and
closed in. Sahi Ram shot a militant carrying a special paratrooper version of
the AK-47 while another, who appeared to be guarding him, was shot by
Hav. Prakash Dhaka. By now it was late night and the remaining militants
broke contact and escaped into the forested area.
The slain militant with the special paratrooper version of the AK was no
less than the chief-designate of the Hizbul Mujahideen, Mohammed Ashraf
Dar, and the other two were his Pakistani bodyguards. Dar was a resident of
the village of Sunnur Kalipur, the direction in which the militants were
trying to escape.

With the first flush of exuberance for the ‘freedom movement’ over, the
insurgents were, by 1992, confronting the hard reality that in a region as
small as the Kashmir valley, people were just not capable of wresting
‘azadi’ through the force of arms. Neither money nor guns were the issue.
India was just too big to cow down. Once the Indian security machine got
going, it began to extract a terrible price.
A measure of the price was evident in the growing charges against the
security forces: that they were using excessive force, torturing captured
militants and killing too many civilians in crossfiring. The government
admitted that till the end of 1991, nearly eighty criminal cases related to
these charges had been registered.
 In August 1992, to counter what the administration felt were gains made
by the militants, a major crackdown was ordered. The police launched
Operation Tiger, which was designed to ‘scare’, if not deal with the
militants in the manner of a tiger in the jungle. Addressing a press
conference at Udhampur in August, the police chief, B.S. Bedi, who had
succeeded J.N. Saksena, pointed out that in about forty-five days of the
operation, 147 militants were killed and 500 arrested. In this period, twenty-
nine security forces personnel also lost their lives. The police viewed the
operation as a means of keeping up the pressure on the militants by
dramatic swoops on their hideouts.
However, the operation seems to have had the hallmarks of Operation
Phoenix in Vietnam, where Vietcong cadre and suspects were assassinated
by special squads rather than being arrested. The problem in Phoenix, as
well as in Tiger, was that the assassins often mistook their targets and those
who sent them out often got the wrong names.
In mid-November, the administration took credit for the killing of Omar
Hayat Qureshi, the chief of the Ikhwan, only to undergo the mortification of
Qureshi appearing before the media to point out that the person killed was
Tabassum Qureshi, the younger brother of Altaf Qureshi, the former chief
of the group who had been killed earlier.
In April, a number of bodies had been found on the Wullar Lake. No one
knew how they had come there; some said they were victims of a summary
execution by the security forces. In September, Mohammed Iqbal Zargar,
the deputy chief of the Al Umar, was arrested in a cordon-and-search
operation and the fact announced by a spokesperson. However, the next
morning the authorities claimed that he had been killed in an ‘encounter’
after his arrest!
According to H.N. Wanchoo, a Kashmiri pandit human- rights activist,
there were some 108 custodial deaths between January 1990 and June 1992,
averaging four to five per month. However, beginning in July when cordon-
and-search operations and arrests were stepped up, the number went up to
fifteen, in August it was nineteen, in September thirty-seven, peaking in
October to fifty-four. The details totalled thirty-two in the first fortnight of
November 1992, Wanchoo himself was abducted and assassinated on
December 5.
Family members said that Wanchoo had been receiving threats since the
beginning of the militancy in 1990, warning him to leave the valley and
stop indulging in politics. In the dark and desperate atmosphere of Srinagar,
Wanchoo was something of an idiosyncratic figure. While his name has
been associated with human rights, he has variously been cited as the
president of the Peace and Integration Council as well as something called
the Kashmiri Hindu Forum. Indeed, there were reports that he was also a
member of the Kashmir Liberation Council headed by Hilal Baig, the
Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen chief, who had been accused of masterminding the
murder of Mushir-ul-Haq.
Wanchoo, it must be noted, was one of the few who did not accept the
government version of events and had even filed a writ in court charging
that the administration had been responsible for the killing of Mushir-ul-
Haq and H.L. Khera. He had also disputed claims that there had been
widespread destruction of Kashmiri pandit properties in the valley.
Human Rights Watch/Asia’s report on the assassination glosses over
Wanchoo’s politics and focuses on his human-rights activities and appears
to buy the thesis that the government may have had him killed. In view of
his activities, Wanchoo was certainly a thorn in the flesh of the government,
but not so much because of these writ petitions, as the embarrassment that
his figures on custodial deaths caused. Being a pandit, his figures had
credibility and were used in several articles, published in various human-
rights organizations’ reports.
The government believes that Wanchoo was eliminated by members of
the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen (JuM). After his arrest, Ashiq Hussain Dar alias
Mohammed Qasim Faktoo, the publicity chief of the outfit, told the
authorities that his killing was ordered by the JuM chief Hilal Ahmed Mir,
also known as Nasir-ul- Islam, because he did not want the movement to
have any Hindu associated with it and because of his suspicion that
Wanchoo was a government agent. In March 1993, Mir himself, the prime
conspirator in the killing of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq in May 1990, was
killed. The main suspect in the killing, Ghulam Qadir, was arrested by the
authorities in 1994 and presumably remains in custody.
By 1992, with the country’s politics caught in the morass of the Babri
Masjid–Ram Mandir dispute, the security forces were without a moral
compass and on autopilot. They were military or paramilitary personnel and
their job was to defeat the militants and they were doing it the only way
they knew. By being classed as ‘anti-national element’ or ANE, the militant
had gone out of the pale of humanity for the ordinary officer or jawan. This
was not a matter of nomenclature, but of the brutal battle being conducted.
The tactics of the BSF G-teams or the Army’s cordon-and- search
operations were by now standard. Capture a militant, take him to an
interrogation centre and ‘persuade’ him to give information on colleagues
and weapons’ caches. Then, with raiding parties, locate the person or
weapons. More often than not, the militant concerned would go along with
the raiding party and wearing a mask, identify other militants. Such tactics
are of course not ‘cricket’, but this was war, and like all insurgencies, a
dirty one.
The problem was that often they had the wrong man. The interrogators
seeking information would redouble their beating to obtain information that
the person did not have and the person died. In some cases, bodies were
thrown into the lake or river, in other cases, an encounter was concocted.
In 1990, the BSF’s rough brutality was an untrained response to an
emergency situation. In 1992, the interrogation systems had become
institutionalized, but contrary to popular impression, it was not run by the
BSF alone. Arrested militants went to joint interrogation centres where the
Army, the BSF and the IB personnel routinely beat the militants, if not
tortured them in other ways. But even here there were no trained
interrogators since the concept was virtually unknown.
At a press conference in July 1992, Ashok Patel admitted that between
five and six militants had died in BSF custody, though he claimed that this
was during the first phases of the insurgency. But, as officials later
conceded, things were much more serious.
 Though the Kashmiri militants were ruthless enough to stage scenes and
concoct events, the real pressure came from families who knew that their
relatives were innocent. The problem often was that they did not know what
had become of their near and dear ones, and there was no way they could
find out. They would shuttle from one BSF or CRPF camp to another in the
hope of getting information. The interrogation centres were soon well
known and a cluster of relatives could be seen around them.
The problem did not appear to be interrogation and custodial deaths
alone, but the very conduct of the operations. On 31 July 1992, according to
Asia Watch, Tajuddin and Imtiazuddin Farooqi, the former a student in
Bangalore, and the latter a school-going fourteen-year old, were watching
the Olympic Games on TV at their Lal Chowk residence. There was a burst
of gunfire, and a knock on the door. As Imtiazuddin opened the door, he
was shot in the chest by a BSF soldier wearing a black scarf around his
face. When Tajuddin went to help him, he was shot in the head. The soldier
dragged Tajuddin out of the house and shot him a couple of times in the
stomach and left.
Officials, including the director-general of the state police, acknowledged
that there had been no grounds for shooting the boys. Apparently, a BSF
truck had been ambushed and one soldier killed, and the personnel
assuming that the firing came from the house, went in and shot the boys.
On 15 October, another incident highlighted the BSF’s lapses. When a
patrol was moving along the road near Badasgam in Anantnag district, they
heard a sonic boom. Mistaking it for a mine blast, one of the members of
the patrol started shooting and the other panickly constables did the same.
Some shops caught fire and two persons were burnt to death. Villagers
charged that the BSF personnel had locked them into the house and killed
them. They also rounded up some of the villagers for interrogation about
alleged militants. Later, an Army officer, Alex Thomas, came to investigate
the incident. He put down his findings in a letter he gave to the locals. He
made it clear that the sound of the blast was that of a sonic boom which his
company, located nearby, had also heard. There was no firing on the BSF,
he noted; all the firing was done by the BSF.
The Mirage of Elections
The distance between the realities of Kashmir and the thinking in New
Delhi was reflected in Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s statement at a rally
in Vishakapatnam in July 1992 that ‘the situation [in the valley] is ripe to
hold elections’. The episode seems to have been authored by Home
Minister S.B. Chavan who, early in the year, declared that elections were
likely to be held by October.
This thinking was based on the views of the man in the field, Governor
Saxena. Since he had arrived, counter-militancy operations had become
organized and effective and leaders of the militancy knew that their hopes
for obtaining ‘azadi’ by force were over. But they had committed
themselves to a path that had created a political vacuum. With the Congress
and National Conference leaders having been killed or lying low, and the
overground secessionists now in jail, the only representatives of the
Kashmiris were the militant ‘commanders’, many of them merely thugs or
fanatics with guns.
In April 1992, in a move to change this situation, Governor Saxena
ordered the release of the five top leaders who had been erstwhile partners
of the Muslim United Front: Syed Ali Shah Geelani, chief of the Jamaat-e-
Islami, Abdul Ghani Lone of the People’s Conference, Maulana Abbas
Ansari of the Ittehad Muslimeen, Qazi Nissar Ahmed of the Ummat-e-Islam
and Prof. Abdul Ghani Butt of the Muslim Conference. They had been in
jail since early 1990, and their release was seen as a means to restart
‘political’ dialogue in the state.
Though the leaders had in the past participated in elections and, like
Geelani, been members of the Legislative Assembly, they quickly became
aware of the changed climate. Indeed, in a press release prepared just before
their release in April, they declared, ‘We resolve to fight for the right to
self-determination of the Jammu and Kashmir people.’ They were aware
that they were under careful watch by the militants and any false move
could lead to their assassination. After their release, speaking mainly at
mosques after the Friday prayers, they had just one refrain—self-
determination for Kashmiris.
To further ease the situation, the administration released ninety-seven
other detainees and began thinning the BSF and CRPF deployments in
Srinagar areas. The aim, according to Governor Saxena, was to create the
‘right psychological climate’ which could give the necessary momentum to
the process. To aid this process, he created an ‘advisory council’ consisting
of prominent citizens who would assist him in giving the administration a
broader base, though in the main its members belonged to the Congress
party. Daunted by the constitutional issues involved, the government had
decided against the idea of restoring the Assembly that had been dissolved
by Jagmohan. The thinking was that once a political process was underway,
a civic poll could be held first, and then if things looked good, an election to
the state Assembly. Confirmation of this government thinking was provided
by the Union Home Minister S.B. Chavan who visited the state at the end of
April. He held discussions with the governor, his advisers and whosoever
was willing to meet him. He declared that he was satisfied with the ‘change
in the situation’ and called for accelerating the process towards full
normality.
At the same time, the government was sending feelers to the militant
leaders it still had in custody. The governor, his advisers and other senior
officials talked to almost all the jailed leaders, such as Yasin Malik, Hamid
Sheikh and Shabbir Shah. The message was that if they had grievances,
those could be pursued through normal political channels. The gun had only
given the advantage to Pakistan and the Hizbul Mujahideen.
This seemed to tally with the information these leaders were themselves
getting from the field. So, in an experiment, the government proposed
releasing Hamid Sheikh, believing that he had more or less agreed to bring
the JKLF around to fighting the Hizb. His insistence on his organization’s
self-determination plank remained a sticking point, but Rajesh Pilot, who
was taking a keen, albeit unofficial interest, took the issue of his release to
the prime minister and pushed it through.
 In early 1992, Sheikh, next only to Yasin Malik in the valley’s JKLF
hierarchy, was released through the device of an uncontested bail
application. In mid-1992, when Pilot paid a visit to the valley as a prelude
to his becoming a special minister for Kashmir affairs, he reportedly met
Hamid Sheikh.
At the time of his release, Indian officials say, it was agreed that Sheikh
would remain in touch with Ashok Patel, now the state’s additional director-
general of police. In the interest of ensuring his own safety, Sheikh had
agreed to call Patel and the latter was never to call him. However, this
sensitive relationship did not last. Sheikh went incommunicado. Finally,
Patel tracked him down and phoned him, infuriating Sheikh. No one knows
what happened, but on November 19, Sheikh was reported killed in a
cordon-and-search operation. Some said he drowned in the Jhelum while
being chased by the Army; others spoke of an encounter in Alikadal, in
which he was killed along with Jameel Chaudhary, a JKLF ‘adviser’ from
Azad Kashmir.
There was little or no response from other militants. Mushtaq Ahmed
Zargar ‘Latrum’ in jail since his arrest earlier that year, reported through a
press note that he had been approached by a National Conference member
of parliament and later by the governor himself with the suggestion that he
seek release by presenting himself before the State Advisory Board.
However, Latrum declared he had rejected all overtures and insisted that it
would be futile for Indian officials to talk to militants individually.
All the moves for holding elections proved to be premature. Even Farooq
Abdullah, the erstwhile chief minister who visited the valley only fleetingly,
was clear that elections were a pipe dream. He said in an interview with
India Today that he would not participate in any election since he had
‘nothing to offer the people’. His point was that he needed something to go
before the people and in that context the central government needed to spell
out clearly the quantum of autonomy it would offer to the people of the
state. This ‘quantum’ became Abdullah’s theme in the coming year.
Chavan, Pilot, Narasimha Rao and even the governor insisted that all
issues of autonomy could only be discussed with a legitimately constituted
Legislative Assembly, and the elections to this Assembly could only be held
if the right atmosphere was created by restoring the ‘political process’,
which meant that Abdullah and his cadre should fan out and start
‘politicking’.
New Delhi was being somewhat mendacious in this. The real reason why
it did not want to discuss Article 370 or autonomy had to do with Prime
Minister Narasimha Rao’s relationship with the BJP which wanted to
eliminate Article 370 in its entirety. Neither principle nor ideology
motivated Rao’s policy, just a cynical desire to remain prime minister of the
country and enjoy the considerable privileges of its office. He had sought to
finesse a policy of appeasement towards Hindu chauvinism as a means of
retaining office. But he failed when on 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid
was razed to the ground. There were riots and demonstrations across India,
both immediately after the demolition of the mosque and in early January
1993.
The Babri Masjid fiasco left Rao stunned, but only for a day or two.
Almost immediately, he began plotting ways and means for saving his skin.
The instrument he chose was the young and ambitious minister of
communications’, Rajesh Pilot. At a gloomy dinner meeting of the Union
council of ministers at the prime minister’s house on 16 December, Pilot
played the cat’s paw by suggesting that the whole Cabinet was culpable for
the situation and offering his own resignation ‘to strengthen the hands of the
prime minister’.
This time-tested formula had been devised by Indira Gandhi to gain
leverage over recalcitrant ministers in times of crisis. It offered a Hobson’s
choice: offer to resign and the prime minister may retain you; don’t, and be
dropped in the reshuffle. The only way out would be to challenge Rao, but
the party had long lost its backbone, and no one knew it better than Rao.
So when Pilot offered his resignation, all the others panicked and offered
theirs and Rao was saved. At the beginning of the new year, Rao carried out
a Cabinet reorganization and ensured that it remained an ineffectual body
with no possibility or potential of challenging his own authority. Instead of
getting in some northern heavyweights like N.D. Tiwari into the Union
Cabinet, Rao inducted Dinesh Singh and Satish Sharma.
He also appointed Rajesh Pilot as the minister for internal security, in
effect, the junior minister in the powerful Union home ministry. This was
both a reward as well as an admission that his protégé S.B. Chavan’s
handling of the Union home ministry had been less than satisfactory, to say
the least. It was a popular choice. Pilot had the image in the government of
being a doer, a person not afraid of stating his mind or running away from
the hurly-burly of politics.
The day Pilot reported to his senior minister, his reception was frosty.
Shankarrao Chavan, a man, as someone said, who should never have risen
above the post of a tehsildar, or a sub- district official, decided to make a
stand. For eighteen days he refused to allocate work to the new minister, but
he was finally ordered to do so by the prime minister. Disgusted with the
state of affairs, Madhav Godbole, the home secretary, resigned.
Pilot, however, was ecstatic. An ex-Air Force officer who had adopted
the nomenclature of his profession as his surname, he belonged to the
politically significant north Indian Gujjar caste. He had come into
prominence as the boy-wonder of politics when he had won the elections
from Ghaziabad in the 1980 elections. In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi appointed him
minister of state for surface transport.
In 1991, when a Congress government again formed a minority
government, Pilot was one of the few northern leaders to have been
returned to parliament. He was offered the post of minister of
communications in the Rao Cabinet. But Pilot was ambitious and looking
for worlds to conquer. Kashmir was one area that drew his attention. His
association with the state went back some years. He had hit it off with
Farooq Abdullah, after both were elected to parliament in 1980. In the
1980s, when Congress-National Conference relations see-sawed, Pilot had
often been asked to intercede on behalf of his party with his friend. In the
run-up to the 1987 elections in the state, he had been part of the informal
negotiating team selected by Rajiv Gandhi to talk to Abdullah. Later, he
was an adviser of sorts to Rajiv in what became the messy dealings of the
Congress with the National Conference.
In 1991, Pilot got involved in the negotiations and release of
Doraiswamy, never mind the high price paid in terms of militants released.
In 1992, but for Chavan, he was perhaps the only minister to actually visit
the valley, even though he had no formal ministerial role in the affairs of the
state. His activities there drew a rebuke from his senior minister Chavan:
‘In spite of the fact he should not go there (Kashmir valley), he has been
going. It is a sensitive area. He should not say or do anything which runs
contrary to my view. His action is very undesirable. Still he is persisting.’
Such a relationship, clearly, did not augur well for the future, especially
since the ISI plans for a heightened effort to aid and intensify the
insurgency were now underway.
 5
The Pakistani Offensive:
India, Kashmir and Doda

To boost Kashmiri militancy, the Pakistanis decided to increase their own

involvement as well as aid the process by extending their activity across
India. Independent of the Kashmir operation, the Pakistan Army’s ISI had
been active in India, in the main ferreting out militarily significant
information. But from the 1980s onwards, it had sustained and supported
the Sikh terrorists. Later, in the face of the rising tide of ethnic discontent in
India, it had cast around to assist any group that was, marching to their tune
—the destruction of India.
Covert activity is not meant to leave any traces. Fortunately, in the case
of Pakistan, the sheer volume of activity has left a detritus of arrested
agents, informers and dupes who have almost certainly gone through what
passes for ‘interrogation’—the roller treatment, electric shock and
thrashings. Naturally, all have talked. What they have said, even if half of
what officials say is true, points to the breathtakingly audacious scale of the
covert assault that Pakistan has launched on India. From the outset, an
element of ‘plausible deniability’ had been built into the ISI operation in
Kashmir. Initially the training camps, except the one at Illaqa-e-Gair near
Attock, were in Azad Kashmir or Afghanistan, and the money and training
were ostensibly given by the government there, using ex-service personnel
from Azad Kashmir. But overwhelmed by sheer numbers and the
compulsions on the ground, the ISI had taken over many of the camps and
run them across northern Pakistan. In view of the mounting American
pressure, the ISI decided to subcontract a lot of the effort to a slew of
militant groups owing allegiance to a number of fundamentalist sects and
organizations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamiat-e-Ahle-hadis, the Jamiat-
ul-Ulema Islam and the Tablighi Jamaat, that had been involved in similar
work during the Afghan jihad.
The failure of the State in Pakistan has meant poverty and illiteracy for
many of the young. Many of them have proved to be easy prey to one of the
several ultra-orthodox sects funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
sheikhdoms. Some were educated in madarsahs (religious schools) run by
them, and others, mesmerized by the itinerant preachers who move from
mosque to mosque, retailing their extremely orthodox brand of Wahabi
Islam and calling for jihad (holy war) against kufr (infidelity).
This is where the CIA and the ISI found their cannon fodder for the war
against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the Pakistanis now saw
them as an ideal instrument for use in Kashmir. Propaganda, through
pamphlets, video films and lectures, on the manner in which Hindus were
raping and killing the Muslims in Kashmir, brought, and indeed still brings,
many a young man across the LoC to face capture and death.
The second phase of this operation was to find Indian recruits who would
facilitate this effort. In 1991, India was not only hit by a bout of political
instability, but with an acute financial crisis. In Punjab, the writ of the state
had stopped running, at least at night and in the villages. In Assam, the
United Liberation Front proffered another threat for India’s over-stretched
security forces. Creating a base among Indian Muslims became an
important priority.
Beginning in the 1960s, communal riots sowed the seeds of fear in the
minds of Indian Muslims. According to Paul R. Brass, an American
specialist on South Asian studies, in the nearly 7000 communal incidents
between 1954 and 1982, 500 Hindus died, but nearly three times as many
Muslims were killed. The Muslims being a little over one-tenth of the
population base of the country, this figure was grossly disproportionate.
From the mid-1980s, the tempo of communal clashes corresponded with
the BJP’s electoral ascendancy. Riots in Meerut, Surat, Ahmedabad,
Hyderabad and Bhagalpur took place with sickening regularity. The terrible
winter of 1992, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, when
hundreds of people were killed in Bombay and the cities of Gujarat, has
become a watershed in dramatically exacerbating the sense of alienation of
Indian Muslims.
These horrific riots created pools of disaffected and radical youth, always
easy to exploit. Encouraging young men to participate in action allegedly in
defence of the faith, and not Pakistan, was exactly what skilled intelligence
operatives did. The Indian Muslims suffered from many of the infirmities
afflicting their Pakistani counterparts, primarily, poverty and illiteracy. Not
surprisingly, they, too, fell prey to fundamentalist preachers and sects, many
of whom had links with Pakistan. The agitation over the Babri Masjid had
radicalized opinion among many of the younger Muslims, and this provided
the ISI with the basis for its over-arching ‘grand strategy’, which was
nothing less than the break-up of India. In the 1980s, Pakistani agent
provocateurs like Mohammed Sharif, Sajjad Ahmed Raza and others fanned
out in Muslim-dominated areas, looking for people whose anger could be
suitably used. Operating out of cities with a large Muslim population, such
as Bombay, Aligarh, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, the ISI established links
with fundamentalist groups, aided by fronts such as the Students’ Islamic
Movement of India and the services of ‘talent spotters’ who could identify
potential recruits.
Nor surprisingly, links were also forged with the Bombay underworld.
While gangsters rarely acknowledged religion as a motivation, the
increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Shiv Sena pushed the substantial
Muslim elements of the underworld into becoming the protectors of their
community. This provided an additional bonus since many of them were
involved in smuggling, an activity requiring special skills in illegal border
crossing.
Waqar Ahmad, an ISI officer in charge of the Babbar Khalsa
International in Pakistan, originally put forward K-2, the idea of linking the
Kashmiri movement with that of the Khalistanis, to the Sikh extremist
outfit’s leadership, then resident in Pakistan. His argument was that by
themselves neither the Sikhs (Khalistanis) nor the Kashmiris could defeat
the Indian state. Coordinated action by the Khalistanis and Kashmiris would
generate synergy and have greater chances of success. On the face of it, the
idea was sound. Punjab and Kashmir were neighbouring states, and both
shared a border with Pakistan. Pockets of Khalistani support existed in
Jammu district though the Sikhs had not been treated too well by the
Kashmiri rebels in the valley. Besides the enemity with India, there was
little in common between the two movements. While all three, the
Pakistanis, Khalistanis and Kashmiri militants, were united in their dislike
of India, their agenda varied. Neither the Khalistanis nor the Kashmiris felt
strongly about each other’s movement; indeed, historically there was an
inbuilt animus since it was the Sikh kingdom which sold Kashmir to the
Dogras. Then, though pro-Pakistan groups were well-armed and on the
ascendant, the bulk of the people in the valley supported independence. The
Pakistanis for their part cared little for the Sikhs, and vice versa, since the
creation of Pakistan had resulted in the massacre of the Muslims of East
Punjab and Jammu, perpeterated, many Pakistanis believed, by Sikhs.
But the increasing radicalization of the Sikhs, culminating in Operation
Bluestar, and the consequent anger and alienation of the community
changed this. While the ISI was committed to backing Sikh militancy in
general, it also found in the movement people who could be used for wider
tasks. Lal Singh alias Manjit Singh and Talwinder Singh Parmar were two
such individuals. Both were on the run and wanted for questioning in
several terrorist crimes including the bombing of the Air India aircraft
Kanishka in 1985.
The former was an Indian who had worked abroad since 1978, eventually
reaching the Vancouver area of Canada, a hotbed of anti-Indian Sikh
activism. The latter was a Canadian national from the same region. Contacts
were established with them through the ISI’s Khalistani contacts in the US
and arrangements made to bring them to Pakistan. As wanted fugitives, they
were ideal material as agents.
In Pakistan, Amir-ul-Azim, officially propaganda and press secretary of
the Jamaat-e-Islami, contacted them through Sattinder Pal Singh Gill, a key
Khalistan Liberation Front member, who resided in Pakistan at various
points in time in the 1980s. Through Gill, he met Lal Singh who had arrived
in Pakistan in September 1988.
Azim, a talent spotter for the ISI, now brought Inthekab Ahmed Zia into
contact with Lal Singh. In fact, the whole friendship was cleverly crafted
with Singh believing his influence got Zia his job as an administrator at the
Sugra Siddique Hospital in Lahore. Singh was also brought into contact
with ISI operatives Khwaja Moin, who operated under the cover of an
officer with the Water and Power Development Authority in Lahore, and
Mohammed Sharif, who had run an ISI ring from Aligarh.
Lal Singh’s job was ostensibly to procure weapons from the ‘arms
bazaar’ at Darra Adam Khel against cash sent by Sikh militant supporters in
Canada and the US, and run them across the border. But he was also trained
as an ISI operative. He was taught Urdu, Islamic theology and how to recite
the namaz. He assumed a Muslim name, Aslam Gill, and was given training
in handling sophisticated high-explosives to demolish large buildings and
installations. He was being groomed to train the Indian network that Sharif
had built. The outbreak of the Kashmir rebellion led to the ISI quickly
changing tack. Now Punjab became subsidiary and Kashmir the main focus.
To this end, Pakistanis created the K-2 organization under the leadership of
Sajjad Ahmed Raza, an agent with experience of India. Others deputed for
the new task were Inthekab Ahmed Zia and Mohammed Sharif, whose job
was once again to direct operations in India so as to help the Kashmir cause.
Lal Singh entered the country along with Sharif in 1991 with a forged
passport under the name of Iqbal Alam. Amir-ul-Azim and Sajjad Ahmed
Raza came through other routes, possibly Bangladesh and Nepal. All of
them met at Aligarh in late 1991 to launch the combined or K-2 operations.
In early 1992, Parmar, a founder of the Babbar Khalsa International,
apparently entered India via Kathmandu. ‘Apparently’ because no
information is available about his movements prior to 15 October when he,
Inthekab Ahmed Zia and Ghulam Nabi Baba, alias Habibullah, died in a
shoot-out near Kang Rain village in Punjab.
 Some people believe that the three were abducted by Indian intelligence
personnel in Kathmandu in May, interrogated and then executed, after
providing India with a great deal of information not only on the modus
operandi of the ISI but also about other Sikh and Kashmiri militants. Faced
with the situation, Pakistani officials claimed in an official protest note that
Zia was a hospital administrator who was not known to the other two
persons. They said that when his family last heard from him, he had told
them that he was going to Kathmandu on 28 May 1992. However, the
Indian authorities pointed out that not only were the three applications for
visas written in Zia’s hand but that in the visa he had stated that his
profession was building construction rather than the hospital administrator
he was supposed to have been as per the Pakistani government note.
Indian intelligence sources claim that the three were on a mission for the
new K-2 outfit. Their job was to link the Hizbul Mujahideen with the Sikh
militants (and for this ‘Habibullah’ had been the key operative). In the end
they may well have been responsible for the fatal blows that Sikh militancy
received in the summer of 1992 when in quick succession it lost its main
‘generals’, Gurjant Singh Buddsinghwala of the Khalistan Liberation Force
and Sukhdev Singh Dasuwal of the Babbar Khalsa International, who were
killed in late July and early August 1992, and Lal Singh who was arrested in
mid-July. Instead of aiding Pakistan, the K-2 plan seemed to have gone
awry and resulted in the wiping out of one of the K’s—the Khalistani
movement in India.
The loss, though heavy, did not end the ISI operations. The Indian
authorities soon realized that the ISI was anywhere and everywhere, where
there was a chance of sparking off a revolt. There were even charges that
Pakistan was aiding the LTTE in the 1987–90 period.
The arrest and interrogation of Khayao Hurey, the finance minister of the
‘Sovereign Government of Nagaland’, set up by the National Socialist
Council of Nagaland, revealed the extent of this support. The ISI, Hurey
revealed, had given his outfit US $1.7 million, spread over the previous two
years in three instalments, which were used to buy weapons from the Thai
arms bazaar. Hurey’s contact was an ISI official operating under the cover
of an education counsellor in the Pakistan High Commission in Dhaka.
Writing in Frontline, M.S. Prabhakara wrote in February 1994 that the
ULFA–ISI link had come up in the late 1980s, though the first batch of ten
ULFA militants were taken to Pakistan for training in mid-1991. In all,
some seventy militants were trained, all of them going via Bangladesh.
ULFA militants told Prabhakara that the ISI wanted them to initiate actions
which they knew would harm not just Indian interests, but also those of
Assam, such as blowing up oil installations.
Shortly after Lal Singh’s arrest on 16 July 1992, the police wrapped up
his ring that consisted of a number of arms smugglers in Gujarat, a top
motivator, Tahir Jamal, and thirteen young men: four from Delhi, five from
Bombay, three from Ahmedabad and one from Modasa, also in Gujarat,
who had actually been sent to Pakistan and trained in guerrilla warfare and
sabotage. The Bombay boys had been sent on to Afghanistan for ‘advanced
training’.
These boys were told to target Indian economic sites. On 4 July, Singh
had planned to blow up the Madras Stock Exchange with the aid of Student
Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists. He had the explosives and the
equipment for triggering the blasts, but the SIMI activists failed to show up
and the plan was aborted. Another scheme was to blow up the main
buildings of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and two huge oil
refineries in the Bombay area.
Not surprisingly, eight months later in March 1993, when the Bombay
blasts occurred, one of the buildings targetted was the Bombay Stock
Exchange and another, the Air India headquarters. This time, the ISI found
the Bombay underworld a convenient and daring ally.
The arrest of Yakub Memon and the subsequent investigations have only
strengthened the suspicion of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay blasts.
Authorities now say that Yakub was given the alias of Yousuf Ahmad
Mohammed, a Pakistani national identity card (No, AJ763587) and a
Pakistani passport (AA763242). While the Pakistanis maintained that these
were forged, subsequent investigations confirm their authenticity, pointing
to Pakistani complicity. On the basis of these documents, Yakub went to the
Thai embassy in Islamabad and obtained a visa for Bangkok. He, along
with other members of his family, with similar documents, landed in
Bangkok on 17 April 1993 and stayed in the city for twelve days at a house
on the outskirts of the city. On 29 April they returned to their house in
Karachi. Singapore authorities have provided evidence of the movements of
Ibrahim Abdul Razaq ‘Tiger’ Memon, the prime accused, who remains in
hiding in Pakistan.
Confessions of others arrested in the case also bring out Pakistani
complicity. Gul Mohammed Sheikh, a Memon gang member, apparently
left India on 17 February and returned from Dubai on 3 March. The
passport was therefore marked for exit and entry for these dates in Bombay
and Dubai. But in addition to this, there were two more entry and exits from
Dubai, without corresponding entry/exit stamps for any other country.
Gul Mohammed told his police interrogators that between 20 February
and 1 March, he was in fact in north Pakistan, probably near Islamabad. He
said he and four other colleagues went to Dubai and were met by Yakub
who took them to a hotel where there were five more persons from
Bombay. The young men, accompanied by Yakub, were put on a flight to
Islamabad where they were met by a Pakistani official who escorted them
through the immigration. Another group of nine persons had preceded them
on 9 February.
They were then taken to a camp in a closed truck, where they were
trained in the use of AK-47s and grenades, improvising explosives and
emplacing them in public places such as shopping centres, bridges and car
parking areas. This training concluded in ten days and from there they
returned to Dubai, following the same procedure. The group leaders
instructed the men to destroy their passports, but several ignored this order,
leaving valuable evidence of this modus operandi.
Bomb blasts in Indian cities were not always planned with such
precision. Tufail Rashid Rajput was arrested when a bomb he was carrying
into the second-class compartment of the Bombay- Ahmedabad Janata
Express slipped from his hands and went off. He was injured, though not
too seriously and lived to tell the police his story. He came from an
extremely poor background and joined the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen (JuM) in
1993 on a salary of Rs 1000 per month. He was trained in the use of arms
and explosives for a period of one month at a training camp near Dudhnial
across the LoC in the north. In the valley, he was put in touch with a group
of terrorists and was sheltered in the house of Manzoor Mirza, a local JuM
activist. He soon began an affair with his sister. However, he was caught in
a compromising position one day and produced before Abdul Rehman, the
JuM chief. He and Mirza were both held guilty and their punishment was to
set off a blast at the Bombay Central station. They were given Rs 16,000
and they set off for Bombay and checked into the Al Mansoor hotel on 23
August. Here they fabricated an explosive device and Tufail Rashid took it
to the station to place it in the train a week later when the accident occurred.
Mohammed Sharif, one of the key operatives of the K-2 plan, was finally
arrested on 20 June 1993, a year after Lal Singh revealed his role. The
Indian authorities had issued an Interpol alert for him, but he was arrested
in India, at the Old Delhi railway station, when he was about to board the
Shaheed Express for Gorakhpur. He first claimed that his name was Pawan
Kumar Sharma and pulled out a passport and driving licence as proof.
However, he confessed later that he was Mohammed Sharif, a resident of
Hari Ke Naul village in Kasur district near Lahore, and that he worked for
the ISI with a cover job in the agricultural department of the Punjab
government. He claimed he had been blackmailed into working for the
Pakistani intelligence.
Sharif was only one of the cogs in the anti-Indian machinations of the
ISI. In December 1994, blasts took place in four long- distance trains and a
bus, killing one person and injuring over thirty. The blasts in the Andhra
Pradesh Express, the Delhi- bound Rajdhani from Howrah, the Howrah-
bound Rajdhani and the Flying Ranee Express between Bombay and Surat,
coincided with the anniversary of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. It
took the police three months to solve the case and arrest Abdul Karim, a
resident of Ahmedabad. Once again the trail led back to Pakistan. Karim
had been an agent for the ISI for some years and had ‘motivated’ youngsters
in several cities for the ‘cause’. He had been trained in bomb-making in
Pakistan, and had in fact lost half an arm in the process. In India he married
into a family in Kalupur, a locality of Ahmedabad, and from there went
about expanding his network. The authorities reached Karim after some of
the boys who participated in the December 6 blasts were arrested.
A few days later another case surfaced with the arrest of a group of
Islami Inquilabi Mahaz (IIM) activists in New Delhi. They were: Mehfooz
Ali Khan, Amjad Ali Mughal, Khalid Mehmood ‘Pehalwan’, Hafiz Taimur
Ali, all Pakistanis, and Mohammed Raeef Sheikh, a Bangladeshi, who had
been sent to further the jihad in India by Major (retd.) Ehsan-ul-Haq, the
‘military commander’ of the IIM, which is headed by Imtiaz Ahmed Shami.
The group came through Nepal and Bangladesh between November 1993
and February 1994, and established contact with Chand Mian aka Amjad
Ali Mughal, a resident of Lahore and an ISI agent of some standing. He was
associated with the Harkat-ul-Ansar and stayed at the Fatehpur Mosque in
Delhi. Their task was to merge with the population and build up sabotage
networks. All of them were well versed in the use of explosives and the
techniques of fabricating them with easily available material. Indeed, the
instruction manuals they were carrying were in two sets of computer floppy
disks. The backgrounds of all of those arrested were ordinary. Hafiz Taimur
Ali had studied till Class V and had then dropped out. In September 1992,
he attended a Tablighi Jamaat congregation and was influenced enough by
the speech of Mohammed Imtiaz Shami, the Amir of the IIM, to join his
outfit. He was sent for a two and a half month course in arms training to
Khost and was part of the abortive attack on the J & K LI battalion
headquarters in Balnoi area of Poonch in February 1993.
He did manage to get away and go for another round of training in
Afghanistan and made another effort to infiltrate through the Gilgit area, but
fell ill at the last minute. After that, he entered India via Nepal in January
1994.
Khalid Mehmood, Mehfooz Ali Khan and Amjad Ali Mughal, too, came
from humble backgrounds. Mehfooz worked as a tailor and Amjad Ali came
from a blacksmith’s family while Khalid who had studied till Class V had
gone straight for the jihad, influenced by Jalauddin Haqqani, the famous
Afghan mujahideen. He was well-trained, haying done a seven-month
course in Khost, and had participated in the Balnoi attack as well.
A third claw of this ‘Break India’ strategy was, to use Kashmiri militants
themselves for larger operations across India. Meharban Sati, a resident of a
village near Rawalpindi, was persuaded by a Pakistani intelligence officer
to join the jihad in Kashmir. He joined the Islami Jang and was trained at
the Moosa camp in Azad Kashmir. He entered the valley in March 1991 and
was quickly enticed to join the Hizbul Mujahideen. But he was not in the
valley for long. He was asked to go on to Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh
and establish contact with a local militant outfit called the Al Jehad, being
run by a Kashmiri Muslim, Mohammed Iqbal Anchloo. The aim was to
motivate local Muslim boys to participate in the Kashmir jihad. He took
two Al Jehad recruits to Anantnag and introduced them to the Hizb
commanders. Here they were trained alongside their cadre and then given
thirty-nine pistols, ammunition and 250 grenades for terrorist actions in
Uttar Pradesh.
But the lead outfit in the larger war against India was the Kashmiri group,
the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen. In April 1992, Hilal Baig contacted his number
two in the valley, Yasin Bhat, on the phone and asked him to arrange for the
departure of Tanvir Ahmed Bhat and Shakeel Ahmad to Kathmandu. Yasin
Bhat arranged for their travel with fellow carpet salesman Istiaq Hussain
Mir. In Kathmandu, this group picked up three more persons, came back to
Delhi, and took up a house in the Bhogal Nagar area, apparently with a plan
for kidnapping relatives of top officials, or carrying out bomb blasts.
One of the persons they had picked up from Kathmandu was Feroze
Ahmed Dar, who had been working at a handicrafts shop there. Dar was one
of the young men who had crossed the border in April 1990 and who owed
allegiance to the Hizb. All of them were arrested in Delhi before they were
able to set off any blasts, or kidnap anyone.
The strategy behind the Ikhwan’s activities was simple. As Tahir Mir, one
of its leaders, said in a message from jail, reported in an Urdu daily from
Srinagar in early October 1993: Neither Pakistan nor the Kashmiris have
the resources to fight India. The way out is to expand the areas of operation
to Indian cities and bring destruction to the Indian economy. As long as the
Kashmiri mujahideen confined their activities to the valley, India would not
be affected.
The fourth claw of the Pakistani strategy was to subvert the loyalty of
Indian Muslims and persuade them to take up arms against the state in the
name of Islam. Elements of this effort can be seen in an Ikhwan operation
in Hyderabad. In November 1993, another Ikhwan–ISI plot was revealed in
Hyderabad. Gowher Amin Mir, an Ikhwan member, had been studying at
the Nizamia Tibbi College to spot and recruit agents. He ‘motivated’ Liaqat
Khan, a local Muslim, who was thereafter smuggled into Bangladesh by
Nisar Ahmed Bhat, another Kashmiri belonging to the Ikhwan. Bhat ran the
Mushtaq Fruit Company, exporting fruit to Bangladesh, and he smuggled
Liaqat Khan in one of the trucks going across the border sometime in
March 1993.
In Bangladesh, Liaqat Khan met a contact who gave him an air ticket to
Islamabad, where he was met by a person who took him to the Ikhwan
office. The next day, he began his training in using AK-47s and explosives.
On his return as a full-fledged agent, his job was to recruit others. He sent
three ‘boys’ across and another two were set to go when he was arrested
along with Bhat and Amin on 30 October 1993. But the key operative in all
this was Bhat who posed as a Kashmiri handicrafts dealer. Besides
‘running’ Mir and Liaqat, he had other contacts and had managed to send
sixteen Muslim youths for training to Pakistan, of whom four were from
Bihar, seven from Kashmir and five from other parts of India.
The call of the pan-Islamist ideology, such as the one espoused by the
Ikhwan or the Harkat-ul-Ansar, was a powerful one and influenced many
non-Kashmiris to take up the call of jihad. In April 1993, the BSF
apprehended a young Bihari Muslim in the valley, Shahid Ansari of
Railway Colony, Gaya, who was sent from Bihar to Kashmir, trained there
locally and asked to take up the battle back home. Zahid Ali Khan was
motivated enough to cross the LoC to Pakistan, where he was picked up by
the ISI and trained at a camp near Kotli in Azad Kashmir and sent back to
India with a mission of sabotage, which included planting bombs in places
like railway stations and public monuments. Jamil Ahmed Khan of
Bhusaval, Maharashtra, came into the jihad through the SIMI and was sent
to Pulwama in Kashmir where he was trained by Al Jehad activists with the
goal of being sent back to his home state to participate in sabotage and
cause bomb blasts. He was arrested in Kashmir in May 1994.
Nisar Bhat had also played a role in another drama. In early October he
had received from Pakistan through one of his agents, a Bihari Muslim, Lal
Mohammed, a video cassette, an audio cassette and some photographs.
They showed Mushtaq ‘Tiger’ Memon, the main accused in the Bombay
blasts case, in conversation with Sajjad Ahmed Kenoo, the number two man
in the outfit, with several armed men around them. They purported to show
that Tiger Memon had taken shelter in Kashmir from the oppression of the
‘Hindu’ government of India, and was not in Pakistan, as claimed by the
Indian authorities.
In the tape played to correspondents on 15 October 1994, Kenoo said in
his opening remarks that the Ikhwan had established its units in different
states for forging unity among Muslims to resist the ‘fascist forces’. As part
of this process, he declared, Tiger Memon was going to join the Ikhwan.
They spoke a bit too early, for by the end of the month, the police, acting on
a tip- off from an informer, had wrapped up most of the network, except for
Tiger Memon, who had been in a ‘safe house’ in Pakistan. But this was not
the end of the effort.
After scores of blasts in 1993–94 in the Jammu area, the ISI shifted its
attention to acts of terrorism in Delhi and its environs. The ISI used a two-
pronged strategy—use of Kashmiri militants and separately, ISI agents in
tandem with Pakistani volunteers, mainly religious zealots.
By mid-1995 it became clear that the Ikhwan was in trouble since the
authorities had managed to successfully use Jamshed Shirazi aka Kukka
Parray to set up a pro-India splinter outfit. With Hilal Baig in eclipse, the
Pakistanis ‘contracted’ Bilal Ahmed Baig, son of Mohammed Yusuf Baig
and a resident of Natipora, for the job. Bilal and Sajjad Ahmed Kenoo
created the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front (JKIF), a tight group of
militants whose job was to carry out terrorist acts in and around Delhi.
Baig’s sister Farida Dar, a widow, was the main courier for the outfit.
Kenoo, Khurshid Baig, Farooq Ahmed Khan and Farida Dar had organized
the worst-ever blasts in New Delhi’s Connaught Place in November 1995
and Old Delhi’s Sadar Bazar on 3 January 1996, killing nine persons and
injuring thirty-three. Five days later, the Jammu and Kashmir police’s
Special Operation Group managed to locate Kenoo and kill him, reportedly
in Farida Dar’s house. But they remained unaware of Dar’s active role in
the outfit.
Now, Dar and Farooq Khan, with the ISI, plotted revenge. They set up a
Lashkar-e-Sajjad in Kenoo’s memory and, on 21 May, carried out the
bloodiest strike till now, the car bomb blast at Delhi’s Central Market in
Lajpat Nagar that killed thirty-five people and injured scores. The following
day, a blast ripped apart a bus travelling to Bikaner from Agra, near Dausa
village, killing fourteen people and injuring thirty. On 25 May, the police in
Srinagar arrested Farida Dar and Farooq Ahmed Khan for the blasts.
A similar operation was foiled in early 1997 when the police caught a
Bombay gangster, Ajaz Mohammed Rafiq, and Maqsoor Ali in a south
Delhi house with ten kg of RDX and other bomb- making equipment. Ajaz
was asked to proceed to Dubai and then was clandestinely transported to
Pakistan where he was trained in the art of making bombs. From Dubai he
went to Bangkok and landed in Delhi on 8 January. He met Javed, Maqsoor
and Tanzeem, and together they purchased an old Ambassador car to
fabricate a car bomb. The police, already in a state of heightened alertness
because of the coming Republic Day anniversary, were aided by an
intelligence tip-off, leading to the arrest.
Yet another operation, beginning in 1997, was master- minded by Abdul
Hakim, also known as Tunda (because he has several fingers missing in one
hand, the result of a premature bomb blast). Tunda, a sixty-year old resident
of Pilkhua, near Ghaziabad, was a criminal wanted for a dacoity in the
Delhi suburb of Mehrauli in the 1960s and came to the notice of the ISI
through the Jamiat-e-Ahle-Hadis, a sect espousing a brand of Islam that
looks down on all interpretations and relies on the Koran and Hadith. Tunda
had caught the attention of the intelligence agencies earlier, but had escaped
arrest in 1995.
He was provided the services of Mohammed Kamran, a resident of the
walled city in Delhi, who had gone to Pakistan in 1990 to work in his
brother-in-law’s medicine shop in Karachi. Kamran, too, was influenced by
preachers into joining the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He had done the Daura-e-Am
and the Daura-e- Khas, two specialised courses, at the outfit’s camp in the
Kunnar province of Afghanistan. He was then taken to Muridke and from
there to a training set-up near Muzaffarabad where Tunda taught Kamran
how to improvise explosives from common chemicals. Potassium chlorate
and sugar combined with acid constituted ‘Imam Sahib’. Potassium chlorate
and nitrobenzene combined made an explosive known as ‘Badam Rogan’.
Aluminium powder and potassium permanganate made ‘Changez Khan’.
Detonation was effected by batteries and an alarm clock as a timer, or more
simply, using a tube filled with acid and covered with a rubber cap. When
required, the device was inverted, the acid bit through the rubber and
ignited the mixture. Floppies with information on how to make bombs, both
crude and sophisticated, were provided to him.
In June 1996, Kamran, by now Tunda’s most trusted aide, flew to Dhaka
from Lahore, and with the help of Tunda’s Ahle Hadis contacts came across
the border into India. He met his accomplices in small mosques close to the
Jama Masjid and they set up base at Pilkhua. By late 1996, Kamran had
joined his mother at Teliwara, a Delhi locality, and told his acquaintances
that he was into the dye business.
Kamran, Tunda and several accomplices, both Indian Muslims and
Pakistanis, established themselves in Delhi and its environs and beginning 4
January 1997 launched a campaign of bomb blasts in the area. The
campaign peaked during the festival season in the month of October when
five blasts took place. The last blast occurred on 8 January 1998, when a
man posing as an orange seller set his cart within a stone’s throw of the
Delhi police headquarters and quietly vanished after making a few sales.
Underneath his cart was a device set to explode. When it did, fifty-three
persons were hurt. Two of the more seriously injured died later. The
seeming simplicity of the devices and their relatively low power did not
take a very heavy toll, but the goal of the exercise was to promote
uncertainty and fear.
On 28 February the Delhi police managed to locate and arrest Kamran
for the blasts and later in the next week, Abu al Husnain, a resident of
Jindraka in Punjab’s Okara district in Pakistan. He was responsible for
seven bomb blasts in and around Delhi in 1997. Badruddin alias Abu
Haider, Maqsood Ahmed alias Fadillah and Abdullah alias Sulaiman, (all
Pakistani nationals who had come into India via Bangladesh) were also
arrested. But Tunda got away.

Mehmaan Mujahideen
The mehmaan mujahideen were the ISI’s trump card and in some ways the
last one. From 1991, Azad Kashmir residents, Pakistani nationals, as well as
a sprinkling of nationals from other countries began making their
appearance in the valley. Most of them were linked to three main outfits, the
Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamiat-ul- Ulema-Islam (JUUI-Fazlur Rehman) and
the Jamiat-e-Ahl-e-Hadis. The JUUI sponsored the Harkat-ul-Ansar, the
Jamaat-e-Ahle- Hadis inspired the Markaz-Dawa-ul-Irshad and the Jamaat-
e- Islami backed the Hizbul Mujahideen, In the early 1990s, the Jamaat-e-
Islami was the key outfit channelling support to the Kashmir rebels, in
particular the tanzeem of its fraternal outfit, the Hizbul Mujahideen. It had
crucial links with the ISI and from late-1990 it was part of the Nawaz Sharif
government.
Maulana Fateh Mohammed, amir of the Punjab branch of the outfit,
made it clear in January 1990 when even the nature of the rebellion was not
clear that as far as the Jamaat was concerned, Pakistan had to fight a jihad
in Kashmir. It was at this time that Afghan mujahideen chief Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar also committed himself to support the Kashmiri struggle. He,
too, saw the fight there as one between Muslims and Hindu domination.
Speaking at a rally in Peshawar in late February 1990, Hekmatyar warned
that Indian rulers needed to heed the lesson from the Soviet defeat in
Afghanistan.
In 1990–1991, the Hizb-e-Islami faction, owing allegiance to Hekmatyar,
provided considerable support, mainly to the Hizbul Mujahideen. With the
defeat of the Najibullah regime, Hekmatyar was able to spare a number of
his own fighters to go for the Kashmir jihad.
The Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen were linked
to the Jamiat-ul-ulema, the Pakistan Tablighi Jamaat and the Yunus Khalis
faction of the Hizb-e-Islami of Afghanistan. The JUUI was allied to Benazir
Bhutto and its chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman was chairman of Pakistan’s-
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The outfit runs a chain of madarsahs
that provide cadres for various terrorist groups. The Tablighi Jamaat is a
one-million strong organization, the largest such body, whose original aim
was to inculcate the tenets of Islam in the masses and stay away from
politics. But it was radicalized by the Afghan war and became a votary of
militant reform. Some of these outfits had originally come up as relief
agencies in Pakistan to look after the Afghan refugees. Later, they got
involved in recruiting people for the Afghan jihad. In the late 1980s, when
large areas of Afghanistan came under Mujahideen control, they also set up
training camps within Afghanistan. The US, which had backed the Afghan
jihad with nearly $1 billion per annum, and the various oil-rich sheikhdoms
funded this effort.
The Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami, founded by Maulana Irshad Ahmed, a
resident of Faisalabad, had come up as a relief organization for the Afghan
mujahideen, using the liberal funds donated by Punjabi businessmen. Later,
it developed links with the Yunus Khalis faction of the Hizb-e-Islami and
the Jamiat-e- Islami of Maulana Arsalan Khan Rehmani and commander
Nasrullah Mansoor Langaryal.
After Maulana Irshad Ahmed died in the jihad, Qazi Saifullah Akhtar of
Chistian, Pakistan Punjab, became its amir. In 1985, its commander-in-
chief, Maulvi Fazl-ur-Rehman Khalil, developed differences with Qazi
Saifullah and formed a splinter outfit, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The
splinter outfit aligned itself to the Yunus Khalis and Jalaluddin Haqqani
faction of the Hizb-e- Islami. Both groups had been active in the Afghan
jihad as well as in the education, motivation and recruitment of mujahids in
Pakistan.
When Maulvi Shadatullah Khan became the amir of the Harkat-Jehad-e-
Islami in 1991, the Karachi Deobandi Ulemas felt that the time had come
for a strengthening of the organization by persuading all the splinter groups
to merge so that their finances and personnel could be more effectively used
for the Kashmir jihad.
The Harkat’s training camps, the Al Badr I and II, are at Yawar in the
Khost province of Afghanistan, though they have access to specialized ISI
camps at the Illaqa-e-Gair and Forward Kahuta. Cadres go through the
Tehsisiya or one-month basic course on the use of arms and then the
Jindullah, an intensive three-month course on the use of heavy weapons and
specialized explosives.
The merger was finally achieved in October 1993 and a new organization
created, the Harkat-ul-Ansar. Afghan mujahideen leader Haqqani was
designated its patron, Maulvi Shadatullah Khan designated amir, Maulana
Masood Azhar, general secretary, and in a sense, chief executive, and Fazl-
ur-Rehman Khalil as its commander-in-chief, based in Islamabad, and
Maulana Farooq Kashmiri, a resident of Rawalkot in Azad Kashmir, was
designated the chief for Jammu and Kashmir. The Harkat’s links to the
JUUI and the Tablighi Jamaat mark it out as a part of the extremist elements
of the Deobandi school in Pakistan. Its world view is pan-Islamic and its
leaders enjoin cadres to fight the jihad anywhere in the world.
Around the same time, the ISI was propelling another pan- Islamic group
towards Kashmir: the Markaz-dawa-ul-Irshad (Centre for the Propagation
of the Right Teachings) or Markaz was founded in 1987 by three university
teachers, Hafiz Mohammed Khan ‘Sayeed’ and Zafar Iqbal of the
University of Engineering Technology in Lahore and Abdullah Azam of the
International Islamic University. Azam was killed in a bomb blast in 1989
and the other two have since continued to teach as well as carry out their
politico-religious activities whose main target is India. The major influence
behind the organization is the Jamiat Ahle Hadis.
 The organization has been headquartered at Muridke, a town forty-five
kilometres north of Lahore, and its main goal, according to its founders, is
to spread their brand of faith through education and jihad, or holy war. To
achieve this goal it created a military wing, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of
the Pure), and not surprisingly, the first target of this group was Kashmir.
The Jamiat-e-Ahle-Hadith believes that subcontinental Islam has come
under ‘Hindu’ influences and it must be purified. As its Amir-e- Alla or
supreme leader, Hafiz Mohammed Khan declared during the Markaz’s
annual meeting at its Muridke headquarters in 1993, ‘Kashmir is merely a
gateway through which the organization would enter India to fulfil its goal.’
Today, according to an article by Zaigham Khan in the Herald of
Pakistan in January 1998, the Markaz is among the more vibrant pan-
Islamic organizations, with money pouring in from Pakistani businessmen
as well as Arab patrons. Unlike the Harkat which acquired a number of
Kashmiri recruits, the Lashkar jihadis are mainly Pakistanis. It is also far
more successful in raising recruits through its combination of preaching,
education and military training. The Lashkar military camp in the Kunar
province of Afghanistan has two courses—the twenty-one day Daura-e-
Aam or routine training and the Daura-e-Khas or special training. Once a
man enters the Lashkar-e-Taiba, he begins using a kuniat or an Arabized
nickname such as ‘Abu Shahid’ or ‘Abu Zubair’ and so on. He stops
trimming his beard and allows his hair to grow long. He adopts another
hallmark of the Ahl-e-Hadith sect—shalwar (traditional trousers) are
hitched above the ankle.
The Markaz’s annual meetings in Muridke are a major event and the one
in December 1997 was no different. It drew top political leaders like Qazi
Hussain Ahmed of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Sardar Abdul Qayoom and
Nasrullah Khan of the People’s Party of Pakistan. Retired Lt Gen. Hamid
Gul, who as ISI chief was instrumental in pointing the Lashkar towards
Kashmir was ill, but he sent a message of felicitation. In the course of the
meetings, besides exhortations by Qari Abdul Wahid and others, there were
dramatic agit-prop performances such as an address, allegedly through a
wireless hook-up with Abu Muslim Zarrar in the valley, who spoke of how
the ‘Hindu Army’ was committing atrocities in Kashmir and how ‘sisters
are being stripped naked in front of brothers’. A similar performance had
one ‘Abdullah’ come before the audience to tell them that he was a Hindu
from Kashmir who had received the calling and slaughtered five members
of his own family and converted to Islam. ‘I was a Hindu and took the path
of Islam,’ he declared. ‘What keeps you away?’ he asked the mesmerized
audience. This is the message Markaz Amir Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed has
delivered for years. Last December, too, he repeated it in his sermons at the
close of the session.
‘The solution to all problems lies in jihad,’ he told the Herald
correspondent Zaigham Khan. ‘Hindus’ of India were the main targets of
the jihad. ‘Hindus are what the Quran terms as mushriks (polytheists). This
is the worst form of shirk (polytheism), in which thirty million gods are
worshipped. And from here, shirk has been smuggled to other nations of the
world.’ To fight this jihad, Sayeed declared, he did not hesitate to take aid
from state agencies like the Pakistani ISI. ‘I feel we should get help from
wherever we can, from our government or any other government which can
help us against India.’
The Markaz amir declared:

Pakistan provided the ‘ideal place for us to work in. We enjoy freedom to
carry out our work and our educational institutions are also located here. We
will produce our workforce here. We will prepare mujahideen, preachers
and an alternative leadership and through jihad God will give this work
success and countries [like India] will break’.

Indian Muslims became the target of ISI efforts, especially after the Babri
Masjid’s demolition and the riots that took a high toll of Muslim lives,
especially in Bombay. The Bombay blasts of March 1993 may have been
the handiwork of the city’s underworld led by Dawood Ibrahim and
Mushtaq ‘Tiger’ Memon, but the ISI played a key role in facilitating them.
Muslims across the country were affected. Fundamentalist and pan-
Islamic propaganda helped create a larger pool of disaffection across the
country. Pan-Islamic groups like the Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Markaz
Dawa-ul-Irshad see their task as recruiting Indian Muslim volunteers for
their covert war against India.
The Afghan war saw the arrival in Pakistan of thousands of poor Arabs
and Bangladeshis, sent in through concessional flights on Saudia, the Saudi
Arabian national carrier. They came through the kafil or sponsor system, to
take the place of some rich Arab, disinclined personally to fight the jihad.
The winding down of the war left some 20,000 of them hanging around the
frontier and Peshawar. Some of these signed for the jihad in Kashmir.
Not surprisingly, while India condemned these foreigners as
‘mercenaries’, the insurgents saw them differently. The pro- independence
elements saw the Pakistani activists as comrades-in- arms since they
championed the concept of one Kashmir. On the other hand, the pan-Islamic
elements urged that faith knew no boundaries and that any true believer
could come to the aid of co- religionists across the world. Given that the
original inspiration for the jihad was the war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan, many of the mehmaan mujahideen, although Pakistanis,
passed off as Afghans. This served the dual purpose of maintaining the
fiction of Pakistan’s non-involvement as well as removing the mystique
surrounding the Afghans’ fighting prowess.
Officials believe that the idea of getting the help of foreign mujahideen
was raised as far back as 1988 when Muzaffar Ahmed Shah of Bandipur in
Baramula district and the chief military adviser of the pro-Pakistani Tehrik-
e-Jehad Islami, a precursor of the Hizbul Mujahideen, met Abdul Rashid
Turabi and Masood Sarfraz, leaders of the Azad Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami.
As a result of this meeting, some militants did come to Kashmir to survey
the area. However, at the time Pakistani commitments were to the endgame
in Afghanistan, and its own timetable on Kashmir was for an uprising
beginning in 1991.
A few guest militants began making their appearance in 1990. They were
in the main bodyguards and used for training the locals. Some were used to
strengthen the secessionist offensive. Sheikh Jamaluddin, a veteran of the
Afghan jihad, was working as a labourer in the Iliaqa-e-Gair camp before
he was persuaded by the Al-Umar Mujahideen to cross the border and
become one of their ‘soldiers’. He came in as a mercenary; in succession he
served the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen and finally the
Al Barq till his arrest in Fatehpora, a suburb between Srinagar and
Ganderbal in December 1992.
Given the speed with which the rebellion grew, the ISI realized that it
needed to spread insurgency across the valley, as well as consolidate it
behind an organization that in the name of Islam was Pakistanpasand. The
organization, the Hizbul Mujahideen had been set up, but it needed to put
on muscle rapidly. The mehmaan mujahideen were ideal for this, since most
of them were already primed to fight the jihad, and the ISI acquired not just
an ideologically committed cadre, but militarily seasoned ones as well.
After the fall of the Najibullah government, the Afghans were able to
spare their cadre. And so in 1992, a group of Afghans, sent in by
Hekmatyar, successfully established itself in Sopur and the surrounding
areas as members of the Hizbul Mujahideen. The leader of this group was
Mohammed Akbar Qureshi aka Akbar Baqi and Akbar Bhai of Jalalabad, a
relative of Hekmatyar. Others included Abu Bakr aka Badr Bhai, a former
bodyguard, Ibne Masood, an engineer from Sudan, Aqil Abdul Rehman, a
rich Bahraini, and five Saudis.
In 1992, the number of Afghans was quite small. Indeed, responding to a
question in parliament on 3 March 1993, Rajesh Pilot informed an MP that
some six Afghan nationals had been killed on the LoC and the valley in the
previous year. While noting that no precise estimates of the Afghans in the
valley were available, he said the ‘number of such persons is not estimated
to be large’. Intelligence estimates are that there were probably more than
200 personnel across the valley. Most outsiders were Pakistanis posing as
Afghans.
One of the consequences of the American pressure in 1992– 93 was to
privatize the whole recruitment and training process of the mujahideen. The
ISI left it to various fanatical religious groups (instead of recruiting
officers), who would do a better job through their mix of religious
propaganda and monetary inducement. With some exceptions, the camps,
too, were privatized and run in areas of Afghanistan where there was no
state authority or which were under the control of factions loyal to Pakistan.
The ISI was able to maintain the fiction of ‘plausible deniability’ since its
task now was to channel the money to these organizations. But there was
one important aspect which the ISI controlled: this was the ‘launch
commands’. All weapons going into India were provided by the ISI at the
last point on the border and all persons going in or coming out were vetted
by it.
There are two kinds of foreign mercenaries. One category consists of
poor and semi-literate people who often see their participation as a way of
earning some money even while doing Allah’s work by fighting the jihad.
The second type includes educated ordinary men, living in an ethos where it
is easy to persuade them to take up the gun against the infidel Hindus of
Bharat, who are committing atrocities against the Muslims in Kashmir.
Imtiaz Ahmed Butt, a resident of Satellite Town near Rawalpindi, was a
student of architecture as well as an Islami Jamiat-e-Tulba activist. He was
recruited for the Hizb and given a regular nine-month training with the
Pakistan Army and then discharged. In September 1991, he was infiltrated
into the valley through the Tikpora area in the Lolab valley into Kupwara.
Given his background, the Hizb used him for training their militants rather
than for combat. When Butt was arrested in January 1993, he told his
interrogators that at that time, there were about fifty mehmaan mujahideen
with the Hizbul Mujahideen.
Nadeem Abassi, though born of a poor family, finished his matriculation
and came under the influence of the Jamiat-e-Tulba in 1993. He was first
encouraged to join a religious instruction camp and sent to the Al Badr
camp as well. Later, he took advanced training at the Hizbul Mujahideen
camp in the Sarsawa jungles, an hour’s drive from Kotli on the Rawalpindi
road. He was sent into Kashmir from the Mendhar sector.
While both Butt and Abassi had a modern education, many foreign
mercenaries had never stepped out of the fundamentalist ambience. Sultan
Ahmed Mayana, of village Abdul Hakim in Tehsil Kabirwala of the North
West Frontier Province in Pakistan, was born of a lower middle-class
family, deeply religious and orthodox. He studied in the Madarsah
Mehmood-ul-Uloom and his house was frequented by Afghan Mujahideen,
so it was not surprising that he let himself be talked into participating in the
Kashmir jihad by the local chief of the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami.
Other stories are no different. Nasir Ikram of Mastaloo, Gujjar Khan,
Rawalpindi, was a matriculate, son of a floor supervisor in one of the units
of the Pakistan ordnance factories. After school, he did four years of
‘Taleem-ul-Quran’ to learn the teachings of the Quran. Bombarded with
stories in the press about the Indian atrocities, he decided to undertake the
jihad and signed up with the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
The Jamaat boasted that it was not just their cadre that was going in, but
the sons of their top leaders such as Zaman Butt, Ehsanullah Butt and Dr
Mubashir Siddiqui, and the nephew of Col. (retd.) Rashid Abbasi, Aijaz
Ahmed Abbasi, who was killed on 18 September 1994 in the Rambagh
locality of Srinagar. According to one estimate, by the end of 1994, some
120 Pakistani nationals were ‘martyred’ in the jihad in Kashmir.
While for many the journey to Kashmir was the call of jihad, Mohammed
Fahid Al-Haj, a Palestinian settled in Lebanon, came by chance. He was a
soldier of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and in 1979,
he fell in love with a German girl and deserted his outfit to live in Germany
with her. The two had a daughter and travelled to various countries. In
1986, without valid papers, he managed to get into Goa. The German girl
and their daughter returned to Germany and Al-Haj went to Delhi and got
himself registered as a refugee at the UN office. In 1988, he was arrested in
Goa and served a four-month sentence for being without valid documents.
After being released, he travelled to the Kashmir valley where he came into
contact with, and later joined, the JKLF. The militants were only too happy
to have an experienced person in their midst. Al-Haj was approached by
Ahsan Dar and he switched loyalties to the Hizbul Mujahideen in August
1991. For a while he served as Dar’s bodyguard and later was given charge
of a camp in the higher reaches of the Pir Panjal range in Pulwama district
to train Hizb activists. By the time of his arrest in September 1993, he had
trained some 500 Hizb activists.
 From the outset, the ISI had toyed with the idea of sending in
independent lashkars, or large parties of guerrillas who would be well-
trained and armed, and live off the land and give more effective combat to
the Indian Army. This was the concept that had first been used in 1965
though it failed because the valley’s Kashmiris refused to revolt.
A lashkar of some forty personnel, led by Sajjad Khan alias Sajjad
Afghani, infiltrated into the valley in June 1990. Sajjad was not an Afghan
but a resident of Rawalkot, across the LoC from Poonch. Between 1986 and
1989, as an activist of the Hizbul Mujahideen, he fought in Afghanistan,
which earned him a nom de guerre. At the outbreak of the rebellion,
Afghani was asked to return to Muzaffarabad to train the Kashmiri youth
coming across. In June 1990, with a view to building a counter- weight to
the JKLF and the pro-independence activists, Afghani was asked to take a
lashkar across the LoC and establish himself in the hills of Dara Harwan
near Srinagar. However, they found the going difficult. They were tolerated
by the locals in that they were not betrayed to the authorities but as in 1965,
they did not get any support either. Members just dropped off, though
Sajjad kept going for another year without being able to establish the group
as a combat unit. Finally, in February 1992, he was recalled, crossing back
to Pakistan across the international border in Punjab with the help of agents.
What the Pakistanis needed were tougher people and soon they were
available. With the winding down of the Afghan war and the overthrow of
Najibullah in 1992, the ISI had more ambitious plans on hand.
Speaking in Karachi at the end of 1993, Maulana Arsalan Khan Rehmani,
the deputy prime minister of Afghanistan and leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami,
declared that activists of the newly formed Harkat-ul-Ansar were active in
the jihads in Kashmir, Tajikstan and Bosnia. He claimed that the Harkat’s
Indian contingent alone was 8000 strong.
According to Indian intelligence, at a meeting at Teheran in mid-1993,
the People’s Conference chief Abdul Ghani Lone met the Markaz Amir
Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, and an ISI representative worked out an
arrangement by which the Markaz would provide seasoned fighters to
bolster the Al Barq. For this, the group would be paid a sum of Rs 6 lakh
per month for the upkeep of the foreign mercenaries. The plan was to
achieve a strength of 300 mehmaan mujahideen by 1994.
By October 1993, there were 150 such mercenaries under the nominal
command of the Al Barq, but operating as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and with
their own amir, Shamsul Rehman of Afghanistan. Members served for six
months to a year and then returned to Azad Kashmir. For security purposes,
they remained aloof from the Kashmiri Al Barq, maintaining contact
through special intermediaries whenever they needed shelter, weapons and
ammunition.
The entry of the mehmaan mujahideen made a dramatic difference in the
quality of the battle being fought between the security forces and the
insurgents. The Afghans and the mercenaries were good fighters and more
often than not, sought out the security forces for combat, even as the latter
came looking for them. Their induction certainly exacted a higher price
from the Indian security forces.
One of their first recorded actions was the ambush of an Army convoy on
National Highway IA at Qazigund in Anantnag district, leading to the death
of a major and a soldier. On 7 March, an Army patrol in the northern
Kupwara district was ambushed, resulting in two Army personnel being
killed and two injured.
Activity was stepped up in June as the snows melted and the mehmaan
mujahideen started coming in substantial numbers. On 5 June, a group of
them was responsible for killing a 19th Division colonel (GS) at Batrigam
in Baramula and injuring Maj. Gen. Inder Verma. On the 23rd, a deadly
ambush in Tosh Maidan in the same district resulted in the death of two
Army personnel and the loss of their weapons and a wireless set. Three days
later, a BSF party was ambushed in Dayalgam, resulting in the loss of two
BSF personnel. On 27 June, militants belonging to the Al Barq conducted
an ambush in Kupwara district, killing an Army captain. This was the
pattern of action for the rest of the year. However, the action was not
entirely one way.
On 5 July 1993, the Al Barq ambushed a patrol near Malangam, seven
kilometres from Bandipur, on the northern rim of the Wullar Lake. But the
Army lashed back, leading to heavy losses for the militants. Eleven of them
died in the incident, which also took the lives of two Army personnel.
Three months later, the Army returned in strength, looking for the
militants. In Operation Alpine Noose, an entire brigade was deployed to
seek out the mujahideen in the area. The concept was the standard ‘hammer
and anvil’ one, in which two battalions were deployed in the high mountain
ranges in an arc in the 13,000–16,000 ft. heights to the north-east of the
Wullar lake, while a third battalion was the hammer working down the
areas of Koel and Malangam. The operation began at 8.45 in the morning
when scouts spotted a large lashkar of sixty militants. Combat began and
lasted through the day with thirty-five of the militants melting away,
leaving behind twenty-four dead, including nine Afghans and three
Pakistanis.
Of the 150 Al Barq militants, as many as forty-seven were killed in the
Army’s winter offensive in 1993 and the rest returned home. Small batches
of militants came in early 1994, but even some of these got killed. In 1994,
the operational strength of the Al Barq Afghans was down to eighteen. The
Afghans and the mercenaries were clearly not enamoured of this lethal
situation. Brought up to believe that they would make short work of the
‘Hindu’ security forces, they found that the going was not easy. Not only
were the Kashmiris of little help in combat situations, they were prone to
betraying them.
The attrition forced on the local militant groups compelled the ISI to
boost the number of foreign mercenaries in Kashmir even further. But even
as scores of the disgruntled returned, more were sent in. Some were from
Azad Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan while others were committed
fanatics who believed that their religious duty lay in the struggle—physical
and ideological—to spread Islam across the world.
The cunning and tenacity of the new entrants in battle had a bracing
impact on the Army. Through 1994, action between the Army and the
mehmaan mujahideen continued across the core districts of the valley—
Baramula, Badgam, Pulwama and Anantnag. On the part of the
mercenaries, the chosen technique was the ambush while the Army and
BSF relied on cordon-and-search operations as well as more precise strikes
on the basis of intelligence which was now flowing in with regularity.
The price of failure was high. On 9 January, a Hizb group consisting
mainly of Afghans and Pakistanis overcame a territorial Army section-level
post guarding the airbase at Avantipur. They shot all ten men in cold-blood.
Of these, only one survived.
Later that month, on 22 January, tipped-off by their G- Branch, the
deputy commandant of the 97th Bn of the BSF surrounded a house in Lar, a
suburb of Srinagar, where Afghan mehmaan mujahideen of the Al Barq
were said to be sheltered. When the mercenaries were challenged, they fired
back. The BSF officer who attempted to storm the house was killed in a hail
of bullets from a high velocity Pika machine-gun. In the fierce combat that
ensued, two more BSF personnel were killed and an assistant commandant
was captured by the militants. Realizing that they had little chance to get
the mercenaries to surrender, the BSF called the Army for fire support. An
Army unit arrived and used its rocket launchers to destroy the house and
kill three militants, of whom two were Afghans.
And so it went on through the year. The mehmaan mujahideen took on
the Indian Army in a series of tough encounters. The Indian armed forces
developed a high regard for the combat capabilities of the Afghans, as
undoubtedly did the latter for them, notwithstanding their propaganda. But
in the battle of attrition, there could only be one winner. Fighting the
conscript Soviets in Afghanistan was one thing; taking on the highly
motivated and trained Indian Army was quite another.
The Indian Army used its numbers to dominate the Kashmiri countryside
and in carrying out cordon-and-search operations. Though BMP infantry
combat vehicles and Mi-35 combat helicopters were used as artillery on
occasion on the LoC and in firefights with the mehmaan mujahideen, the
Indian Army was very careful not to make them a primary vehicle for their
combat operations. This denied the militants a propaganda victory in
destroying them and flashing their photos across the world a la
Afghanistan. It also compelled the Indian security forces to fight insurgency
largely in a basic foot-slogging campaign.
 The ‘Afghans’ and their Pakistani acolytes also brought another flavour
to the war from their home country: that special touch of barbarism for
which they are justly infamous. In their homeland, death from a thousand
cuts, gouging out the eyes of prisoners, slitting their throats were a common
feature; some of these were now imported into Kashmir. The hapless Bikash
Nazary, a BSF head constable, who was held captive after the Dessa village
encounter with Langaryal’s lashkar about which we will read more later,
was killed in the most brutal way with his eyes being gouged out while he
was still alive. K. Biswas, a BSF official who was captured in Bandipur in
September 1994, was treated in a similar way, tortured and later hanged to
death.
On 29 October 1994, a large group of Lashkar-e-Taiba mercenaries,
overpowered five Army personnel and three jawans of the 16th Rajputana
Rifles battalion. The men were apparently on a covert mission as a prelude
to an operation in the Rajwar forest area and were probably betrayed by
their informant. All were horribly tortured. Two were castrated, and all of
them had large pieces of skin peeled off. Then they were beheaded and their
bodies thrown into a local police station from where they were recovered,
some thirty hours after their capture.
Killing captives, both civilians and security forces’ personnel, by slitting
their throats has been common practice. Qari Zarrar, the Harkat-ul-Ansar
commander in the Doda area, later the outfit’s chief commander who was
killed in May 1997, made this a practice so as to terrify the locals.
The Lashkar-e-Taiba personnel also took up the practice as a means of
dealing with prisoners. All prisoners were executed since the Lashkar could
not afford to hold them. One Lashkar fighter, Abu Haibat, according to the
Pakistan Herald’s Zaigham Khan, beheaded a dead Indian soldier and took
his head back to Pakistan.

Poonch, Jammu and Doda

In the mid-1990s, the logical area for expanding militancy would have been
Poonch-Rajauri, whose majority Muslim inhabitants, ninety per cent in
Poonch and sixty per cent in Rajauri, had ties of consanguinity with those
across the LoC. But though the valley was in flames, the Poonch-Rajauri
area remained calm. There was movement across the LoC as well as local
pockets of support for the militants, but there was no general uprising. The
militants moved across the LoC mainly in the night under the cover of
Pakistani firing, and by morning they tried to make it to a safe-house in the
Pir Panjal mountains for crossing over into the valley.
The reason for this was the experience of the people of the area during
the 1965 war. During Operation Gibraltar, almost the entire population of
the border belt in Poonch crossed over to the Pakistani side of the LoC for
their safety. No one is clear what happened, but apparently they were very
roughly treated, housed in concentration camp-like conditions, and in some
cases there were instances of firing. When things settled down, many
people never came back. As a result of this, large tracts of the area remained
depopulated for over a decade, and it was only through special efforts that
people from other parts of the region were motivated to live there and take
up cultivation.
Besides this event, there was always distrust between the residents of this
area and the valley’s Kashmiris. Though Muslim, they were of Rajput and
Gujjar stock and spoke a language akin to Punjabi. Since 1947, the
dominant valley Kashmiris neglected their region, and the lingering feeling
that it would be traded off in a deal between India and Pakistan further
depressed conditions in the area.
Whatever be the case, nowhere in the area were there the type of security
operations taking place in the valley. In fact, till 1992, Army convoys
travelling up to Rajauri did not even have armed guards. However, cross-
border raids and ambushes from Pakistan necessitated the use of armed
personnel onward to Poonch. Since the Kashmiri militants did traverse the
region to move to the Pir Panjal ranges, the Army patrolled the area
intensely and, from the outset, involved one or two local people from each
village in the patrol.
In 1991, the ISI tried to recreate the conditions of 1965 in order to get the
people to cross over. They believed that were this to happen, they could use
these people to launch frontal attacks on the Indian positions on the LoC.
Many people were tempted to go across on the promise of receiving a
thousand rupees per month per person as dole. Several hundred people,
living in other areas such as Balakote which were exposed to firing from
across the border, migrated. This area had been part of Azad Kashmir till
the 1972 redrawing of the LoC and is so located that people live beyond the
frontline of Indian trenches. Some families from the Pir Badesar area also
crossed the LoC and became ‘refugees’. In Kirni, after people refused to go
across, the Pakistani shelling created such a situation that some hundred
persons went across and became refugees. In one attack here, the Pakistanis
destroyed twelve houses.
Thirty young men from Surankote in Mendhar did cross the LoC and got
training in the use of arms. But when they returned, they faced social
pressure to surrender. Estimates are that by the end of 1992, twenty-four of
them had in fact turned themselves over to the authorities.
These hapless refugees were used to mount a propaganda campaign
against India, and a few of them even became militants. The result was that
their dole was progressively reduced and most of them returned disgruntled,
sadder, but once again wiser.
This failure led the ISI to use direct tactics for launching attacks from
across the LoC. Given the terrain, it was not too difficult to send across
saboteurs to lay an occasional mine, or to blast houses and generally create
conditions of uncertainty. Blasts in 1992, often ascribed to Sikh militants,
were carried out by people like Kazeem-ul-Rehman and Majid Ahmed, who
were not militants but professional agents for the ISI They had been
arrested in 1979 on an intelligence collection mission in the Ganganagar
area of Rajasthan and served time in an Indian jail.
On 3 December 1993, a series of blasts blew up two buildings in
Mendhar town, one belonging to the special service bureau, the paramilitary
arm of the RAW, as well as the local branch of the State Bank of India.
While two more blasts shook the town that same night, three blasts also
took place in Bisnah town near the bus stand. Two Nepali guards of a saw
mill and a one-year-old boy were killed.
 When it became clear that there was going to be no repeat of 1965, the
Pakistan Army settled for a regular campaign of firing and the ISI, for
cross-border raids. As usual the story unravelled from the accounts of
captured dupes. Mohammed Nazir’s poor family was one of the first to be
tempted by Pakistani offers to migrate from the Poonch area in 1989. They,
along with others from their region, were herded into a refugee camp at
Kahuta. After a while there was pressure on Nazir to sign up for the jihad.
He and a number of others were persuaded by the Al Mujahid Force (Sardar
Abdul Qayoom’s ‘personal’ security force) to volunteer. They were trained
for six weeks at a camp near Abbotabad and their job was to commit
sabotage across the LoC in the areas familiar to them in Poonch. The ISI
tried to send Nazir across on a mission to blow up a bridge and a supply
line in November 1992 but he could not make the crossing. For the next two
years, he was used to escort infiltrating groups to the LoC in the Poonch
area. In 1994, he was sent on a covert mission by the ISI to kidnap western
hostages in Delhi.
ISI officials, working out of Kotli and Sialkot, divided the Poonch–
Rajauri area as they had the valley. The Hizbul Mujahideen was given the
task of operating in the northern area, the Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Budhil–
Darhal area, and the Harkat- ul-Ansar in the Mahore–Gool area covering
the Poonch, Rajauri and Udhampur districts.
Special ‘border action teams’ were created whose job was mainly to
conduct orthodox cross-border raids into India, and wherever possible, to
create a base just as the Harkat and Lashkar had managed to do in north
Kashmir and Doda. Terrorist acts also manifested as bomb blasts in Jammu.
In 1994 alone, there were some thirty-three blasts across the district, killing
sixty persons. Of these, six blasts occurred in passenger buses, killing
thirty-four people.
Till late 1992, try as it might, the ISI had been unable to stoke militancy
in areas outside the six valley districts. While some leaders and young
persons from other areas also came for training across the LoC, the
overwhelming bulk of those who arrived were Kashmiri Muslims from the
valley. Yet, stoking militancy was important to keep up the momentum in
the struggle in the valley. Nowhere did the prospects look more promising
than in the Doda district.
The Doda district is a mountainous area bordered on one side by
Himachal Pradesh and on the other side by Udhampur, Ladakh and
Anantnag districts. About 110 kilometres of the main road connecting
Jammu and the rest of India with Kashmir passes through the western
portion of this district, which is somewhat developed. The rest of the vast,
11,700-sq kilometres district is a backward area with just about 500
kilometres of roads. Most of its 700-odd villages are accessible only by
mule tracks and on foot.
From the outset, the ISI planners were aware of the importance of the
region in any guerrilla operation. First there was its terrain, very different
from the valley. Doda district was a vast expanse of thickly wooded high
mountains and deep gorges and was just a little smaller than all the six
districts that comprised the vale of Kashmir. Second, its people were fifty-
eight per cent Muslims, almost ninety per cent of them being of Kashmiri
Muslim stock. Third, its location. Its western portions lay astride India’s
main National Highway IA, linking the country to the valley. It also
bordered the Kathua and Udhampur districts, and the spread of militancy
there would make the Indian position very difficult.
Most of the minority Hindus were concentrated in the small towns of
Doda, Kishtwar, Bhaderwah and Ramban. The Jamaat- e-Islami was active,
but mainly in the towns, and had established a number of madarsahs. The
proportionately larger number of Hindus as well as the proximity to Jammu
made for a potentially explosive situation since many Hindus, especially in
the cities, were supporters of the BJP.
The area had remained more or less quiet through 1990 and 1991. In
April 1990, there had been one incident of police firing on a demonstration
in Doda town that resulted in several deaths. Some youths from the area
thereafter followed their valley brethren into Azad Kashmir to get arms and
training.
Pakistani handlers knew that in Doda, small, well-trained lashkars could
carry out classic guerrilla warfare, and tie up a disproportionately high
number of the Indian forces almost indefinitely. Indeed, this had been an
element in their 1965 Gibraltar plan when one of the Gibraltar groups had
been asked to cross the ceasefire line, move along the Pir Panjal, cross it
and operate in the area around Ramban and Banihal to cut off National
Highway 1A.
Insurgency could be sustained using several channels. The first directly
across the LoC through Kathua and Jammu tehsils; the second, by
following the Pir Panjal heights from Jammu and Rajauri; the third across
the valley from Anantnag; and the fourth from the northern extremity,
across the rugged heights of Kargil.
Once militants crossed the LoC, either from the shortest route across the
Pir Panjal from Poonch or Rajauri or from the Baramula and Kupwara
districts, they could move unhindered along the thickly wooded slopes of
the Pir Panjal, ringing the valley. After crossing the national highway, they
could move up again, cross the range and then come south to the Doda
district across Synthen and other passes, or the various galis and nallahs.
The Hizbul Mujahideen and the ISI began scouting around for potential
leaders to launch operations in Doda in 1991, but they found the going
tough.
Finally, they found Sheikh Aslam, who had local links, and his
organization, the Al Jehad, became the nodal group for Doda district. In
1992, the Jamaat stepped up its efforts to recruit youngsters from there and
succeeded. By this time, the Hizb was well on its way to becoming the
dominant group in the valley, and its appeal had more potency.
In 1992, a couple of incidents revealed that things were changing. In
March, a police post in Chattru in the distant Kishtwar tehsil was
overwhelmed and three police personnel killed. In May, two Army convoys
were fired upon near Banihal on the Jammu-Srinagar highway. On the night
of July 18, when a CRPF team surrounded some houses in Doda town,
believed to be the hiding place of Al Jehad and Hizb militants, they got
more than they bargained for and in the encounter, a CRPF head constable
was killed and two locals were caught in the cross- firing. The untrained
CRPF was enraged and set several houses ablaze. In the mêlée, the militants
escaped.
The following month, the militants gave a call for the boycott of India’s
Independence Day in Doda, a town with a forty-two per cent Hindu
population. On the night of 14 August, in a show of strength, the militants
fired thousands of rounds of AK-47s and rockets in Doda, Bhaderwah and
Kishtwar in a coordinated action. As a result of the firing, Doda SSP Ashok
Gupta and a BSF officer were injured.
By September, militants were emboldened enough to attack a newly
established police post in Sarthal in neighbouring Kathua district, killing
three security personnel. The next major incident was the 19 December
assassination of BJP’s Doda district general secretary, Santosh Kumar
Thakur, outside his house in the Nagri area of the town. On 9 February
1993, a bomb planted in a bus which was en route to Kishtwar from Doda
exploded, killing four persons and injuring fifteen seriously.
The campaign of terror had begun in earnest. On 18 February, Mohan
Singh, who had been abducted from his house in the Bijrani village in
Doda, was tortured and hanged to death. On the same day, Kashmira Singh
was kidnapped from his house in Bhaderwah and his body bearing marks of
torture was found six days later in a local canal. On 20 February, Diwan
Chand, a BJP worker, was shot dead in Doda. On 14 April 1993, Ashok
Kumar, a nephew of Mast Nath Yogi, a prominent Janata Dal leader, was
shot dead in Bhaderwah, and the Hindus burnt several shops and houses
belonging to the Muslims. A curfew was immediately clamped and the
Army alerted. The target of the attack was Yogi himself, a former BJP
activist, who had been demanding that the whole district be handed over to
the Army.
On 10 May, Satish Bhandari, the leader of the Hindu Raksha Samiti, was
shot dead in Doda. The next gruesome incident was the abduction of three
young men, Prakash, Uttam and Hem Chand, in Bhaderwah in late June.
They were held captive and tortured, allegedly for being informers. On 30
June, Prakash managed to escape though the captors shot the other two
dead.
 On 14 August 1993, Pakistan’s Independence Day, at about 6.30 a.m., a
Jammu-bound passenger bus from Kishtwar was halted by five armed and
masked men at the Sarthal road intersection, seven kilometres outside
Kishtwar. Male Hindu passengers were separated and the bus driven off on
the Sarthal road. Shortly thereafter, the gunmen opened fire, killing fourteen
people instantaneously and injuring two others, one of whom died later in
hospital. The incident, one of the first of its kind in the state after the initial
burst of communally inspired killing, shocked the valley’s Kashmiri leaders
who unreservedly condemned it. Later, it was discovered that the killers
were a group of five local Harkat-ul-Mujahideen activists led by Arif
Hussain, the son of a government official.
The expansive terrain, secure routes for ingress and egress as well as its
strategic value, persuaded the ISI to send in its special forces consisting
almost exclusively of Pakistani or Afghan mercenaries. In Doda they could
operate as autonomous lashkars, and depend only minimally on the locals.
The Hizb network would be used to provide arms and ammunition as well
as occasional food and medicines. The lashkars, too, preferred this
arrangement since it brought an additional measure of safety.
Doda was a threat that the Indian authorities could see but could do little
about. They were still in the process of consolidating their strength in the
valley and had little time to apply their minds to Doda. In 1991, five
companies of the BSF and an equal number of CRPF personnel were posted
there, but they were in the main towns and guarding the vital national
highway. By 1993, this deployment had tripled but it remained a drop in the
proverbial ocean, considering the size and the terrain of the district. The
Army deployment, geared more towards maintaining the security of the
NH1A, was confined to a brigade in Banihal.
On April 28, an Army establishment on the national highway near
Ramban came under sustained fire from a group of militants. The Army
personnel returned the fire, but the attackers melted away into the night. In
the morning, the northern command headquarters authorized an armed
helicopter to check whether the group could be tracked, but to little avail.
The next day a BSF convoy travelling on the same road near Ramsu was
fired upon. These were the first incidents on the strategic NH1A and the
authorities were now more than concerned.
Earlier that month, a high-level conference was held at Nagrota, the
headquarters of the Army’s 16 Corps. The corps commander, Additional
Director-General of Police M.N. Sabharwal, as well as state government
authorities decided to step up operations in Doda. When the Army made the
39 Division available for deployment, one of its brigades was deployed at
Doda, but as a temporary measure. Plans were made for the setting up of a
regular cantonment at Bhaderwah.
In May 1993, the BSF and the CRPF launched a somewhat grandiosely
titled Operation Huntdown. It achieved little as the BSF had neither the
forces nor the information to make a breakthrough. More dangerously, at
this time, it did not quite appreciate the very different nature of the terrain.
Following Operation Huntdown, the authorities decided to alter the game
plan and encourage the BSF to undertake long-range patrols and focus on
keeping the militants away from the Chenab valley and the districts of
Udhampur and Kathua. The decision to send out long-range patrols without
adequate training cost the BSF heavily. It also dramatically brought home
the seriousness of the situation to the authorities. On June 26, an informer
told the BSF that some foreign militants were holed up in Dessa village,
some seventy kilometres from the district headquarters, Doda, and three
days march from the nearest BSF camp at Kokernag across the Pir Panjal
range in the valley.
Unfortunately for them, they had just walked into an elaborately laid out
trap. Among the first victims of the militants hiding in ambush was their
wireless operator, cutting off communications. In the ensuing battle lasting
the whole day, almost the entire party was wiped out. As many as twenty
BSF personnel were killed, some immediately, and some after being taken
prisoner and tortured. Six civilians were also killed, probably in the
crossfiring.
One prisoner, Head Constable Bikash Nazary, was taken around southern
Kashmir in chains and exhibited to some local journalists. The leader of the
groups, Nasrullah Mansoor Langaryal aka Khan Mohammed Khan, told the
correspondents that they would release him in exchange for some detained
militants. The deal did not come through. Some months later, they tortured
Nazary, gouged out his eyes and killed him.
Langaryal, a resident of Jalalpur in tehsil Jattan in the Gujarat district of
Pakistan’s Punjab, had fought in the Afghan jihad through most of the
1980s as one of the commanders of the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami. After the
fall of Najibullah, the organization’s Afghan leader, Maulana Arsalan Khan
Rehmani, who became the Afghan deputy prime minister, sent him to lead
the jihad in Kashmir.
He infiltrated into Kashmir via the Lipa valley, with eight Kashmiri
militants and two Pakistanis in November 1992. Asked to focus on southern
Kashmir, he based himself in Kapran. Here he gathered up his lashkar and
led it in operations across the Pir Panjal in the Doda district. Among the
other members of this group were Abdul Bari, an engineering student from
Taif in Saudi Arabia, Habibullah, from the Wakhan area of Afghanistan, and
Abdul Hameed from Turkey. Occasional media briefings for the Srinagar
press were organized with the aim of getting the message across that
Kashmir had now become the focus of an international jihad.
Parallel to the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami, the ISI was also trying to
persuade its sister outfit, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, to take up some of the
burdens of the Jehad-e-Kashmir. To get things going, they knew they
needed an experienced combat commander as well as motivated cadre.
Maulana Mashood Azhar, the general secretary of the Harkat-ul-
Mujahideen, was asked to persuade Sajjad Khan aka Sajjad Afghani to
return. In late 1992, Azhar offered Afghani the command of the Harkat-ul-
Mujahideen and so, in January 1993, he travelled to Bangladesh, crossed
the porous Indo-Bangladesh land border and journeyed to Kashmir to take
charge of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Having spent nearly two years in the
valley, not only was he knowledgeable about its topography, but had a
better idea than many of the ISI’s agents about the conditions there.
Langaryal set up a regular training camp in the Pir Panjal ranges near
Kapran in the south-eastern part of the valley, complete with barracks,
tarred parade ground and so on. Here he began training Kashmiri militants
as well as militants from other parts of India. Meanwhile, the Harkat-ul-
Mujahideen used some of its trainees to set up local cells in Doda and
Udhampur districts.
In early November 1993, as part of the general Kashmir offensive, the
Army and the BSF conducted several major sweeps on both sides of the
Banihal and the Jawahar tunnel. The Army conducted operations north of
the tunnel in the Kapran–Verinag and the Mahu Mangat area, west of the
highway in the southern part of the tunnel. The first encounter with a
militant group was in this area where a trapped Afghan mercenary took
cyanide and died rather than be captured. In its searches, the Army was able
to locate and destroy a couple of well-sited and professionally constructed
bunkers made by the mujahideen, indicating that the personnel who were
being infiltrated had a higher level of military education than the Kashmiri
militants. On 11 November, in another phase of the operation, the Army and
the BSF began searching villages north-west of Doda. When they
surrounded two of them, Ghat and Bhabour, they came under sustained fire
from some half-a-dozen militants hiding there. In the two-day encounter,
ten persons were killed and eight arrested. Among those killed may have
been at least four civilians who died in the crossfiring. Among the militants
killed were two foreigners, while one Afghan was arrested. The Kashmiri
militants killed included the number two Hizbul Mujahideen activist of the
area, Tanvir Jalil, a son of the Jamaat leader, Syedullah Tantrey.
In a third set of actions, the Army located the Kapran camp on killing the
top Afghan training instructor, Farooq Teli aka Mohammed Suleiman. In a
sequel to this encounter, on 19 November, they captured Nasrullah Mansur
Langaryal, the chief commander of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and deputy-
chief designate of the new Harkat-ul-Ansar.
These developments created alarm in Pakistan. To sort things out, it was
decided to send Maulana Masood Azhar, travelling with a Portugese
passport under the alias Wali Adam Isa. He had been the key player in the
decision at Karachi to merge the two Harkats into the new Harkat-ul-Ansar.
Azhar had been born and brought up in an orthodox family of the
Deobandi persuasion. He got his early education in Karachi’s Jamia Islamia
from where he passed his Almia examination and became a teacher there.
He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Afghan jihad and became a member
of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. In 1989 he had also received a week’s
training in Afghanistan in the use of arms.
But he was mainly a teacher and a motivator. Besides teaching, he edited
and published the monthly magazine of the outfit, the Sada-e-Mujahid.
As a top commander, Masood Azhar merited a ‘safe’ route into India. On
29 January 1994, he landed at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport
on a flight from Dhaka. Thereafter, he visited Lucknow and Deoband. Then,
he reached Srinagar on an Indian Airlines flight.
On 9 February, Azhar contacted Sajjad Afghani and the two met in
Bijbehara town. The meeting was necessary since Azhar was carrying
money for the outfit. He also wanted to instruct Sajjad on the modalities of
the merger that had resulted in the creation of the Harkat-ul-Ansar. But
Indian intelligence was on to them. On 11 February 1994, as they were
travelling in an autorickshaw, they were suddenly surrounded by security
personnel and arrested. The three arrests, that of Langaryal earlier and now
that of Azhar and Afghani, were a great coup for the authorities and had
enormous, unexpected consequences.
By 1993, the fierce combat in the valley had drawn in another Indian
Army division though the security officials were not inclined as yet to
commit additional forces to the Doda area. The paramilitary and the Army
had their own priorities and had learnt after a number of sweeps and actions
that they just did not have the forces available for the job. The events of
1993 persuaded the authorities to increase their presence in the district, but
the main deployments were in the tehsil or block towns of Wadwan,
Marwah, Bhalessa/Gandoh and Tathri and in the heights near them. The
higher reaches of the mountains, especially on the Warwan river valley,
remained inaccessible. The problem was the enormously expensive and
arduous logistical requirements. A large number of troops were deployed in
just the logistical effort to man some of these isolated posts.
The capture of the Harkat’s top commanders, charged with leading
militancy, dampened the militants’ ardour somewhat and reduced the
activities of armed gangs that preyed on Hindus and Muslims alike. In May,
Abdul Qayoom, a constable of the J & K Police, was abducted from his
house and killed after being tortured for several days. Two days later,
mercenaries stopped two buses on the Malikpora bridge near Gandoh and
pulled out selected passengers and executed them. Among the three killed,
one was a Muslim. In July, they attacked Bashir Ahmed’s house at Pootinag
in Doda district, killing him and injuring his brother. Again, a few days
later, Amanullah Wani, a teacher at Kaskoof in the same district, was
abducted and killed after being tortured. In September, three villagers of
Khanitop, Sansar Singh, Jagdish Raj and Abdul Majid, were abducted and
tortured for two days before being hanged.
The Gujjars, Gaddis and Bakarwal herders were their main victims.
Given the isolation of the villages, little or no information was available to
the authorities. Any informant, if indeed he or she dared, could take days to
reach a police post, which in any case was not equipped to deal with the
well-armed mehmaan mujahideen. While the mercenaries got the support of
activists of the Jamaat in the semi-urban areas, in the countryside people
just wanted to be left alone. Whether Hindu or Muslim, many of them
worked out a modus vivendi with the militants and provided them food and
shelter in exchange for security. Even this was not a guarantee of safety and
many of the killings, especially those after torture, were the result of
suspicious militants wreaking vengeance.
By 1993, the Hizb, led by Ahsan Ahmad, emerged as the largest group in
the district with some 150 armed men on its rolls. Using the Jamaat
overground network, they were able to tap into the madarsahs, trusts and
charities for support. The Harkat-ul-Ansar functioned as an autonomous
group led by Dawood Manhas in the Doda tehsil and Abu Javed in the
Udhampur area. A small group led by a BSF deserter, Manzoor, was also
active; he took a leading role in extortion and killings.
But along with criminal activity, at least till 1994, there were attacks on
the security forces and BJP activists. The effort to vitiate the communal
atmosphere was part of a wider strategy to ensure that the roots of militancy
were firmly established in the region. On 27 May, a BJP leader, Balwant
Singh, escaped unhurt, but his bodyguard was injured in an attack. On the
same day, the terrorists massacred three dalits in Hadyal-Grabha village and
killed two brothers, Jivan Lal and Kishori Lal, and their cousin Ravinder.
The resulting tension led to the imposition of curfew in Kishtwar.
On 30 May 1994, Swami Raj Katal, a district vice-president of the BJP,
was gunned down just outside Bhaderwah town. Curfew was immediately
imposed in the town as well as in Kishtwar. But just as things were
returning to normal, on 7 June, Ruchir Kumar, yet another BJP activist, was
shot dead by three armed youth with AK-47 assault rifles. The neighbours
tried to give chase to them, but were deterred by gunshots fired by fleeing
terrorists.
The BSF battalion commander in the town despatched a patrol in a futile
bid to track down the assassins of Kumar, but even while they searched, the
town exploded in a frenzy of arson and rioting as BJP cadres looted Muslim
homes in the Vasak Dera neighbourhood and torched some houses in the
poorer Muslim localities, killing one Bashir Ahmed and injuring four
people. In retaliation, ten houses of Hindus were sacked and razed in
Muslim-dominated Qila Mohalla. The incident was seen as being serious
enough for the government to despatch a top home ministry functionary,
V.K. Jain, to Srinagar and Doda for an on- the-spot inquiry.
New Delhi’s actions were not altruistic. The Rao government was ever
sensitive to the BJP’s challenge and was aware that the killing of local BJP
activists would have wider national and electoral consequences. For the
BJP, demanding tough action against the militants was as much part of a
national agenda for winning elections as for the security of its local cadres.
But propelled by the latter consideration, the BJP’s hardline demands
served to alienate local Muslims and drive them further into the hands of
the militants and their sympathizers. The Harkat was pleased with its
actions and boasted in a press note published by the Mirror of Kashmir of
16 September 1994 that India would soon have to pack up its bags and
leave. It claimed that the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and other related
factors would soon lead to a breaking apart of India. In this context, he
called on the Hurriyat to provide guidance to the militants, just as the
Pakistan- based mujahideen leaders like Hekmatyar, Rabbani and others
had guided them in Afghanistan.
By mid-1994, there were just two battalions of the Army, seven of the
BSF and one of the CRPF available for counter- insurgency operations in
this district, which was nearly as large as the entire Kashmir valley. The
main problem was the lack of a clear-headed strategy. An important
subsidiary reason was the turf battles between various Army formations, the
BSF and the administration. Within the Army there were differences over
whether the area ought to be the concern of the 15 Corps based in Srinagar
or the 16th Corps headquartered in Nagrota.
Another issue was the need for air support. Following the assassination
of Katal and Ruchir Kumar in May–June 1994, Rajesh Pilot had spoken of
the need to use helicopter gunships in the area. While this was a logical
solution to hunting the lashkars from the heights, the Army was not too
happy; it had no intention of using gunships in a routine fashion. It was not
even keen on using helicopters for liaison or observation, fearing the
Afghans, well-trained in anti-aircraft tactics. However, minus helicopter
support, offensive action in the mountainous terrain was like chasing the
will-o’-the-wisp.
But there was no let up in the action of the lashkars against the security
forces. In early January 1994, a mercenary group ambushed a BSF patrol
moving on foot from Tathri to Gandoh. The ambush was expertly executed
near a bridge at Moin- Malikpur, killing Head Constable K.R. Sharma, Naik
P.C. Dubey, Lance Naik Shankar Singh, Constables Lalit Daimari, Devinder
Patel and Sarjan Verghese. The finesse of the ambush was seen when a BSF
group rushing to rescue the trapped party was also ambushed. Later in
September, there was another ambush of a security forces patrol in the
Kunthal hill area near Bhaderwah, leading to the death of three personnel.
In this encounter, one of the Afghan militants was also killed.
In September 1994, the Rashtriya Rifles and the other forces—the BSF,
the CRPF and the Assam Rifles—were integrated to function as a counter-
insurgency force (CIF) under the command of Maj. Gen. Yogi Behl, who
assumed command of the newly created Delta (Doda) Force of the
Rashtriya Rifles. Since there had been little coordinated action in the past,
the impact of the force was immediate. In four months they were able to kill
fifty- eight militants, of whom ten were mehmaan mujahideen, and arrest
eighty-six. As the Rashtriya Rifles strengthened its presence, problems
cropped up with the BSF. By early 1995, tension had reached a point when
the BSF’s seven companies in Doda slowed down their operations and
senior BSF officials wrote to the home ministry, demanding clarification of
its role. Privately, the BSF accused the Rashtriya Rifles of shirking
deployments on the Pir Panjal ranges to check the infiltration of militants.
The Rashtriya Rifles for its part felt that the BSF was not contributing its
mite to the strong combing operations in and around the urban areas of
Doda.
But even as the CIF bickered, the ISI was one step ahead, by expanding
its presence in the whole of Jammu region. Of particular concern was the
Kathua district bordered by Punjab and Pakistan. The LoC in Jammu had
been used by the smuggling fraternity for decades; now it was used by
terrorists. In the meantime, the conflict in the valley was reaching its
climax.
 6
The Tide Turns

The year 1993 represents in some ways the turning point of the Kashmir
rebellion. The year began with a carnage in Sopur and ended peacefully
with a surrender in Hazratbal. It was the year of some of the heaviest
fighting between the security forces and the rebels. It was also the year of
the rebels’ defeat, not only at the hands of the security forces but at the
hands of their one-time mentor, Pakistan. In trying to fine-tune the
militancy to ensure the merger of the state with Pakistan, ISI officials
manipulated the conflict to the point of death of its original aim—azadi.
As the Kashmiris dropped out of the conflict on account of capture, death
and despondency, Pakistan entered it by committing an ever larger number
of its own nationals to sustain the conflict. The mehmaan mujahideen or
guest militants, as Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the Jamaat chief, called them,
were not just foreign mercenaries but represented a dangerous escalation of
the conflict. As a Hizb statement of 14 July published in the Mashriq
indicated, it was now men fighting, not just boys:

‘The participation of foreign nationals from brethren Islamic countries in

the Jehad-e-Kashmir is a pious deed. Those who were of the opinion that
the ongoing struggle for freedom was the handiwork of some “misguided”
youth who had “rebelled” against the Indian state would soon realize that
the masses of Jammu and Kashmir are not alone in their struggle.’
Sopur Burning
Even while the rest of India was still burning after the Babri Masjid’s
destruction, Kashmir went up in flames, literally: not the valley, but its third
largest town of Sopur.
Centred in the apple-growing region of the valley, this town of about
100,000 persons was a stronghold of the Jamaat-e- Islami. In 1972, its state
Assembly seat had been won by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who had won it
again in the 1977 elections. In 1983, the Farooq Abdullah wave had
overwhelmed him, but he had wrested back the seat in the controversial
election of 1987. As the green flag with the white crescent and star of the
Jamaat waved from most houses, Sopur had been christened ‘Little
Pakistan’.
Not surprisingly, it had become a major base of the Hizbul Mujahideen,
and at the end of 1992, it acted as a safe haven for their strike forces.
Located astride the Jhelum, near the Wullar lake, it was a funnel for
militants coming in or going out across the LoC in Kupwara and northern
Baramula. It also became a base for mehmaan mujahideen.
Beginning 1990, the CRPF and the BSF had been in the valley three
years. The years had wrought a qualitative change. First, increasingly the
CRPF had been replaced by the BSF. Beginning with twenty-six companies
in 1990, the BSF’s strength had gone up to 135 companies in 1992. During
the three years in the valley, the BSF had suffered a loss of 157 dead and
830 injured, some seriously. The BSF was being forcibly reborn as a
counter-insurgency outfit, something that had never been planned in its
original charter.
The pangs of this rebirth were terrible. Untrained, ill- equipped, the BSF
lacked the tough command and control systems of the Army. Organized for
combat and not policing, the Army had a well-developed infrastructure to
look after the needs of the jawans, provision of special equipment, food,
first aid, hospitals and rehabilitation of the wounded. It had a system for
providing leave for its personnel as well as rotating forces out of the valley.
The BSF and the CRPF systems were either non- existent or nowhere near
as smooth as that of the Army. One problem was size. Rotating 30,000 men
from a 170,000-strong force is different from doing the same from a 1.1
million strong outfit.
Organized in sections, platoons, companies and battalions, the Army
units were not developed in ‘penny packets’ but were always led by persons
of the officer rank. This brought in accountability as well as leadership in
crisis situations such as an ambush or a grenade attack.
The main BSF deployments, on the other hand, were in cities where
officers rarely shared the vermin-infested, damp and often cold bunkers of
the forces. This was not only because the force lacked the command and
control structure of the Army, but because in the city, the level of
deployment in the area—a set of three or four bunkers—did not require an
officer to be in command. More often than not, command was in the hands
of a junior commissioned officer. So while officers would go around touring
the bunkers through the day, a risky enough job, they went back to their
camps for the night.
But it were the nights that were the problem. From alleys, rooftops, or
across a river or lake, there would be abuses, taunts or gun and rocket fire
from militants. These long, cold nights told on the nerves of the constables.
Long spells of duty without relief brought them to breaking point.
For the BSF deployed in Sopur, all these factors were at play, as well as
the fact that unlike Srinagar, their opponents were the ruthless and
dedicated Hizbul Mujahideen, led by Afghani mercenaries. On a cold
morning of 6 January 1993, in a pre-planned operation, cadres of the Hizb
approached a BSF bunker on one side of the main chowk of the town,
which lies on the main road to Bandipur, with their weapons and grenades
under pherans, and suddenly wrenched away an LMG from the hands of
two BSF personnel, tossed a grenade to distract the others and escaped into
the side-streets. Losing a weapon is a major misdemeanour in the armed
forces
Instead of the rational response of sending teams to retrieve the weapon,
the BSF personnel began indiscriminate firing from their positions, even
raking a bus that happened to be in the chowk. When the local police officer
tried to intervene, the BSF troops threatened to shoot him. Witnesses
charged that the personnel also set alight a section of the shops, and soon
the whole row was ablaze.
Estimates are that nearly fifty people died in this incident, most of them
non-combatants. The scale of the event brought home the gravity of the
situation to New Delhi. The resulting pressure compelled the state
government to immediately suspend a number of the 94th BSF battalion
officers and transfer the unit out of the area. A judicial inquiry, to be
conducted by Justice Amar Singh Chaudhry, was also ordered.
(Since the wheels of BSF justice move very, very slowly, it appears that
in September 1997 a trial began in a BSF court which has been adjourned
‘due to non-availability of essential documents from the CBI’.)
The incident compelled the state, administration and the Union
government to realize that the situation was perhaps going from bad to
worse in the valley. They had slipped into the comfortable ‘body count’
mode where the accumulating totals of the number of militants killed,
weapons seized, etc, seemed to point to an improvement in the situation.
The problem was that many of those killed were not militants, and the
security forces were in many cases fudging accounts of encounters and their
superiors were accepting this, without bothering to check.
In the first report of the Sopur incident, the BSF officer claimed that an
ROP (road opening patrol) to the post had suddenly come under fire from
militants hidden in the houses nearby. Militants mingling in the crowd had
also lobbed a grenade at an LMG crew and snatched away the gun. Firing
had prevented the evacuation of Constables Arvind Pandey and Jagatpal
Singh, the gun crew. The BSF then undertook covering fire to retrieve the
injured soldiers. Meanwhile, some buildings caught fire spontaneously and
explosives (presumably belonging to the militants) began going off,
resulting in the gutting of the market. An unspecified number of persons,
the report claimed, had been killed in the crossfiring between the BSF and
the militants.
A Pilot and a General Take Command
Following the carnage in Sopur, the new minister for internal security,
Rajesh Pilot, decided to visit the valley to see for himself how things were.
The angry Sopur residents boycotted his visit, but he did see for himself the
state of affairs in the valley. Though pro-militancy politicians also refused
to meet him, he did manage to annoy Governor Saxena and the security
forces by declaring that the government was ready for talks with everyone,
including the militants, to restore normalcy in the state.
In a move to assuage the mounting public anger at the continuing spate of
custodial deaths, Pilot announced a number of measures to make the policy
of arrest and detention more transparent. ‘All custodial deaths will have to
be answered for,’ he declared. In addition, relatives of those detained would
be informed within twenty-four hours. The cases of detention would be
reviewed every Monday by a screening committee headed by the district
deputy commissioner and consisting of the superintendent of police and
representatives of the paramilitary and the Army.
Pilot had some definite views on the state. He believed that the Saxena
administration had not been able to bridge the gap between the alienated
Kashmiris and India. Further, it had not been able to get the stalled
development work going, resulting in unemployment, which in turn was
fuelling insurgency. While the anti-military operations had begun impacting
on the situation, the time had now come for the Centre to take advantage of
this by some dramatic and bold moves to restore the political process in the
state.
In this context, there was an urgent need for the administration to have a
‘human face’, perhaps with the help of some J & K cadre IAS officers who
were deemed too ‘soft’ and sent out of the state. While Governor Saxena
had done a great job, there was need now for someone with a different
temperament and style.
On the issue of dealing with militants, Pilot, like Fernandes in 1990,
worked on trying to establish a channel of communication with some of the
more moderate militant groups; in essence, that the JKLF could, with some
support and encouragement, be persuaded to come to the negotiating table.
Pilot had been involved in or, in the view of some, been meddling in the
affairs of the state for the previous year and more. Once he became minister
for internal security, he had sought out jailed leaders of the various militant
groups such as Yasin Malik and begun a dialogue with them. Despite his
best efforts he had not gotten any commitments from these leaders, who
were firm on ‘self-determination’ as a prelude to any negotiations.
While there were no real signs that any top leader in the JKLF had given
any commitment to deal with the government on any terms other than their
oft-stated ones, in a place like Kashmir, the seeds of suspicion sprouted fast.
In 1993, Pilot and the administration’s strategy were being affected
through two channels. The first was through Dr Guru. When he had played
a leading role in the negotiations for the release of Rubaiya Sayeed, the
government did not know that this cardiologist was also a top functionary
of the JKLF. At the time it was believed that the good doctor was
interceding with the militants as he had been a teacher of Dr Mehmooda
Sayeed, Rubaiya’s elder sister. In the next few months the true status of
Srinagar’s leading cardiologist began to dawn on the powers that be.
Jagmohan and a mortified Mufti Mohammed Sayeed wanted to place him in
detention, but George Fernandes, who wanted to use him to establish links
with militants, stayed their hand.
As soon as George Fernandes was out of the picture, Guru was arrested
in August 1990 and charged with, among other things, ‘participating in the
release of five militants’, with reference to his role in the Rubaiya affair.
Guru was released in December, again with a view to re- establish
channels with the militants. He obviously retained considerable clout
because in the summer of 1991, he played a role in the release of K.
Doraiswamy from the hands of the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen. Through the next
two years, Guru represented the seemingly moderate and articulate face of
militancy. He talked to the international media, human-rights activists, and
privately, to the Kashmir administration and possibly Government of India
officials.
 In some ways there was nothing new in Pilot’s strategy. He was working
along the lines crafted by Governor Saxena and Additional Director-
General of Police Ashok Patel, who since 1991 had been working on plans
to assist the JKLF to combat the rising clout of the Hizbul Mujahideen. But
while they saw it as an intelligence operation to be effected through lower-
level JKLF cadre, Pilot wanted to work through the top leaders in jail or
outside, like Guru. This is where the administration had reservations. Its
assessment of Guru was quite different from that of Pilot. They saw him as
a dangerous and devious foe who could not be trusted, while Pilot saw him
as the vehicle for his political breakthrough.
A parallel track in Pilot’s thinking was shaped by his friendship with
Farooq Abdullah since Pilot believed that he was the only political leader
who could help restore normalcy. The problem was that public opinion, in
the form of media commentators and important elements in the government
felt that Farooq had been discredited and was not a viable option. Various
formulae were suggested, including the appointment of Farooq as a
‘political adviser’ to the governor. However, Farooq made it clear that he
was not willing to make a back-door entry to office in the state. Pilot,
obviously a man in a hurry, was working overtime to jump-start the political
process. Even before the old governor was out, he created a ‘Kashmir cell’
which was chaired by him. Among its members were V.K. Jain, special
secretary in the home ministry, Madhukar Gupta, joint secretary, looking
after Kashmir in the ministry, Ashok Patel, additional DGP, Wajahat
Habibullah, J & K BSF chief, and Jairam Ramesh, a Rajiv Gandhi groupie
and whiz-kid who was posted as officer-on- special duty at the Planning
Commission.
But to get Farooq to play any role, Pilot needed a new governor. Over the
next month, he pushed the case for a change with a prime minister whose
normal inclination was to do nothing. Governor Saxena had done a lot to
blunt militancy in the state. But because of his background or perhaps due
to the circumstances on the ground, he had a side that was blind to the
rising tide of criticism against the harsh conduct of the security forces and
the unchecked spate of excesses. Not surprisingly, he had to bear the brunt
of the criticism of the Sopur incident. Realizing that New Delhi wanted a
new dispensation, Saxena called it quits and on 11 March, submitted his
resignation. The same night, the Government of India announced the re-
appointment of K.V. Krishna Rao, whose removal in 1990 had precipitated
the resignation of Farooq Abdullah as chief minister.
The new governor’s appointment was welcomed by the Congress and
National Conference members who gave him a rousing reception during his
inaugural ceremony in Jammu on 12 March. Gen. Krishna Rao’s inaugural
speech was a classic exposition of New Delhi’s view of the insurgency:

‘Some ill-informed and misguided young men have been lured across the
border, imparted training in terrorism, provided with arms and finances,
indoctrinated, infiltrated back into the State and have been carrying out
serious depredations . . .
While J & K has a population of 40 lakh Muslims, there are 800 lakh
Muslims in the rest of India, who live as equal partners and in amity with
other communities. Indeed, J & K itself has been a symbol of the secularism
of our country.’

The general went on to add that he had issued strict instructions that:

‘. . . while operations against militants will, of necessity, continue till they

give up violence, the people will not be harassed or put to avoidable
inconvenience. Action will be taken in any cases of proven indiscipline. The
administration and the police will be made more accountable’.

A new governor was taking over and a young minister, seeking to achieve
political renown, was backing him. But the destiny of Kashmir were not in
their hands alone. Other powerful and malevolent forces were also at work,
which soon made their presence felt.
After Gen. Krishna Rao took over, he outlined a four- pronged strategy to
restore normality. Its elements were security, administration, politicians and
the public. While the general called on the security forces to defeat
militancy, he was clear that he would not tolerate excesses by the security
forces. It was in his watch that some incidents such as the Daribal incident
and the Masroof Sultan case actually moved ahead to the point of trial. His
second plank was administration. But this is where he was not able to
achieve much. The failure here lay both in the personality of the governor
and the pusillanimity of the civil administration officials. Top echelons of
the administration remained bogged down by infighting and unhappiness
over the governor’s own style of functioning. It soon became clear that the
former Army chief favoured a military ‘speak when you’re spoken to’ style.
It was said that he spoke only to God and the prime minister. Indeed, he
refused to acknowledge some of his new civilian advisers like Ashok Jaitly.
In 1993, there was a heavy turnover among his advisers with B.J. Herjee,
Hamiddullah Khan, R.C. Jain and Jaitly leaving at various intervals.
The third element comprised politicians. As the governor pointed out,
there could be no political process minus politicians. After the death of
Guru on 31 March and Farooq’s departure abroad, there was no one around
except Yusuf Tarigami, the CPI(M) and the peripatetic Mohammed Shafi
Bhat, member of parliament.
With Gen. Rao’s three tiers not quite in place, the people remained where
they were, ground between the actions of the militants and the security
forces. The governor’s perspective on the militants remained unchanged:
they were ‘misguided youth’ and it was the job of the people to turn them
in.
This uncompromising message was more than matched by the response
of the militants and the emerging united secessionist leadership under the
All Parties Hurriyat Conference. But while the Kashmiri secessionist
leadership claimed it was ready for dialogue, despite its weakening
position, or because of it, its posture seemed to remain rock steady on the
issue of the demand for ‘azadi’.
This was underscored by the scorn with which the tanzeems dismissed
attempts to create a political process. They ignored the governor, dismissed
Farooq and as for Pilot, he was, as the JKLF declared, ‘building castles in
the air’. The Harkat-ul-Ansar sneered that Pilot was fooling himself and his
country by holding meetings in Kupwara and Gurais areas, where there was
a large concentration of Gujjars. An Ikhwan statement rejected the official
view that insurgency was a rebellion of unemployed youth, declaring that it
was a cause for freedom.
All the groups, especially the Hizbul Mujahideen, warned locals through
statements published in the Srinagar press not to get involved in any of
Pilot’s schemes to revive the political process or with the advisory council
being set up by the governor. The base line stand of all groups was
‘tripartite talks under UN supervision and resolution of the Kashmir dispute
as per the wishes of the Kashmiri people’.

A Birth and a Death

Following their release from prison in April 1992, Jamaat-e- Islami’s S.A.S.
Geelani, People’s Conference’s A.G. Lone, Muslim Conference’s Prof.
Abdul Ghani Bhat and Maulvi Abbas Ansari of the Ittehad-e-Muslimeen
decided to provide a combined political front against India. Initially, the
leaders agreed to have Geelani, who was the political head of the most
powerful tanzeem, the Hizbul Mujahideen, as their leader. But this did not
quite work mainly because none of the leaders were ready to trust the
Jamaat.
In December 1992, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the seventeen-year-old son of
the late Maulvi Farooq, took the initiative to invite all the above mentioned
leaders as well as other Kashmiri politicians to organize a body to counter
the rising tide of custodial deaths. But while Umar Farooq was motivated
by human-rights issues, Geelani, Lone, Bhat and Ansari realized that the
only solution to the issue of unity lay in persuading Umar Farooq to take up
the mantle of leadership. They were not unaware of the political ambitions
of his father who had founded the Awami Action Committee which had
been active in Kashmiri politics even if its appeal had been limited. But
they figured that the young Umar Farooq was as yet in no way a threat to
their own ambitions. In any case, what they envisaged was a platform
where the constituents were not expected to dissolve their respective
identities.
 In February 1993, following up on the all-party meeting of December
1992 and spurred by the Sopur incident, a committee, consisting among
others, of Justice Bahauddin Farooqi, Mian Abdul Qayoom and Pir
Hafizullah Makhdoomi, was appointed to draft a constitution for the body,
and on 9 March, the formation of the Kul Hurriyat Jamaat Conference or
All Party Liberation or Hurriyat Conference (APHC) was announced. And
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was put forward as the unanimous choice to be its
head.
The thirty-two member body included the Awami Action Committee, the
Jamaat-e-Islami, the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, the People’s Conference, the
Tehrik-e-Hurriyat Kashmir, the Jamaat- e-Ahle-Hadith, the Muslim
Conference, the Anjuman Tabligh-ul- Islam, the Jamiat-e-Hamdani, the
People’s League, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Kashmir, the Bazm-e-Tawheed,
the Anjuman Auqaf Jamia Masjid, the Ummat-e-Islamia, the Kashmir Bar
Association and the Human Rights Committee.
At this stage, the JKLF, the most popular liberation group, was not in the
Conference. Over the next few months, efforts were made to rope the outfit
into the Hurriyat. Given the JKLF’s difficult relations with the Jamaat, it
was disinclined to join.
The role of the US in the creation of the APHC is a mystery of sorts.
From the outset, the US embassy in Delhi had kept a close eye on
developments in the valley. As of late 1992, officers of its political section
began visiting the valley as well and openly interacted with the overground
militant apparatus.
Some hint lay in the US formulation that the route to solving the Kashmir
crisis lay through an agreement between India and Pakistan, but one that
took into account the ‘wishes’ of the Kashmiri people. It seemed to carry a
suggestion that there was need for an organization which could claim itself
a representative of the people.
But by the end of 1992, the pitch of militancy seemed to have lost its
stridency. Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Abdul Ghani Bhat spoke of the
inevitability of Indian defeat with a kind of mechanical repetition that
belied reality.
 None of the leaders, such as the jailed Malik or Shabbir Shah or the freed
ones such as Bhat, Geelani or Abdul Ghani Lone, were in a position to
adopt any but the narrowest posture of demanding ‘self-determination’.
Each one was watching the other, and over their shoulder, each knew there
were scores of faceless men who could gun them down with no
compunction if they were perceived to be stepping aside from the straight
and narrow path.
But there were signals that could not be ignored. The most important was
Yasin Malik’s opposition to the idea of Panun Kashmir, or an independent
homeland within the valley for the pandits. In a note from his jail cell,
Malik declared, according to the Kashmir Times of 1 October, that he was
in touch with people in the valley and Jammu to evolve a strategy that
would ensure the return of the pandits to their homeland in the near future.
Considering that it was his outfit whose barbarous treatment scared off the
pandits, this was a major shift. Similar sentiments were expressed by
Shabbir Shah, also in jail. According to the Wadi ki Awaz of 8 October,
Shah called on the pandits to return, and pending this, for their property to
be treated as quami amanat or a public trust. A subtle shift in the stand of
this formerly pro- Pakistani activist was visible in his call for Pakistan to
‘lend a helping hand rather than wield the whip’ in resolving the Kashmir
problem.
But the Hurriyat remained uncompromising, in the main because of
Jamaat’s dominance. On the issue of the pandits, Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat
declared in late October that the Hurriyat could not issue a formal call to
welcome them back because they had been infiltrated by Shiv Sena
activists. Feigning injured innocence, he repeated the charge that it were
Jagmohan and the Government of India that led to the pandits’ migration in
the first place.
Unable to make any kind of compromise, the Hurriyat politicians became
not just prisoners of their own rhetoric but purveyors of ideas that seemed
remote from the realm of reality. Bhat’s suggestion, through an interview in
the Sunday Mail in May 1993, that Kashmir and Azad Kashmir be reunited,
placed under UN supervision and thereafter a plebiscite be conducted, was,
he probably knew, unacceptable not just to India but to Pakistan as well.
Equally unreal was his suggestion in June, at a joint press conference
with Maulana Abbas Ansari, the Shia leader and Kashmir Liberation
Council chief, that the political parties in India ‘adopt the right perspective’
and work out a consensus on giving the Kashmiris ‘self-determination’ after
initiating a dialogue.
The formal launch of the APHC took place on 3 September in front of a
large gathering in the Hazratbal shrine. By this time the Mirwaiz had
obtained the endorsement of Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah, both still in
jail. The combination of all streams of the rebellion’s political thinking did
represent a formidable combination of secessionist forces. In his inaugural
speech, Umar Farooq declared that the Hurriyat had taken the pivotal
decision to leave the issues of accession to Pakistan or independence to be
decided upon after ‘freedom from India’. However, he underscored the goal
of maintaining the ‘Islamic character’ of the movement. Present on the
occasion were Abdul Ghani Lone, Maulana Abbas Ansari, Prof. Abdul
Ghani Bhat, Qazi Ahadullah of the Jamaat- e-Islami and Shabbir Siddiqui
of the JKLF. The various tanzeems were not entirely happy since it meant a
diminution of their authority. But, as Abdul Ghani Lone put it, the APHC
was meant only to ‘supplement’ the armed struggle. Geelani made it clear
that the Jamaat support to the Hurriyat was ‘conditional’ and that The
moment we feel that it is going in the wrong direction, we will withdraw’.
The Jamaat was jubilant. Geelani told a newsman that his outfit, which
had a consistent stand on the Kashmir issue since 1947, had a place of pre-
eminence. Realism demanded that this position be accepted by all. This was
not a message that could have gone down well with the pro-independence
parties, notably the JKLF and the People’s League, which had nevertheless
decided to remain within the grouping. To make sure that the militants got
the right message, in his Friday sermon at the Jama Masjid on 17
September, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq warmly praised the militants for bringing
the Kashmir dispute before the world agenda. He made it clear that the role
of the APHC was to provide support to militancy and to bring the
movement to its logical conclusion.
Dr Guru was not merely an onlooker or even a participant in the events
that had rocked Kashmir since 1989 but in his own eyes and that of his
interlocutors, he was the éminence grise of the rebellion.
The role of the medical community of Srinagar has been a controversial
one. Foreign human-rights organizations have been quick to seize on
incidents relating to doctors and in hospitals there as ‘violations of medical
neutrality’. But the medical fraternity was anything but neutral in the
rebellion. Indeed, in some notable instances like that of Dr Guru, they were
its leaders, organizers and sustainers. In view of the general rebellion that
had broken out, it could hardly have been otherwise.
The numerous hospitals of the city provided convenient shelter for
fleeing militants, and before the authorities began keeping a watch, for
clandestine treatment of those suffering from gunshot wounds in the battle
with the security forces.
To protect this clandestine network, Kashmiri Pandit nurse Sarla Bhat
had been abducted, raped and killed in March 1990. Apparently, she had
inadvertently overheard a conversation between a militant and a doctor. A
number of other killings around the institute were also attributed to the
goings-on there. In February 1991, Mohammed Yusuf, the head cashier of
the institute, was kidnapped and tortured and the keys of the cash chest
taken away from him. The injuries to Yusuf were so severe that he died a
few days after his release. Later that year, an ambulance of the SKIMS was
used to transport the kidnapped Khemlata and Dr O.N. Wakhlu.
But some of the more serious incidents occurred in 1992. Early in the
year, M. Hafizullah Dar, additional deputy inspector- general of police
(security), was kidnapped from SKIMS when he had gone there to meet a
relative. He was kept in captivity for 132 days and released only in
exchange for Shabbir Siddiqui and Mohammed Idris, two top JKLF leaders.
Both were fated to die in two separate incidents relating to the Hazratbal in
1995 and 1996.
 In response to such activity, the police carried out several raids in the
institute, and in two such searches in September and October 1992, the
police seized 19 AK-series rifles, magazines and ammunition, as well as
JKLF pamphlets and other literature. Other hospitals were no different. A.R.
Khan, a deputy superintendent of police, went to the Medical College Girl’s
Hostel to meet his daughter. Some militants were stalking him and on
spotting him on 21 October, gunned him down.
Other centres of militant activity were the two city hospitals: the Sir
Maharaj Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital and the Lal Ded Hospital. In 1992, in
raids conducted in different months of the year, twenty-three AK-series
assault rifles as well as an assortment of grenades and ammunition were
seized from the two hospitals. In one raid, a nursing orderly was arrested
and he turned out to be a ‘base commander’ of the Ikhwan.
As a leading doctor, Guru took full advantage of his position to aid and
advise the ‘boys’ who had taken up the gun. He was, as it became clear
later, instrumental in pushing their agenda through his links with the
authorities. When Pilot took up the reins of the Kashmir policy of the
government, Guru was the target of his efforts to make peace with the
JKLF. In mid-March 1993, Guru visited New Delhi to treat Yasin Malik
who was being held in the Mehrauli sub-jail, to facilitate his treatment at
the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Undoubtedly, he talked to some
of the people around Pilot, who was now actively involved. At the end of
the month, on 30 March, Pilot, accompanied by Farooq Abdullah and state
Congress party chief Ghulam Rasool Kar and other members of the
‘Kashmir cell’, arrived in Srinagar to assess the situation on the ground. But
the message of their opponents came the very next day.
On 31 March, as Guru was leaving the SKIMS in his car with two other
doctors, a man flagged it down and demanded a lift for himself and another
person. At first the doctor refused, but the man and a companion forced
their way into the car and ordered it to drive towards Naushera. The men
indicated they were armed and that they wanted the doctor to come with
them to treat a companion. After about two kilometres, the car stopped and
immediately, an autorickshaw with some more men came up and
surrounded the car. At this point, one of the other doctors offered to go with
the men, but they insisted that Guru go with them. He then got out of the
car and the men drove off with him in the autorickshaw, saying that they
would return with him in a short while.
Nothing was heard thereafter from Guru or his kidnappers. Next
morning, on 1 April, residents of a locality on the road to Sonamarg found
Guru lying in a pool of blood near a wall of a house on Industrial Lane. He
had been shot dead.
No one really knows what happened. The common view is that he was a
victim of the Hizbul Mujahideen. There was a lot of speculation that he
might have been killed because he had been dealing with Indian
representatives like Pilot, and earlier Fernandes. This speculation was
triggered off by reports that Guru’s body bore marks of torture, indicating
that the persons who killed him were seeking some information. Pilot, in a
letter to Guru’s son on 7 April, said that he had never met his father though
he had spoken to him on the phone. Had this been the end of the story, it
would have been sad enough for the family. But what the militants did was
now compounded by an action of the security forces.
On 1 April, after its discovery, Guru’s body was taken to the SKIMS and
at 11 a.m., his funeral procession wound its way through Srinagar to his
house, which it reached by 2.30 p.m. Caught up in the emotion of the
moment, or instigated by the JKLF elements wanting to make a point to the
Hizbul Mujahideen entrenched there, the crowd began demanding that the
burial take place at his native place in Sopur, fifty kilometres away. The J &
K Armed Police declined permission and the angry crowds protested
against this decision. Government officials claim that some militants began
firing and to quell the mob, the police fired in the air. But other observers
say that the bodyguards of Senior Superintendent of Police K. Rajendran
began to fire at the mob when it attempted to jostle him. Whatever be the
case, a fatal shot struck Ashiq Hussain on the head, killing him instantly. He
was Guru’s brother-in-law.
One story doing the rounds in Srinagar was that Guru was killed by the
Srinagar area commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, who went by the nom
de guerre of Zulqur Nain. The timing seems to suggest that the Hizb wanted
to send an unambiguous message about what it thought of the efforts of the
Indian government to restore normality.
The action may have been triggered off by another incident. On 15
March, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, along with his son and son-in-law, were
kidnapped by JKLF militants from his hospital bed at the SKIMS, where he
had gone for treatment. They were released after a couple of hours in
captivity, and the following day, Javed Mir, heading the JKLF at the time,
issued an apology claiming that he had not ordered the kidnapping. There is
some mystery about Zulqur Nain’s antecedents and his end. He had been
arrested in 1990 as a relatively junior functionary of the Hizbul
Mujahideen, indeed so minor that he was released in 1992. However, by
early 1993, he became one of the top Hizbul Mujahideen militants in
Srinagar.
The authorities claim that he died in an encounter with the BSF later that
year while other sources say that he was shot dead by an assassin while he
lay in bed with his mistress, who was left unharmed.
Despite Guru’s killing, Gen. Rao and Farooq Abdullah, personifying the
optimistic view, insisted that elections could be soon held and things would
shortly return to normal. However, Home Minister Chavan, for once in
agreement with his junior colleague Pilot, declared that no elections could
take place till ‘near normalcy’ could be achieved.
Farooq Abdullah was mortified. He had worked hard since January to
push for a change of leadership in the valley. With the ministers blowing
hot and cold, he charged that New Delhi was ‘clearly incapable of taking
any firm decisions’. In a huff, he once again took off for London. But
Farooq was being less than fair. In April, not only did violence appear to
have reached a new high, but there had been other developments suggesting
a qualitative shift in the situation, unfortunately, in a negative direction.
The Police Revolt
As part of the new face of the government, the BSF was ordered to pull out
of some bunkers in the Lal Chowk area. Having held these very bunkers
through harrowing months and indeed years, the BSF personnel saw it as a
retreat, which in effect it was. Between the midnight of 9/10 April and the
morning, the BSF simply walked away from their bunkers in a half
kilometre area from Amira Kadal, the bridge across the Jhelum, to the
Clock Tower in the Lal Chowk area. They did not inform the local police
and, when warned by Kashmir police officers that the bunkers and buildings
that were abandoned were liable to be attacked and burnt, as was the
standard practice in Kashmir, the commandant of the 117th battalion, B.R.
Sharma, promised help but did nothing.
This move inadvertently coincided with a large protest rally of the Hizbul
Mujahideen on 10 April, mourning the death, the day before, of Maqbool
Illahi, their top-ranking commander. As soon as they discovered that the
BSF had abandoned some bunkers, the crowd moved to demolish them.
Someone, probably Hizbul Mujahideen cadre, also set ablaze the Sanatan
Dharma Sabha buildings, whose top floors had housed BSF posts earlier.
Thereafter, the blaze spread across the Lai Chowk, resulting in the
destruction of two office buildings, five commercial buildings and two
schools. Four persons were killed and scores lost their homes.
As this was happening, Sharma was reportedly sipping tea and playing it
cool at his headquarters in a nearby building. Only when SSP Rajendran,
alerted by the J & K Police, came and ordered him to act, he swung into
action but not to control the situation, but to make it worse. BSF personnel
of his unit began to torch buildings and fire indiscriminately. Some
residents allege that BSF personnel bolted the doors of the torched
buildings to prevent people from escaping the conflagration. An inquiry
ordered by the government did not come to any specific conclusion.
Officially it is not accepted as such, but the events were tantamount to a
mutiny.
 The mutiny by the J & K Police in April was a potentially serious
business. It was linked to the growing public resistance to custodial deaths.
The event showed the gulf that separated the state police leadership from
the J & K Armed Police (JKAP), a force whose cooperation ought to have
been deemed critical for combating militancy in the state.
Since 1990, the JKAP had more or less been sidelined. Its constables
were deemed suspect and as many as 500 of them had been dismissed.
Several had become top-ranking terrorists. The administration’s handling of
the police brought out the dilemma that confronts anyone dealing with the
subversion of law- enforcement personnel. The assassination and killing of
several police officers indicated that while there were bad eggs in the force,
there were also good ones. Many officials had to buy their peace with
militants and they did; not a few militants were sheltered in the houses of
such officers, and on occasion, police vehicles were used to ferry trapped
militants out of trouble. But while the whole police force had been cast
aside, it had not been disbanded or disarmed. It continued to be used for
guard duty and other low-priority tasks. Indeed, it manned the police
stations of the state and dutifully recorded the particulars of the various
dead militants brought there by the Army, the BSF and the CRPF.
Speaking to the Times of India in early April 1993, state police chief B.S.
Bedi seemed unaware of the simmering tension in his force. He declared
that ninety-one per cent of the top militants had been arrested or eliminated,
and that at this rate, ‘it would be reasonable to expect normalcy within six
months’. He spoke a bit too soon. On 22 April, the state armed police went
on strike. The agitation was sparked off by the apparent custodial death of
one of their colleagues, Riyaz Ahmed, at the hands of the 10 Garwhal Rifles
of the Army on 21 April. While the Army maintained that the constable had
been killed in ‘crossfiring’, there were allegations that this was not true.
Ahmed’s death was linked to another curious episode. This was an
aborted Army operation to search the Hazratbal on 21 April. Army units had
taken positions around the valley’s most sacred shrine, when the operation
was called off by the security adviser, Lt Gen. D.D. Saklani, allegedly to
avoid any damage to the structure. But what was thought to be a minor loss
of face for the Army was of lesser consequence than the situation that had
developed.
Riyaz Ahmed, a constable living in one of the two JKAP barracks
adjacent to the shrine, was apparently seen by some colleagues being taken
away in an Army vehicle. JKAP constables charged that SSP Rajendran had
asked the Army to teach Ahmed ‘a lesson’. On 23 April, hundreds of armed
policemen took to the streets and the entire state police force joined them in
striking work. About 1,500 uniformed policemen, carrying service rifles,
marched to the United Nations Military Observers’ Group Office on Gupkar
Road.
They occupied the police headquarters and its control room and they
increased their demands every day. First they wanted the removal of
Rajendran, which the government conceded. Then they wanted cases to be
filed against him and the Army and the reinstatement of 500 police
constables, dismissed in the past because of doubts about their loyalty to the
state. This was refused. The government ordered an inquiry into Riyaz
Ahmed’s death, announced compensation to be paid to his family and also
asked the Army to place a loose cordon around the area of their march. As
days went by, the situation appeared to be going out of control.
On 27 April, talks broke down and the policemen marched to the District
Police Lines to raise support. There was some firing, and some of the
processionists were injured. JKAP personnel alleged that security forces
had fired at them and went on the rampage, smashing a number of vehicles
parked near the police control room.
The authorities decided to send in the Army. That afternoon, elements of
an entire brigade were deployed, including the battalion which was alleged
to have killed Riyaz Ahmed in custody. They surrounded the entire area and
tension began to grow. At about 4.30 a.m., on 28 April, the Army carried
out a diversionary action of floodlighting the main gate of the building and
the other forces moved in, leaving the shocked policemen time to raise their
hands in surrender. Not a single shot was fired. Later, thirty of the
policemen were sacked for their role in the revolt.
 The Army and the authorities were pleasantly surprised at this
development. They had expected resistance and at least fifty to hundred
dead or wounded among the assaulting forces. This was all for the good.
Had there been deaths on either side, relations between the two sides would
have been poisoned. As such, after this event, Kashmiri officials began to
pay serious attention to the problems of their neglected force and work out
ways of employing them in the fight against militancy. In January 1994,
speaking to the media, Lt Gen. Surrinder Singh, the GOC- in-C of the
northern command, said that the joint inquiry into Riyaz Ahmed’s killing
had absolved the Army of any responsibility. But beyond saying the
constable had not died in custody, he did not provide any other details.

Command and Control

In the style of the Army general, the new governor, Krishna Rao, had been
working to a plan. The first item on his agenda was to change the style of
the operations that were resulting in too many collateral and custodial
deaths. This meant sharp, focused action based on intelligence, rather than
broad sweeps designed to keep the militants off balance.
The second was to get the administration to be more responsive to the
needs of the people. To this end, Governor Rao began touring the valley
with a view to showing the people That there was a government around, as
well as to encourage his officials to do the same. Both these points were
designed to convey to the people that they could either carry on with
militancy and confront the strong arm of the law, or begin interacting with
the administration and restore normality.
Though Kashmir was a ‘disturbed area’ and the security forces were
provided with special legislation to arrest, shoot and even kill people acting
against ‘law and order’, civilian supremacy remained vested in the office of
the governor. However, the reality was that the civil administration was
non-existent. The director-general, J & K Police, remained the head of the
law and order machinery reporting to the governor. But the police itself
ceased to function as a coherent body, especially after the police strike of
April 1993. Also, by this time the Army and the BSF operations had
become so extensive that the fiction of police control over them had worn
thin.
With the governor, a former Army chief, in the saddle, the authorities
believed that coordination with the prickly Army, which is very conscious
of its preserve and distrustful of the ‘civilians’, would benefit. This was
underscored by the return of Lt Gen. M.A. Zaki, 15 Corps commander in
1990–91, as adviser (home).
On 6 May, probably for the first time in the three years since the
beginning of the rebellion, top security officials dealing with Kashmir met
at Srinagar’s Badamibagh cantonment to work out a more coordinated
approach to combating insurgency. Present at the meeting were Minister for
Internal Security Rajesh Pilot, Chief of Army Staff S.F. Rodrigues,
Director-General CRPF D.P.N. Singh, Director-General BSF S.
Anantachari, Lt Gen. M.A. Zaki, and their top aides. Among the decisions
taken was that of holding assembly elections, as the strategic goal of the
administration. To this end, the Army would send in two additional
divisions and the BSF would add forty-six more companies.
The next day, the group met the governor. A consensual proposal was
drafted to be put up to the Union Cabinet for approval. It was suggested that
operations in the valley be coordinated by a ‘unified command’ headed by
Zaki. Valley-wide operational control would be exercised by the Army’s 15
Corps commander, Lt Gen. Surinder Nath. Srinagar city would remain
under the charge of the BSF through its inspector-general.
To revitalize the administration, Muslim officers would be drafted, but in
the meantime, two senior IAS officials, Wajahat Habibullah and Ashok
Jaitly, known for a ‘softer’ approach towards the locals, would return to
Kashmir.
Ten days later on 16 May, after some dithering, the Union Cabinet met
and put a stamp of approval on the plan. None of the forces were happy in
sharing their authority with the others. The Army insisted that this was not
just a ‘law and order’ problem but a 'low intensity conflict’ that demanded a
mainly military response, which most appropriately could come only from
the Army. The BSF, on the other hand, steeled by its three years’
experience, felt that it was best adapted to the needs of the situation. The
state police was the unhappiest since its authority was brought down
another notch.
As the ‘unified command’ got underway, the administration’s moves to
assert greater control over the security forces began to irritate the Army. As
a first measure, the administration banned operations in places of worship.
Then they were asked to curtail night operations. Troops were told not to
fire at fleeing militants unless they were armed.
The overhaul of the command and control and the induction of more
Army units meant that the government would not rush precipitously to
‘restore’ the political process. However, the induction of Habibullah and
Jaitly meant that the administration had decided to put on its humane face.
Jaitly in particular was seen as being dovish in dealing with militancy and
being too close to Farooq Abdullah. Habibullah, who had been special
commissioner, Anantnag division, and had been away from the state since
mid-1990, had a reputation for civility and fairness and was known to be
critical of the excesses conducted by the security forces.

The Dirty War

Whatever may have been the government’s goals, they were but plans on a
piece of paper. In reality, in 1993, death stalked Srinagar in a way it had not
before. While earlier, the pandits, security personnel or suspected militants
were its victims, now it began to reap its grim harvest all around. On 18
February, it had claimed Dr Farooq Ashai, the chief of orthopaedics at the
Bones and Joint Hospital in Srinagar. In addition to being a doctor, he was
also a human-rights activist, since he often dealt with patients who had been
victims of gunshot wounds and torture. Doctors in the Bones and Joint
Hospital were a major source of information, cited by foreign journalists
and human-rights groups visiting Srinagar. For this reason, they had earned
the wrath of the Indian authorities. Dr Ashai was shot dead as he travelled
home at about 7 p.m. on 18 February in his white car, clearly marked with a
red cross denoting his profession.
While there is little doubt that Ashai was killed by a bullet fired from a
CRPF bunker, we can only speculate about the motive. Was it a planned
murder by ‘counter-insurgency’ forces since the doctor’s car was well
known? Or was it fired in anger or frustration by a CRPF jawan? The
government ordered an administrative inquiry and stated that he had been
killed as a result of ‘crossfiring’ between the militants and the security
forces, a theory that has the least credence in view of the testimony of his
wife and daughter who were in the same car, and the fact that just three
shots were fired, directed specifically at the side in which Dr Ashai was
sitting.
In the same month, February, two relatives of the state Congress-I chief,
Ghulam Rasool Kar, were abducted from their homes in Sopur. Both were
retired persons, having been low- level functionaries in the state
bureaucracy. Habibullah Mir Shah, Kar’s brother-in-law, was a naib
tehsildar, and Ghulam Nabi Baba, a close relative, an assistant
commissioner. On 1 March, the former was shot and his body dumped on
the street and on the next day, the latter. Both had apparently been tortured.
The trail of violence did not discriminate as this representative sample
shows: in January, four labourers from Bihar, working at a saw-mill in
Soura, were hanged to death because they were Hindus. In February, social
worker Abdul Ghani Bhat was kidnapped from his village Tral and done
away with in the same manner. In March, Abdul Majid Shah, a post and
telegraph employee, was abducted and tortured to death. In April,
Mohammed Akbar and Mohammed Ramzan were dragged out of their
house in Barkatpura in Anantnag district and shot dead. In May, Prem Nath,
an employee of the electricity department, was done away with. In June,
two prominent writers, Nazir Ahmed Hafiz and Ahmed Din Mushtaq whose
pen-name was Mushtaq Kashmiri, were killed, and in July, Ghulam Nabi
Ahanger, a prominent physician. In August, Ghulam Mohiuddin and his son
Shabir Ahmed were abducted from their residence. The father was tortured
for not allowing his son to go to Pakistan for training and then released. The
boy was not seen again.
A number of killings were related to what the militants termed mukhbirs.
Though they gave Asia Watch a laboured explanation as to how they
detected and tried such people, in most cases, people were simply tortured
and executed on grounds of mere suspicion. Mohammed Shafi Butt, Haji
Mohammed, Mohammed Ashraf Bhat and two women, Wahida Bano and
Farida, were tortured and executed in early January. The Ikhwan- ul-
Muslimeen acknowledged that it executed them for allegedly working for
the Indian security forces and for being responsible for the killing of their
chief, Altaf Qureshi, at the hands of the security forces in October 1992.
Almost every other day there were reports of bodies being found, with
militants’ notes declaring that they were mukhbirs. In Baramula district,
there were two such instances on 30 October, 1992. In Hardipora, Ghulam
Ahmed Reshi, Ali Mohammed Lone and Sikandar Malik were tortured to
death for being mukhbirs. In Malangam, Manzoor Ahmed Bhat and
Mohammed Sharif Bhat suffered a similar fate. In November there were
two incidents in which entire families were wiped out. The first was in
Haihama on the 20th and the second in Rangwar, Kupwara, where six
members of a family including a six-month-old child were shot.
The militants also executed, almost always after torture, any member of
the security forces who fell into their hands. They did not discriminate
between Hindus and Muslims.
Later in the year, in September, another prominent citizen, Prof. Abdul
Ahad Wani of the law faculty in the University of Kashmir, was abducted
and held captive by militants for fourteen days before being released. On
the last day of the year, 31 December, he was not so lucky as he was
kidnapped again, and after a few hours his body was found on the roadside
at Hazratbal. A respected teacher, Wani was against the kind of violence that
had been unleashed by the militant movement.
The administration in its new manifestation was acutely conscious of the
problem of custodial deaths and human-rights abuses. In an interview with
India Today in May, Gen. Rao spoke out against torture and indirectly
confirmed the problem: ‘What is the need to kill a militant when he is
totally defenceless? I’ve told the forces to be careful. Custodial deaths will
hurt my cause, and so I have a vested interest in putting an end to them.’
But the problem for the general was that he just did not have the
appropriate instruments to implement this policy. It was one thing to talk
about ‘unified commands’, or harsh action to compel the security forces to
walk the straight and narrow path, but quite another to achieve it. There was
the problem of habit. The lack of control and accountability had brutalized
the security forces to a point where a death here and there mattered little to
anyone except the near and dear ones of the person who had been killed.
For the militant, the situation was bleak. If arrested, he faced the prospect
of torture and summary execution or years in jail. If he belonged to the
Hizbul Mujahideen or a group associated with a strong ideological content
movement, some effort would be made to help his family by compatriots;
otherwise, he or his family had to fend for themselves.
The greatest problem lay in what is somewhat inappropriately known as
collateral damage, of human beings and property. After 1990, when families
of most of the security forces, except the Jammu and Kashmir police, pulled
out, the main sufferers were the families of militants and other Kashmiris
who lived in the valley and worked in an environment where a low-
intensity war was being carried out.
By its very nature insurgency depended on civilian support, and the
militants never made any bones about using civilian cover for their
activities since theirs was a guerrilla movement. Militants routinely put to
risk those who harboured them as well as innocents by attacking security
forces in crowded localities. Most locals took this as part of the price to be
paid for the ‘cause’ which they supported with increasing reluctance. The
strong and often brutal arm of the security forces frequently did not
discriminate between combatant and non-combatant. Sometimes it was
simply not possible to do so, given the circumstances of the guerrilla war.
At other times an assault occurred, which no one bothered to explain, such
as the incident on 6 March when nine persons including two J & K Police
constables and a child were killed while crossing the ferry at Jhelum in
Sopur. The killings sparked off a strong protest in the town, and the
militants retaliated with an attack on a patrolling BSF party, injuring eight
personnel. On 18 April 1993, in the same town, a crowd of school-going
youth protesting against the serial, Bible Ki Kahaniyan, were shot at and six
persons were reportedly killed. All this happened in front of visiting
newsmen from the AFP, who were shot at and were lucky to get away with
their lives. There were other such incidents, some retaliatory and some
simply a matter of bad training and tactics. Deaths of militants, civilians
and BSF personnel continued to occur.
On 1 July, the BSF cordoned off the Baba Reshi shrine, a short distance
from Tangmarg in northern Kashmir. They had information that militants
were hiding there. As soon as the force was deployed, they came under fire
from a barrack in the complex and from an adjoining forest, which killed
Constable Muralidharan Nair. The BSF retaliated, and by the time the
militants melted away, nine people had been killed, of whom at least five
were pilgrims to the shrine.
The focus on custodial deaths in 1992 led to another ‘creative’
transformation. Now, there were ‘alley deaths’. There would be round-ups,
‘cats’ or informers would identify some people who would be separated and
then, the next day, their bodies would be found in an alley or in the
numerous lakes and rivers. On 7 and 8 April 1993, the security forces
carried out search operations in Batmaloo and its neighbouring localities.
The first day, four bodies were found in different parts of the city. The next
day, according to the official spokesman, eight militants were killed when
the police were attacked during the search, and after the security forces
lifted their cordon on 9 April, the police recovered six more bodies. And
these were not isolated incidents.
Horrific details of what was probably happening surfaced in a case
reported by the Washington Post and the Independent and documented by
Asia Watch. Masroof Sultan, a nineteen-year-old student, was travelling in a
bus from his residence in Batmaloo to Sri Pratap College in Lal Chowk on
8 April. He had boarded the bus at Rambagh bridge at 11 a.m., and just after
it crossed the bridge, the bus was stopped. A ‘crackdown’ was in progress
and BSF personnel ordered him out of the bus. He was asked to sit with
fifty other people on one side. A number of other buses had also been
halted, though Masroof was the only one asked to get down. After a while
Masroof was asked to go to the Rambagh Park on the other side of the
bridge where several hundred young men had been assembled. All of them
were systematically paraded before some ‘cats’ sitting in security force
vehicles. After a while Masroof and three other people were made to sit on
the side. An hour later, four BSF personnel came and started beating,
kicking and punching him on his nose and face. The others were similarly
beaten. Then Masroof was blindfolded and taken to a small room where he
found the other three along with a dozen BSF personnel. All of them were
asked to confess that they were militants and warned that if they did not,
they would be thrashed. They told Masroof that if he admitted to being a
member of the Hizb, he would be let off.
After that Masroof was asked to take off his clothes. He was tied and
then systematically beaten with a stick. After a while an officer came in to
ask whether Masroof had confessed, and on being told no, he asked them to
continue the thrashing. Masroof then passed out. When he came to, the
officer returned to order his transfer to Papa II, the Hari Niwas interrogation
centre.
By this time, his parents had rushed to the place where he was reported to
be and tried to contact him. But Masroof was blindfolded, bundled into a
jeep and taken to Papa II. Here he saw the other three persons with whom
he had been detained; all appeared to be badly battered. Thereafter Masroof
was subjected to electric shock on his feet and genitals, which carried on till
he passed out again. Then an officer came and told the BSF personnel to
take him back to Rambagh. He was dressed, blind- folded and taken in a
jeep to a building near the bridge. The other three were also brought out. All
of them were taken to a place outside the city and then lined up near a tree
and shot. The first few shots hit him on the legs. Presumably the other three
died instantly. He then heard voices asking the men to check whether all the
persons had been killed. At this point, a BSF soldier realized that Masroof
was still alive, so he fired another shot into his chest. Another shot was fired
at his head, which providentially grazed his neck. After a while, J & K
Policemen came to the site, and realizing he was alive, took him to a
hospital where he was treated. He survived.
A look at the news reports of the time, along with Masroof’s testimony,
point to the possible cause. On 7 April, Assistant Commandant Shamsher
Singh of the BSF was killed along with Naik M.D. Dutt, Lance Naik K.B.
Gupta and Rameshwar Dayal when a mine was detonated under their
vehicle near a girl’s higher secondary school in Batmaloo.
The BSF decided to teach Batmaloo residents a lesson. While the identity
and names of the other victims are not known, it is likely that they were
from Batmaloo, as was Masroof. Through the years of the rebellion, the
area had been one of the most troublesome spots. Using tactics not
dissimilar to those used by the Germans in Europe during World War II, the
BSF decided that the immediate execution of four persons from the area
would be a message.
A worldwide furore compelled investigation, but to little avail. An officer
and some others were tried by a BSF court and acquitted in 1998.
But the incident that generated the greatest revulsion was the one in
Daribal in the Khanyar locality where on 1 August, a BSF official allegedly
mistook a school-boy’s lunch box for a grenade and shot him. When his
parents came out of their house and berated the constable, he shot them
dead too. Such patent atrocity generated waves of anger in Srinagar. Almost
all the organizations condemned it. Once again, the officer concerned was
tried and acquitted by the BSF court.

Militants versus Security Forces

All said and done, as of 1993 the atrocities, the police revolts and the effort
to restore political processes, remained a peripheral issue. What really
mattered was the battle between the militants and the armed forces.
The 8th Mountain Division finally got into its stride in 1992 and the
militants began to feel the heat. The units that had come in 1990–91 had by
now developed their local contacts and a feel for the lay of the land. They
had also evolved their own innovative tactics. Some battalions created their
own combat terms and developed intelligence and acted on it. The ‘Liaison
Units’ or the military intelligence also became active in tracking militants.
Daily life for the security personnel, besides those manning the LoC, was to
either be part of an ROP or QRT, a cordon-and-search party or a long-range
patrol (LRP).
Armies being what they are, maintaining lines of communication are a
top priority, and the task of clearing them of obstructions and mines for
military vehicular movement was a daily affair. QRT’s would sit in their
trucks at nodal points, ready to dash off in this direction or that to assist
another group in trouble. The task of the cordon-and-search or the LRP was
to seek out the adversary. Life for the militants was shaped by this. Their
task: to ambush and otherwise strike at these teams through ambushes, mine
blasts, rocket attacks and lobbing grenades, usually under the cover of built-
up areas and crowded streets.
On 9 April, the Army delivered a crucial blow to the Hizbul Mujahideen.
A bit of a mystery surrounds the death of Maqbool Illahi, one of the best
commanders of the Hizbul Mujahideen and its de facto combat chief. Based
on intelligence information, the 11 Rajputana Rifles were ordered to
surround Pohar village in Badgam district where it was learnt that Illahi was
hiding. The battalion was split into four columns and ordered to move in the
afternoon so as not to miss the elusive Hizbul Mujahideen chief. The crucial
role in this operation was played by the unit’s commando platoon,
commanded by Lt Suresh Radhakrishnan. A team led by Naik Nawab Singh
Tomar entered the village and attacked the hideout. Apparently, Illahi was
killed in the initial assault, but this was not known to the rest of his team,
including his bodyguards who were for some reason not with him and
valiantly fought to reach him and break out of the cordon.
Hizbul Mujahideen wireless messages were intercepted, trying to get
Illahi out of the area. In one message, a J & K Police officer was requested
to come in his official capacity to rescue the trapped leader. Illahi was one
of the most seasoned Hizb commanders, having been instrumental in setting
up the Hizbul Mujahideen, the militant arm of the Jamaat. In a tribute to
him, Hizbul Mujahideen’s district commander in Srinagar, Yunus Saleem,
said that Illahi had been the founder-leader of the ‘Jehad of Kashmir’.
Despite this loss, through the summer of 1993, the Hizbul Mujahideen,
led by Maulvi Yusuf Shah aka Salahuddin, along with the mehmaan
mujahideen, gave combat to Indian security forces across the valley.
Despite heroic efforts, it seemed India was no nearer to defeating the
insurgency than it had been a year earlier, or even two years ago. The
impunity with which militants called the shots in Sopur, where security
forces were unable to enter the town, marked the ascendancy of the Hizbul
Mujahideen, which was now the supreme body, and of Salahuddin, its hero.
But after Illahi’s death, the Pakistani handlers decided that Salahuddin
alive was of far greater importance to the Hizbul Mujahideen than as a
martyr, and directed him to return to Azad Kashmir. He was not a young
man as Illahi was. He was old, overweight and probably suffering from high
blood pressure. Guarding and escorting him were not an easy task, and
where others could walk, Salahuddin had to use a pony, making him stand
out all the more. He was asked to cross the LoC to Pakistan, where he
remains to this day.
By now the militants had inducted new weapons and learnt new
techniques. Unlike in the past, they avoided direct conflict with the security
forces when not required. From the beginning of the year, the Hizbul
Mujahideen had been using rockets. There was also a sharp rise in instances
of the use of mines and explosives, which took the heaviest toll of the
security forces. As the Army sought out the militants, the, latter redoubled
their efforts. Their effectiveness was evident from the fact that the Army’s
losses in 1993 doubled to eighty-eight from the 1991 figure.
Illahi’s death was followed by major successes against the Al Jehad, a
well-armed outfit owing allegiance to the Rehmani faction of the People’s
League. On 23 April, the Army surrounded the hideouts of Syed Ahmed
Beg, the commander-in-chief of the outfit, and that of Mohammed Ayub
Lalu, his deputy, and their bodyguards. Thirteen persons were arrested. The
next month the Army captured a succession of the chief commanders—
Abdul Aziz Sheikh on 21 May and Bilal Ahmed Gogloo aka Altaf Alamgir
the following day. The resulting interrogations led to the ‘biggest ever’ haul
of weapons, ammunition and explosives.
Abdul Aziz Sheikh was one of those who crossed the LoC in May 1989.
His initial task was to coordinate the activities of the People’s League there.
He established contact with the Afghan Mujahideen and returned to the
valley in November 1989. With the outbreak of rebellion and the need for
converting his group to a tanzeem, he returned to Azad Kashmir in April
and there created the nucleus of the Jammu and Kashmir Jehad Force or the
KJF.
On 15 December, the official spokesman announced that the Jehad Force
chief, Abdul Khaliq aka Jamal Afghani, had been arrested during a raid in a
hotel in Kupwara the previous day. On 16 December, there was a bandh
protesting the arrest, and on the same day his body was handed over to his
family. The BSF personnel who had arrested him said that he was being
escorted to Baramula to recover hidden weapons when militants ambushed
the convoy at Chakloo, killing Afghani. There was no word about possible
BSF casualties.
The pattern of operations had now become standard. Based on
intelligence, from the Army’s liaison units or the BSF G- Branch, the Army
and the BSF or sometimes both, would sweep down on a village, search the
houses and detain suspects for interrogation. Sometimes they would be
confronted by militants; on other occasions, the militants would blend with
the villagers, and abandon their weapons. Sometimes there was a firelight,
and casualties, one or two on the side of the security forces, three or four on
the part of the militants,
In one such instance, in mid-September, a BSF G-Branch team was
involved in hand-to-hand combat with a group of mercenaries and Hizbul
Mujahideen activists. The Bandipur chief of the G-Branch, I.S. Rana,
received information that some eight to ten of Hizb militants were
sheltering in a particular house in village Bazpura, near Ajas. It was decided
that instead of a big cordon and search, a small team would strike at the
hideout in the early hours of the morning and use the element of surprise to
overwhelm the militants.
 At about 2 a.m., the group left their vehicles a little outside Bazpura and
moved on foot to attack the set of three houses where the militants were
hiding. The main party consisting of I.S. Rana, the joint additional director
(G), and Inspector (G) S.C. Mishra, went for the main hideout; the BSF
squad, headed by S.N. Ghosh, commandant of the 173 Bn, struck at two
houses nearby.
As they neared the house, they were challenged, but Inspector Mishra
decided on a frontal assault and kicked the door open and burst into the
house. Almost immediately, he caught a burst of AK-47 fire in his stomach,
though he managed to kill the person who had fired at him. In the
meantime, Rana was trying to break in from the back of the house when
two militants jumped out of the window. Both were shot dead. It was pitch
dark and action continued for about an hour. The BSF squad evacuated
Mishra, but he died soon after. Five militants were killed, most if not all of
them, foreign mercenaries, and an equal number managed to escape. The
BSF team searched the area and recovered seven AK- 56 rifles, one 9 mm
pistol, one grenade launches and a VHF wireless set. Later it was
determined that two of the militants who were killed were Afghan nationals:
Abdul Rehman, the deputy district commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen,
and another mercenary whose name could not be determined.

The Battle for Sopur

However, Sopur remained the biggest headache. After the January arson,
the security forces had been pulled out of many areas in the town and had
taken up positions on the outer fringes and across the Jhelum river. A major
post remained within the State Bank of India building and another more
precarious one a little distance from the one housing the Jammu and
Kashmir Bank. Every night militants would rain rocket fire on their
positions, sometimes firing rockets over the areas populated by Sopur
civilians who were their hosts. The Army had been given overall control of
the BSF operating there, but it was not inclined to go in for a frontal
operation that would have almost certainly razed the entire town.
 In mid-April, an Army unit was ambushed near the fruit market.
Mehmaan mujahideen belonging to the Hizb attacked the Army in broad
daylight, using the cover of hundreds of civilians who were around. They
killed an officer, Capt. V.S. Sayi, and four jawans, and injured twelve. The
Army column retreated in good discipline, but left behind a rifle, a pair of
binoculars, some maps and a burnt out Nissan vehicle which was later
exhibited by the Hizb. Two civilians were killed in the crossfiring.
The Hizb also claimed credit for attacking a BSF picket on 1 May, razing
the building it was housed in to the ground. As a result of the blaze, fifty
other houses were burnt. Hizbul Mujahideen guerrillas said that before
firing their rockets at the building, they had asked the personnel there to
surrender and that the collateral damage was a result of BSF retaliation
rather than their own action.
After enduring a lot, the security forces had a major success in August
when the BSF managed to kill Abdul Baqi alias Akbar Mohammed Qureshi
aka Akbar Bhai, a resident of Jalalabad and one of the top leaders of the
mehmaan mujahideen, working with the Hizbul Mujahideen. Akbar Bhai
was said to be a former bodyguard of Hekmatyar and his personal
representative in the valley. Whether it was true or not is not relevant; what
was important was its propaganda value in convincing the gullible valley
Muslims that with Hekmatyar on their side, they could not lose. Despite all
its difficulties in the valley, the BSF had been maintaining its intelligence
sources. One day in early August, they were tipped-off about an audacious
plan by Akbar Bhai to attack the main BSF bunkers in Sopur, protecting the
State Bank of India (SBI) and the Jammu & Kashmir Bank, The raid was
meant to launch the ‘celebrations’ of Pakistan’s Independence Day on
August 14, a general occasion anyway for stepped up activity by pro-
Pakistan militant groups and secessionists.
The BSF information was that the Hizbul Mujahideen would concentrate
in the Kral Tang locality of the town before launching its attack. Offense
being the best form of defense, the BSF commander decided to attack
Akbar Bhai’s gang before it got going. Given the scope of the operation, the
BSF decided to put in everything they had. While companies of the 19th
BSF already deployed in the pickets were alerted, Commandant G.S. Bal
deployed his own commando platoon for the strike and also requisitioned
those of two other battalions. In the ensuing battle near the SBI, Akbar Bhai
was killed, shot by Constable Hira Bahadur Chetri.
But the action had not ended. The militants decided on a counter-attack
on the somewhat more precarious J & K Bank post. As a prelude to the
attack, the militants had set up roadblocks to prevent reinforcements from
reaching the post. The reinforced BSF squad from the SBI moved out to
remove the rubble and stones piled up on the road. As they were doing so,
they came under militant fire. It was so intense that a stray bullet actually
entered through a loophole in the armoured vehicle used to fire outwards
and fatally hit Head Constable Souchandra Kumar. Though he was wearing
a bulletproof breast plate, it went through a gap between the breast plate
and his armpit and penetrated his heart.
Though Akbar Bhai had been killed, the situation in Sopur remained
precarious. More than anything, the action showed that maintaining a few
posts in the towns was becoming too hazardous. Commandant Bal told his
superiors, ‘Either we carry out operations on a large scale and flush out the
terrorists from the town and dominate it, or we should withdraw our troops
from the J & K Bank post to avoid undue casualties.’
In Sopur’s outskirts too, the Hizb retained considerable capability. In
mid-September, a BSF party, out on reconnaissance in a large village,
Adipur, abutting Sopur, was ambushed and the battle that developed spread
to the town and involved the entire mehmaan mujahideen group of the
Hizbul Mujahideen located there.
After the August action, the militants decided that they needed some
depth to their defences in Sopur. So they decided to establish themselves in
nearby Adipur as well. Located on the shores of the Wullar lake and
surrounded by forests, apple orchards and standing crops of maize, criss-
crossed by water channels debouching onto the lake, it was an ideal area for
the movement of militants in and out of Sopur.
This information alarmed the 41st Bn BSF, which was responsible for the
security of the area. Their worry focused on their ability to defend a major
position located in the Indian Technical Institute (ITI), a polytechnic
institution on the Bandipur road. The second-in-command of the batallion,
P.L. Bidhu, decided to reconnoitre the village on 20 September with a
platoon. It was an operation that extracted a heavy price in terms of the
militants’ reaction.
Having checked the area around the lake and two small dams, the platoon
was moving towards Adipur when at about 11.30 a.m., it came under fire
from militants firing from the houses on the outer fringes of the village.
Bidhu decided to split his group and sent fifteen men along with Assistant
Commandant Amar Singh Bhati to loop around the village. At the same
time, he ordered his men to move towards the ambush to break it. But it
soon became clear that their opponents were too well-entrenched. Both
groups were now pinned down and Bhati sustained a bullet injury on his
thigh. Lance Naik Zafar Ali and Constable Shiv Shankar Kumar had been
shot dead as they attempted to storm one of the houses, and Constable
Shyam Manohar was hit by a bullet in his wrist and was unoperative.
Reinforced, the militants were now moving in for the kill and the entire
BSF platoon was in danger of being wiped out.
Even as Bidhu realized that he was in a tough spot and began radioing for
help, militants started jamming his transmissions. Unable to get through to
the ITI post, with great difficulty they did manage to convey an SOS to the
battalion headquarters, which in turn contacted the ITI post to send
reinforcements. It was now 12.30 p.m. and the engagement had been going
on for an hour and a half. In the meantime, Head Constable V.K. Pathak and
Constable Bhupen Das were also hit, the latter succumbing to his injuries.
Both BSF groups were now encircled as Bidhu’s attempt to link up with
Bhati proved futile.
As soon as the headquarters received the SOS, Deputy Commandant
Sultan Ahmed rushed to the ITI and tried to establish contact with the
platoon to determine its location. But heavy jamming made communication
difficult. At the same time, he contacted the Baramula area headquarters of
the BSF.
 A team from the 65th Bn punched through an ambush and reached the
ITI post by about 3.30 p.m. In the meantime, DC Sultan Ahmed had also
contacted the nearby 5th Guards unit of the Army and by late afternoon,
two companies of the unit set off towards the area. One of the companies
moved to block the route of reinforcement for the militants, and the other
moved to the site of the ongoing battle.
At this time BSF reinforcements also came through. The 65th Bn BSF
commandant now decided to send an armoured vehicle to rescue the
trapped teams. But the going was tough since the militants had created
roadblocks by placing boulders and other rubble which were not easy to
remove as the firing was continuing. It took two more hours and the
combined efforts of the Army and the BSF to clear the area of the remaining
militants who melted away, carrying most of their dead with them.
After the establishment of the unified command, it was decided that a
general offensive would be launched to clear militants from their
strongholds. The plan to clear the militants out of Sopur was code-named
Sahayak (Helper) and carefully planned because of what had happened in
January. It was divided into four phases: Operation Sahayak I on 7 October
1993; II beginning 28 October; III on 26 November; and IV on 20
December. The first and second phase of the operation was almost
concurrent to the Hazratbal operation in Srinagar.
The task given to the Army was a delicate one. It was asked to clear the
town of militants, but at the same time ensure that collateral damage did not
occur, or was kept to a minimum. The strongly entrenched militant
presence, and that too, dominated by the mehmaan mujahideen, made the
task a daunting one, additionally so because there was no precise
intelligence as to the number of militants and their strong points. Estimates
varied between 100 and 400.
The Army’s plan was conceived on the assumption that a battle in the
town had to be avoided at any cost even while convincing the militants
within that the Army was indeed willing to destroy the town if need be. Use
of ‘psy ops’ or psychological operations ranged from the somewhat fatuous
warnings against cohabitation with the foreign mercenaries because of the
danger of AIDS, to a demonstration of firepower in the form of assembled
armoured BMP infantry combat vehicles.
The Sahayak operations involved some two brigades, a battalion of
Mechanized Infantry in BMP vehicles, Mi-25 attack helicopters, as well as
a number of BSF units. Overall command was by the GoC-in-C, 8th
Mountain Division, Maj. Gen. S.S. Grewal.
The plan of operation in Sahayak I, beginning 7 October, was to establish
BSF posts along the main road and other vantage points dominating the
main road going to Kupwara. At this stage, the militants assumed that the
security forces were merely acting to protect the convoys going to Kupwara
from ambush and the action went largely unchallenged.
There was a lull thereafter. The BSF strengthened their bunkers and
additional bulletproof vehicles were visible, making it clear that there
would be another round of operations. On 28 October, the Army made its
appearance and began to bombard the town with messages on the futility of
militancy, the rapacity of the Afghan mujahideen and on the necessity of
avoiding physical contact with them since some of them were HIV positive.
Then, on the morning of 26 November, moving in the pre- dawn
darkness, BMPs of the mechanized infantry, with soldiers of the J & K
Rifles riding in them, drove through to the main Iqbal Chowk and took up
positions around it. At the same time, six companies from the north and six
from the south began cordon-and-search operations in a designated area to
secure the main road to Bandipur.
In the Iqbal Market area, there was resistance to the cordon and search
and there were several firefights in which eleven militants were killed.
Later, the Hizbul Mujahideen claimed that 200 people had died, but that
was more to justify the muted response. The lull between 28 October and 26
November and the conspicuous activity was meant to enable the militants to
heed the warning and escape, which they apparently did, leaving a
screening force behind.
The operation was not quite over. By the end of Sahayak II, the entire
market and the chowk, the roads to Kupwara and Bandipur and the southern
half of Sopur, had been secured. The BSF had constructed five new
interlocking bunker systems to dominate the road to Bandipur.
Sahayak III, again, came suddenly, a month later on 19 December when
security forces moved, again in pre-dawn darkness across the Jhelum near
the ruined bridge to the heart of the town and from the Iqbal Chowk to
secure all of northern Sopur. It began constructing BSF posts in the Jama
Masjid and Baba Yousuf areas. This time not even a shot was fired. The
militants had disappeared.

Militant versus Militant

Through 1993, even as the insurgents waged a full-fledged battle against the
security forces, they also stepped up their vicious war against each other.
The strength of the Hizbul Mujahideen and its desire to win by the gun
what it could not otherwise, led to conflicts with almost all other militant
groups. The longest lasting battle was with the JKLF. But subsidiary battles
seemed to erupt every now and then with the People’s Conference and its
tanzeem, the Al Barq, the People’s League and its armed wing, the Al
Jehad, as well as the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, but the most bitter appeared to
be with the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen. Usually such quarrels seemed to play
themselves out in kidnapping or beating up each other’s leaders and
activists and the snatching away of each other’s arms. But there were
instances of torture and assassination and consequent bad blood.
The persistent quarrels came in the face of great efforts to promote unity.
There was only so much that could be done by the handlers across the
border or through the mechanism of the United Jehad Council. The ISI’s
leverage was limited. They controlled the flow of weapons and ammunition
into the valley, but there was enough of a black market to make available
the requirements of small tanzeems. But it was Pakistan’s ‘original sin’ of
stabbing the JKLF in the back in 1990–91, and the consequent roiling of the
ambience of the ‘azadi’ struggle that created this problem.
In 1993, even while the ISI was increasingly relying on Pakistani and
Afghan recruits, it tried everything it could to jump-start the flagging
morale of the valley’s Kashmiri movements. It was clear by now that the
Kashmiris were no great fighters. By culture, temperament and inclination,
they were not violent people and neither did they feel the need to become
so. The Pakistani authorities had high hopes from Ahsan Dar. They paid
him Rs 4 lakh per month, and provided his Muslim Mujahideen cadre with
special training lasting a three-month period. In 1993, Ahsan Dar, who had
no love lost for the Hizbul Mujahideen, began making efforts to get the Al
Barq, the Al Jehad and other smaller groups to join him in a new United
Supreme Command Council. The goal seemed to be motivated by a desire
to create an organisation that could take on the Hizbul Mujahideen as well
as the Indian security forces.
The ISI now also tried to woo back the JKLF. In June 1993, Javed Mir
‘Nalqa’, Chief Commander Altaf Qadri and Deputy Finance Chief Bashir
Ahmed Indrabi went to Pakistan again. Though the JKLF had almost ceased
to be an effective tanzeem, it retained a formidable support structure in the
heart of the insurgency—Srinagar. Nalqa and his team went from India to
Nepal, where they contacted Pakistani ISI officials. They were then flown
to Teheran and from there to Islamabad. If Nalqa’s own account of his
1990–91 visit is true, he could not but have been apprehensive. He had been
detained and tortured by the ISI, which wanted him to declare his affinity
for Pakistan.
But this time, when the valley’s JKLF team arrived in Islamabad, the ISI
welcomed it with open arms. It was received by a delegation of ISI
personnel at the VIP section of the airport. In their discussions, Pakistani
officials Javed Faisal, Col. Sumail and Iftiaq tried to persuade the JKLF to
throw in its lot with the United Jehad Council, which essentially meant an
abandonment of the JKLF’s ‘azadi’ platform’ In turn, the Pakistanis
promised the JKLF an immediate one-time payment of Rs 2 crore and Rs
50 lakh per month for weapons and logistics.
Three years into an armed struggle they had launched, the JKLF leaders,
most of them in jail, were desperately seeking ways to revitalize their
movement and to establish their relevance in a situation where between
them the millstones of the Indian security forces, the Hizbul Mujahideen
and the mehmaan mujahideen were grinding down the will of the valley’s
Kashmiri ‘azadi’ movement.
Despite the last-minute effort, the JKLF was more or less through with
the armed struggle though another year would elapse before it declared a
unilateral ceasefire. In an interview with journalist Binoo Joshi at the
Central Jail in Jammu in May, Yasin Malik made it clear that his outfit had
not abandoned its ‘azadi’ platform. Rejecting suggestions that his tanzeem
was favoured by India, Malik said that there could be no dialogue with the
Indian authorities as long as they insisted that it be within the purview of
the Indian Constitution.
But there was more than a hint of reflection on Malik’s part when he
spoke of the limited role of the gun. He claimed that people like him had
taken up guns when their ‘non-violent’ struggle of 1988 failed to yield
results. ‘For us the gun’s role is limited to forcing the concerned parties to
sit across the negotiating table,’ he declared.
So changed was the climate and so dominant the formerly marginalized
Jamaatis that when the Mahaz-e-Azadi leader, Azam Inquilabi, called for a
Save Kashmir Movement from a London platform in February 1993, the
Hizbul Mujahideen coldly termed the idea as ‘unfortunate’ and charged that
Inquilabi’s ‘secular’ proposal was not acceptable to them. Indeed, they
charged that the platform had been engineered by Farooq Abdullah. In their
view, the movement was now out of ‘Indian’ hands and no ‘inquilabi’
(revolutionary) or ‘junooni’ (mad man) could change that.
The Save Kashmir Movement sought to get a bunch of overseas
Kashmiris together to approach the governments of India and Pakistan so as
to facilitate a conference of Kashmiri leaders from various fields for
drafting a ‘peace plan’ which was to be submitted to the governments of
India and Pakistan and the UN.
The Hizb did not miss the significance of the appeal to other leaders to
join the movement. The list included Shabbir Shah, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq,
Maulana Abbas Ansari, Yasin Malik, A.G. Lone, Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat
and others, but pointedly left out S.A.S, Gilani or any functionary of the
Jamaat.
 But the struggle to get India out of the valley still united all the groups,
and this alone provided the glue for the various patch up efforts. In mid-July
the Hizbul Mujahideen and the JKLF once again agreed to bury the hatchet
and cooperate. Their leaders declared that they had directed different units
and district commanders to ‘strictly’ adhere to fresh orders in this respect.
They started cooperating in calling for bandhs and joint action in Srinagar.
But this short-lived unity was derailed by the continuing attacks by the
Hizbul Mujahideen on JKLF cadres. On 30 September, two Hizb activists
shot Ghulam Mohammed Mir, a leading JKLF activist, Imam of the Hanifa
Jama Masjid, as well as the superintendent of the SMHS. A JKLF statement
pointedly demanded that the APHC punish the killers ‘under Islamic law’.
The APHC set up a committee to look into the affair but little came of it.
On 6 October, another JKLF statement said its ‘zonal commander’, Riaz
Ahmed Lone, was shot by some ‘known’ people in Sangrama along with his
colleague, Nazir Ahmed Shah. In November, when Parvez Ahmed ‘Bilal’
was gunned down, Rafiq Ahmed Dar, acting chief of the JKLF, said that he
had been shot by Hizbul Mujahideen elements. From across the border in
Muzaffarabad, Javed Mir declared that the JKLF would avenge the act and
called on the APHC to find out the killers, failing which they remained free
to take any action they deemed fit.
The Ikhwan and the Hizbul Mujahideen had begun the year well with a
meeting between their leaders, Omar Hayat and Syed Salahuddin,
promising to end the fraternal strife and to coordinate their activity. But
things did not stay this way as in May, the Hizbul Mujahideen kidnapped
and subsequently killed Ikhwan Baramula District Commander Manzoor
Ahmed Mir. In retaliation, the Ikhwan took a number of Hizbul Mujahideen
and Jamaat activists hostage. A ‘committee of elders’ was called on to
mediate in the dispute and its decision was that the ceasefire be maintained
and hostages and arms be returned.
While the security forces were not able to reduce the violence to create
conditions conducive for elections as the administration wanted, they were
able to impose a steady attrition on the militant groups and their leaders. At
the beginning of the year, in April, the Hizbul Mujahideen had lost its top-
most leader, Maqbool Illahi. At the end of the year, it lost another, Ghulam
Mohammed Mir alias Shamsul Haq, its acting supreme commander. Mir
was killed when the Army surrounded his hideout at Gatapora village in
Badgam on 15 December.
At a meeting of its military command council in Srinagar in January
1994, Hizb General Secretary Maqbool Alam admitted that it had suffered
its highest losses in 1993. He disclosed that the outfit had lost 675 cadres in
action against the security forces. The administration’s estimates were along
similar lines, noting that in addition to the top commanders, the Hizb had
lost at least fifty area commanders and district commanders.
Other top Hizbul Mujahideen combatants had died or been arrested, such
as mehmaan mujahideen Akbar Bhai, Raja Khalid Manhas, as well as
Zulkur Nain and Abdul Rauf. The Harkat-ul-Jehad Islami suffered the loss
of Mansur Langaryal. The A1 Jehad’s ‘supreme commanders’ kept getting
arrested in almost bimonthly succession. Ghulam Mohiuddin alias Khalil-
ur-Rehman, a supreme commander of the Al Jehad, was killed on 23
October. The Jehad Force’s Bashir Ahmed was arrested and his
predecessors, Jamal Afghani and Aziz-ur-Rehman, were killed. The Jamiat-
ul- Mujahideen’s commander-in-chief, Mohammed Ramzan Sofi alias
Ghulam Rasool Shah, and Gen. Abdullah were arrested in September.
The biggest catch of all on 19 December was Master Ahsan Dar. Acting
on a tip-off, the security forces raided a house in the Jawaharnagar locality
of Srinagar and arrested him, bringing to naught the ISI’s plan of reviving
militancy under his leadership.
 7
Hazratbal and After

On the afternoon of 15 October 1993, A.K. Suri, inspector- general of the J

& K Police, called on Lt Gen. M.A. Zaki, adviser (home) to the governor, at
his Sonawar Bagh residence. He had bad news.
A state police head-constable, originally hailing from Poonch, had told
him that forty heavily armed militants with as many as twelve UMGs had
taken shelter in the shrine of Hazratbal. Worse, another constable, Ghulam
Mohammed Shah, with known links to the Jamaat-e-Islami, had
information that someone had cut two of the five locks to the doors that
lead to the cabinet housing the relic.
In view of the sensitivity of the area, the administration had permitted the
JKAP, which had some barracks nearby, to look after the security in the
environs of Hazratbal. Armed guards of the police force were posted around
the shrine, but it was well known that they usually saw nothing and heard
nothing.
Ever since the rebellion had broken out, Indian security officials had
crossed their fingers and hoped that the shrine at Hazratbal, also known as
the Asaar Sharif or Dargah, would stay out of harm’s way.
After the Sopur massacre earlier that year, the governor had made a list
of areas which the Army could enter only with his permission. Hazratbal
topped that list. In April, the Army during the sweep of a neighbouring area,
came under fire from the shrine and surrounded it. The then security
adviser, Lt Gen. D.D. Saklani, promptly ordered the Army off.
The Asaar Sharif housed no ordinary relic. What it had. was the Moe-i-
Muqqudas, said to be a hair of Prophet Mohammed that had been enshrined
in a quartz case in the dargah, which is also called Madina Sani, the second
Madina by the locals. While the Wahabi or Arab brand of Islam has tended
to disdain such relics as being tantamount to idolatry, most Kashmiri
Muslims passionately believe that the Moe-i-Muqqudas is their most
precious cultural possession. Devotees flock to the shrine for offering
namaz as well as to witness the ritual deedar or glimpse of the relic.
In 1963 its loss had provoked a virtually uncontrollable frenzy of rioting
and public protest, and given rise to a whole generation of politicians in the
valley, especially the then eighteen- year-old Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq. For
this reason, especially so in the circumstances of 1993, any threat to the
relic, or its loss, had disturbing consequences.
Confronted with the news Suri had for him, Zaki immediately summoned
other senior officials, and by 5.45 that afternoon, top officers of the Army,
the BSF, the CRPF, Chief Secretary Sheikh Ghulam Rasool, Home
Secretary Mehmood-ur-Rehman, and Commissioner (Srinagar Division)
Wajahat Habibullah were deep into a crisis meeting. There was worry that
Hizbul Mujahideen activists owing allegiance to the orthodox Jamaat were
not above staging an event to discredit the government. In April, security
forces found explosives in another shrine, the Mazar-e-Shoda in Khanyar.
In early October, an attempt was made to burn the shrine of Makhdoom
Sahib in the Hari Parbat area.
There were no two opinions about the implications of the news, and Zaki
told the gathered officials that he had informed the governor and Union
Home Secretary N.N. Vohra in New Delhi that an attempt had been made to
steal the relic. Till that point, no effort had been made to determine whether
or not the reports were true. The best way to do that, one of the officials
suggested, was to ask the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Auqaf Trust that
administered the shrine. Its chairman, Ghulam Qadir Draboo, was not
available, but the secretary, Abdul Rashid Chisti, soon arrived. What he had
to say was both disquieting and reassuring. He told the meeting that since
the 1963 crisis, there were as many as five different locks on the shrine’s
two doors and the inner sanctum housing the relic, and the keys for each of
them were held by different persons to prevent any individual from being
coerced to steal the relic. The bad news was, he said, that he too had heard
reports that the keys to the innermost lock were not fitting, suggesting that
the lock had been changed or that the person holding it had lost the original
key. The trust, he assured the meeting, would change the locks as soon as it
verified the report.
This conundrum now consumed the meeting. Was this as innocent as it
appeared? Could it be possible that the person who had lost the key was
conspiring with some people to steal the relic? Some officers suggested that
the report be verified by asking the trust to go and physically check out the
situation. After all, it was no secret that some militant groups had been
using the shrine for shelter. But they were overruled.
Zaki insisted that the matter was too sensitive and that the administration
had to act immediately. Since it would take the Army some time to get itself
organized, it was decided to send in the BSF immediately to surround the
shrine, and replace it later in the night by the Army. Even before going to
Raj Bhavan to report to the governor on the outcome of the meeting, Zaki
ordered the BSF in. When he returned, he informed his colleagues that the
governor had approved of the course of action, but had ordered that the
Army be sent in to replace the BSF immediately.
This was somewhat curious since the BSF was as capable of carrying out
a static siege, where everyone knew there were little or no chances of a
direct assault on the shrine; on the other hand, the governor may have
wanted a more disciplined force to handle what was clearly a sensitive
situation.
This is the conventional account of how the Hazratbal crisis began, but
there are some tantalizing clues to suggest that this could have been a
carefully contrived psy ops or psychological warfare operation with a
complex set of political and military goals.
Officials say that at one level, the tough response was part of the counter-
offensive that had been decided on by the May meeting that had seen the
induction of the 39th Division and of additional BSF personnel in the
valley. One of the elements of this offensive was Operation Sahayak I,
begun in Sopur on 8 October with the goal of ending the security forces’ no
go status there.
The psy ops plan was based on the knowledge that any cordon at any
time would net a couple of militants in the shrine. Such a psy ops exercise
was needed and necessary, and in view of its goal of defeating militancy
without the use of bullets, indeed, laudable. Its aim was to dramatically
demonstrate the irresponsible and perfidious nature of the militants who
were not above using Kashmir’s most sacred shrine for their nefarious
purposes. The action would portray the Indian Army as a tough but
accountable force, capable of restrained action in the face of such
irresponsible behaviour. Finally, by compelling the surrender of the
militants holed up inside the shrine through a protracted siege, the militants
would be belittled in the eyes of the Kashmiri people.
All these were acceptable goals, but in conducting the drama around
Kashmir’s most sacred shrine, the authorities were taking a risk. If the
Army had to storm the shrine, and the militants destroyed or damaged the
edifice or the relic, the Indian authorities would be blamed for it. On the
other hand, if the militants inflicted the damage, the government would
again be chastised for laying the siege and then not saving the relic.
Undoubtedly, they were aware of the risks. This was one reason for the
Army being there, and not the BSF. From the outset it appeared that the
soldiers surrounding the shrine had been given specific instructions as to
their behaviour and the circumstances in which they were to use their
weapons.
There seems to have been another subsidiary political goal in the
operation, not directly related to the Kashmir situation. Prime Minister
Narasimha Rao, who seems to have personally authorized the action and
remained in close touch with the government top brass throughout, was
vitally interested in its outcome. He was concerned about elections to the
state assemblies of Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and
Madhya Pradesh which were staggered across the month of November.
They were being held because the BJP-controlled state governments there
had been dismissed in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. A
tough line in dealing with Muslim secessionists holed up in a shrine could
go down well with audiences that were being primed by BJP propaganda
that the Congress was appeasing the Muslims.
Accounts of the first crisis meeting and Zaki’s actions suggest that he
was working on a pre-arranged course that had the approval of the highest
in the land. This was obvious at the meeting when Zaki stressed the need
for speedy action, overruled suggestions that the information be first
verified, and immediately ordered the BSF to cordon the shrine. Only then
did he go to meet the governor.
The Asaar Sharif at Hazratbal symbolizes the essence of the Kashmiri
brand of Islam. Its history, as recounted in Sheikh Abdullah’s
autobiography, began when a hair of Prophet Mohammed was brought from
Mecca to the subcontinent in 1635 by one of the keepers of the faith in the
Holy Kà aba. A Kashmiri trader bought it from him at a great price, but
when he was taking it back, Emperor Aurangzeb ordered it confiscated and
placed in the dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti at Ajmer. That night the
emperor had a dream in which the Prophet appeared, asking him why he
wanted to stop his journey to Kashmir. The emperor got the divine message
and the relic was sent to Kashmir under royal protection. It was originally
housed at another shrine, the Dargah- e-Naqshbandia in the downtown
Khanyar area, and later shifted to its present site, which was a Mughal
garden touched by the Dal Lake, where it was housed in a traditional
pagoda-like wooden building.
Later, Sheikh Abdullah, as the chairman of the Auqaf Trust, had this
replaced by the present domed Islamic structure. According to his own
account, more than Rs 1 crore was spent in constructing a new edifice of
white marble that came from the same place that had provided marble for
Taj Mahal. The central chamber, holding the Moe-i-Muqqudas, was
decorated by a chandelier imported from Czechoslovakia.
The polities of Srinagar in the 1930s was divided between the followers
of Sheikh Abdullah and the Mirwaiz-e-Kashmir Maulvi Yusuf Shah,
Beginning as allies united in the Muslim Conference, by 1939 they had
split, with the Maulvi having formed his own Azad Muslim Conference and
the Sheikh taking the bulk of the Muslim Conference to form the new
National Conference.
Religion and religious symbols were then, as now, an important element
in the political discourse of the valley and the Sheikh took several tactical
measures to counter the influence of the hereditary Mirwaiz. The first step
was to align himself with the junior Mirwaiz, Maulvi Ahmad Ullah
Hamadani of the Kankah-i-Muallah, the shrine of Mir Syed Ali Hamadani,
a saint who had done much to establish Islam in the valley. The second was
to expel the Ahmadiyas from the Muslim Conference.
An important component of the political struggle was a demand that all
shrines and mosques be handed over to the people. The Muslim Conference
helped in creating a Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Auqaf Trust or an Islamic
Endowments Committee, and the historic shrines and mosques were turned
over to them.
The grand strategic stroke was the Sheikh’s assumption of the
chairmanship of the Auqaf Trust. All this was devotion, but it gave the
Sheikh a great opportunity to build up his political base. The Shers, as his
group was known, had been assigned the Pathar Masjid for their Friday
prayers, and this was the place where the Sheikh delivered his political
discourse. But soon he shifted to the Hazratbal, where the Moe-i-Muquddas
was kept. The devout who clustered to Jama Masjid on Fridays, the day of
the Mirwaiz’s sermon, were those who lived mainly in Srinagar. Hazratbal
attracted devotees from across the valley.
Friday after Friday, the thousands of Kashmiris who came to the dargah
to offer namaz, heard a pre-khutba (sermon) speech by the Sheikh. In view
of this platform and the land reforms that his government implemented, the
Sheikh became virtually impregnable in Kashmiri politics.
Hazratbal was then a stronghold of the National Conference, Since many
of the JKLF cadre originated in the National Conference, it was not
surprising that this area became their stronghold. Indeed, their main office
was in a house adjacent to the shrine. All around it, beyond the mohallas
around the shrine, is the university area, and its students’ hostels had always
been a hotbed of radicalism.
 Nevertheless, the shrine was spared the ravages of the rebellion between
1990 and 1993. Notwithstanding their support for azadi, most Kashmiris
would not have appreciated the use of Asaar Sharif for overtly political
purposes.
By 1993, things had changed; the state had seen three years of an
increasingly intense battle between the militants and the security forces.
Militants on the run, or just passing through, found the shrine a convenient
shelter when they realized that there was a sort of ‘hands off' policy towards
it. It became a place for militants to meet, for propaganda where various
groups distributed their pamphlets and recruited the young. Following the
April incident when the Army was called off, the militants were
emboldened. On 31 August, on Id Milad-un-Nabi or the Prophet’s birth
anniversary, various groups even had an exhibition of arms where the JKLF,
the Al Umar and some other groups displayed some 300 weapons for a
week, as well as distributed propaganda material.

The Siege
By the morning of 16 October, not only had the Army been deployed, but
another act in the drama had unfolded. A fire broke out in a structure in the
complex, a two-storeyed building called Noor Khan, some distance from
the dargah, used for namaz by women who came to the shrine. Fire engines
were quickly brought in to control the blaze.
When journalists reached the scene early that morning, the flames were
gutting the building, and the Army was occupying the buildings and
localities adjacent to the shrine. They were told by Brig. S.P.S, Kanwar, the
Army officer in-charge, that the fire had broken out a little after midnight
and been preceded by five explosions. The brigadier charged that militants,
now taking shelter inside the dargah, had been seen sprinkling kerosene on
the structure. The account of explosions and the kerosene sprinkling
appeared contrived, to say the least, but it was sufficiently dramatic for the
authorities to convey to the people of the valley the sense of threat to their
beloved dargah. The crisis mood was accentuated by the decision to declare
a curfew over large sections of the city.
Later, journalists were invited to another press conference at the Tourist
Reception Centre, where DGP M.N. Sabharwal, Additional Chief Secretary
(Home) Mehmood-ur-Rehman and Suri gave the official version of what
had happened. Sabharwal said that it had been brought to the government’s
notice that two locks to the outer door of the shrine had been replaced and a
criminal conspiracy of a most heinous nature had come to light to steal the
holy relic to create a law and order problem. However, according to one
account, he also confessed that when checked, the locks were found to be
intact.
At this stage, the district administration was asked by Gen. Zaki to make
arrangements to house some 3000 people who were being cleared out of the
Halwai and Dhobi mohallas, adjacent tothe shrine, which were being
occupied by the Army. With the help of the Kashmir University officials,
these people were provided accommodation in the Regional Engineering
College complex.
There is little doubt that the militants, belonging to disparate groups,
were taken by surprise at the turn of events. Their problem was twofold.
One was to get out safely, the other to convince the people that the Moe-i-
Muqqudas was unharmed. They had no knowledge of the government’s
intentions, but they could assume the worst, and their worry was that should
something untoward happen, they would be blamed for harming the Asaar
Sharif.
So when Suri established contact with the militants within, they told him
that they were willing to hand over the shrine to an ulema, and that they
wanted the curfew lifted and people permitted to freely come to the shrine.
The idea was that if a large number of people came, they could mingle with
them and escape.
As a matter of caution, they claimed that they had laid explosive charges
everywhere in the complex which they would blow up if the authorities
tried to force their way in. Further, there were 170 persons, including
women and children inside, and all of them had expressed a desire to
remain with the militants.
News of the fire and the siege raised tension in Srinagar. The secretary of
the Auqaf Trust denied that any locks had been tampered with and called on
the people to protest. Condemnation of the government’s actions came in
thick and fast. The JKLF called on the people to assemble at Lai Chowk
and march to Hazratbal. The Hizb gave a call for a two-day bandh. S.A.S.
Geelani accused the government of setting the Noor Khan on fire. Calling
on the government to lift the siege and restore normality, he charged that the
whole story that militants wanted to steal the relic was a figment of
someone’s imagination.
Maulvi Mohammed Yaseen Hamadani, the mirwaiz of the Hamadania
Masjid and patron of the Jamiat-e-Hamadania, demanded the immediate
withdrawal of the Army. Only the Hizbullah condemned the militants in the
shrine, arguing, in a statement, that militants ought to come out of the
shelter of various shrines and fight it out with the security forces.
The militants inside turned out to be a disparate lot. The best known and
perhaps the most senior was Mohammed Idris Khan, intelligence chief of
the JKLF. There were at least two Hizbul Mujahideen men who
mysteriously vanished on 31 October, sixteen days before the siege ended,
through the Army cordon. Shahid Latif and Mohammed Zuber Malik
belonged to Azad Kashmir and were members of the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen.
Both were sheltering in the shrine the night it was surrounded.
But once trapped, all the militants were in the soup. It was not just the
question of escape that bothered them but the possibility that the
government would give them safe passage and then break the lock and pin
the blame for attempted sacrilege on them.
Thinking in the councils of the Hurriyat was identical. Most of them
believed that the whole thing was a sham. Maulana Abbas Ansari, one of
the APHC members, contacted the administration and told them that he
could persuade the boys to leave in a couple of hours. Suri put up the
militants’ and Ansari’s proposals to Zaki who, in turn, transmitted them to
the governor and these were promptly and not surprisingly rejected.
 The following day, on 17th October, when Suri conveyed this decision to
them, the militants declared that they would only deal with Divisional
Commissioner Habibullah or Chief Secretary Sheikh Ghulam Rasool.
Within the government councils it was felt that while there was need to
maintain a dialogue, sending the chief secretary, the head of the Kashmir
administration, could create complications since it would be difficult to
review or resile from any commitment he made. So, Habibullah was
ordered to go and negotiate the surrender of the militants.
When Habibullah, accompanied by Suri, first walked up to the militants
at 2 p.m., they invited him in to see for himself that the relic was intact and
the locks had not been tampered with as alleged by the government.
Habibullah was inclined to walk in, but was restrained by Suri, who said
there was a danger that the militants may take him hostage.
The militants came up with the same three demands that they had been
repeating since the first day: first, the Army be removed and the curfew
lifted; second, in the Kashmiri tradition, an ulema or group of Islamic
teachers inspect the relic; and third, if they confirmed that no harm had
been done to it, the militants be allowed to leave unconditionally.
Negotiations were conducted by two persons with a blanket or shawl
wrapped over their heads to prevent identification. They were later
identified as JKLF ‘intelligence chief’ Mohammed Yusuf Khan aka
Mohammed Idris, and Umar, a member of the somewhat more shadowy
Operation Balakote group, owing allegiance to Azam Inquilabi.
When Habibullah reported their conditions to the governor, he was
instructed that the only commitment that could be given was for an
unconditional surrender, with the guarantee of a fair trial. He was also told
by the governor not to bother to return for more talks on that day.
Obviously, there was some interest in stretching the crisis.
The Army now played its part. Because of the siege, no food had been
going in. But suddenly it was discovered that the shrine was getting its
supply of water and electricity and the Army ordered them cut off. But it
took them a few more days to learn that there was a telephone with an
unlisted number inside the shrine, and have that disconnected as well.
 The next day, on 18 October, the militants declared that they would
negotiate only in the presence of the media, For obvious reasons, the
administration rejected this idea and no talks were held that day. By now, a
large contingent of Indian and foreign print and TV journalists had arrived.
But they were kept well away from the area. On that day, the APHC gave an
ultimatum to the authorities to withdraw the siege by the following
afternoon, failing which they and their followers would march in thousands
to the shrine.
At this point, the government roped in two intermediaries, Abdul Majid
Wani, the father of the top JKLF leader, Ashfaq Majid Wani, who had died
in 1990, and Abdul Kabir Sheikh, the father of Hamid Sheikh, also part of
the HAJY group, who had died in November 1992.
The one consequence of this was that in their talks with Wani and Sheikh,
the militants dropped their demand for the Army’s removal. But having
seen the scope of the Army’s siege, and undoubtedly through conversations
with people outside the shrine via telephone and wireless, they could not be
sure as to the government’s aims. They still suspected that the government
planned to frame them for desecration of the shrine, and so they insisted
that a ritual inspection of the relic precede their safe passage.
Now came the subtle element in the psy ops. The government let it be
known through leaks that while it was toying with the idea of permitting a
safe passage for the militants, with or without weapons, it was the Army
that was bent on pressing for surrender.
It was now made to appear that having been called out, the Army felt that
it could not accept anything short of surrender. The civil administration, on
the other hand, was seen as arguing that in view of the sensitive nature of
the subject, a quick, peaceful defusing of the crisis was the best course to
take.
Both sides now readied for a showdown. The Army built up its positions
around the shrine’s perimeter while the militants built bunkers on top of the
old namaz hall, and on top of the minaret. In addition, they wired up the
dome, re-emphasizing that they would blow up the entire structure in the
event of an assault.
 Yet, there was a strange quality to the siege. On 19 October, the fourth
day, confident that the Army was not authorized to shoot, some of the
besieged persons calmly walked out of the dargah to an adjacent room and
dragged three sacks of grain across to the main shrine.
On the same day, a big procession organized by the Hurriyat marched
towards the shrine. However, well away from it, they were challenged by a
BSF cordon, and when they failed to disperse, they were lathi charged.
Then, in front of the media, the BSF personnel focused their ire on Abdul
Ghani Lone, leading the procession, and thrashed him mercilessly. Echoes
of this event came from Washington where Assistant Secretary Robin
Raphel told members of a congressional committee that her office was
making every effort to find out what had happened to him and had urged the
Indian government to provide him medical care.
News of this event must have reached the militants inside for their mood
turned hostile. Even as Habibullah conferred with Wani and Sheikh at Suri’s
house, the militants did something dramatic. They walked up to where the
media personnel were holding their vigil and showered abuses on the
commissioner, referring to him as a paid Muslim and an agent of the
‘Hindu’ government.
Habibullah, however, had been pushing forward the view that food be
allowed inside the shrine as an inducement for getting the militants to
cooperate. He had spoken to Rajesh Pilot about this and he also took it up
with the governor. Both were supportive of the idea and the governor gave
his approval on the 20th. But the opportunity seemed to have been lost. So,
the next day, when the intermediaries, namely Wani and Sheikh, went to
offer food to the militants, they were turned down and abused and accused
of having sold out to the government. At this point, they withdrew from the
negotiations.
New Delhi was keenly watching what was happening. It was the job of
Joint Secretary Madhukar Gupta to monitor the situation, but there were
other actors also showing an unusual degree of interest. The private
secretary to the prime minister, Ramu Damodaran, was in touch with
Habibullah, and on 19 October, the éminence grise of the government,
Amar Nath Verma, principal private secretary to Narasimha Rao, also got
into the act to find out what was happening.
On the 20th October when Habibullah spoke to Damodaran, he was told
that the prime minister wanted to talk to him. Rao came on the telephone
and told Habibullah to proceed on the lines he was working on, the so-
called soft line. Apparently, later Rao spoke to the governor and expressed
his approval of the course of action.
Hazratbal was being watched by those interested in the Kashmir issue
around the world. It was being projected as a case of Indian restraint and
reasonableness in the face of a serious threat from a bunch of terrorists,
exploiting a holy shrine. Indeed, Habibullah had even received a call on 21
October from L.M. Singhvi, India’s high commissioner in London, telling
him to keep up the good work since India was now winning the PR battle.
Public relations were trashed the next day, and the BSF’s already battered
reputation received a big dent. As part of the planned protests, people
gathered in Bijbehara Chowk to march to Hazratbal to pressure the
government to lift the siege. By 2.30 p.m., the crowd swelled to 5000. The
atmosphere was charged and at some point an altercation developed. BSF
personnel claimed that someone tried to snatch away the gun of a constable
and militants began firing from different sides. The BSF officials there said
that they retaliated, killing several militants, and that one of their number
was injured by a grenade blast.
Thirty-one people were killed that day and several times that number
wounded. According to the Kashmir Times of 2 November, the BSF brought
out an impressive list of militants who had been killed in their counter-fire
in Bijbehara. The BSF claimed that of the thirty-seven killed, there were
thirteen hardcore militants, seven from the JKLF, three from the Hizbul
Mujahideen and three from Al Jehad.
No one bought the story, neither the administration beleaguered in
Srinagar, nor the Union home ministry in New Delhi, nor the magistrate
who inquired into the event and not even the BSF’s internal inquiry. In an
interview to India Today, the governor acerbically remarked, ‘The BSF says
there were militants in the crowd, but I don’t think militants fire that
inaccurately. That is why I have ordered a magisterial inquiry.’ A BSF court
tried an officer and some others in 1995. Everyone was found not guilty. An
additional probe concerning a sub-inspector led to another trial in which he,
too, was found innocent.
The government’s chief negotiator, Habibullah, was despondent and
conveyed his frustration to the prime minister that evening. Later, the
governor summoned the commissioner and told him that storming the
shrine was out of the question and that he, Habibullah, now had a free hand
to negotiate the end of the siege.
The terrible killings of 22 October seemed to have brought the militants
also in touch with reality. When Habibullah spoke to Idris for more than an
hour the next day, the latter accepted the government’s offer to send in food
and medicine. Two Hazratbal locals went into the shrine with packets of
food and medicines for thirty-two people who, the militants said, were ill
inside.
On this day, 23 October, water and electricity were restored to the shrine
along with the telephone connection, the last at the request of the IB. This
immediately provided an alternative source of information to the militants
inside, and also to the authorities. Immediately, interviews were given to
journalists and information on what was happening outside went in.
In an interview to the Voice of America, a militant spokesman said there
were 200 people inside the shrine and that contaminated water may have
made some of them ill. He also declared that they had entered the shrine to
protect the relic, having found that there were no guards around the shrine.
But he emphatically denied that the militants had laid any explosive devices
around the shrine.
To emphasize the shift in the situation, the administration agreed to
provide hot food to the inmates. The Army appeared reluctant. They wanted
an assurance that the food would be served in the verandah outside since
they wanted to photograph the militants. Habibullah wanted to underscore
his success in getting the militants to accept the administration’s
intervention.
 When food was delivered on 24 October, the militants made it clear they
would not eat outside. Realizing that they were serious, Habibullah
conceded their point. From the railing, Brig. Kanwar bellowed, ‘Khana
andar nahin jaega!’ (The food will not go in.) Habibullah went across to
explain to him that this was a minor matter and that he had the governor’s
assent in any case. The media pounced on this as evidence of an
administration- Army rift over handling of the crisis.
The problem was seemingly compounded by Corps Commander Lt Gen.
S. Padmanabhan’s statement on TV that food had gone in against the
Army’s wishes. Army officials even alleged that some additional people had
entered the shrine. In view of the fact that they were conducting the siege,
this charge appeared somewhat strange.
The supply of food to the militants became a big issue because the BJP
decided to play up a campaign whose emotive slogan was ‘Biryani for the
terrorists, and bullets for the innocents,’ for use in the critical state assembly
elections.
The Army’s was not the only strange reaction to the food episode. Home
Minister Chavan rang up Gen. Zaki late that night and asked him to convey
to the governor that the supply of food was ill-advised and to tell
Habibullah ‘not to embarrass me’. However, the course had the backing of
not just the governor but the prime minister, who had called up earlier that
evening to convey his approval, with the message, ‘Keep on trying.’
Clearly, even the home minister was out of this decision-making loop.
Narasimha Rao was running with the hares and hunting with the hounds.
His goal was obvious. He was aware of the true dimensions of the psy ops
plan, but he also had to stave off the BJP threat in the assembly elections.
In the next few days a complicated three-way drama was played out:
between the militants and Habibullah on the terms of their surrender; a
feigned quarrel between the Army and the civil administration on the issue
of letting in food for the besieged; and one between the militants and those
inadvertently trapped with them over whether or not they should leave.
A farcical interlude was the intervention of the Jammu and Kashmir High
Court. On 20 October, it had, in response to a petition from the Auqaf Trust
and the High Court Lawyers’ Association, ordered senior advocate Zaffar A.
Shah to visit the shrine, and report on the conditions there. When Shah went
to the shrine, he was prevented from going in. However, the state
government appealed to the Supreme Court on the 25th, and Justice Ahmadi
modified the order, calling for Red Cross personnel to go in as
commissioners of the court instead of Shah. However, when the Red Cross
team went on the 27th, the militants turned it away.
This drama was, of course, on the public stage with scores of busy-bodies
briefing the media and playing the intermediary. But the key was the staged
good-cop-bad-cop routine played out by Habibullah and the Army. The
fiasco over food, staged before a full gallery of the media, seemed to
suggest that the Army and the administration were at loggerheads. But this
was part of the psy ops design.
Psy ops require subtlety and intelligence, things which sometimes go
against the grain of the Army’s style, especially the Indian Army which
emphasizes mechanical obedience. In sophisticated operations involving
psy ops and intelligence-related activity, only senior officials need to be in
the know, though the behaviour and decisions of those down the line can
spoil the show.
The governor was furious at the contradictory statements being attributed
to various officials and Army officers. He asked the Army to prevent a
recurrence of this and the Army chief, Gen. B.C. Joshi, nominated Maj.
Gen. Shankar Prasad to assist. Prasad, who was commanding the 12
Division in Jodhpur, was ordered to go to Srinagar. Here, wearing civilian
clothes, he established himself in an adjacent building near the site and
coordinated the action on behalf of the Army. His job was also to brief and
debrief Habibullah each time he talked to the militants, and to devise the
negotiation strategy.
By the 25th it appeared that a decision had been taken to terminate the
crisis. The Bijbehara killings had spooked the government. At this point,
Prime Minister Rao also got Rajesh Pilot, who had been out of the loop,
into the picture. He came up with the suggestion that the administration
accept the militants’ surrender, giving ironclad assurances that they would
be let off after a decent interval, a proposal that was eventually used. On 25
October, Shankar Prasad, who apparently had his mandate, told Habibullah
that he had to intensify the talks and try and get a settlement as soon as
possible.
The administration was now worried about the condition of the civilians
trapped inside. The militants apparently refused to let even the children go,
claiming that they were there of their own accord. They released one
seriously ill person, but not the others. Thereafter, they agreed to allow a
doctor in and he confirmed that some nine to ten persons were stricken with
gastroenteritis.
With the next Friday approaching, everyone wanted the crisis to end or at
least pretend they were working to end it. Even Idris, whom Habibullah met
on the morning of 26 October, said that they wanted an end to the crisis, but
he reiterated the earlier stand that the ulema come to the shrine to see the
condition of the relic. Later that day, however, he toughened his stand,
denouncing the negotiations as a farce.
The Army, through Gen. Prasad, now countered by telling Habibullah
that he, too, would have to harden his stand by demanding unconditional
surrender. Even while Habibullah was discussing the list of notables who
could come, Idris said that they would surrender, but carry four of their
arms with them. Habibullah knew that he could not get an approval for this
and told the militants so, but their reply was that this was their final offer,
though they would await his reply till late that night.
The next day, on the 27th, the militants refused any further discussions.
The administration now decided to get the APHC to mediate. State Chief
Secretary Sheikh Ghulam Rasool called up Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat, who in
turn again contacted Maulana Abbas Ansari, and the four of them went to
Mirwaiz Manzil to talk to Umar Farooq. The consensus seemed to be that
while the APHC had no objections to mediating, it was not appropriate for
the Mirwaiz to be involved. So Maulana Abbas Ansari, Prof. Abdul Ghani
and Mohammed Yaqub, a lawyer and spokesman for the Awami Action
Committee, were nominated to act.
 That evening at about 5 p.m., two persons, Shabbir, a dumb fifteen-year-
old boy, and Kasturi, a beggar; came out. While the former was taken away
by his mother, the latter was debriefed by the police.
The next morning on 28 October, Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat and Maulana
Abbas met state administration officials who put forward government
conditions for lifting of the siege.
The administration had already taken the decision to authorize any
agreement that would facilitate the departure of the militants sans their
arms. Later, this was confirmed with the two in a meeting at Raj Bhavan in
the presence of the governor. Gen. Rao conveyed the administration’s desire
to resolve the crisis peacefully in a separate meeting with the two leaders
alone.
The APHC leaders and other activists—Firdous Aisme, Hakim Ghulam
Rasul and Mohammed Yaqub—now proceeded to the shrine to talk to the
militants. They were in there for some three hours and discussed the various
options available. On their return, they met the governor and said they
would finalize a package the next day. Gen. Rao reiterated his keenness for
a settlement.
That evening, escorted by the Aquaf Trust chairman, G.Q. Draboo, four
doctors—chief medical officers of Srinagar and neighbouring districts,
appointed as Red Cross commissioners— were permitted by the militants to
enter the shrine and examine the inmates. They found eighty persons inside,
though they said there were some other people they were not allowed to
meet. There was just one woman among them and no child below twelve. A
number of people were ill from gastroenteritis, and two seriously so.
Apparently, there was no water or electricity and the bathrooms were in a
filthy condition.
The following day, Friday the 29th, was peaceful, without any tension or
untoward incident. The APHC team went in again and met the militants for
two hours. Having been in the shrine, the APHC leaders soon became aware
that there was little to substantiate the government’s statements that the
locks of the shrine had been tampered with. By this time, the comments of
Robin Raphel, US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, questioning
Kashmir’s accession to India, had been splashed across the newspapers of
the country. Sensing an opportunity, the APHC hardened its stand. They
now declared that a committee of the ulema, to verify the charge of some
tampering, was essential to any settlement. If the government’s claim was
true, they declared, exemplary punishment was to be given to the
perpetrators. If it were false, the Army was to lift its cordon and allow the
people inside to leave. For obvious reasons, this was unacceptable to the
government and the Hurriyat now pulled out of the negotiations.
However, there was another unexpected development. On 29 October,
based on the report of the commissioners it had sent the day before, the J &
K High Court had issued an interim order directing the Auqaf Trust to
supply food to the people trapped inside. The Trust was in no position to
implement the order and the Army was unwilling to do so. So the J & K Bar
Association, a body dominated by secessionists, went to the Supreme Court,
and on 2 November, the court passed an order that permitted subsistence-
level food and water supply. The order of the highest court of the land was
not something that either the government or the Army could ignore.
By now, the Army and the government had milked the crisis for whatever
it was worth. With the Supreme Court having ordered food for the besieged,
the stand-off codld be prolonged indefinitely. The order also gave the
militants a face-saving formula since they could argue that they had not
been starved out but were leaving in the interests of preserving the sanctity
of the shrine.
So, on that day, 2 November, a deal was quickly struck. The militants and
the inmates would surrender their weapons. While the civilians would be
released immediately after screening, the militants would be released after
more detailed debriefing.
But again something went askew. Surrender was to take place on 3
November, but the militants refused to come out. They had spotted a
Doordarshan TV crew near the gate they were supposed to leave from. Part
of the agreement was that their surrender would not be telecast à la Black
Thunder, the action in the Golden Temple, when the terrorist surrender was
lovingly replayed- again and again by the state-owned station to the point of
over- kill. The militants dug in their heels, declaring that they now anted the
Army cordon to be replaced by that of the JKAP, adding that the screening
would be done at the shrine.
There was one last twist in the complicated tale. Next morning,
Habibullah and Zaki went to the governor’s residence to get his approval
for removing the TV crew from the site. They were driving to Hazratbal
when on a roundabout, an Army one- tonne truck appeared, coming from
the wrong side. The driver had no time to brake and the truck swerved, but
hit a glancing blow on the right hand side of the car and dashed against a
pole. Both officials were injured, Habibullah seriously.
They were rushed to the Army hospital, but it did not have the facilities
to treat him. Security officials hesitated to send him to the militant-infested
SKIMS but the governor overruled them. The decision probably saved his
life. With Habibullah injured, who was to broker the deal? Since trust was
the key issue, the militants now baulked. Habibullah’s accident, they
believed, had been engineered by the Army which was opposing a deal, and
they were not sure whether they would honour a safe passage. The Ikhwan
declared in a press note that the accident, which coincidentally injured two
top Muslim officers of the administration, was actually part of a conspiracy
to destroy the shrine sacred to Kashmir.
The Hizbul Mujahideen claimed that its intelligence sources had
confirmed that the accident was actually engineered, and that the military
vehicle was planted to hit the car so as to kill both officials. The spokesman
even claimed that Habibullah had been arrested by the Army on 2
November and released because of the intervention of the Kashmir police.
In the atmosphere of the times, any story was true, depending on your point
of view.
The governor now asked Additional Chief Secretary Mehmood- ur-
Rehman and Lt Gen. D.D. Saklani to take up the negotiations, but they had
to rebuild the trust of the now rattled militants, Two rounds of talks failed to
yield anything, the government sticking to its view that surrender of the
militants was the bottom line for any agreement.
 New Delhi was now desperate. With the assembly elections over, the
government was now keen on a closure of the issue. V.K. Jain, special
secretary, was again despatched to Srinagar on 7 November. Jain ignored
Saklani and Rehman and went to Sheikh Ghulam Rasool, the chief
secretary, to revive the APHC participation in the negotiations. That night,
two persons nominated by the APHC, Majid Wani and Nurul Hassan,
former conservator of forests, met Jain and Rasool and had prolonged
discussions, and the following day they went into the shrine to talk to the
militants.
However, another two days of talks with the militants failed to yield a
solution because the formula proposed by Wani and Hassan was a rehash of
the earlier one: that the Army cordon be replaced by one of the JKAP; that
there be safe passage for the militants who would leave some of their arms
behind as well as a statement by the government that it had erred in
accusing the militants of tampering with the locks. An impasse of sorts now
developed.
The militants wanted to leave the shrine, give up their weapons and be
released after a decent interval. They wanted an assurance that there would
be no humiliating TV cameras.
This appeared to be the hitch, with the Army and elements of the home
ministry wanting to recoup their investment in their operation and insisting
on a televized surrender. Chief Secretary Sheikh Ghulam Rasool was asked
by the governor to go to New Delhi on 14 November and persuade the
prime minister’s office to get the Army and the home ministry to agree.
The next day, the administration had all its approvals and that night, on
15 November, three militants walked out and met Mehmood-ur-Rehman
and agreed to the modalities of surrender. But they wanted two witnesses.
So, Ghulam Nabi Daga and Ghulam Nabi Bakshi, imams of two local
mosques, and apparently close to the JKLF, were called in. It was in their
presence that, beginning around 2.30 a.m. on 16 November, under the
watchful eyes of the Army, the militants and their hostages streamed out in
batches of ten, from the northern Kanli Mohalla side of the shrine. Sixty-
two in all were taken to a half-way house, hastily rigged up at the Zakura
facility of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Fifteen AK-56s, a
Dragunov sniper rifle, a UMG, an RPG with one rocket, a pistol,
ammunition, grenades, two binoculars, a telescope, two walkie-talkie radios
and three IEDs were recovered.
There were no foreign nationals except the hapless Zubair Malik and
Shahid Latif from Azad Kashmir. Another fifteen persons had left the shrine
earlier. Six women had come out on the very first days of the crisis,
followed by Abdul Aziz Guroo who escaped on 18 October. A mute fifteen-
year-old boy from the Hazratbal locality and another person had escaped on
27 October. Mehrajuddin had to be evacuated because of health problems
and Ms Raja, an employee of the shrine, had left on 31 October. Two other
militants, Manzoor Ahmad and Mohammed Shafi Butt, apparently
belonging to the Hizbul Mujahideen, had escaped on 31 October on the
pretext of getting coal from the gutted prayer area, though how they crossed
the Army cordon is a mystery. Sonaullah Sheikh, a destitute who lived
around the shrine, came out on 13 November.
The Government of India declared victory and pulled out all the stops of
the public-relations machine. A triumphant Chavan landed in Srinagar on 18
November and declared that the surrender was totally unconditional, adding
somewhat egregiously that the relic was safe. He declared that in this
changed atmosphere, elections would be held as soon as possible. On that
day the dargah was declared open to the public. But if Chavan was hoping
to participate in the deedar like Lal Bahadur Shastri did in 1965, he was in
for a disappointment. The Auqaf Trust and the APHC declared that they
wanted all the security forces, including the BSF which was taking up
positions around the shrine, to withdraw before they would accept charge of
the shrine or permit namaz to be offered there, leading to another stand-off
that kept the shrine closed for eight more months.
The arrested militants were kept in the custody of the JKAP and went
through a routine interrogation. The government released thirty-five persons
who had been held hostage by the militants on 18 November. The twenty-
one militants, of whom two were Azad Kashmir nationals, and seven with
some record of militant activity, were kept at the Zakura facility where they
were treated as VIPs.
As a matter of form, they were interrogated by the authorities, but they
made it clear that they had a right to remain silent when they chose. The
reason became clear when Mehmood-ur-Rehman and Lt Gen. D.D. Saklani
visited them. The latter went and hugged the two JKLF leaders Idris and
Bashrat Raza. The two Azad Kashmiris, Shahid Latif and Mohammed
Zuber Malik, were sent across the LoC in January 1994.
After the end of the siege, the police did carry out an investigation of the
Hazratbal incident. Its report declared that two of the original locks of the
third door to the shrine had indeed been broken and replaced and that the
siege had prevented further mischief. The police claimed that the two
persons responsible for the deed were, coincidence of coincidences, the
same two militants, Manzoor Ahmed and Mohammed Shafi Butt, belonging
to the Hizbul Mujahideen, who escaped on October 31 through the tight
Army cordon.
Militants or, to be more accurate, militancy, was the net loser in this
complicated operation. The authorities were able to manipulate events and
reactions to the point where other militant groups and the APHC, which
started off by declaring this to be a put-up job, got involved in an
adversarial confrontation with the government, one which they, in a sense,
eventually lost.
On 26 October, the Al Safa and the Aftab carried a statement of Syed
Salahuddin, warning the Indian government of dire consequences if they
dared enter the dargah. He declared that instructions had been issued to the
Hizbul Mujahideen to form suicide squads to resist Indian efforts to attack
the shrine. His valley-based deputy, Ali Mohammed Dar aka Burhan-ud-din
Hajazi, deputy supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, said in a
statement issued to the local press on 5 November that the prolonged siege
was the last nail in the coffin of communal India. He warmly praised the
determination of the besieged mujahideen and said that the event had
created a rift between the Army and the civil administration.
 But when the surrender took place, the Hizb was mortified. Reflecting
the common feeling of all the militant groups of being let down, a
spokesman did not term it a betrayal, but rather a sign of impatience and
weakness. In a pained tone, a spokesman told the Aftab of the enormous
sacrifice made by the people of the valley during the strikes and bandhs,
and in terms of the lives lost in Srinagar and Bijbehara. He said that those
who take up guns ought to use them rather than throw them down in
surrender.
But for the fledgling APHC, there was a pay-off. For the first time in
years there was a mass protest in Srinagar and it was the newly formed
Hurriyat that led it. Through strikes, bandhs and other actions, it was able to
project itself as the umbrella body of the Kashmiri movement. On 31
October, in a declaration of self-confidence, the APHC issued a statement
noting that it was not merely mediating a dispute, but negotiating with the
government as a representative of the Kashmiri people.
But a steady drumfire of criticism was focused on the APHC’s handling
of the crisis. The Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen and the Al Jehad roundly chastised
the APHC for assisting in the negotiation for a surrender rather than
compelling the authorities to lift the siege. The Jamiat told the Srinagar
Times that the ‘coffin sellers’ of the Hurriyat had to realize that it was not
political leadership that had brought prominence to the Kashmir movement,
but the armed struggle. Even the Hizb chipped in with a call to the APHC to
investigate the episode and determine the role that some people played in
persuading the militants to make the shameful surrender.
All this breast beating appeared strange to the really tough men who had
come in to do the fighting for the Kashmiris. On 22 November, the Harkat
Jehad-e-Islami issued a statement, published in the Al Safa, declaring that
jihad and politics cannot move together. Caustically, it pointed out that if
bandhs and strikes could have solved the Kashmir problem, then the
problem would have been resolved when Sheikh Abdullah-formed the
Plebiscite Front. Declaring that only an armed struggle could combat the
Indian armed forces, the outfit charged that self- seeking politicians had
helped obtain the surrender of the militants.
 But was it an intelligence operation or a staged event? Were Idris, Umar
and other militants in the pay of Indian agencies? The ISI probably believed
it, and sent Shahid Latif, the Jamiat-ul- Mujahideen cadre who had been
arrested in the shrine, back to the valley in August 1994, apparently in a
mission to kill Umar and Idris. Unfortunately for him, he again landed up in
the hands of the authorities on 10 November 1994. This time he did not
have the luck of being repatriated across the LoC.
There are too many strange coincidences to believe the government’s
version in its entirety. Administration officials, including the governor,
claimed that the reason for the government’s pre-emptive action was a set
of seemingly isolated events that seemed to point to a plan on the part of the
militants to desecrate holy places and pin the blame on the authorities. But
people who investigated, for example, the incident relating to the
Makhdoom Saheb, another Srinagar shrine, in early October found evidence
of contrivance there as well.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that an event of this scale could be
entirely a staged one. What appears to have happened is that the Indian
authorities skilfully manipulated a number of given events, possibly with
the assistance of some covert agents who formed part of the militant group
trapped in the shrine. Not everything was contrived, certainly not the
Bijbehara massacre or the intervention of the courts.
Nor were all the consequences a plus for the authorities. There may have
been some anticipation and even encouragement of the role of the APHC.
But even as the Hurriyat used the Hazratbal issue to emerge as the political
vehicle of the Kashmiri rebellion, it moved towards a harder and more
uncompromising line on India.
At this time, the only free or surviving member of the HAJY group of the
JKLF, Javed Ahmed Mir Nalqa, was across the LoC in Muzaffarabad,
having left the valley in June 1993 via Nepal. In early January, he returned
the same way, having spurned an offer by the ISI to restore funding and
logistical support to the organization. In a meeting with the press he
declared that a decision had been taken to promote the unity of various
outfits in the valley, and he called on the Hizbul Mujahideen to join the
struggle to secure the liberation of Kashmir from India. Since Yasin Malik
and Hamid Sheikh’s arrest, Mir had been the main valley-based leader of
the JKLF, but for a brief period of freedom that Hamid Sheikh enjoyed
before his death in 1992. Mir had to bear the burden of coping with the
Hizb and the ISI, but he was helped by the fact that the Indian authorities
did not pursue him with any zeal. However, on 12 March, a police officer
spotted him in a bakery apparently in circumstances in which it would have
been awkward not to arrest him, and so he was taken into custody.
The flurry of activity on the part of the Hurriyat alarmed the JKLF.
Though it was a constituent of the APHC, its most prominent political
figures such as Yasin Malik were in jail. While the pro-independence JKLF
had widespread popular support, the dominant force in the APHC was the
Jamaat-e-Islami, committed to merger of the state with Pakistan. In jail in
late November 1993, Yasin Malik and his colleagues heard of Benazir
Bhutto’s categorical rejection of the so-called third option of independence
when she made it clear that the Independence Act of 1947 had no provision
for an independent Kashmir. Now, watching the mirwaiz’s moves, Yasin
and his colleagues were disturbed. In a statement from jail, the JKLF
lodged its strong protest against the exclusion of Kashmiris from the Indo-
Pakistan talks. Malik declared that if India and Pakistan failed to recognize
the Kashmiris as the principal party to the Kashmir dispute by 10
December, he and his colleagues would begin an indefinite hunger strike. In
any case, he declared, the JKLF would call for a one-day strike on both
sides of the LoC in protest against their exclusion.
Malik called off the hunger strike and the bandh on assurances that both
sides were willing to have the Kashmiris participate if and when the talks
reached a decisive stage. The Indian assurances were relayed by journalist
Kuldip Nayyar.
Aware that its rival, the JKLF, was trying to undercut the APHC, the
Hizbul Mujahideen issued a statement calling on the people not to heed any
strike calls unless they came from the Hurriyat. While it supported the issue
of Kashmiri participation in the talks, the Hizb declared that no constituent
of the Hurriyat could be permitted to chalk out an independent course of
action.
Actually, neither the Hurriyat nor the JKLF had any answers, and the
mirwaiz’s unrelenting stand that there would be no compromise on the right
of self-determination, did not address itself to the situation on the ground.
There was an air of unreality in some of Umar Farooq’s comments. In late
January, for example, he told an interviewer that a precondition for any
talks in the valley was a unilateral withdrawal by all the Indian forces into
their barracks. Perhaps, he calculated, better to be unrealistic than dead.
The Hazratbal affair as well as a coincidentally ill-timed contretemps
with the Americans cannot be seen without some reference to the political
twists and turns in Delhi. Rao had compromised his first two years of office
by kowtowing to the BJP, leading to the terrible dénouement of 6 December
1992.
By the summer of 1993 he had fallen out with the belligerent forces of
Hindutva, and as a consequence of this lost the support of the BJP in
Parliament. To add to his woes, it was around this time that the nation was
rocked by Harshad Mehta and the stock market scandal, with its heat
enveloping the prime minister himself through accusations of accepting
bribes.
Faced with the prospect of losing his government, the prime minister was
able to induce a number of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha members of
parliament to support him. Over the next year or so, defections from the
Janata Dal converted his minority government to a majority one.
Fortunately, the baleful star of Harshad Mehta receded and the BJP received
a setback in the elections to the assemblies in the northern states in
October–November 1993.
The defeat of the BJP was certainly not the result of the Hazratbal
episode, but it marked a turning point of sorts for Rao. Attention shifted to
the rapidly rising flow of foreign investment into the country, suggesting
that the controversial liberalization policies were finally working. After a
long time, India and Prime Minister Rao began to look like winners.
 There was another case of falling out—between Rajesh Pilot and the
governor. Most observers would have said that this had to come sooner
rather than later. Pilot had adopted Gen. Krishna Rao as his candidate for
governor at the suggestion of his friend Farooq Abdullah. There was
nothing in common between the patrician general and the plebeian Air
Force squadron leader who was now a minister. A younger man, bubbling
with enthusiasm, Pilot was the opposite of the deliberate and formal former
Army chief. Through the year, Pilot’s publicized tours of the valley and his
activism had been grating to the governor. Pilot was pushing for a different
style of counter-militancy operations, stressing the role of the local police
and based on the experience in Punjab. He proposed measures for
strengthening the local police, deputizing ex-militants as ‘special police
officers’ and creating special task forces to hunt down targetted militants. In
mid-1993, with the term of the state police chief B.S. Bedi coming to a
close, he began pushing the name of K.P.S. Gill, the director-general of the
Punjab police.
For months the Delhi press was rife with rumours that K.P.S. Gill, who
was retiring as head of the Punjab police, would be sent to Kashmir. He was
Pilot’s favourite for the job, even if others questioned his worth in the
circumstances of Kashmir. The governor was clearly not amused, and it was
his call. He turned down Gill’s name and appointed M.N. Sabharwal to the
job. This was the same officer who, as inspector-general of police for
Srinagar, left the security forces leaderless on the day that Mirwaiz Maulvi
Mohammed Farooq was shot in 1990.
This was a curious turn of events. When he had been riding high, Pilot
had in fact pushed the appointment of Gen. Rao in early 1993. But asked
about his relationship with Pilot at the end of the year, Gen. Krishna Rao
told journalist Harinder Baweja, ‘To say that differences don’t exist would
be wrong. I deal with the person in charge and Mr Chavan is in charge,’
adding, ‘In fact, the prime minister is dealing with Kashmir.’
Through the Hazratbal siege, Pilot was more or less marginalized. He
was away in Assam, dealing with the Bodo issue, and as he later said
somewhat caustically, that he had learnt of the event from the newspapers.
He remained minister of state for home looking after internal security and
despite his best efforts, Chavan could not quite keep him down. He also
retained the ear of the prime minister. Indeed, the eventual settlement at
Hazratbal had been based on his suggestion of 24 October, offered through
the prime minister when he called him in for consultation after the
Bijbehara massacre.
Pilot remained the only minister of the Union government with a lot of
time for Kashmir. Some saw him as naïve and meddlesome, others as
ambitious. Perhaps he was all of them, but he did not lack courage, physical
and political. His visits to the state as minister of communications as well as
minister of state for home affairs were made with the full knowledge that he
would be a prime target for the militants. It took courage to travel to the
state where he went not just by helicopter but in more vulnerable
motorcades.
On one occasion, in 1993 at Charar-e-Sharif, his convoy was attacked,
but he was quite unfazed. In June 1993, he made a well- publicized three-
day visit to Pulwama, Kupwara and Baramula districts, going by road
wherever he could instead of by helicopter. Wherever he went, he insisted
on addressing meetings, even when confronted by crowds demanding azadi.
As his convoy moved across a district, he would insist on stopping a bus,
talking to the people, or get off the jeep and talk to a farmer in the field.
A key card in his hand was his Gujjar caste. He was a Hindu and the
Kashmiri Gujjars Muslims, but caste as everyone in South Asia knows, has
its own mystique. Though skilled from the time of the British in using caste
and religious differences to break rebellions, India had been strangely
hesitant to do so in the Kashmir situation. But beginning with Pilot’s forays,
the card was played to the full. The Gujjars residing in the areas near the
LoC had played a vital role as logisticians and guides of the insurgents. But
they had no special commitment to the valley’s Kashmiri movement.
Having faced arrest, torture and death at the hand of the security forces,
many of the Gujjars were not unwilling to switch sides, especially when the
offer was being brought by their caste brother. Pilot became the
intermediary for a strategic switch that the Gujjars undertook in 1993 by
abandoning the valley rebellion.
This move was assisted by Pilot’s efforts to recruit Gujjars into the BSF
and other police forces. The BSF set up a special academy in the valley in
1991 and by 1993, had recruited and trained over 400 cadets. Pilot
promised to open up even more jobs for those willing to come forward. In
1993 alone, over 500 persons were admitted to various branches of the
central police organizations.
On 10 December, when the prime minister summoned a meeting to
review the fallout of the Hazratbal operation, a detailed briefing was
provided to the media. The prime minister, it was said, wanted to see what
further steps were needed to normalize the situation. Gen. Rao flew into
Delhi and gave him an upbeat briefing of the situation, and emphasized the
need for more financial assistance from the Centre to step up development
work in the state. Present at. the 10 December meeting were Finance
Minister Manmohan Singh, Chavan, Pilot, Cabinet Secretary Zafar
Saifullah, Home Secretary N.N. Vohra and Army chief Gen. Joshi. Briefing
the group, the governor highlighted the changed environment, but conceded
that the security situation was not quite normal because, as he charged, the
ISI had stepped up its activity. In addition to funds, the governor sought the
services of new advisers, specializing in finance and development.
After intense discussions and confabulations, the administration began
work around a plan for elections in the state. The new year was marked by
the release of nearly 200 detained militants. Two new advisers also showed
up: S.M. Murshed, a retired West Bengal cadre officer of the IAS, and A.R.
Moses, an officer from the Karnataka cadre of the IAS. Both were
experienced officers, the former meeting Gen. Rao’s criterion of being a
Muslim as well, and both had extensive experience in development work.
Back in Srinagar, the governor also began the long-postponed process of
reorganizing the police set-up. This was something that Pilot had been
urging through most of 1993. A committee chaired by Veerana Avelli, IG
(CID), and consisting of other senior police and administration officials,
recommended changes in the organizational and territorial set-up of the
police as well as steps to enhance communication and intelligence work,
and operational effectiveness.
By the middle of 1994, special task forces became operational in all the
districts of the state. Working under a newly appointed superintendent of
police (operations), the task forces’ job was to use their local contacts to
track down militants. Taking a leaf out of the Punjab police’s book, task
force personnel were given substantial monetary rewards for arrests and
killing of wanted militants.
While the state administration was busy trying to set its house in order,
the Government of India was caught up in dealing with Pakistan and the
US. Following Benazir Bhutto’s election in October 1993, India quickly
signalled that it was willing to resume dialogue. Talks between foreign
secretaries were scheduled on the first three days of the new year of 1994.
This time, Rao instructed Foreign Secretary J.N. (Mani) Dixit to take up the
Kashmir issue frontally and discuss it with Pakistan. During the talks held
in Islamabad, Dixit told his Pakistani counterparts that he was authorized to
tell them that India was willing to discuss the Kashmir issue in its entirety
and that detailed proposals for the next round of talks would be sent to them
soon.
As Mani Dixit’s special aircraft readied for departure, his Pakistani
counterpart Shahryar Khan came to the lounge and informed him that as per
his instructions, he had to announce that there would be no further foreign
secretary-level talks unless India fulfilled certain preconditions relating to
Kashmir.
What these were became apparent two weeks later on 18 January, when
the Pakistani authorities sent a set of proposals to India, allegedly for
‘normalizing relations’. Since the principal one related to ‘modalities for
holding plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir,’ it was clear that Indo-Pakistan
relations were not going anywhere. What the Pakistanis were saying was
that the next round of talks should discuss the modalities of the transfer of
Kashmir to Pakistan!
The Indian response was studied and clever. It was not, like the Pakistani
move, designed for failure. In a set of four ‘non’ papers and two draft
agreements, Indian officials made specific offers on every major Indo-
Pakistani dispute. The most important draft agreement was for maintaining
peace and tranquillity on the LoC. The ten-part agreement called on the two
sides to cut down their forces there and take measures to prevent intrusion
along it. Without prejudicing the case of either country in relation to
Kashmir, the agreement would put in place measures to verify its
provisions.
Islamabad was not amused. Pakistani officials claimed that they were
aimed ‘not for conflict resolution, but [Kashmir issue] resolution
avoidance’. Shahryar Khan made it clear that Pakistan was aware of India’s
tactic of raising a host of issues so that the ‘pressure of world opinion . . . is
diverted away from the core issue [of Kashmir]’. Convinced that world
opinion, especially that of the US, had finally woken up to the Kashmir
problem and was in a frame of mind to pressure India, Pakistan decided that
it would avoid all further bilateral discussion and focus on international fora
such as the UN Human Rights Commission and the UN itself.
Over the New Year of 1994, Farooq returned to India after an eight-
month hiatus. He was active in Srinagar and Jammu in trying to revive his
party. Later that month, he met the governor as well as Chavan in New
Delhi. In February, National Conference leaders met in Jammu at a
conclave organized by Wali Mohammed Ittoo, the former speaker of the
state Assembly. Chastened by his experiences, Abdullah was
uncharacteristically restrained and cautioned his party men to be careful
about their own security.
A manifestation of the attention now being paid to the Kashmir issue
came through a resolution adopted by parliament on 22 February 1994. In
some ways this was the capstone of the skilful exploitation of the Hazratbal
and Raphel affairs, but it was also a defensive mechanism of a polity that
had ignored systematic attention to the issue and had woken up only when
human-rights advocates and the US government started speaking about
what was happening in the valley.
There had been many resolutions on Kashmir in the Pakistan national
Assembly, but the Indian one was only the second of its kind, the first
coming in the wake of the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Being unanimous, it
not only represented the will of the people of the country but sharply
defined what was negotiable and what was not:
(a) ‘The State of Jammu and Kashmir has been, is, and shall be an
integral part of India and any attempts to separate it from the rest of
the country will be resisted by India by all necessary means.
(b) India has the will and capacity to firmly counter all designs
against its unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
(c) Pakistan should vacate the areas of the Indian State of Jammu and
Kashmir, which they have occupied through aggression,
(d) Any attempt from any quarter to interfere in the internal affairs of
India will be met resolutely.’

The ‘solution’ to the Kashmir issue, pushed strongly by the Kashmir

governor, remained focused on elections and, as a prelude to it, ‘restoration
of the political process’. At their meetings with Abdullah and other parties,
the home minister and the governor stressed the need for some of the
leaders to return home and sort of ‘be around’. As Pilot put it at one
meeting, ‘Political process means that some pro-government politicians
remain in the valley and people who had bases there earlier should try and
recapture them.’
The problem for Abdullah and the National Conference was not just
security but how to approach the people. So much had happened in four
years and they felt that without some kind of a political package, going
back to face the people was rank folly. Following a two-week trip to the
valley and Jammu in January, Abdullah met a number of government
officials and political leaders in New Delhi in what were termed
‘brainstorming sessions’.
Discussions with Chavan and Pilot centred around the resumption of
political activity in the valley and Governor Rao’s offer to the National
Conference to provide security and vehicles for its cadre. He also resumed
lobbying with various political parties and opinion makers to push for a
special package, including autonomy for the state as a precondition for
elections. But no one, neither Chavan, nor the prime minister had anything
to offer.
But, despite optimism in New Delhi, things were not all that good in the
valley.
The reality was hard and compelling. Militancy may have been down, but
it was by no means out. The Kashmiris were dropping out of the struggle,
but the Pakistanis were coming in and raising the level of violence. In mid-
January in Illahi Bagh, on the outer suburbs of Srinagar beyond Soura, two
Pakistani members of the Harkat-ul-Ansar and a Kashmiri colleague were
trapped in a house in a pre-dawn cordon-and-search operation. Participating
in the operation were six companies of the BSF, two sections of a women’s
battalion and the ‘spotters’ of the Hari Niwas interrogation centre. The
trapped militants as well as their colleagues outside the area of the cordon,
engaged the cordoning troops.
Three Harkat militants occupied the first floor of a three- storeyed house
and kept up a steady volume of fire with AK-56s and by rolling grenades
down the stairwell. BSF personnel who had gained access to the ground
floor and killed one militant, extricated themselves with some difficulty by
digging a hole in the wall. A bulletproof vehicle that came to remove them
was immobilized by a grenade blast that punctured all its tyres.
The BSF now decided to set the house on fire but was not able to do so
because it was, unlike usual Kashmiri houses, not made of wood but bricks
and masonry. The BSF called in G- branch personnel to blast the house with
RPG rockets. After a while firing from within the house subsided, and it
was decided to storm the structure. It was now 5 p.m. and the action had
been going on for twelve hours. N.S. Chauhan, a deputy commandant, and
Bhawani Shankar, an assistant commandant, used ladders to enter the first
floor while another party led by Subedar Hardeva Ram stormed the ground
floor. As they entered, Ram got a burst of AK-56 fire from the militant
covering the stairwell. But the two officers managed to enter the upper floor
and cleared two of the rooms by lobbing grenades to kill the militants
within. As they went to the other rooms, they came under fire, both
receiving several bullet injuries.
 By nightfall, the BSF decided to call in the Army, which brought in its
rocket launchers and fired at the building with high explosive rockets for
the next several hours, as a result of which the house caught fire. At about
10 a.m., one of the militants attempted to escape but was shot down;
another militant’s body was recovered from the debris of the house later.
Two weeks later, in Batmaloo, the BSF again had to summon the Army
when it got into a prolonged battle with the militants. The action began
when a picket was attacked by militants. Then, as a reinforcing group
moved in to help their comrades, they were ambushed, with one constable
being killed and several injured. Both groups were, effectively pinned
down. The Army rushed reinforcements in its BMP infantry combat
vehicles, whereupon the militants pulled out.
In Kupwara, on 27 January, an Army convoy came under fire from the
militants. The Army soldiers retaliated with indiscriminate firing that not
only killed eighteen persons, but three police personnel on duty as well. The
Army version was that the militants fired at the tail-end of a convoy that
had cleared the main town on its way to Srinagar. The security personnel
and the J & K Armed Police fired back and one militant was killed.
‘Simultaneously, the militants hiding in a mosque, adjacent to the district
hospital, and on the hill overlooking the deputy commissioner’s office,
opened fire on the crowded market and the main road. Two policemen and
eight or ten civilians were killed while two Army personnel and ten
civilians were injured . . .’
Later, the defence ministry in Delhi claimed that the militants had staged
the whole thing and even posted a photographer at a vantage point to
photograph the incident to implicate the security forces. While the basic
outline of the Army’s story may well have been true, the facts seem to point
to a case of a panicky over- reaction which may have allowed a minor
ambush to become a carnage. No action was taken against the responsible
persons. The most telling fact is that just two Army personnel were injured
in this ambush.
A third major incident that shook the confidence of the authorities was a
blast on 29 March that took the life of Lt Gen, E.W. Fernandes, the senior-
most Indian Army officer to die in Kashmir. Promoted recently to the rank
of lieutenant general, he had been appointed director-general of Military
Intelligence. A veteran of the Sri Lanka operations, Fernandes decided to
familiarize himself with conditions in the valley prior to taking up his post.
On that fateful day, at about 10 a.m. Gen. Fernandes, accompanied by a
number of senior Military Intelligence officials, visited the 2 Field
Ordnance Depot (FOD) in the Badami Bagh cantonment in Srinagar to
inspect captured weapons and IEDs. Ten minutes later, a bomb detonated,
killing Fernandes, Col. S.K. Bansal, Col. E.T. Mathews, Lt Col. K.
Krishnamoorthy, the commanding officer of the 96 Composite Intelligence
Unit, his second-in-command, Maj. L.C. Yadav, and five other officers,
three junior commissioned officers, two soldiers, and one civilian.
The Army initially blamed the blast on an accident with one of the
devices in the depot. But later it transpired that the blast was caused by a
timer-device that had been placed there by unknown persons. After the
blast, the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed credit for it, saying that it had used
a sophisticated pencil timer to set it off. This was almost certainly the
handiwork of the ISI, with a view to delivering a psychological blow and
slowing down the heightened tempo of the Indian security operations in the
valley.
On 18 March, in a parallel action, the Hizbul Mujahideen gave its
response to the National Conference’s efforts to build up a momentum for
an election in the Valley. They struck by gunning down Wali Mohammed
Ittoo, former speaker of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly and the man
who had organized the February conclave of his party leaders in Jammu.
There was some mystery about his shooting in a lane near his house at 3 in
the afternoon. Some said a man with a police identity card was responsible.
Later, the authorities blamed Bashir Ahmad Padroo, a Hizbul Mujahideen
cadre who hailed from the same village as Ittoo. He had probably been
stalking the National Conference leader for a while and may have used his
village contacts to gain access to the protected leader.
Ittoo’s assassination as well as the FOD bomb blast brought home to the
authorities the difficulties that still lay in the path of normalization. For
people like Abdullah, it was a warning to tread very, very carefully. The
normally ebullient Farooq took the lesson to heart. ‘Flamboyance will not
pay,’ he told an interviewer in Frontline. ‘I have told the National
Conference leaders that they should understand the security scenario and
work accordingly, instead of becoming victims of that scenario. I have
advised my party men to stay put in their homes, and then go out when the
time comes. We have to visualize the situation correctly and beat the enemy
at their own game.’
Nevertheless, most observers found that notwithstanding the militants’
ability to strike, the average Kashmiri was genuinely tired of the four-year-
old militant movement. Gestures such as allowing the Red Cross to visit the
jails and the stepped up release of detainees had to be strengthened by a
stronger effort to restore the administration in the valley. Yusuf Tarigami,
the CPI(M) veteran, perhaps the only leader of a mainstream political party
to remain in the state throughout, declared, ‘The people are ready for some
sort of settlement, but the government has to stop dithering . . .’
The heart of the problem lay in the handling of the Kashmir ‘problem’ by
leaders in New Delhi and Srinagar. It was one thing to stand in the halls of
parliament and affirm that Kashmir belonged to India or to chastise Robin
Raphel through a friendly Indian press, but it was quite another thing to
restore normality in the state. Taking up the various tangled threads,
unravelling them and then weaving them into a workable political solution
required nothing short of a virtuoso performance. Indian policy, no one will
deny, fell considerably short of this.
Gen. Rao found it difficult to work in any other way than that of a
military commander. Enthusing and leading civilian officers to get on with
the job of administration was something he was clearly incapable of. It was
not that he did not try. Having failed to get the National Conference to
resume the ‘political process’, the governor decided to resume it himself. In
a series of visits across the state, he addressed a number of rallies. At a
public rally in Tral in Pulwama district and Pattan in July 1994, he called on
everyone to start the ‘political process’ and even called on the Hurriyat to
join the mainstream, a proposition that had little chance of being accepted.
Though under tight security, the rallies were well attended, but more by
people wanting their problems resolved. This was a clear signal of the
failure of the state to restore a semblance of normal administration across
the valley.
But the deepest roots of the problem lay in Delhi, especially in the prime
minister’s unique style of governance, playing off two, or several ministers
against the other. It also lay in his legendary inability to take decisions,
especially on matters of changing his ministers and officials or insisting on
a smooth functioning of the ‘unified command’. In any case, in the first half
of the year, he was preoccupied with the parliament session and with
planning his US visit.
The consequences of this went down the chain to the feuding home
ministry in Delhi. In March 1994, the minister of state and his senior Union
home minister traded insults through the press. In Srinagar, Pilot let it be
known to all that the governor was likely to be removed, to give way to a
more politically savvy administrator. In New Delhi, Chavan made it clear
that changes contemplated in the administration would not involve the top
man there.
Problems at the apex of decision-making allowed the Army to assert
itself and undermine the ‘unified command’. Till Hazratbal all had been
well, with Zaki in command on behalf of the governor; once Zaki was out
of action, the Army quietly downgraded the concept and began sending a
colonel to its meetings. This practice did not change when the general
returned after a period of convalescence.
On 8 May, Prime Minister Rao set up a permanent committee of
secretaries of the Government of India, chaired by K.R. Venugopal,
secretary in his office. Its mission was to plan and monitor the
administrative measures that the government wanted in place before any
elections. For this purpose, the government had earmarked Rs 200 crore for
rural development schemes as well as a grant of Rs 152 crore for
revitalizing the public distribution system and health care facilities.
As a second step, the prime minister sought some expert advice on the
next course of action. He pressed into service M.K. Narayanan, the retired
IB chief, who had been informally advising him on Kashmir since his
superannuation from service in 1992, and retired Cabinet Secretary B.G.
Deshmukh. The latter toured the state in June and visited Srinagar,
Anantnag and Baramula, and had detailed discussions with district and state
officials. He recommended immediate elections and suggested dates
ranging from November to March–April 1995.
Deshmukh and later Narayanan told the prime minister that conditions in
the state would never be ideal and that late 1994 was as good a time as any
to hold elections. That summer, the Army chief, Gen. Joshi, also visited the
state and put across the Army’s view that elections could be held if the
government was not too concerned about the turnout. In his view, the Army
could manage the security adequately to ensure a reasonable turnout in the
rural areas, though the urban areas would be a problem.
Deshmukh also made another suggestion. That the prime minister’s
office look after Kashmir affairs directly. Mulling over all this advice, and
spurred on by yet another Chavan-Pilot spat, on 31 October, Rao decided to
take direct control of Kashmir affairs from the home ministry. His step was
not motivated by the plight of Kashmir or the Chavan-Pilot gridlock alone,
but the fear that in the coming national elections the BJP would make the
handling of Kashmir an issue.
Actually the change was more nominal, though it did have the value of
keeping Chavan and Pilot out of the decision-making loop. Joint Secretary
(Kashmir) Madhukar Gupta, the pointman for the Centre’s handling of
Kashmir issues, was told to report to minister of state in the Prime
Minister’s Office (PMO), Bhuvanesh Chaturvedi, and Principal Secretary to
the Prime Minister A.N.Verma.
In September, the governor reiterated his plans for elections. In his view,
the back of militancy had been broken and the time had come for elections
to be held. The general made it clear that while no dates had been fixed,
elections would come, sooner, if he could help it, rather than later. In the
meantime, he pushed, prodded and ordered his administration to become
more active. Complicated as they were, these problems paled before the
political headaches. When it had released the various detained leaders, the
government had gambled on the belief that they could, in some way or the
other, be persuaded to become part of the ‘political process’.

Kashmiri Militancy at an End

On 17 May 1994, a visibly ill Yasin Malik walked out of the Mehrauli sub-
jail of Delhi. His release had been ordered by the Supreme Court on
account of his ill health. He suffered from rheumatic heart disease as well as
other complications, and was being kept there for easy access to the All
India Institute of Medical Sciences nearby.
Later that year, detained leaders of the Hurriyat, Geelani and Lone, were
also released along with the other popular leader, Shabbir Ahmad Shah. Not
only did this mark the confidence of the government and its efforts to get
the Kashmir problem back on track, but an end to the valley’s Kashmiri
insurgency.
In Srinagar, Malik was accorded a massive reception, unhindered by the
security forces who had been asked not to intervene even when the crowds
demanded azadi. The excitement and his illness was too much for Malik,
who collapsed at the public meeting near his Maisuma home and was
advised rest. Three days later he made his first public comment. At a press
conference he said that the JKLF was ready to give up the gun in exchange
for an Indian commitment to an unconditional dialogue, with, of course, the
participation of Pakistan.
‘For a permanent and meaningful solution, a result-oriented dialogue is
absolutely unavoidable,’ he declared, adding that ‘demilitarization and
unlimited and unconditional talks should be the sine qua non’.
Between 1988 and 1990, the gun had been wielded largely by the JKLF
and it had been responsible for a trail of death and destruction. Malik’s
declaration in a sense marked the formal end of the Kashmiri armed
rebellion.
At his uncle’s house in Maisuma, Malik met a stream of people and
began assessing his and his organization’s position. The government made
it clear that it would not hinder the JKLF chief’s political activity. By now it
was clear that the JKLF had stopped getting armed support from Pakistan
and, it had abiding, indeed fighting differences with the pro-Pakistan Hizbul
Mujahideen.
Trying to ride the wave of anti-militancy feelings, the JKLF leaders
spoke out sharply against ‘terrorist’ actions that were giving militancy a bad
name. In a statement, the JKLF made it clear that the movement had
suffered widespread destruction because of ‘elements from within and not
outside’. Its supreme council declared that there was need to check the
extortion being carried out in the name of donations for the movement or
fines imposed on contractors and shopkeepers.
One voice of Kashmiri militancy came out loud and clear against a
ceasefire. Shortly after Malik’s declaration, on 26 May, Syed Salahuddin,
supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, released a statement that
there was no question of a ceasefire so long as the iast Indian soldier with
his weapon is on the soil of Kashmir’. The statement declared that the
Kashmiris were ready for tripartite talks between ‘Kashmiri
representatives’, Pakistan and India, but would oppose any effort by the
Indian governmentto hold elections. His bottom line:
‘The 12 million people of the state . . . have burnt their boats and there is
no point of return or retreating from the path they have chosen after due
thought.’
On 2 June, twelve pistol-wielding youngsters tried to kidnap Malik from
his room at the SMHS hospital where he was undergoing treatment. The
JKLF blamed the Hizbul Mujahideen for the attempt. But, immediately
after this, Salahuddin had, in a telephonic interview with the BBC-Asian
Age correspondent Yusuf Jameel strongly condemned the incident and
blamed it on ‘vested interests, goons and Indian government agents’.
Speaking probably over international circuits from Azad Kashmir where he
had been residing, he warmly praised Yasin as ‘one of the pioneers of the
freedom struggle’. Separately, he also wrote a letter to the JKLF chief,
promising all support to forge unity among the various organizations.
The next day, Friday, 3 June, a JKLF procession, shouting, ‘We want
azadi’, ‘Down with terrorism’ and ‘Yasin Malik zindabad’, wended its way
through downtown Srinagar. At its head, sitting on the roof of a car was
Malik, who was to begin a hunger strike at the Idgah martyrs’ cemetery to
protest against the previous day’s attack. As the procession moved from
Khankah Mualla and headed for the Idgah martyrs’ graveyard, unidentified
gunmen opened fire.
After the Friday attack, Malik and his colleagues, Bashir Ahmed Bhat
and Mohammed Shafi Misgar, did not hesitate in pinning the blame on the
Hizbul Mujahideen. Indeed, they named the gunmen as Aziz Ahmad,
Mohammed Jan and Bol Daga. Malik waved the letter written to him a day
earlier by Salahuddin, demanding explanation for the action. JKLF
spokesmen also charged that some persons had fired shots near the
Maisuma residence of their chief before the procession began.
The Hizbul Mujahideen denied any involvement in the attack, charging
that JKLF dissidents had engineered them. Nevertheless, a spokesman
attacked Malik for abandoning all talk of an armed struggle, leave alone
jihad. As a concession to his popularity, as it were, Malik was charged with
trying to emerge as another Sheikh Abdullah. The Hizb spokesman made it
clear that his organization ‘which had lost more than ten thousand members
during the five-year-old campaign will at no cost allow the jihad to be
turned into “Gandhian” politics’.
At the Jammu Central Jail, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, the other major popular
leader, had also come to the realization that the gun had created chaos in
Kashmiri society. He felt that by getting involved in pro-Pakistan and pro-
independence dissension, the movement was ‘getting lost in the jungle’. All
attention, he maintained, must be focused on working jointly against the
‘Indian occupation administration’.
Even this reasonably accurate portrayal of the Kashmiri militancy’s
plight drew criticism. The Al Jehad, owing allegiance to a rival faction of
the People’s League, politely told Shabbir Shah to shut up since he was in
jail and did not know what was happening in the state. A statement by its
supreme commander, Nasir Bhaktiyar, decried the ‘hopes of those who
promote the worship of an individual’ and said that Shah was depending on
his advisers who had themselves become ‘unreliable’.
 Through much of 1994, the Hurriyat had been caught up in the single-
plank campaign of getting the security forces to remove their bunkers from
the Hazratbal area. With its principal leaders in jail, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq
assumed the position of spokesman. But Umar Farooq was not about to
stray from the straight and narrow path. Speaking to Frontline early in the
year, he declared that the only way to resolve the Kashmir problem was
through a withdrawal of the Indian security apparatus from the state,
followed by talks with Pakistan.
In these circumstances, Yasin Malik made the next political move in the
form of a fast-unto-death at Hazratbal to demand the removal of the BSF
bunkers placed around the shrine after the siege of October 1993. Malik
entered the shrine on 30 July with his mother and two women relatives who
were in burqas and sat on hunger strike. But the very next day, his condition
deteriorated and the police entered the shrine to arrest him and took him to
the SKIMS for treatment. However, doctors there advised him to go to New
Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and he was flown there by
the authorities. Whether he was so ill is not clear since Malik returned on 2
August with Kuldip Nayyar and Justice Rajinder Sachar in tow, and through
their mediation, successfully obtained a settlement.
In the early hours of the morning of 6 August, the BSF marched out from
their thirteen bunkers around the shrine and in the presence of the office-
bearers of the trust, the APHC leaders and Additional Chief Secretary
Mehmood-ur-Rehman, the relic was ritually identified. For the record, as it
were, the trust chairman reiterated his belief that nothing had happened on
14/15 October the previous year to have led to the siege and the drama
thereafter.
The lifting of the siege was meant to embarrass the Hurriyat, and it did.
Even the Hurriyat’s friends, like the Hizbullah, were exasperated with the
outfit, accusing it of being incapable of doing anything more than issuing
statements. In a scathing critique of its role, a spokesman told a number of
valley newspapers in late July that there had been high hopes for the
organization when it had come into being. There had been expectations, he
said, that it would take the freedom movement to new directions. But now it
had taken on itself the task of giving calls for hartals ‘to save its skin’.
In early October, the government released Geelani and Lone from
detention. They had been arrested in the wake of the Hazratbal events. Later
on 14 October, Shabbir Shah, who had been in jail since late 1989, was also
released. Whatever expectations the Indian government may have had from
them, the Hurriyat leaders did not budge from their stand that elections
were futile. At a press conference on 17 October in Srinagar, Geelani and
Lone made it clear they had held no talks with the government on the issue
of elections while in detention. As Lone put it, ‘Our struggle is not for
forming the government but to choose our future,’ adding sarcastically that
if the government was keen to hold the polls, it could hold the referendum
under UN auspices.
On 21 October, Shabbir Shah returned to a tumultuous reception in
Anantnag and began to articulate his post-release political programme. ‘I
was for Kashmir’s self-determination twenty-six years ago, and I am still
for self-determination,’ he declared.
Even while backing the call for the implementation of the UN
resolutions, Shah took pains to emphasize the need for the Kashmiri
movement to incorporate all its regions, including Hindu-majority Jammu
and Buddhist-majority Ladakh. In the past, Shah’s stance on Kashmir’s
final status had been somewhat hazy, but most observers had seen a studied
tilt towards a merger with Pakistan. But the years in jail and the knowledge
of what had transpired made Shall shift to the centre, towards advocacy of
independence.
Earlier in July, when he was still in jail, Shah declared that the only way
out was to amalgamate the Kashmiri groups into three main political outfits:
the Pakistanpasand, the pro-autonomy, and the pro-independence
groupings. He also proposed that the underground outfits come under a
unified command to ensure that the gun was properly used. At this stage he
felt that guns ought to be used to protect prominent persons, since its use
otherwise had played havoc with Kashmir’s cultural heritage.
 Not surprisingly he came under sharp attack from the pro- Pakistan
groups like the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, which charged in a statement in
November that Shah was ‘blowing hot and cold’ in his views and
questioned his competence, declaring that Shah’s rhetoric was no different
from that of Sheikh Abdullah. The JuM was particularly miffed by what it
said was Shah’s ‘blindness’ to the ‘love that Pakistan had for Kashmir’.
But the Hurriyat remained deadlocked. A commentary in the weekly
Chattan at the end of the year noted that while the Hurriyat was gaining
popularity abroad, within the valley ‘its functioning has not been
satisfactory’. It said that of the seven members of its executive council,
some never bothered to come to the meetings while others were divided
into various lobbies.
Chattan’ s view was that this was the outcome of a situation where the
gun had become the source of ‘power and authority’ in the state, and the
militant commanders had developed a vested interest in retaining their
control over it. The true measure of the failure of the Hurriyat was that
while it was created to give political guidance to a militant movement, it
was the latter which ran the show.
From jail itself Shabbir Shah had accurately diagnosed the weakness of
the Hurriyat. It was in the artificial unity it projected. While all the leaders
within the outfit swore by self- determination and unity, each of them ran a
tanzeem which was, on the ground, trying to dominate or eliminate the
other one.
The Hurriyat nevertheless spread out the red carpet for the released
leader as the mirwaiz had issued a statement, calling on all Kashmiris to
welcome him. Shah became a part of the Hurriyat forum, but on 19
December he put the cat among the pigeons by proposing, at a meeting of
the Hurriyat’s general council, that the thirty-two members of the APHC
dissolve their respective parties and constitute a single political outfit under
one leader that could fight India for independence. His eight-point proposal
called for the inclusion of people from Jammu and Ladakh in the
conference and for reasons of policy to aid the return of pandit migrants to
the valley.
 There was at first a deafening silence in response to his main proposal of
creating a single political party. Lone deflected the blow by declaring that it
deserved serious thought. Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat bluntly termed it
impractical. The Jamaat opposed it for obvious reasons. None of the leaders
were about to dissolve their organizations and allow a popular leader like
Shah to steal their constituency.
Though formally a member of the Hurriyat, by mid-1994, Yasin Malik
had stopped attending its executive council meetings. The Hurriyat
remained an anaemic grouping, seeking status as a representative body of
all Kashmiris and the political directorate running the militancy, but in
reality, not even being fully representative of the valley Kashmiris
themselves.
There were fundamental differences of opinion among the secessionist
leaders. Malik was for independence. Geelani, though for a merger with
Pakistan, took the tactical position that the choice for Kashmiris was to go
for either India or Pakistan. Shah, too, took the view that it was for the
people to decide. A little bit more practical, Abdul Ghani Bhat told the
Uqab in an interview published on 1 December that the Dixon Plan, on the
basis of which the valley could be divided between India and Pakistan, was
perhaps the best solution.
Across the border, the man who started it all, Amanullah Khan,was even
more desperate. With the arrest of Nalqa, he had lost the link to the top
echelons of the JKLF leadership, that is, Yasin Malik. Though he was in
touch with Shabbir Siddiqui and other second-ranking leaders, he could not
help but notice the increasing inward orientation of politics in the valley.
Speaking at a seminar in Lahore in July, Khan was characteristically blunt.
The struggle, he declared, was going in favour of India and the militants
were losing out because of their infighting. Commenting on the governor’s
public meeting at Sopur, Khan said that the movement was now clearly
ineffective.
On 25 October 1994, two days before the anniversary of the Indian
intervention of 1947, Khan issued a ‘letter to the people of India’. He
declared: ‘We in the JKLF, myself in particular, are not enemies of the state
of India.’ His grouse was with the machinery of the government, which was
not only denying self- determination to the Kashmiris, but ‘treating us,
since 1988, the way the most cruel and inhumane of erstwhile colonial
powers used to treat the people of their colonies’.
Second, he affirmed, the JKLF were ‘not religious fanatics or aimless
killers nor enemies of the State or the people of India’. The JKLF
campaign, which initiated the rebellion, Khan declared, was for complete
independence.
The aim of the letter, he said, was to alert the Indian people about the
brutalities that had been going on in Kashmir and to enable them to weigh
these against the losses suffered by India in terms of money and casualties
as well as international prestige.
To aid India, as it were, Khan proposed three options: the first was the
usual one of withdrawal of the Indian and Pakistani forces and plebiscite;
the second was an international conference of all the regions, religions,
militant groups and political affiliations, to come up with proposals to be
put to the governments of India and Pakistan and the international
community for implementation; and the third was tripartite talks between
India, Pakistan and Kashmir, under the auspices of an ‘influential
international organization’. Kashmiri representation at the talks could
consist of all three schools of thought: pro-India, pro- Pakistan and pro-
independence. Having lost the ball, Khan was whistling against the wind,
and he knew it.
 8
American Interlude

A note prepared by the office of the historian of the US department of state

in 1991 says that the US ‘became involved in the international efforts to
resolve the Kashmir dispute cautiously, even reluctantly . . . ‘It went on to
admit that it ‘soon became a pivotal participant’. Fifty years down the line,
little seems to have changed.
A position paper prepared for the US delegation to the UN General
Assembly on 2 December 1947, underlined the following: ‘We would much
prefer that the Kashmir question be settled by direct negotiation between
India and Pakistan. ’ It acknowledged, however, that the problems between
the two could not be removed without ‘external assistance’. Since ‘the
British are apparently not in a position to render this outside assistance, and
rather than have the role fall either to the United States, or to any other
single third party, assumption by the United Nations of the problem would
be preferred,’ US Secretary of State Gen. George C. Marshall told his
permanent representative in the UN, Warren Austin, in a telegram of 6
January 1947, ‘that the only solution acceptable to all would appear to be a
determination, probably by plebiscite, of the wishes of the inhabitants of
Jammu and Kashmir with respect to their long-term affiliation with either
India or Pakistan, taking into account that some form of partition may be
proposed’.
The issue of the third option or independence was also yet to be dealt
with. Warren Austin met Sheikh Abdullah in January 1948 when the latter
had come to the UN in connection with India’s complaint of Pakistani
aggression. Abdullah, according to Austin, seemed ‘overly anxious’ to get
the point across that there was the option of independence, but as the US
permanent representative reported, ‘I, of course, gave Abdullah no
encouragement on this line.’
This position was underscored in a later communication of Marshall: ‘Re
various proposals for Kashmir independence: We have in the past, as you
know, followed a line that princely states should be incorporated in either
India or Pakistan on the assumption that Balkanization of Indian
subcontinent would be . . . ultimately adverse to broad US interests in that
area.’ However, the general went on to add, that were independence to be
the basis of an Indo-Pakistan peace agreement, the US would ‘not oppose
such a solution, but certainly would take no initiative in supporting it’.
The bottom line US position was that the accession of Kashmir to India
was legally valid, though later, because of the position it took in connection
with the UN resolutions, it remained somehow ‘incomplete’. Notes taken
by American officials of a meeting on 27 February 1948 with their British
counterparts bring out the subterranean elements about which we still know
too little. The British tried to convince the Americans that it was all right to
allow Pakistani troops to be used as an interim force in the valley prior to
the plebiscite. The Americans demurred:
‘The US representatives agreed that Kashmir was a state about which a
dispute had arisen between India and Pakistan but stated that they found it
difficult to deny the legal validity of Kashmir’s accession to India. In the
end, the British representatives agreed with the US point of view that we
had to proceed on the assumption for the time being at any rate India had
legal jurisdiction over Kashmir.’
The next week, on 4 March, in a telegram to its embassy in India,
Marshall reiterated this point when he observed that the Security Council
could not impose a settlement under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, but only
make recommendations to the parties. ‘Such recommendations must
necessarily be made in light of India’s present legal jurisdiction over
Kashmir which makes complete civil and military neutralization of kind
envisaged by Jinnah impracticable unless with Indian consent. Even if the
latter given, project for neutral army unrealistic . . .’
 Since the US and UK were the major influences in the UN at the time,
American policy has since reflected these views as well as their
qualification by UN resolutions of April and August 1948. There is little
point repeating the story of how India’s complaint of Pakistani aggression
was twisted to become an ‘international dispute’. But it is useful to outline
the 13 August resolution of the progressive steps through which plebiscite
was to be carried out: ceasefire; withdrawal of Pakistani troops and
tribesmen; the thinning out of the Indian troops in the vale; and then, the
appointment of a plebiscite administrator who would determine the will of
the people. India accepted the resolution with some qualifications. But,
according to the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan
(UNCIP) report to the Security Council, Pakistan ‘attached so many
resolutions, qualifications, and assumptions that the Commission had to
consider its answer as “tantamount to rejection”. ’
From the outset, Marshall had made it clear that the British would play
the lead role in the Anglo-American response to the dispute. Lead role it did
play and we are still battling with its consequences. Given the zeal with
which Britain guards its real secrets, they will probably never be known.
There is another factor that has intruded since the early UN resolutions.
Neither at the time that it took up the complaint, nor in subsequent visits to
the area, did the UN have with it the detailed evidence of Pakistani
complicity in sending the raiders into the state. Indeed, Pakistan’s
admission that its own troops had been participating in the war was made
only after the first resolution calling for plebiscite was passed.
The failure of the UNCIP led to a phase in the 1950s when single
mediators, appointed by the UN, attempted to resolve the problem.
Probably no one worked harder than Sir Owen Dixon of Canada whose
final plan in 1950 was for a partition of the state, with the obviously pro-
Indian areas of Ladakh and Jammu going to India; Baltistan, Gilgit, Hunza
and Azad Kashmir merging with Pakistan; and a plebiscite being conducted
in a demilitarized valley.
While India appeared agreeable to discuss the plan, Pakistan turned it
down on the grounds that India had committed itself to a plebiscite for the
whole state. After its invasion of the state in 1947, this was probably its
second blunder, but perhaps occasioned by the knowledge that had a
plebiscite taken place any time between 1947–52, India would have
probably won it.
In the 1950s, the US worked closely with the various UN officials
following the Kashmir dispute. But with Pakistan signing up with the US
alliance system, there was additional pressure on the US to act on behalf of
Pakistan. But even then, there were limits to which the US was willing to
go to oblige its enthusiastic ally. The Pakistani obsession probably got
somewhat tiring for the US as one memo of a conversation between US
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Pakistan Prime Minister Feroze
Khan Noon in November 1957 indicates. According to the record:

‘The Secretary noted that the United States had collaborated closely with
the Pakistan representatives, but not with the Indian. The United States had
special ties with Pakistan. The United States also thought Pakistan had a
meritorious case . . . Yet, the Secretary explained that actually the Security
Council no matter what action it took, whether its resolution was hard or
soft could not solve the Kashmir question as long as the GOI basically
disagreed with the Security Council’s approach.’

In 1959, to further assuage Pakistani concerns, the US also signed a

bilateral defence pact committing the US to defend Pakistan against
aggression from communism. A secret clause, not revealed at the time,
extended the commitment to cover an attack from India as well.
John Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon in 1960 caused further
worries. While the latter had been a staunch Cold Warrior and friend of
Pakistan, Kennedy looked up to Nehru as a statesman and had been an
advocate of better ties with India even as a congressman and senator.
Knocking Heads: President Kennedy and Kashmir
The Kennedy administration has till now been the only period during which
the US, with the president himself playing a role, made a major and direct
effort to resolve the Kashmir dispute. It represented both an
acknowledgement of the failure of the UN efforts, as well as a big push by
the US to build ties that spanned the Indo-Pakistan stand-off.
The sudden dynamism in this area owed not a little to the new US
ambassador in India. John Kenneth Galbraith, professor at Harvard, friend
and adviser of John Kennedy, was a political appointee and carried with
him all the advantages and baggage that comes with such a situation. He
had a direct channel to the president, and though he lacked supporters in the
State Department, he did not have the bureaucratic burden of having to
support past policies.
In September 1961, at a dinner meeting with Panditji, he broached, what
he said, was a delicate subject: the new administration’s dissatisfaction with
the state of Indo-US relations. The subject led to Kashmir, whereupon
Nehru made it clear that in his view the conversion of the ceasefire line into
ah international frontier was the only possible option. However, Nehru said,
if there was a general settlement, there was no reason why there could not
be a ‘soft’ border between Pakistan and Indian-held Kashmir.
In his long conversation with Nehru, Galbraith seemed to have realized
that the design in Nehru’s Kashmir policy was to partition the state along
the ceasefire line, that would keep the valley within India. His effort, as he
noted in a telegram to the State Department on 28 December 1961, was to
apply ‘ingenuity and imagination [that] might partly modify, partly
circumvent the territorial question . . .’
President Kennedy had the opportunity to discuss the Kashmir issue with
both President Ayub and Prime Minister Nehru during the course of their
official visits to Washington in July and November 1961. Ayub came with
the aim of foiling the emergence of a new strategic relationship between
India and the US. The thrust of his briefing to the US president was that
Pakistan confronted an undiminishing ‘Indian threat’, something that the
young president appeared to be clearly sceptical about. However, Kennedy
promised his best effort to get the stalled Indo-Pakistan negotiations on
Kashmir going. The president probed Ayub and found that the Pakistani
dictator’s bottom line for a Kashmir settlement was a partition that would
leave Jammu with India.
Prime Minister Nehru’s visit to the US was not an unalloyed success.
When the president sought Panditji’s bottom line on Kashmir, the answer
was the same that Galbraith had got: status quo, but if territorial demands
were dropped, India was willing to examine other issues such as softening
the border between the two Kashmirs.
India’s military action in Goa in December 1961 briefly soured relations
between India and the US. Pakistan sensed the opportunity and tried to
exploit the situation but to little avail. In January 1962, Pakistan decided to
test the waters by sending in an aide mémoire, calling on the US to:

(a) renounce a nominal military sales agreement with India. (Pakistan had
been assured that it would be consulted before any military assistance was
given to India.)
(b) limit US economic aid to prevent India from diverting an ‘unduly large
part of its own resources to build up its military machine’. (This was despite
the fact that most US aid was project related and could not be diverted.)
(c) act to ‘deter India from committing aggression against Pakistan’.
In this context, the Pakistanis wanted a public avowal of a confidential
assurance to the effect that the US had given to Pakistan in 1959. (The US
was willing to reiterate this privately, but not willing to say so in public.)
(d) increase military aid to Pakistan. (The US was willing to guarantee a
five-year package, but not increase its quantum.)

Pakistan probably overplayed its hand. In a testy analysis of the Pakistan

memo, Robert W. Komer, then a member of the National Security Council
staff, told his boss, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, ‘Ayub uses
his alliance tie to push us into supporting his forward policies . . . he forces
us into a position which runs contrary to our larger strategic interests in the
area.’
On 20 October 1962, Chinese forces launched a major attack on Indian
troops on the Thagla ridge in the North East Frontier Agency.
Simultaneously, attacks were also launched in areas claimed by the Chinese
in Ladakh, which is a part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The border war of 1962 was a national trauma ending in a humiliating
defeat, indeed rout, for the Indian Army in the eastern sector. Galbraith was
in close touch with the Government of India and Nehru. Seven days after
the war began, on 29 October, Nehru formally sought US military
assistance, though he did request Galbraith that the US should avoid
seeking a military alliance in exchange.
A day before India formally sought arms aid from the US, Kennedy sent
a note to President Ayub Khan, requesting him not to use the conflict to
seek advantage on Kashmir. Kennedy reiterated the secret 1959 assurances
that in the event of Indian aggression, the US would commit itself to
defending Pakistan. Even before the conflict had ended, it was clear to
Pakistan, if not to the US, that India’s predicament had created a major
leverage for the US and Pakistan on the Kashmir issue.
Not a few US officials saw the new situation as providing an opportunity
for restoring a balance to US South Asian policy. The strongest votaries
were in the NSC. Carl Kaysen, the deputy special assistant for national
security affairs, told the president in a memo on 3 November, ‘We are now
faced with the necessity of making the Pakistani realize that their alliance
with us had been of immense value to them . . . They are obviously the
weaker power, and they have been able to maintain as strong a line on
Kashmir as they have in part because of the existence of our support in the
background. ’ Kaysen went on to add that the US was now moving to tell
the Pakistanis that:

‘We are really not able to support their demand for a settlement via
plebiscite, and that their best opportunity for settlement on terms something
like ratification of the status quo may be passing from their grasp. This will
be a difficult and painful process, but it is one we must push through.’

Bob Komer repeated this point of view in a memo nine days later, pointing
out that the ‘Pakistanis are going through a genuine emotional crisis as they
see their cherished ambitions of using the US as a lever against India going
up in the smoke of the Chinese border war.’
Komer went on to underline that the US had no need to apologize for its
new position. ‘If we compensate Ayub for our actions vis-à-vis India, we
will again be postponing the long- needed clarification of our position, and
this at a time when we’ve never had a better excuse for clarifying it.’
These views seemed to echo Ambassador Galbraith’s tentative thinking
on the subject, put down in a personal letter to Kennedy on 13 November
1962:

‘Eventually but not too soon the Indians must be asked to propose
meaningful negotiations on Kashmir. This should not, incidentally, raise the
question of a plebiscite, an idea in which there is no longer any future. The
only hope lies in having a full guarantee of the headwaters of the rivers.
Each side should hold on to the mountain territory that it has and there
should be some sort of shared responsibility for the valley.’

But the worsening border situation now persuaded the Indian government to
throw in the towel of non-alignment and accept a virtually full-scale
military alliance with the US. These were contained in two letters written to
the president by Pandit Nehru, on 19 November 1962, and apparently
without consulting his Cabinet. In the letters Nehru called for at least twelve
US air force squadrons, to be piloted by the Americans, to defend Indian
airspace, as well as for B–47 bomber squadrons to strike at Chinese
airfields. Before anything developed in this direction, the Chinese declared
a ceasefire on 22 November. The ceasefire eased the immediacy of the
situation, but the ball had been set rolling.
 The Anglo-American countries now undertook their last major effort to
push a Kashmir settlement outside the UN framework. In charge of the
effort were the somewhat erratic Duncan Sandys, the UK minister for
Commonwealth relations, and W. Averell Harriman, assistant secretary of
state for Far Eastern affairs. The effort was backed by Philips Talbot, the
US assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs in
Washington, and the National Security Council staffers, Bob Komer and
Carl Kaysen. But, almost at every stage, the president himself was involved.
Kennedy kicked off the effort in a communication of 25 November, to
Harriman, that his planned stopover in Karachi on his way back to the US
was not just to keep Pakistan abreast of the talks going on in Delhi, but ‘a
major opportunity to show Ayub how radically the Sino-Indian
confrontation has altered the situation in the subcontinent from our point of
view’.
The president said that the Sino-Indian border war had given the US a
‘one-time opportunity’ and that though this ‘may be fleeting, we still ought
to seize it if we can’. To this end Kennedy asked his aides to finesse a
policy that could, with ‘a lot of nursing along’, resolve the Kashmir dispute.
In Rawalpindi, Harriman met Sandys and called on Ayub, and the
discussion focused on a draft communique which the two were trying to get
the Indian and Pakistani leaders to issue on an agreement to resume
bilateral talks. Sandys’ draft spoke of efforts to resolve the ‘differences
between the two countries’. However, Ayub wanted it to read ‘to resolve the
Kashmir problem’ At this point, as Harriman related in a telegram to
headquarters:

‘Both Sandys and I made it plain that it would be impossible to have a

plebiscite, that the Vale as such could not be transferred to Pakistan, but that
there was an understanding in India that they had to make certain
concessions beyond the present ceasefire line.’

An acceptable draft was worked out and in New Delhi on 30 November,

after a meeting of the officials, Harriman and Galbraith met Nehru alone.
Panditji made it clear that no scheme for dividing the valley or giving it
independence, would be acceptable; however, the Galbraith suggestion of a
‘soft border’ could be considered.
The need for concessions on both sides was something which was clear
to the Anglo-American negotiators. However, pinning down the quantum
was the problem. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted in a telegram to
the embassy in India on 8 December: ‘While the need in Delhi is for GOI
willingness to make concession greater than it has previously been willing
to consider, need in Karachi is for GOP’s receptiveness to a solution which
is likely to fall considerably short of achieving Pak objectives.’
Given the history of the dispute, the Americans and the British were
aware that negotiations on Kashmir would not be easy. Officials
recommended that the approach be deliberately slow to prevent an early
breakdown of the negotiations. Galbraith pointed out in a meeting between
the president and the British prime minister in Nassau in December 1962
that it was important to realize that ‘we must do more than talk of the
desirability of a settlement . . . the question is what settlement; India and
Pakistan both want the valley.’
Five rounds of talks took place between the Indian and Pakistani
officials, beginning in Rawalpindi in December 1962, and ending in New
Delhi in May 1963. Heading the Indian team were the Indian foreign
minister, Sardar Swaran Singh, and his Pakistani counterpart, Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto. In the second round of talks held in New Delhi between 16 and 19
January 1963, a joint statement of objectives was worked out, though it was
kept confidential. Both sides agreed to explore all possibilities for a
settlement. Incorporated were the objectives of India and Pakistan. The
former urged that territorial readjustments take into account geography,
administration and a desire not to disturb the ‘life and welfare’ of the
people, and the latter, a division ‘taking into account the composition of
population, control of rivers, requirements of defense’. As Komer noted in a
memo to Kennedy, ‘Both sides have agreed to talk about partition but
neither has shown its hand.’
 But even while all this was happening, the British were playing their own
game for which the only charitable explanation can be Sandys’
incompetence. As the Americans were now readying to put forward a
partition plan, British diplomats sounded out Ayub after the first round of
talks on the idea of internationalizing the vale for a ten-year period and a
subsequent plebiscite. Ayub took this up and the idea began to show up in a
hardening of the Pakistani proposals, and soon became their sine qua non
for the settlement.
Pakistani Ambassador Aziz Ahmed met President Kennedy on 4 February
1963 with Ayub’s proposals that the valley be internationalized for one year
and then be handed over to Pakistan, adding, somewhat disingenuously, that
this would free India from the burden of defending the area from the
Chinese. A subsidiary suggestion he made was that perhaps the US could
now play the role of a mediator and formally join the talks.
However, a sceptical Kennedy bluntly informed the ambassador that in
view of India’s refusal to consider a plebiscite, there was nothing new in
Ayub’s proposal. He went on to tell Ahmed, ‘The Indians now have most of
Kashmir, any settlement will call for the Indians to make the concrete
concessions, and the real question is how they can be brought to make the
difficult and painful concessions which are required.’
These points were also contained in a formal reply to Ayub. Instructions
to US Ambassador in Pakistan Walter P. McConaughy directed him to
inform Ayub that ‘we see no possibility of India being willing to give up all
the vale. Thus we see no possibility in idea of arranging transfer of vale
after duration of one year or after any period for that matter.’
In the third round of talks in Karachi on 7–11 February 1963, India, after
great prodding from the US, offered ‘limited but significant concessions’ to
Pakistan, indicating that it was willing to partition the valley, offering a
small north-western portion which constitutes the district of Kupwara to
Pakistan. Karachi came up with its counter-proposal. India could keep an
equally small portion of Jammu, while handing over the rest of the state to
Pakistan.
 Efforts to push the talks towards a settlement came on the eve of the fifth
round of talks that were scheduled for 22–25 April in Karachi. There was a
difference of opinion within the American camp on negotiation tactics.
Ambassador Galbraith, who was to finish his tenure in August that year,
appeared to be in a hurry to strike a ‘crude bazaar level’ bargain with India.
In exchange for a partition plan involving a substantial portion of the
vale, roughly half of it in a north-south line somewhere between the Wullar
Lake and Srinagar, India would get assistance to set up defence production
facilities, long-term aid and support for air defence. The State Department,
however, felt that there was need to build up more common ground between
the two sides and not go in for the breakthrough mode recommended by
Galbraith. Kennedy endorsed this course as well as a document outlining
what the US and UK believed could be ‘elements of a settlement’. These
were:

1. Neither India nor Pakistan can entirely give up its claim to the Kashmir
valley. Each must have a substantial position in the vale.
2. India and Pakistan must both have assured access to and through the vale
for the defense of their positions to the north and east . . .
3. Outside the valley, the economic and strategic interests of the two
countries should be recognized—e.g., India’s position in Ladakh and
Pakistan’s interest in the development of water storage facilities in the
Chenab.
4. The position of the two countries in the Valley must be such as to permit:
a) clearly defined arrangements for sovereignty and for the maintenance of
law and order;
b) political freedom and a measure of local self-rule for the inhabitants;
c) free movement of the people in the valley . . .

In two meetings of 15 April and 20 April, Galbraith decided to jump the gun
and outline the US partition proposal to Nehru and press India to come up
with more substantial territory concessions for Pakistan at the next meeting
of the Indian and Pakistani officials. In his earlier discussions he had led
Nehru to believe that giving Pakistan a small portion of the valley could be
a way out; at the 15 April meeting, however, Galbraith put foward the
revised American proposal for a fifty-fifty partition. At the first meeting,
lasting an hour and a half, Nehru vigorously, and then angrily, defended
India’s position, and subsequently, according to Galbraith, lost his cool and
rejected partition outright. The meeting ended with Nehru saying he would
consult his cabinet colleagues. Another meeting on 20 April did not bring
any further movement, and it was at this point that the ‘elements’ paper
reached Nehru via the Indian High Commission at Karachi.
Panditji’s responses were penned in a letter to Kennedy, which is not
declassified. But S. Gopal cites a part of this to say that Nehru chided the
US on its policy, observing that ‘Intervention by third powers, if quiet,
unobtrusive and objective, might have been helpful; but public and semi-
public efforts at pressure had only worsened the situation.’
Komer’s assessment is that it was neither the Galbraith meetings nor the
‘elements’ that enraged Nehru, but the fact that the Americans had now
more or less put down clearly what they expected of the Indians. ‘Nehru
tends to avoid facing up to unpleasant decisions as long as possible, and we
know that he personally is the chief roadblock to a forthcoming Indian
position in Kashmir.’
The US came to the conclusion that the chances of settlement of the
Kashmir issue were nil. As much was voiced by Kennedy himself during a
meeting on India on 25 April, where all the top officials—Secretary of State
Rusk, Secretary of Defence McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, CIA Chief John
McCone—were present. But the president made it clear that efforts to
develop a new relationship with India would not be held hostage to the
issue.
The idea of direct mediation had been mooted by Kennedy in January
1962 when he proposed using Eugene Black, the World Bank president, to
build on the Indus Waters Agreement goodwill to push a Kashmir
settlement. Though Ayub had been cagey, Nehru flatly refused. Between the
second and third round of talks in early 1963, the Pakistanis proposed that
the US interject as a mediator in the talks. Nothing had come of the idea,
though an official had been appointed to put across US views to both sides.
In early May 1963, during Lord Louis Mountbatten’s visit to New Delhi,
Pandit Nehru broached the idea and said that someone of international
stature, unconnected with the ongoing talks, could play such a role. When
Dean Rusk visited Delhi around the same time, he got the impression that
there was support for the mediation idea, both from Nehru and President
Radhakrishnan who even cited Ellsworth Bunker, former ambassador to
India, as a possible candidate.
On 6 May, the idea was broached to Ayub in Rawalpindi by the US
ambassador and the UK high commissioner. Ayub did not seem too
interested; what he wanted was the US and the UK to commit themselves to
using their military aid to India as a leverage to resolve the Kashmir issue.
He also seemed to feel that a panel rather than a single mediator may be a
better idea. In any case, he said that the Pakistani response would be given
after a discussion with his officials.
On 17 May, the reply came through Bhutto in Karachi. He had just
returned from the sixth and final round of the India– Pakistan discussions
that had ended with both sides recording ‘with regret’ that no agreement had
been reached in settling the Kashmir dispute.
The Pakistan foreign minister told McConaughy that the Pakistanis were
willing to accept the idea with some safeguards. He spelt them out: a) a
time limit on the process; b) freeze on long-term military aid to India during
the process; c) terms of reference should focus only on Kashmir; and d)
mediation should be in the general context of the UNCIP resolutions.
These excessive qualifications became a stumbling block, which they
were probably designed to be. Prime Minister Nehru shot off a letter to
Kennedy, complaining of the general Pakistani truculence, and on 13
August 1963, in parliament, he recounted the ministerial talks. He referred
to the mediation proposal and said that it was difficult for India to accept it
because of the conditions being placed by Pakistan. The mediation idea
never really got off the ground thereafter.
 By the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, the US interest in India
and Pakistan had waned. This was an inevitable consequence of the lack of
progress on Kashmir, despite great effort on the part of the US officials. Ten
days before that fateful event in Dallas, Komer told the president in a memo
that Chester Bowles, the new ambassador to India, was feeling low about
the lack of interest in Washington. ‘We’ve explained to Chet that it isn’t our
policy but circumstances that have changed. Neither we nor the Indians
could keep up the accelerated pace stimulated by the Chicom [Chinese
Communist] attack last October.’
The Marshall and the Kennedy periods in some ways define the
parameters of the US policy on Kashmir. The Marshall period showed the
‘minimalist’ phase, with the US trying to avoid direct involvement and
adopting a legalistic position. The Kennedy period avoided reference to
juridical context and spoke the language of realpolitik. Between these two
periods was, of course, the sterile period when the UN tried to resolve the
problem.

The 1990 Revolt: US and Kashmir

Since there had been no need to, US officials had not quite applied their
minds to the Kashmir issue in the two decades and more till the outbreak of
the 1989–90 rebellion. On 6 March, 1990 when the top-most State
Department official dealing with South Asia, Assistant Secretary of State
for Near East and South Asia John H. Kelly, testified to the Asia-Pacific
Sub-Committee of the House of Representatives’ International Relations
Committee, he spoke of ‘other views’ being ‘voiced’, calling for
independence. Asked whether the US had a position on the issue of
independence as an option in any plebiscite, Kelly responded, ‘We haven’t
spoken to that position.’
There was an extensive question-and-answer session on the issue of
plebiscite between Republican Stephen Solarz, the pro- India chairman of
the subcommittee, and the State Department official:
Mr Solarz: So at that time (1949) we favoured a plebiscite. Do we still
favour a plebiscite, or we no longer favour . . . is it our position now that
whether or not there should be a plebiscite should be determined bilaterally
between India and Pakistan?
Mr Kelly: Basically, that’s right, Mr Chairman.
Mr Solarz: So we’re no longer urging plebiscite?
Mr Kelly: That’s right.

US officials later discounted Kelly’s, views as having been forced out by

Solarz’s partisan questioning. However, as seen in the Kennedy period, the
US had all but abandoned the principle of plebiscite. An officer as seasoned
as Kelly is hardly likely to have actually erred in stating US policy.
Even as Kelly spoke, there were other issues that were bringing the US to
focus sharply on the region. They were not the US’s legal views on Kashmir
or the question of plebiscite, but they did relate to Kashmir. The rebellion
there had sharply increased the tension between India and Pakistan, and
some US intelligence analysts were talking of a possible nuclear exchange.
The story was somewhat involved. In 1989, having seen the last of the
Soviet troops in Afghanistan, the Pakistan Army decided on a grand
exercise that would rival India’s 1986 exercise Brasstacks in its scope.
Called Zarb-e-Momin (the sword of the believer), the exercise, involving
the northern and southern strike armies, was both a victory parade as well
as a signal to India of the Pakistan Army’s new confidence and capabilities.
We can only speculate as to whether it had any linkage with the sharply
escalating Pakistani aid to JKLF militants in the valley.
Pakistan had never really been worried about a cross-border attack from
Afghanistan through the early 1980s. It had deployed just one corps in the
western headquarters at Peshawar. In 1989– 1990, even this became
available for use in the east against India. Pakistani generals began speaking
of a new strategy of ‘offensive defence’, in short, a deterrent strategy based
on an ability to launch pre-emptive thrusts into the adversary’s territory.
Indeed, the strategy that the much larger India maintains vis-à-vis Pakistan.
 The exercise, in the usual north-south orientation, was held in northern
Pakistan Punjab, in terrain, suspicious Indian intelligence assessed, similar
to that around Jammu and northern Indian Punjab. Whether or not it was
related to what happened in Kashmir in December 1989 is not clear, but
what did happen was that when the exercise ended, the Pakistani northern
strike corps remained in the Shakargarh area, which is the chicken’s neck
that bulges into India, south of Jammu.
Across the border India and its Army were in an unenviable position. The
country had just emerged from a bruising election with a fractured verdict.
Even as the government was settling down, the Kashmir rebellion had
erupted. At the same time, the hold of terrorists in Punjab seemed to be
strengthening.
Four divisions of the Indian Army, involved in the Indian Peace Keeping
Force in Sri Lanka, were either forming up for return or making their way
back slowly to their normal places of deployment in the north. Indeed,
minus the Indian mountain divisions oriented towards China, it appeared
that even the traditional numerical edge was not available to the Indian
Army facing Pakistan.
In these circumstances, whatever may have been its inclination in
responding to Pakistani support to Kashmiri militants, India had little
alternative but to maintain a defensive posture. To keep Pakistan guessing,
the Indian side did do something that they knew would not go unnoticed in
Pakistan. Regiments of the armoured corps were in the process of refitting
with newer tanks. As part of the exercise, they normally went to the
Mahajan Ranges in Rajasthan to try out their paces and fire the guns for
training purposes. When one regiment was due to return in February 1990,
and another got in, they were both ordered to stay on.
By this time the situation on the LoC had become quite uncontrolled,
with large-scale movement of militants and weapons. Not surprisingly, the
incidence of cross-border firing increased and there was acute tension in the
air. There were demonstrations from Pakistan’s side of the LoC and
Pakistani leaders made no efforts to calm the rising crescendo.
 In this situation when the Rawalpindi GHQ picked up the signs of Indian
armour at the Mahajan Ranges, it began to think dangerous thoughts. There
are conflicting accounts of what happened. B.G. Deshmukh, former cabinet
secretary and then principal secretary to the prime minister, said in India
Today later: ‘We got definite information that Pakistan was planning to
make a pre-emptive attack in northern Punjab as soon as the monsoon
broke, which would make movement on the Indian side very difficult. The
Pakistani terrorists would then declare in Srinagar, on August 14, their
secession from India and invite Pakistan to send its Army to protect them.’
Equally dramatic is a charge made in 1992, after she had been removed
from office, by no less a person than Benazir
Bhutto, that Pakistani generals contemplated dropping a nuclear bomb on
an Indian military exercise, presumably the tanks on the Mahajan Ranges.
In an article in The New Yorker at the end of March 1993, later expanded
into a full-length book, Seymour Hersh, the noted journalist and writer,
described a frightening sequence of events picked up by the CIA.
According to Hersh, in ‘early spring’ of 1990, US intelligence had ‘100
per cent reliable’ information (probably through National Security Agency
intercepts) that Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the Pakistan chief of staff, had
ordered a nuclear weapon to be put together. Then in early May, satellites
detected an evacuation of civilians from Kahuta, where the Pakistan nuclear
enrichment facility is located, in anticipation, it was assumed by the CIA
analysts, of an Indian attack. Later, a truck convoy was seen moving from a
suspected nuclear weapons storage site near Quetta in Baluchistan to a
nearby airbase. Apparently, they picked up signs of F–16s, armed for
delivery, with pilots in the aircraft.
Hersh based his account largely on interviews with the principal CIA
analyst, Richard Barlow, and a number of senior officials such as Deputy
Director Richard Kerr, and the former CIA Chief Robert M. Gates. Not
surprisingly, there is a lot of disagreement on this subject. The US
ambassador to Islamabad, Robert Oakley, told Hersh that there were no real
hard indications of a prospective nuclear exchange. Aslam Baig himself, in
an article in The News of Islamabad in April 1994, claimed that the US
deliberately fabricated the whole story at the behest of the India lobby.
Curiously enough, while Hersh and commentators provide reams of
information on what Pakistan was planning to do, there is little or no
indication of an Indian response. Indeed, the real situation was that through
the spring of 1990, most Indian forces, other than those in the Kashmir
valley, were in a routine ‘Op Alert’ status, which means that there were
extra guards out, and vehicles were escorted by armed personnel. In Punjab,
which though wracked by militancy, had been normal for a while, the ditch-
cum-bund anti-tank defences were unmanned, even in the sensitive area
across the LoC in Chhamb.
None of the Indian strike forces had left their peacetime locations. This is
something that the CIA bean-counters could not but have been aware of. In
fact, in April, Indian Army chief V.N. Sharma told Ambassador William
Clark Jr. that either he or his defence attaché could visit any of the strike
formations and check for themselves that they were still in their peacetime
locations. Two officers of the defence attaché’s office did go and later
noted, ‘We went to Bikaner, south of the Mahajan training area, and there
was no evidence of deployment . . . there were some rail cars with military
equipment but within normal limits.’
However, there was plenty of heightened rhetoric. After the murder of
H.L. Khera and Mushir-ul-Haq, and Benazir’s shrill statement repeating her
father’s pledge to fight a thousand-year war with India, Prime Minister V.P.
Singh lashed out at Pakistan in parliament on 10 April, warning that it
would have to pay a heavy price for its activities. His aim seemed to be
more to deter a Pakistani move across the border in support of the rebellion
by a Gibraltar or Grand Slam kind of a strategy. But the warning of India’s
ability to extract a ‘heavy cost’ from Pakistan, and the admonition that those
who wanted to fight a thousand-year war ‘should see whether they will last
a thousand-hour war’, appeared highly suggestive.
All this indicated the kind of escalatory scenario that the Americans were
dreading. Undoubtedly, they had also picked up indications of the scale of
guerrilla warfare training that was now being imparted to the valley’s youth
in camps in Azad Kashmir and northern Pakistan, and India’s belated efforts
to shore up its security situation in the valley.
President George Bush was concerned enough to order his deputy
national security adviser, Robert M. Gates, who was then visiting Moscow,
to proceed to the subcontinent without delay. A man with a long period of
service in the CIA, Gates had no experience in South Asia. But he had the
assistance of the agency and National Security Council specialists. Gates
came with an awareness that the two countries stood on the brink of a
nuclear holocaust. In Islamabad, he placed the evidence the US had on the
training camps which Pakistan was running for the Kashmiri rebels to
whom Islamabad claimed to give ‘moral support’ as well as for the
Khalistanis. He told officials there that should a wider conflict break out,
the US would not pull Pakistan’s chestnuts out of the fire. His blunt
message to Islamabad was that the US had ‘war-gamed’ all the options and
that there were none that suggested that Pakistan could ever win a war with
India.
In New Delhi, Gates’ efforts were to soothe Indian tempers and to inform
them that he had a promise that Pakistan had shut down the thirty-one
camps it had set up for training Kashmiri militants. Even before Gates
came, New Delhi had already told Ambassador Clark that its units in the
Mahajan Ranges would be pulling out as per routine. The causus belli, as it
were, would no longer be there.
Warned off by the Americans, or perhaps satisfied that the Indians would
not launch a cross-border attack, the Pakistanis backed off from a direct
military intervention in support of the Kashmiri rebellion. For their part, the
Indians decided on a defensive strategy, one that would not involve any
cross-border operations. It would be limited to preventing recruits crossing
the border to go to Pakistan, or for that matter, returning after training with
arms. This meant that the vale of Kashmir would be the battleground
between India and Pakistan, and the Kashmiris the cannon-fodder. There
was only one way this war could end. In the meantime, after having been
caught napping for the second time in four years by a Pakistani nuclear
threat, India decided to cross the nuclear Rubicon and authorization was
given for the fabrication of the first batch of atomic bombs.
Through 1990, the Bush administration continued to press both sides to
talk to each other so as to pre-empt a wider war. The effort was coordinated
by Richard N. Haass, special assistant to the president and senior director
for the Near East and South Asia Division of the National Security Council.
Some of his ideas were put across in an address to the Asia Society, and
became the basis of a seven-point package of confidence-building measures
that India offered and Pakistan rejected in June 1990. But the US did
manage to convince the two sides to set up a hotline between their Army
headquarters, and pushed for an agreement on additional measures such as
prior notification of military exercises, military hotlines at the level of field
formations, coordinated patrolling by Indian and Pakistani border police to
foil infiltration, and so on.
One intended, or unintended, consequence of the nuclear scare was to
sharply focus US attention on the nuclear ‘problem’ in South Asia. In 1989
and early 1990, the US and Pakistan were still basking in the glow of their
victory in Afghanistan. Indeed, the US had just begun groundwork on a new
arms package that would provide sixty additional F–16 A and Bs to
Pakistan.
But the events of the spring brought the US down to earth. In October
that year, when the time came for President Bush to give an annual
certification, as required by the Pressler Amendment, that Pakistan did not
have a nuclear explosive device, he did not issue one. All US military
assistance to Pakistan ceased. Caught in the pipeline were some $2 billion
worth of arms, some paid for, some ordered.
Further action was stayed because the US had now got into election
mode. The year 1992 was the presidential election year which saw Bush
lose his bid for re-election. The election of Democrat Bill Clinton meant a
more than normal turnover of personnel and policy, postponing
consideration of all serious issues to 1993, at the earliest.
Notwithstanding the elections, in June 1992, Secretary of State James
Baker shot off a letter to the Pakistan government, warning that it could be
branded a ‘state sponsor’ of terrorism if it did not desist from aiding the
Kashmiri militants. Baker noted that he would be compelled to act because
of legislation, specifically Section 620 (a) and 6 (j) of the Foreign
Assistance Act.
This was only a public declaration of what had been an intense debate
within the administration about the value of declaring Pakistan a ‘terrorist
state’. This theme was taken up by the new Clinton administration as well.
In early April 1993, Pakistan sent a high-level team led by Chaudhri Nisar
Ali, a minister in Nawaz Sharif’s government, to hold discussions with
Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other American officials to
convince them that the Pakistan government was not supporting terrorists.
The US official position at this time was summed up in a response by the
official spokesman of the State Department, who, when asked whether the
US believed that Pakistan was arming the militants in Kashmir, said, ‘The
US government is concerned with continuing reports of Pakistani support
for militant groups engaged in terrorism in India. We are keeping the
situation under review.’
The Americans privately indicated that they were not just concerned
about the role of the ISI but unhappy over the activities of the Jamaat-e-
Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat which were being used as conduits by
certain ex-ISI officials for supporting terrorist actions in India and
elsewhere. Pakistani officials denied any official involvement, claiming that
it was very difficult for the government to stop the activities of private
religious groups.
All this activity was taking place in an interesting context. On 8 January,
Pakistan Army chief Asif Nawaz Janjua had died following a sudden heart
attack and been succeeded by Gen. Abdul Waheed Kakkar, viewed as a
moderate by the Americans. Then, on 12 March had come the Bombay
blasts in which Pakistani complicity had almost immediately become
apparent. While the US urgently pressed India not to act precipitately, the
development certainly strengthened its resolve to pressure Pakistan.
In Washington, giving testimony on 22 April to the US Senate Judiciary
Committee, the chief of the CIA at the time, James Woolsey, went on record
to disclose that Pakistan was ‘on the brink’ of being declared a state sponsor
of terrorism by the US State Department, an action that would have
compelled the US to end all trade relations with Pakistan. He said that
Pakistan had supported the Kashmiri and Sikh groups and that these groups
had found a ‘safe haven and other support in Pakistan’. The CIA director’s
testimony came on the same day that the Washington Post published a
report from Islamabad, quoting a former officer of Pakistan’s ISI as saying
that the Jamaat had ‘hired former employees of the ISI and the Special
Services Group, the Army’s elite commando force to run its Kashmir
operations’.
The Bush administration, despite its non-proliferation concerns, had been
inclined to see the Rao government in New Delhi as one with whom it
could do business. Indeed, in view of Pakistan’s intransigence on the
nuclear issue and its support for terrorism, important elements in the
administration, including Secretary of State Baker, were beginning to see a
larger role for India in the US post-Cold War strategy.
But by the end of 1992, the Rao government had backed into a corner
and allowed a mob of Hindu revivalists to raze the Babri Masjid.
Accompanying riots had taken the lives of hundreds of people, mainly
Muslims. Once again, it appeared, India was on the brink of chaos. The US
administration took the lead in preventing India from being pilloried around
the world over the issue, especially the moderate Arab world.
When the Clinton administration took office, it was hampered by the fact
that the newly created position of assistant secretary of state for South Asia
had not been filled. Soon the post of ambassador, too, fell vacant. Tom
Pickering, who had been exiled to India from his post as UN ambassador by
jealous Secretary of State Baker the previous year, was now asked to
proceed to Moscow as envoy. He left behind a competent team led by
Deputy Chief of Mission Kenneth Brill and Political Counsellor Robin
Raphel in New Delhi, but they were much too junior to make an impression
in Washington.
L ’Affaire Raphel
Following the Bombay blasts in March 1993, the US, alarmed at Pakistani
complicity in the event, sent John Malott, the principal deputy assistant
secretary of state, to the subcontinent. The career diplomat, now
ambassador to Malaysia, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Sub-
Committee on Asia Pacific Affairs in the same month that ‘a military
standoff continues along the line of control’ that needed attention, and in the
valley, militants had launched an insurgency and were resorting to terrorist
attacks, while the Indian security forces committed ‘human rights abuses’
[in tackling them]. He called for bilateral talks as envisaged by the Simla
Agreement and said that the US was prepared to be ‘helpful’ if both sides
wished it.
Since the new Clinton administration had not quite settled down, Malott’s
main political directive remained the Bush administration’s priorities of
preventing Kashmir from becoming a potential flashpoint for a nuclear war,
as well as of making it clear to Islamabad that its arming of Kashmiri
militants was not only unacceptable to the US, but that the US was
seriously contemplating placing Pakistan on a list of ‘state sponsors’ of
terrorism, a development that could result in a breakdown of all US-
Pakistan relations.
In Delhi, Malott gave sufficient indications that the US was reluctant to
brand Pakistan a ‘terrorist state’ because that action would reduce US
leverage there. Unstated was the proposition that the US had other goals,
namely non-proliferation, and it did not want to divert its focus by what
would be seen as a counter- productive move.
At a lecture at the India International Centre in New Delhi in May 1993,
he declared that the US wanted the two countries to ‘convert the principles
embodied in the Simla paper into a reality’. The US would not advocate any
particular solution, and the three principles guiding its policy were:

1) ‘We consider all of Kashmir to be disputed territory, on both sides of

the line of control;
 2) This is an issue to be settled peacefully by India and Pakistan, taking
the views of Kashmiris, both Muslims and Non-Muslim, into account;
and
3) The United States is prepared to be helpful in this process, if this is
desired by both sides.’

But Malott was already lame duck. Early in 1993, the US announced the
appointment of the first assistant secretary for the new Division of South
Asian Affairs within the State Department. The person selected for the job
was Robin Lynn Raphel, at the time political counsellor at the US embassy
in New Delhi.
India’s problems with Robin Raphel began before she left New Delhi to
take up her new assignment in Washington. They probably began in late
1992, when Washington began to take an active interest in the affairs of
Kashmir. Political officers at the US embassy in New Delhi established
contact with Kashmiri politicians in Delhi and visited the valley.
For the hard-pressed secessionist leadership, American interest, for
whatever purpose, was invaluable, both as a defensive measure to check
human-rights abuses as well as to project their cause. The chosen
interlocutor was Abdul Ghani Lone. His son, a businessman, and daughter,
a lawyer, worked out of New Delhi and were articulate champions of the
Kashmiri cause.
Once he was freed in April 1992, American diplomats and journalists
inevitably made a beeline for him. In April 1993, on a visit to the US,
allegedly for medical treatment, Lone declared that the APHC was a vehicle
through which India could negotiate across the table. ‘We want the United
States and the international community to know,’ he declared, ‘that a
political leadership exists in Kashmir with broad popular support, which
seeks a peaceful, negotiated settlement.’
He called on the US to pressure India into talking with the new group.
Lone met aides of various Congressmen, some National Security Council
officials, and various private individuals to put across his views, none of
which were particularly comforting for India.
 Indian officials, however, ascribe their new difficulties in Kashmir in
1993 to their falling out with Raphel, problems, they claim, that arose from
her expectation of being treated as assistant secretary-designate, even
before taking office. She wanted to meet officials and ministers at levels
which were not appropriate for a mere political counsellor. What she saw as
an opportunity was seen as presumptuousness on the part of the hierarchy–
conscious Indian bureaucracy, perhaps a little resentful of her sudden
promotion. Even while the Indian officials were being coldly proper, their
Pakistani counterparts wooed her.
Raphel compounded the problem by her ‘tough guy’ approach. Her calls
on India to reduce human-rights abuses and ‘clean up your act’ in Kashmir
or ‘get your act together’ hit a raw nerve. The mandarins did not want to
hear this message, not from an American, and that, too, a woman. IB
officials tapping her line added spice to this by reporting to their masters the
not-very- complimentary terms in which they were referred to by Raphel.
But Raphel had not quite taken over head of the South Asian division
when the shift in American policies became apparent. Even as Pakistan
began a new phase of activity by arming and sending in mercenaries and
mehmaan mujahideen into the valley, the issue of declaring it a terrorist
state simply faded. In July 1993, Secretary of State Warren Christopher
decided not to cite Pakistan as a state sponsoring terrorism. This decision,
an aide later explained in a letter to the House Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Lee Hamilton, was not an easy one. ‘Although it was a close and
difficult question—not entirely free from doubt—the Secretary did decide
not to put Pakistan on the terrorism list for the time being.’
The official, Wendy R. Sherman, went on to add, ‘The Secretary reached
this conclusion because the evidence currently available to us indicates that
Pakistan’s policy of ending official support for terrorists is apparently now
being implemented on the ground.’ She said that the US had told Pakistan
that if the positive trends did not continue, or if there was ‘subsequent
resurgence of official support for those who commit terrorist acts against
India, either directly or through private groups, the Secretary will not
hesitate to name Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.’
 This development was welcomed by the militants in the valley since it
seemed that the US had, according to the People’s Conference statement
cited in the Al Safa of July 17, rejected Indian propaganda that the Kashmir
movement was a ‘terrorist’ one. This was underscored by the view of
another militant outfit, the Tehrik-ul-Mujahideen, which expressed extreme
happiness over the US decision since it proved that the Clinton
administration thought that the ‘political, diplomatic and moral support’
given by Pakistan was legitimate.
It did not matter whether the US was actually shifting tracks. Kashmiri
militants thought it was. The pro-secession daily, Greater Kashmir, noted
that ‘A succession of “positive” signals from America in relation to
settlement of the Kashmir issue is tickling many a heart in Kashmir.’ This
was in reaction to an American news agency citing on 6 June, a report of
the US House Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee on Asia and Pacific, to the
effect that insurgency in the valley was ‘largely indigenous’ and that no
settlement could be imposed without taking into account the wishes of the
Kashmiri people.
Interestingly, an Indian news agency’s report of the same event focused
on another of the committee’s findings, that the plebiscite option has been
overtaken by history and that the idea, as originally envisaged, did not
provide Kashmiris with any choice other than to go with either India or
Pakistan.
With people in India, the valley and Pakistan hanging on to every word
and gesture of the American officials, it is not surprising that Robin
Raphel’s visit to the valley in June prior to taking up her appointment in the
US was watched with great attention. Raphel had gone to talk to all parties,
listen rather than put across views. But the secessionists could hardly
contain themselves over the idea that a representative of the US was
actually talking to them.
The Srinagar Times of 26 June cited a JKLF spokesperson welcoming
the interest being shown by the Clinton administration on the Kashmir
issue. The JKLF urged the American administration to ‘stress upon the
prime ministers of India and Pakistan that Kashmiris are not going to accept
any decision whatsoever to which Kashmiri people are not a party’.
According to the Greater Kashmir, during her four-day visit, she met a
number of political leaders, government officials and others. She declined
government security and resided in a local hotel. Raphel sought their
opinion on a range of options—more autonomy under India, possible Indo-
Pakistani condominium, and so on. Not surprisingly, her view that there
should be tripartite talks involving Pakistan, India and the ‘Kashmiri
people’ found ready support, even among the anti-West Jamaat leadership.
In her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Raphel reiterated the US view that both India and Pakistan had
nuclear weapons capabilities and that Washington was working on a multi-
party dialogue on these issues. She also reaffirmed US policy that viewed
‘the whole of Kashmir as disputed territory’ and that a workable solution to
the conflict must be acceptable to India, Pakistan and the people of
Kashmir. On 30 July, the Senate approved Robin Raphel’s nomination as
assistant secretary. The new official’s agenda was clearly laid out before
her.
Meanwhile, there was another important development with implications
for the US policy in India. In the October 1993 general elections in
Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto rode back to power. Bhutto had important friends
in the new administration. Peter Galbraith, the son of the former
ambassador to India, had been in Oxford during her time, and Raphel had
known her from earlier stints in Islamabad.
Whatever may or may not have been Raphel’s thinking on Kashmir, as of
August–September 1993, the US had not quite thought out its Kashmir
policy. In the US system in the 1990s, no one official, no matter how senior,
could write the agenda alone. Any shift would require an intense inter-
agency discussion and then NSC clearance. The only area where such an
exercise had been conducted was in nuclear non-proliferation and its impact
was very obvious in terms of the systematic and sustained pressure that was
being brought on India, not just from a department of the US government,
such as the Bureau of South Asian Affairs, but other agencies, such as the
Department of Defence, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and
the G–7 allies of the US as well.
Nowhere was there activity on the scale that took place, for example,
during the Kennedy administration for ‘fixing’ Kashmir. Indeed, there was
not even a US ambassador in New Delhi. The White House was battling
pressure to announce the name of Stephen Solarz, the former New York
Congressman whose career had been curtailed by the ‘kiting’ scandal.
However, though welcome in India, there were serious doubts as to whether
Solarz would win approval in the Senate. So, even as the former
Congressman lobbied and the White House explored options, the American
Chancery in New Delhi was headless. But while there was little real
activity, there were a lot of statements on Kashmir, words that generated
certain perceptions.
Malott, and then Raphel’s constant repetition of ‘Kashmir is disputed
territory’, grated in New Delhi. Their visits to the region or the valley
appeared to presage US activism. It hurt all the more because the US had let
Pakistan off the hook on the issue of terrorism and this happened in mid–
1993, when, in the valley, a terrific battle was raging between the security
forces and the insurgents, a lot of them being Pakistani and Afghan
nationals.
In New Delhi, there seemed to be a qualitative shift in the US policy on
Kashmir. This was with reference to the need for a settlement to take into
account the ‘wishes’ of the ‘Kashmiri people’. The Americans said that this
did not reflect a contradiction or shift, merely an added nuance compelled
by the developments since 1990. Many in India believed that the references
to the ‘Kashmiri people’ were gaining a dangerous salience, if not
centrality, in American thinking on the dispute. Raphel’s first public
remarks as the top US official dealing with South Asia, in a speech at a
dinner by the Asia Foundation on 17 September, appeared at first sight to be
quite unobjectionable. Her basic point on Kashmir was that tensions there
could trigger a wider war, and that there had been little follow-up to the
Simla Agreement, whereby India and Pakistan committed themselves to
dealing seriously with this issue. But in responding to questions, she
observed that the leadership vacuum in the valley was being filled: ‘I am
happy to report that they are working on it . . . They are working together
and organizing themselves so they have someone who can speak for them
as a whole, as a group. Various combinations are being tried and I think
that’s healthy.’
For Indian officials, these remarks appeared ominous. In a news weekly
report of this meeting, an unnamed Indian diplomat commented that the
repeated US statements about Kashmir being disputed seemed to suggest
that ‘by implication they [the US] don’t accept the finality of accession of
Kashmir to India’.
The next apparent signal of a US shift was a somewhat maladroit use of a
rhetorical device by President Clinton. On 27 September 1993, while
addressing the UN General Assembly, the president referred to the
prevalence of ‘bloody ethnic, religious and civil war’ in a region from
‘Caucasus to Kashmir’. Once again, New Delhi was not amused.
Raphel was experienced in the ways of India and the minefields of South
Asian politics, but she needed something more than that: luck. It ran out for
her on 28 October when she decided to brief Indian journalists in
Washington.
The question was very specific: did she agree that the Instrument of
Accession of 1947 was the legal basis for the state being an integral part of
India? She could have said ‘yes’ and thereby undermined the official US
view that Kashmir was disputed territory; but she chose to say: ‘We view
the whole of Kashmir as disputed territory.’
Had she stopped at this point, it would merely have been a reiteration of
long-held US views. But, Raphel being Raphel, she added, ‘That means we
do not recognize that Instrument of Accession as meaning that Kashmir is
forever made an integral part of India.’
The collective might of the Indian press came down on her. The Times of
India, whose correspondent asked the question, led with the story, ‘Kashmir
disputed, says US’; the Indian Express ran the lead along with the
Government of India’s response: ‘India lambasts US for questioning
accession’. The official response, carefully studied and correct, was
dramatic, to say the least. The next day, Joint Secretary (America Division)
Hardip Singh Puri called in Kenneth Brill, acting ambassador, at 6 p.m., and
read an aide mémoire to him. Later, on orders from the highest in the land,
officials in the ministry of external affairs briefed the media and even faxed
copies of the aide mémoire that had been presented to Brill.
The document declared that Raphel’s remarks questioning the status of
Kashmir appeared ‘most disconcerting’, and that the Government of India
‘are hearing in Raphel’s statement a qualitative shift in position’. The
statement went on to add that the entirety of Raphel’s statements ‘in both
their content and tone’ led India to perceive a ‘studied tilt on the part of the
USG (US government) towards Pakistan’.
The note went on to add that Raphel’s remarks overlooked the ‘reality of
external support of terrorism’ and that they would only encourage Pakistan
to ‘persist with the interference’. Referring to the media, already primed
with background briefings, the aide mémoire declared, ‘We anticipate that
Raphel’s press briefing will be viewed by the domestic public opinion in
India as biased and tendentious and incongruent with Indo-US relations . . .’
There was another area where the remarks had an impact. The issue
exploded just as the government was trying to finesse its Hazratbal
operation to a close. On 29 October, the APHC, which had been trying to
mediate a solution, suddenly raised the ante, and when the Kashmir
administration refused to meet their demand, they pulled out of the
negotiations.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who had been tentatively exploring his political
role as the chairman of the Hurriyat, stepped up the rhetoric on self-
determination from his pulpit in Jama Masjid. His colleagues such as Abdul
Ghani Bhat were jubilant, declaring that the US stand was a ‘realistic
assessment of the situation’ and that ‘the Instrument that the people do not
recognize cannot and should not be accepted’. However, he denied that the
breakdown in negotiation occurred because of this development.
Commenting in the Mashriq of 1 October 1993, Syed Ali Shah Geelani
said that the changed international situation was to the advantage of the
Kashmiris and the best proof of this lay in the US president’s remarks
which were a pointer to the international pressure building on India. At the
same time, the JKLF, which presented a memorandum to the UN, recorded
its appreciation of Raphel and Clinton’s remarks. Stoking American fears
on a possible nuclear exchange in South Asia, the memorandum called on
the world to act against India’s ‘stubborn attitudes’.
The generally anti-western Hizbul Mujahideen did not praise the
Americans, but its number two, Ali Mohammed Dar aka Burhanuddin
Hajazi, declared that all the signs indicated that the Indian domination of
Kashmir could not last for long. In an interview. with the Sada-e-Hurriyat
(Voice of Liberation, a Pakistani radio station broadcasting to India), he said
that the American president’s remarks as well as the offer of mediation by
UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali indicated that the world was
moving against India and international pressure was mounting.
The way the Indians saw it, the remarks of American officials, howsoever
offhand and casual, were giving aid and comfort to the adversary. Some
American officials privately admitted that there had been a diplomatic
blunder. According to one official, the US position before Raphel spoke was
that the status of Kashmir was to be decided by the Indians, Pakistanis and
Kashmiris, and for the present, the US government can rule nothing in and
rule nothing out’. As he noted, ‘Robin was speaking of the outcome that
Kashmir would not be part of India.’
There was another angle to her remark that struck South Asian specialist
Ainslee T. Embree, professor at Columbia University, and a man with a
wide knowledge and experience of India. Speaking at a meeting of the Asia
Society in March 1995, he pointed out, as indeed the Indian aide mémoire
had, that in questioning the Instrument of Accession, Raphel was
commenting on a complicated arrangement through which 600–odd Indian
princely states had been enabled to join the Union. ‘To say that we don’t
accept the instrument means that we are questioning one of the foundations
of the integrity of the Indian nation,’ he observed. It was one thing to
believe that the status of Kashmir was disputed and quite another to
question the Instrument of Accession which was born from the
Independence of India Act, passed by the British parliament in 1947.
 American officials later claimed that the entire episode, beginning with
the seemingly innocuous question at the Washington Press Conference, had
been set up to embarrass Raphel and manipulate US policy. While this
seems somewhat far-fetched, it does appear that Indian officials exploited
Raphel’s blunder to the full. An interview with J.N. Dixit, the then Indian
foreign secretary, given to Vir Sanghvi of Sunday went this way:

Q. [Do you admit that] . . . the foreign office decided pretty early on that it
did not want to deal with Robin Raphel and set out to deliberately discredit
her.
A. Let me divide your question into two parts. Yes, there was a subjective
value judgement that we thought that Robin Raphel was not sufficiently
experienced or senior to be in charge of the whole of South Asia. But did
we discredit her? She discredited herself.
Q. You are still not answering the basic question.
Because you didn’t like her you used the Indian media to discredit her. Do
you accept that?
A. Once she questioned Kashmir’s accession to India, we had no choice.
We did not want to deal with her. We came to the conclusion she was a
difficult customer.

Instructions for the campaign against Raphel were approved by the prime
minister himself. The government’s aims in orchestrating a campaign were
ambitious and in the end successful; in terms of national interest, their
tactics legitimate. They were to destroy any embryonic role that the US or
Raphel may have envisioned on Kashmir to architect another Camp David
type agreement.
The government-generated media storm clearly rattled Washington as it
was meant to. But a day after the event, when Raphel had flown off for a
scheduled trip to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal, State Department
spokesman Mike McCurry made it clear that the statement did not represent
‘a change in US policy towards Kashmir, nor in any way on India’s
territorial integrity.
 As we have noted consistently since 1947, the US believes the entire
geographic area of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir is disputed
territory’.
Even this clarification was somewhat curious. Indian officials privately
charged that it was another way of stating the same thing. The ‘dispute’
element figured in the Kashmir problem only after India took the issue to
the UN in early 1948. For the US to declare that Kashmir was disputed
territory since 1947 was yet another way of challenging the legality of the
Instrument of Accession.
Ambassador S.S. Ray, who was normally denied top-level access, was
called in to meet the number three person in the State Department, Under-
Secretary Peter Tarnoff, who then wrote a formal letter to him to be shared
with the press as well. In the letter Tarnoff asserted that the consistent US
position had been that Kashmir is disputed territory and ‘Our view is that
negotiations between the governments of India and Pakistan, as envisaged
by the Simla Agreement, provide the best means for resolving their dispute
over Kashmir. As a practical matter, we believe this process of bilateral
negotiations needs to take into account the wishes of Kashmiri people.’
Even while affirming this, Tarnoff added, almost as an aside, ‘Moreover, the
US has always supported India’s territorial integrity.’ This was not a shift,
but certainly a more calculated and straightforward formulation of US
policy.
Later that month, when the Hazratbal ‘crisis’ was satisfactorily
concluded, Ray actually got to see Warren Christopher. The US secretary of
state congratulated India for the peaceful end of the crisis and offered to
help resolve the Kashmir issue. ‘The success,’ Christopher wrote in a letter
to Rao, again made available to the media, ‘is due to your steadfast
determination to resolve the siege through negotiations and not by
violence.’
Indeed, the US had worked in another direction, to help India during the
Hazratbal crisis. A few days after the start of the Hazratbal drama, US
Chargé d’ Affaires Ken Brill informed the Indian government that American
missions had been asked to convey to OIC member countries the need to
refrain from making provocative statements on the issue Later, the US was
successful in persuading Pakistan not to press a set of resolutions it had
planned to bring up at the UN General Assembly.
Despite this, things went from bad to worse. Surprisingly, it was
President Bill Clinton himself who touched off the next furore via two
letters, written in response to the Khalistan and Kashmir lobbies in
Washington. Getting some Congressmen to write a letter on behalf of this or
that cause is the work lobbyists do all the time in the US. But Indian
sensitivities had been rubbed to the raw on Kashmir and Punjab. The letters
were written on 27 December, but the respective lobbies made them public
later in January and February 1994.
Responding to Gary Condit and other Congressmen, Clinton said, ‘I am
aware of the chronic tension between the Indian government and the Sikh
militants and share your desire for a peaceful solution that protects Sikh
rights.’ In the letter to Ghulam Nabi Fai, who heads the anti-Indian
Kashmiri Action Council, Clinton said, ‘I look forward to working with you
and others to help bring peace to Kashmir.’
But while this could have been dismissed as ill-timed and even careless,
what upset the Indians were his remarks while accepting the credentials of
Pakistan’s new ambassador, Maleeha Lodhi, on 16 February 1994. Lodhi,
not unexpectedly, used the formal ceremony to excoriate India for its
brutality in Kashmir. What took Indians aback was Clinton’s response, ‘We
share Pakistan’s concerns about human-rights abuses in Kashmir.’ Indians
saw in all these remarks a remarkable and unjustified turnaround in US
policy, which less than a year ago, was set to declare Pakistan a state
sponsor of terrorism for supporting terrorist activity in India, specifically
Kashmir.
Some measure of the Indian discomfiture can be seen from the way in
which opponents of India in the valley saw these seemingly random
statements. Speaking to Venkatesh Ramakrishnan of Frontline in January
1994, the Mirwaiz noted, ‘. . . the recent signs are encouraging. The US
President himself has evinced interest in the issue. He has made it clear that
while settling the dispute, the wishes of Kashmiris have to be taken into
consideration. We hope to see advancements on this US role.’
It seemed to India that US policy was now tilting once again towards
Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto’s return as prime minister, following her victory in
the 1993 elections, was seen as the point of departure for a new soft line
towards Islamabad. The first confirmation of a shift was seen in a leaked
‘discussion draft’ in Washington, calling for a repeal of the Pressler
Amendment.
While all this was happening, India was still minus an American
ambassador. Things came to a head in early February 1994 when the
administration was grilled over the delay in appointing an envoy by the
powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Raphel, as the senior
administration official, had to face the music. She was duly apologetic, but
all she could say was that a nominee had been identified and would be
named shortly.
To move away from the controversy and highlight the positive, Raphel
used the platform of the Asia Society on 9 February to point to the
burgeoning economic links between India and the US. After running
through the checklist of US concerns— non-proliferation, narcotics,
democracy and human-rights—Raphel came to Kashmir, but discussed it in
passing, referring to its human toll rather than the political issues. The US,
she complained, was trying its best to solve the problem, but India and
Pakistan remained ‘trapped in what appears to be a zero-sum game’ and ‘an
approach on our part seems doomed to be interpreted by one side or the
other as a tilt’.

Working the Main Agenda

Behind the latest US ‘approach’ lay a carefully thought out plan of pressing
Washington’s main agenda for the region—non- proliferation. It was
Raphel’s job now to work on the agenda. She began to praise the efforts
India was making in response to US criticism on human rights’ observance
in Kashmir. In one congressional testimony she had cited the formation of a
National Human Rights Commission in India, as well as the Indian Army’s
crackdown on its own soldiers as steps ‘in the right direction’.
Just some months before, in her 28 October 1993 remarks, which had
been swamped by the Instrument of Accession issue, she had been
positively harsh, noting that the US had pushed the Indians to ‘clean up
their act’, adding that her government had told its Indian counterparts ‘that
you need to make security forces more accountable for their behaviour.
Making people disappear, encounter killings, extrajudicial executions, death
in custody . . . frankly there is no excuse for it’.
A subtle shift in emphasis was also visible in her testimony to the
Ackerman panel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in early March
1994: Kashmir was disputed territory and the US believed that the bilateral
talks between India and Pakistan under the Simla Agreement were the best
means of resolving the issue. ‘As a practical matter, however, it is important
that any settlement and resolution take into account the desires of the
people of Kashmir. As to how these desires were to be ascertained, the US
had no position.’
Meanwhile, Rao, in an ultimately cynical act, had his old buddy and
home minister Chavan play the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine, even while his
ambassador to the US, Ray, and Principal Secretary A.N. Verma were
quietly negotiating a freeze in the Prithvi and Agni missile programmes
with the Americans, in exchange for an invitation for Rao to visit
Washington, Chavan was publicly lambasting the Americans. Predictably,
parliament fell for the act, hook, line and sinker. On 2 March, introducing a
resolution to extend president’s rule in Kashmir, Chavan launched a
scathing attack on the US, declaring that it had developed a ‘vested interest’
in the conflict. ‘We have to discuss with them frankly and try to find out
what exactly are the intentions of the US government. If their intentions are
different from the public stances, then it is our responsibility to see what our
response will be in the changed situation,’ he thundered amidst the
thumping of desks. The next day he repeated his performance in the Rajya
Sabha and received similar applause.
 This was about the time the invitation came through, but the Americans
kept up the pressure subtly. Dates and the agenda had yet to be finalized. So
it was still important to keep Raphel in good humour during her visit on 22–
25 March. Through cable and telephone, Ray bombarded Verma with the
need for India to appear conciliatory, notwithstanding what had occurred.
The obliging Verma urged the prime minister to ignore the ministry of
external affairs and not only meet Raphel but instruct a very reluctant
Chavan to also do so.
Though the Rao government had more or less told the Americans that the
Agni programme was over and Prithvi slowed down, no commitment had
been given to the five-nation conference on nuclear disarmament on what
the US wanted and believed the Indians had committed themselves to. To
check out these and some other details, the president wanted to send Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott to the region. This was put across as a
response to India’s desire to have a senior interlocutor to discuss its affairs
with the US, and in line with this, Raphel’s visit was seen as part of leg
work.
Everyone whom Raphel wanted to meet met her. The prime minister
dithered till the last. Chavan being his subordinate was compelled to give in
first. A discomfited home minister told his aides he was doing this ‘in the
interest of better Indo-US relations’.
At the end of the visit, Raphel met a select group of journalists to clarify
the misunderstandings on the views of the Clinton administration. She said
that the US had a five-point approach while spelling out its policies:

‘First, we support a negotiated end to the conflict in Kashmir. Our focus is

not how it started, but on how it can be ended.
Second, we support efforts to resolve the dispute as envisaged in the Simla
Accord . . .
Third . . . we support Prime Minister Rao’s efforts to pursue a political
process that will bring to an end the fighting in Kashmir . . .
Fourth . . . we are concerned about credible reports of human rights
violations in Kashmir. We always acknowledge that militants share
responsibility for violations with the security forces. We appreciate the steps
the Government has taken to reduce the abuses committed by members of
the security forces . . .
Finally, we vigorously oppose outside aid to the militants and have
repeatedly made that clear in capitals where it needs to be heard. We have
worked harder than anyone else to decrease that support.’

If the 28 October remarks were an ‘excessively negative’ policy assertion

by the US, the carefully crafted 25 March remarks were remarkably benign.
The professional that she was, Raphel did not allow personal feelings to
cloud her nation’s agenda.

Rao Goes to Washington

Rao had carefully calculated the price. Agni was not a missile, merely a test
vehicle or a technology demonstrator. With its three tests over, ergo, the
programme was over. In the case of Prithvi, design and development would
be stretched ad infinitum. India would not actually field the artillery units
with the missile. So the Americans could take a breath and relax and the
Pakistanis could keep their China-supplied M-11 missiles in their crates.
On the nuclear issue, there was a problem. It was not a moral one, merely
political. India’s nuclear activities had always been shrouded in mystery. No
one really knew what was happening, neither the armed forces, nor the
Cabinet. To give assurances beyond the actual evidence of non-action was
not just difficult but politically suicidal.
Rao was not quite the Rao of 1992. Gone was the atmosphere of crisis
brought on by the Harshad Mehta allegations or the Babri Masjid affair.
Foreign investment that had begun as a trickle now became a respectable
flow. Most significant was that US investment, $20 million in 1990, had
topped $1.2 billion in 1993 alone.
The Army’s autumn offensive across the valley as well as the psy ops at
Hazratbal had perceptibly improved the atmosphere in the valley. To
outflank the expected Pakistani assault at the UN, India had offered
Pakistan talks on each of their outstanding disputes. Indeed, they had even
agreed to discuss the so-called core issue of Kashmir.
Even the pressure on capping nuclear capability wavered. The more
realistic Pakistani, Gen. Abdul Waheed Kakkar, undermined the American
initiatives by categorically rejecting the capping for an F–16 offer during a
visit to Washington in late March. In April during his visit to Islamabad,
just prior to his departure for Delhi, Strobe Talbott was given the message
that any arrangement had to stress ‘equity, balance and even- handedness’.
This led to revived American pressure for movement in the stalled plans
for talks for the five-nation regional NPT. US officials claimed that India
had committed itself ‘in principle’ to multilateral talks on non-proliferation
in the September 1993 round of the talks. Their Indian counterparts charged
that the US had misinterpreted their position. While India had indeed
accepted that there could be a multilateral discussion, it had not accepted
the US framework which saw the aim of the conference as one of resolving
India–Pakistan disputes.
To mollify the Americans, Rao told Talbott that the two sides could hold
yet another round of bilateral talks, and this time the Indian delegation
would be headed by his special envoy. Since talks in New Delhi and
Washington generated media speculation and frenzy, why not hold them in
a third country? The Americans were elated. All this made it appear that the
Indians were finally coming around.
After going through the motions of sending a secret delegation to London
on 27–28 April, Rao decided to pull the plug by having news of the ‘secret
talks’ leaked to the Indian media on the day they were held. There was
another surprise in store for the American delegation led by Robert Einhorn,
the deputy assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation affairs. Instead
of talking about the modalities of the five-nation talks which the Americans
had been pursuing for the previous three years, the Indian delegation led by
Natarajan Krishnan lectured them on Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 action plan for
universal disarmament.
The result was a curt American démarche calling on the prime minister to
carry to Washington ‘realistic proposals’ on what India could do in the area
of non-proliferation. Washington was determined to extract its price for the
prime ministerial visit, and Rao was equally determined not to give
anything more.
In these circumstances, the actual visit of the prime minister to the US
between 16 and 21 May 1994, was a routine affair. Non-proliferation was
mentioned, but in the general sense that both countries would strive to
reduce and eliminate such weapons. The accent was now on the growing
trade relations between the two countries.
Speaking to the Asia Society on 30 April, Lee Hamilton, chairman of the
powerful House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, had noted
the burgeoning Indo-US economic relationship. The $1.2 billion investment
in 1993, he said, was more than the total since 1947. Two-way trade
touched $7.3 billion and US exports to India rose forty-four per cent. This
worried him.
‘Before economic forces can reshape the bilateral relationship, we have
to resolve our specific difficulties. The single most contentious issue
disrupting Indo-American relations today is the question of Kashmir.’
But Hamilton was too late. Opportunities for economic growth, seized on
by US businesses, began changing the context of Indo-US relations. With
the failure of the London talks, the Indo-US bilateral dialogue on non-
proliferation came to an end. The US now began to focus on a campaign to
get an indefinite and unconditional extension of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty when it came up for renewal in 1995. India, not being a signatory,
was out of the reckoning, but Washington was keen to ensure that India did
not lead a campaign against an extension of the treaty among Non-Aligned
Movement countries.
A certain peace enveloped Indo-US relations after the prime minister’s
visit to Washington. The appointment of Frank G. Wisner as the US
ambassador to India played a significant role. One of two of the highest
ranks of ‘career ambassador’, equivalent to a general in the Army, and with
excellent connections in Washington’s corridors of power, Indians now had
someone else to talk to apart from Raphel.
 With Wisner came a period of calm, reasoned dialogue with the US on a
variety of issues. A former under-secretary of defence, Wisner was
especially sensitive to India’s feelings of insecurity. Even on issues like
Prithvi and Agni, he did not take a hectoring tone, but urged US policy in a
sophisticated style that did not appear threatening to New Delhi. He did not
have to since the Indians had already made the necessary compromises.
Along with Wisner in a short-term assignment came Prof. Ainslee T.
Embree. His job was to advise the ambassador on the cultural and political
angularities of India.
Even before he arrived in New Delhi, Wisner made it clear that he would
pitch his efforts to put across the US agenda on non-proliferation and
Kashmir in an overall framework of friendship and cooperation. He told
Indian reporters in Washington that the US did not have a game plan on
Kashmir and that it hoped that a settlement could be worked out by direct
negotiations between India and Pakistan in a process that would ‘take into
account the attitude and wishes of all the people of Jammu and Kashmir’.
He also made it clear that the US ‘aspires [to] no role in this matter’. In
some ways, given the Raphel affair, Wisner felt, as he privately told friends,
that he had been caught in the ‘tail of a comet’. It became apparent to him at
the time he was being briefed for his confirmation hearings that the US had
been caught in a trap of its own making. The policy of stating that the US
viewed Kashmir as a disputed territory which could be resolved by the
Simla Agreement and by taking into account the wishes of the people of
Kashmir was according to an aide, ‘not a policy of handling Kashmir, but of
defending the US from assaults from the Paks, the Indians, the Pandits, and
what have you’. To escape from this cul-de-sac, as it were, Wisner began a
strategic shift that would set aside the issues of ‘disputed territory’, UN
resolutions, or Simla agreement, and identify steps that could resolve the
problem.
As India started winning the battle on the ground in Kashmir after 1993,
secessionists and their lobbies began to call on the US to intervene on their
behalf. The idea of third-party mediation went back to the very origins of
the dispute. But the US had, except in its 1962–63 efforts, avoided pushing
itself forward as the ‘honest broker’.
In April 1995, the US Under-Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff
emphatically reiterated ‘That US is not going to be a mediator’ and
underlined that there could be no ‘made in USA’ solution to the Kashmir
issue. Tarnoff’s comments came in a question and answer session after a
lecture to the United Services Institution in Delhi. What was remarkable
was that through the lecture, ‘India as an Emerging Global Power’, Tarnoff
made no reference to Kashmir.
The Kashmir administration’s and the government’s strategy of holding
elections in the valley inevitably attracted US attention. Raphel first
dismissed the idea as being impractical or inadequate to meet the needs of
the situation, but at the beginning of 1994, Wisner pushed for supporting
them. He argued that it was possible to back the elections without
necessarily compromising the basic US position that Kashmir was a
disputed territory. The way he saw it was that elections, howsoever
imperfect, represented a peaceful track. In his reckoning, elections were
‘not an end point, but part of a process’.
Through 1995 and 1996, Wisner was active, visiting the valley, talking to
officials and ‘intellectuals’ of New Delhi without provoking the kind of
reactions Raphel had. His message to the Kashmir administration and the
government was that a dialogue ought to be restarted. However, it soon
became clear to him that the Hurriyat was unable to deliver. As he
complained to his aides, ‘they (the Hurriyat) seemed to have no peace
strategy, only a protest strategy’,
Wisner made efforts to shift the India–Pakistan gridlock out of what he
termed a ‘time warp’. In a speech to the Command and Staff College at
Quetta, Pakistan, in July 1996, he told the assembled top brass that it was
the Pakistani imperative to move from ‘confrontation to reconciliation’ with
India. The US view on Kashmir, he said, was:

First, that its role was limited and it was for India and Pakistan to find the
solution to the issue following the steps set out by Tashkent and Simla
Agreements. ‘Outsiders can wish you well, and may find ways to help, but
you and India have what it takes to do the job.’ Second and more
importantly, the solution lay not in ‘revisiting the troubled history of the
Kashmir dispute . . . [but through] . . . a fresh look at your assumptions so
that you can arrive at new conclusions’.
Third and most important, Pakistanis had to acknowledge that ‘after nearly
50 years, there are certain fundamental realities that will not be changed’.

Increasingly, the US line on Kashmir began to look like its approach to

the Middle East problem: the US accepted that a dispute existed over
territory, that it had important stakes with all the parties involved, but it
refused to take any stand as to where or what it saw as the end point of the
process of its resolution. As Wisner put it, ‘The end game is where you guys
end up, the US, for its part will stubbornly resist the definition of the end
game.’
Six months later, Wisner had the chance to deliver his message to the
Indian side. He chose a lecture delivered at Jammu University, with an
audience probably more in tune with the BJP than any other. US policy, he
reiterated was:

‘That the dispute needs to be resolved by India and Pakistan, taking into
account the wishes of the people of the state. The solution to the conflict
will not be found by engaging in sterile historical debates . . .
[That] the United States seeks no role in this affair, other than as an
advocate for peace and reconciliation. India has made it clear that it does
not seek third-party mediation, and America is not offering to serve as
mediator.’

Wisner’s statements on Kashmir, principally calling for new ‘forward

looking’ solutions and stressing the US’ even-handedness, turned out to be a
prelude to a wider reassessment of US South Asian policy in 1997.
With the advent of the second Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright
became secretary of state in the place of Warren Christopher. The new team
dealing with South Asia consisted of Under-Secretary Thomas Pickering,
who had been ambassador to India for a brief interregnum in 1991. Robin
Raphel moved on as ambassador to Tunisia, to be replaced by Karl
Inderfurth, an Albright aide. Central to the shift were three developments.
The first was the steadily increasing Indo-US economic interaction; the
second, India’s decision to oppose the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
(CTBT) and the third, the reality that the Kashmiri armed rebellion was
over and the residuary violence was the result of increasing numbers of
armed mercenaries and fanatics being sent from Pakistan.
In statements opposing the CTBT and readying for another nuclear test,
for the first time Indian officials got off their moralistic high-horse and
admitted that their nuclear capabilities did have a role in India’s security
doctrine. This fact brought home to the US the limits to which India could
be pushed but at the same time also indicated that the US would have to
refashion its policy to deal with India’s unique status as a threshold great
power.
The new policy manifested itself in 1997 with a series of high-level visits
which made it very clear, both in Islamabad and New Delhi, that the US,
while interested in a settlement in Kashmir, would not interpose as a
mediator unless asked to do so by both sides. A new nuance was added to
ties with India, with whom, the US declared, it was now engaging in a
‘strategic dialogue’. While emphasizing that this dialogue was not military
in content, US officials said that it was a recognition of the extra- regional,
if not global, scope of the Indo-US relationship, a breadth that Pakistan just
could not hope to match.
 9
Endless Night

The storm that had hit Kashmir in 1990 had more or less bypassed Qazi
Nissar Ahmed, the Mirwaiz of South Kashmir. A resident of Anantnag, the
Qazi represented his town’s view of itself as a rival to Srinagar. If Sopur
had the moneybags, Anantnag had always seen itself as the intellectual
centre of the valley. Many leaders such as Mirza Afzal Beg, Shabbir Shah,
and even Ahsan Dar and Salahuddin originally hail from this town.
The Qazi had gained great prominence in the mid-1980s as an opponent
of the National Conference. He headed the Ummat- e-Islami or the United
Muslim Front, and had come to symbolize radical Islamic protest against
the National Conference, though the articulate Qazi denied that he was any
kind of an extremist. But his dramatic actions, such as ritually slaughtering
a sheep in protest against Governor Jagmohan’s ban on the sale of meat on
Janmashtami, only seemed to confirm his fundamentalist image. In the
1987 elections, he was instrumental in giving shape to the Muslim United
Front that had cobbled all the Islampasand political formations into one
political grouping. However, while the others had got wiped out, allegedly
because of widespread rigging, the Qazi managed to get three of his
protégés elected to the Assembly.
The Qazi stayed away from the mainstream of events of 1990, though he
supported the secessionist rebellion. However, after the death of Maulvi
Farooq, he was taken into custody, more for his own safety than for any
specific activity. He was released along with S.A.S. Geelani, A.G. Lone and
Abdul Ghani Bhat in early 1992, and once out of jail, he remained outside
the main currents of politics.
 He did not join the APHC. In some measure this was because the APHC
was headed by the Mirwaiz of Srinagar and represented the Srinagar-based
leaders, while the Qazi held what he viewed as an equivalent status in
Anantnag. But an equally important reason was the Qazi’s differences with
militancy. Between 1990 and 1994, militancy in Anantnag was as virulent
as anywhere. By 1993, Anantnag was already a major centre for sheltering
the mehmaan mujahideen as they established themselves in southern
Kashmir with an eye on operations in Doda and across the Banihal Pass on
the Pir Panjal.
The arrest of Langaryal in 1993, and Afghani and Azhar early in 1994,
posed an enormous dilemma for the mehmaan mujahideen owing allegiance
to the fanatical Harkat-ul-Ansar. To be captured by the adversary was bad
enough, but to be paraded by the hated kafir, and that too the Hindu, was
galling, to say the least.
Abandoning the stoicism that normally characterized the mujahideen, the
Harkat began an effort to rescue their colleagues. The method chosen was
simple and smacked of its Afghan origins. Kidnap someone important, hold
them hostage and trade them.
The Harkat first tried to negotiate the release of its leaders with a BSF
official taken captive by them. Then they abducted Major Bhupinder Singh,
engineer with the General Reserve Engineer Force that maintains the roads
in the state. He was kidnapped at Verinag on 17 January 1994 and a
message demanding the release of Langaryal was sent to the authorities.
When it became clear that the government would not accept a deal, both the
captives were killed.
The hapless Singh was a small fry, and when Azhar and Afghani were
also caught in February, the Harkat realized they needed much more
leverage to persuade the Indians to give them up. Why not kidnap a
foreigner? Preferably British or American and then demand the freedom of
their colleagues. The action would immediately generate international
interest and the Indian government was bound to concede their demands.
While most Indians carefully avoided the valley, some foreigners still found
Kashmir pleasant, especially since the separatist conflict had dramatically
reduced the cost of a vacation. It was not as though foreigners had been
immune to the happenings. In 1992, several of them had been kidnapped
and an Israeli had died in an incident. While tourism in Kashmir was
nothing compared to what it had been, small groups of adventurous
westerners still chose to come and enjoy its bountiful offerings. A lot of the
action was concentrated around Pahalgam area which offered several good
treks and hikes and fishing in the Lidder river.
In early June 1994, Kim Housego, 16, suggested to his father that they
take a hiking trip to Kashmir. David Housego, erstwhile New Delhi
correspondent of the Financial Times, who had retired to begin a business
from New Delhi, was not very enthusiastic, but he asked his local contacts
and everyone assured him there was no problem. So along with wife Jenny
and son, he decided on a visit that brought them to Pahalgam from where
they hired two ponies and guides to carry their loads.
After three days of trekking, the family was returning on Monday, 6 June,
when just as they crested a hill, they saw three armed men. Aware that white
foreigners were not usually troubled by the militants, David was not too
worried at first. But these men appeared different. One immediately seized
his watch and his wallet, another his Timberland boots, and the family was
made to proceed to the village of Aroo. Here they met David Mackie, a
graphic artist, and his wife Cathy, who, too, had been captured by the men.
They told the Housegos that they had been asleep in a hiker’s lodge when
gunmen broke open the door and robbed them and took them captive.
Cathy and Jenny were now separated from the men and told to cover
their heads with a veil. The militants killed two chickens from the village
and had them for dinner. Then calculating that David would not be able to
keep up on the march, they left him behind with the two women, locked in
the Aroo rest-house. and-took the two younger men with them. They left a
note written in Urdu, calling on all tourists to leave Kashmir within a week,
as well as demanding the release of Langaryal, Azhar and Afghani. The note
was signed on behalf of the Harkat-ul-Ansar and declared that if their
leaders were not released, they would be compelled to take the ‘extreme
step’.
 The authorities in Srinagar were perplexed. If they launched a massive
operation to rescue the young men, there was the chance of their being
harmed by the captors. On the other hand, if they did nothing, they would
be accused of negligence. So, a perfunctory search operation was launched
by the BSF, while the authorities awaited word from the Harkat.
In the meantime, the lashkar marched its captives to the higher reaches of
the mountains. They would spend the nights in the huts of the Gujjars or in
the open. The two described their captors as being tough and hardy and
well-adjusted to the mountains. They were also profoundly religious,
though in a fanatical rather than spiritual way.
The sensational kidnapping was denounced by everyone—the APHC in
Srinagar, other militant groups in the valley and even in Pakistan. In fact,
the Pakistani official spokesman said that there were rumours in Delhi that
the drama was being staged by Indian agents! He declared that Pakistan had
always condemned acts of terrorism, regardless of their motivation.
The Harkat was taken aback by the volume of the protest. They were
probably also told by their ISI handlers in Pakistan to release the boys since
an alternate plan to force their release was already in motion. To soften the
blow, the Harkat issued a statement from Srinagar saying that while they
had the hostages, they would not harm them. Later they issued a press note,
expressing sympathy for the worried families and stating that arrangements
were being made for their release.
This was followed by yet another statement, issued by the Harkat’s
advisory council, declaring that the two young men had not been abducted
but had to be taken into custody because they had inadvertently stumbled
onto their camps. As soon as these camps were relocated, they would be
released. From the Harkat’s point of view, the strongest pressure came from
Qazi Nissar and the local notables in the Anantnag area since they were
critical of the lashkar’s support structure in the region.
Eventually, on 23 June Housego and Mackie were allowed to go, with the
Harkat making the best of it by turning it into a major public-relations
event, presenting their captives with token gifts and embracing them. They
also returned all their property. Even at this time there was little public
awareness of the behind- the-scenes role played by Qazi Nissar.
For some time, the ISI handlers had been unhappy about the activities of
the Qazi. He had privately and also in some of his sermons spoken out
against the depredations of the militants. But his role in pressuring the
release of Housego and Mackie probably sealed his fate. On 19 June, at
about 3 p.m., a man came to invite the Qazi for a meeting at Buna-
Dayalgam, six kilometres from Anantnag. There were reasons to believe
that the Qazi was somewhat apprehensive and that he may have gone there
under duress. Accompanied by one Ghulam Nabi Reshi, the Qazi reached
there in a taxi, late in the evening. According to a statement made by Reshi
later to a coordination committee of militants, the Qazi had come
voluntarily to the meeting with Hizbul Mujahideen and Al Jehad activists.
The meeting continued for several hours and the Qazi sent his taxi home to
fetch some cigarettes and medicine for himself. Later, however, some of his
family members said, this request for cigarettes and medicines was a pre-
arranged code to signal that he was being held under duress.
That evening, one Mohammed Sadiq alias Farooq Baba, went to the
house of Javed Ahmed, a taxi driver, and told him to drive the Qazi Sahib
back to Anantnag. Ghulam Nabi Reshi once again accompanied the Qazi
and sat in front of the car with the driver. When they reached Mominabad
village, four masked men, armed with weapons and speaking in Urdu,
stopped the car and demanded that the headlights be turned off. Then they
took the Qazi aside and all that Reshi and the driver heard were gunshots.
Intelligence officials were able to quickly determine that the
assassination had been carried out by the Hizbul Mujahideen, They named
Fayaz Ahmed Mir alias Abu Bakr, the Hizbul Mujahideen battalion
commander for Buna-Dayalgam, as the person responsible for the act.
The Qazi’s body lay on the ground for some hours before it was
discovered. The next morning, it was taken to Anantnag. Nearly 100,000
people gathered in the town, denouncing the Hizbul Mujahideen and
Pakistan. When Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat and some Srinagar-based media
personnel arrived at the Qazi’s house to offer condolences, they were
roughed up and people shouted anti-Hurriyat slogans. They were charged
with protecting the tanzeem that they believed was responsible for the
assassination.
The Hizbul Mujahideen was chagrined at the developments. Journalists
friendly to the outfit were immediately given a copy of a letter written by
the Qazi to Abu Bakr, praising the Hizb and offering his services to the
outfit. Quite a few people believed that the letter was fabricated, especially
since the Qazi was known to be strongly opposed to the Jamaat-e-Islami.
Watching the ground slip from under its feet, the Hizb cracked the whip
and demanded that all those who raised anti- Pakistan and pro-India slogans
apologize through paid advertisements in local newspapers. They also
attacked the Hurriyat for not doing enough to protect Pakistan’s reputation
in the minds of the people. The result was that when the funeral took place
the next day, the 50,000-odd mourners raised pro-Pakistan and pro- Hizbul
Mujahideen slogans. According to reports, some 500 armed Hizb cadre
were in the procession to ensure that this happened.
The truth never surfaced. The mysterious Ghulam Nabi Reshi had told
the media that immediately after the killing, he had been kidnapped by
some persons who wanted him to blame the Hizb for the killings. But he
had managed to escape from them with the help of a Harkat-ul-Ansar
activist. Later, in April 1995, Reshi was mysteriously shot dead.
On 26 July 1994, a much deadlier and better organized Plan II for the
release of the jailed Harkat-ul-Ansar leaders got underway. Ahmed Omar
Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, flew into Delhi on a flight
from Lahore. Urbane and well educated, Sheikh was different from the run-
of-the-mill passengers. Born and brought up in Wanstead, an east London
suburb in a middle-class home, he had been a chess champion and a model
student. He was a student of the prestigious London School of Economics
(LSE), and in his baggage was a copy of Plato’s The Republic and the
Lonely Planet’s Guide to India.
But Sheikh was no tourist. He was an activist of the Harkat- ul-Ansar, on
a clandestine mission. Notwithstanding his catholic upbringing, Sheikh was
deeply involved with Islamic groups at LSE, keenly interested in what was
going on in Bosnia and Somalia. Soon he decided to join the jihad to defend
his co- religionists from assaults around the world. He dropped out from
LSE after just one year and went to Bosnia on a relief mission. Here he met
Afghan mujahideen and came into contact with Abdul Rauf, probably an
ISI talent spotter who worked with Kashmiri groups. Rauf persuaded him to
help his Kashmiri brethren, and Sheikh went to Pakistan and received some
perfunctory training in the use of arms and explosives through the Jamaat-e-
Islami network.
After this he was told that there was another job at hand that suited his
skills. This was to effect the release of some Harkat leaders by organizing a
kidnapping of western tourists in India. But the story did not quite follow
that scenario. Luck and a local cop’s instinct sent awry the ISI’s best laid
plan.
On 31 October, in Delhi, at about 1.30 p.m., a stout, bearded man had
entered the office of the BBC and left a packet containing the polaroid
photographs of four white males, obviously prisoners, and a note
demanding the release of ten mujahids in Kashmir in exchange for the
hostages. Even as the BBC broadcast the news and the crisis was building
up, it was also dissipating.
Coincidentally, in an unconnected event that afternoon, district police
personnel in Ghaziabad, across the Jamuna river from Delhi, had gone to
Masuri, twelve kilometres away, to investigate a theft case. The area, a
suburb of Ghaziabad, is a conglomeration of one or two-room houses made
of open brick and mortar on small plots of land, legally or in most cases
illegally occupied by their owners.
Suddenly, a person wrapped in a blanket, sitting atop one of the
structures, scuttled away. Suspicious, the police officer- in-charge decided
to investigate. At best he expected to find an illegal still or stolen goods;
what he actually found stunned him. Shackled and chained to the wall was a
white male, a foreigner named Bela Joseph Nuss of California. Preoccupied
with a particularly vicious breed of extortionists and gangsters, district
officials did not immediately realize that they had stumbled on the third
attempt to free Langaryal, Azhar and co. Ghaziabad being a district of Uttar
Pradesh, and not part of Delhi where there is a special watch on terrorists,
they would not have known that two days earlier a packet with four
photographs of dishevelled and obviously distressed white males and their
passport details with a note had been received by an office in the ministry of
home affairs in New Delhi. The note was blunt and to the point. It said that
the Al Hadid group was holding the four foreigners hostage ‘somewhere in
India’, and that unless six top militants—Azhar, Langaryal, Sajjad Afghani,
and three Kashmiris, Mushtaq Ahmed Bhat, chief of the Hizbullah, Ahsan
Dar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar of the Al Umar—were released, the
hostages would be executed one by one. Through that day and the next, at a
crisis meeting officials pondered over the note. They had little to go on as
‘somewhere in India’ was a tall order.
With Nuss’ providential rescue, the conspiracy came apart. Inexplicably,
the guard who had run away failed to inform his colleagues. So when five
of them returned with fresh apples and mineral water for the American, the
police pounced on them.
The five militants were now subjected to a ‘tough’ interrogation. The
Ghaziabad police was still playing it close to its chest. Having stumbled on
a case of this dimension, it was not about to allow any other outfit to corner
the glory. In an area where several well-armed criminal gangs operated, the
police was equally tough and competent when it wanted to be. But for all
their toughness, they were just not equipped to deal with the terrorists who
were better armed and more desperate than any ordinary criminal gang.
One of the five persons broke after interrogation at 11 o’clock that night
and confessed that the place where the others were being detained was near
Saharanpur, an hour and a half’s drive away. SSP Ghaziabad A.K. Jain,
Station House Officer of Sahibabad Inspector Dhruv Lal Yadav, and a
police party along with one of the kidnappers set off for Saharanpur. They
arrived at about 2.30 a.m. and surrounded the house in question. The SHO
now addressed the occupants of the house and demanded their surrender. A
burst of gunfire came in reply.
Inspector Yadav, in a brave but foolhardly move, crept up to the door and
pushed a rifle through an opening and fired a few shots. There was no
response, and so he and constable Rajesh Yadav crashed through the door
into the house. They were met by a burst of gunfire.
No one is sure what happened then, but three militants blasted a portion
of the wall of a room and jumped through the opening, and after tossing a
couple of grenades at the police, escaped. Armed with obsolete rifles, the
police in the cordon had never confronted desperate terrorists before. The
bursts of gunfire and the shouts of their colleagues as they were hit,
unnerved them, and when two grenades exploded, they took to their heels.
After a while they returned to help their colleagues, and found both had
died almost instantly along with one terrorist. Cowering in the toilet were
the three Britons—Miles Croston, Paul Ridout and Rhys Partridge.
The story began in the Paharganj area opposite the New Delhi railway
station, a maze of shops, eating houses and small hotels catering to the
itinerant railway traveller or tourist. It is always crowded with people, stray
cattle, rickshaws, buses, autorickshaws, tongas and hand-pulled carts,
competing for very limited space. It is also the haunt of drug pushers and
addicts. For this reason it is a favourite of young western tourists who like
its ambience as much as its incredibly cheap accommodation.
Staying in the Ajanta Guest House in nearby Nabi Karim, Miles Croston
and Paul Ridout had run into an urbane, well- educated and hospitable man
named ‘Rohit Sharma’. Sporting a trimmed beard and speaking with a
clipped British accent, Sharma appeared sophisticated, friendly and
trustworthy. As Croston and Ridout later recounted, Sharma was well-
travelled and had apparently lived in Britain for some time. One day he told
them that he had just inherited an entire village and its lands and invited
them to see the ‘real’ India. People on the beaten tourist track would have
smiled away the invitation, but this is the sort of experience that the young,
mainly single westerners who come with their backpack to India, are
looking for.
The following morning, 14 October, they checked out of their hotel and
‘Sharma’ drove them in a Maruti-Suzuki van to Saharanpur, 120 kilometres
away. Located in the Shivalik mountain ranges, the town and the district of
the same name are known for mangoes as well as a significant Muslim
population. Most are farmers.
Instead of a village, they were brought to a nondescript four- room house
in Khatakhedi locality on the outskirts of the town. As soon as they entered
the house, pistols were placed at their heads, and the stunned foreigners
were quickly manacled and chained to the wall. When they recovered from
their shock, they found that there was another person sharing their
predicament. Rhys Partridge had been residing in the Hare Rama Hare
Krishna guest house in Paharganj and had been enticed to make the same
journey on 29 September. So he had already spent two weeks and more as a
guest of Rohit Sharma. In one corner of the room was a makeshift toilet.
The long chains allowed them some freedom of movement, though the
shackles made this an unpleasant experience. The fastidious ‘Sharma’ had
laid in a stock of mineral water and packaged juice for his foreign victims.
Having got the Britons, ‘Sharma’ appeared to be waiting for something.
As they passed their days playing cards and chess, his British captives saw
him scan the pages of The Lonely Planet’s Guide to India, a thrifty
traveller’s book, for hotels and restaurants, presumably to locate his next
victim.
Ajay Guest House, a nondescript place in Paharganj, is where Sharma
found Bela Josef Nuss. But instead of Saharanpur, Nuss was taken to
Masuri and to the house that had been recently purchased by one Sofi
Anwar.
The dead terrorist was identified as Mohammed Ali Khan of Lucknow.
But Sharma escaped. However, the captured militants gave the police the
address of another location in Masuri. The police surrounded that hideout
but the terrorists gave battle and in the exchange of fire, Sharma took a
bullet in the shoulder but survived.
For two days Sharma was in no condition to talk. When he did speak, he
told the police that he had been operating under an alias, that his real name
was Mohammed Omar, and that he was an Afghan national. However, this
story soon frayed and he confessed that he was a British national of
Pakistani origin and his name was Ahmed Omar Sheikh.
 Both associates of Sheikh’s were named Mohammed Nazir and had come
across the LoC in 1994. One used the surname Khan and the nom de guerre
Salahuddin Saifullah while the other called himself Bilal Khan. Nazir aka
Salahuddin was a resident of Karachi and a member of the Harkat-ul-Ansar.
A Muslim of Kashmiri stock, he had joined the outfit in March and was
given a 40 forty-day course in Khost. Bilal was formerly from the Poonch
area and had crossed over to Azad Kashmir in 1989. Both were arrested in
Delhi from their hideout in Sarai Kale Khan a few days after their escape
from Saharanpur.
Sheikh was taken to a prison in Ghaziabad. His wound turned septic and
his bone took time to heal. His captives have deposed that he was not
violent with them though he terrified them with his threats.
A week after admitting who he was, Sheikh spoke to the Sunday Times of
London, confirming the goal of his mission as being the release of his
Harkat comrades. He came across as a dedicated, if somewhat naïve fanatic.
‘I let the ends justify the means,’ he told the correspondent. ‘I do feel
remorse about the method, but not about what I set out to do.’
The fortuitous break that the police got saved the Indian authorities from
a nightmarish scenario where a hostage drama would have been played
through the Dussehra and Deepawali holiday season. The foreign media
would have swooped on New Delhi, pressure would have been built up
through the execution of one or more of the hostages, and the police would
have had few leads to work on. The success of the Harkat’s operation would
have been a major setback for the Indian authorities who had at last begun
to see light at the end of the tunnel in Kashmir.
But the incident also marked another development. This was the
separation of the goals of the valley’s Kashmiri movement and that of the
ISI-backed mehmaan mujahideen. While the former were increasingly
pondering over the cost that militancy was imposing on the valley, the latter
were operating according to someone else’s timetable. Indeed, as the two
kidnapping incidents revealed, they seemed to have decided that rescuing
their compatriots was more important than the Kashmiri movement. Later,
it transpired that it also had a lot to do with the factional politics of the
Harkat-ul-Ansar.

The Destruction of Charar-e-Sharif

Another incident a few months later seemed to confirm this, even though it
sullied the image of the Indian security forces and brought out the
weaknesses of their ‘unified command’ structure. In slow motion, as it
were, between February and May 1995, a stand-off between the Army and
the mehmaan mujahideen became a tragedy, leading to the razing of one of
Kashmir’s most sacred shrines. This was the mazar (tomb) and relics of the
greatest saint or wali of Kashmir, Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani. Made of
walnut wood, the pagoda-shaped shrine, forty-five kilometres south-west of
Srinagar, was built by a Buddhist king who converted to Islam in the
fourteenth century. It was a monument to the faith of Kashmiri Muslims and
Hindus. Nooruddin was the Alamdar-e- Kashmir for Muslims and Nand
Rishi for the latter. There are several shrines honouring the Sheikh across
Kashmir: at Khe- Jogipora in Kulgam tehsil of Anantnag, where he was
born in 1377; at Kai-Muh, a village near Bijbehara where he spent his
youth; the Gufa Bal cave where he lived for twelve years as an ascetic;
Driyagam where he spent another twelve years; and the Rupvan hamlet
where he spent his last years before he passed away and was laid to rest at
Charar-e-Sharif.
The shrine complex housed the tombs of the saint and his disciples. The
mausoleum of the Sheikh was constructed by the great Kashmiri king, Bud
Shah (1420–70 AD), but it was later razed by a fire and reconstructed by
Yaqub Chak who reigned between 1586 and 1588.
During the Pathan rule it was once again razed and reconstructed by Atta
Mohammed Khan (1808–10). It was renovated by Khwaja Nizam Drabu
and Mohammed Didamari in the early years of the current century. The
interior of the shrine was decorated with carvings and calligraphy and the
tomb of the saint was made of marble. Other rishis too were buried in the
main chamber of the mausoleum. The shrine also housed the relics of the
Sheikh—a silver-headed staff, a woollen robe, two wooden bowls and a
wooden sandal.
It is no secret that the unique Kashmiri practices of Islam have been
anathema to the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami which had tried in 1979 to
bring a Shariat Bill in the Assembly to eliminate them. Pan-Islamic
movements with headquarters in Pakistan, such as the Harkat-ul-Ansar,
Markaz Dawa-ul-Irshad and the Tablighi Jamaat, have tried to push what
they consider the pure concept of the faith, based on the teachings of the
Koran, and divorced from any local context. Given the status of Sheikh
Nooruddin as Kashmir’s patron saint, in February 1990, the JKLF had
given a ‘Chalo Charar’ call as part of its political mobilization drive.
Braving the bitter cold, rain and sleet, on 24 February some 300,000
persons reached there. It was at this meeting that the JKLF vowed a jihad
for azadi. But with the decline of the JKLF and the ascendancy of the
fanatical elements associated with the Jamaat, there was constant pressure
on Kashmiris to abjure their Sufi traditions. In October 1993, an armed
youth tried to prevent the Ziki, a unique tradition of reciting the attributes of
God at the Charar-e-Sharif. In several instances, the fanatics called for an
end to the celebration of the urs, the annual commemorative celebrations at
the shrines and mausoleums of the Sufi saints across India. To prevent the
urs of Sainuddin Rishi at his shrine in Aish-Muquam near Pahalgam,
militants took all the men of the village hostage, and in an ensuing
confrontation, two of them were killed.
After the October 1993 incident, insurgency seemingly bypassed Charar-
e-Sharif, though given its location on the wooded slopes of Pir Panjal, close
to Pakistan, it housed small groups of militants from time to time. In the
winter of 1994, two lashkars, one led by ‘Major’ Mast Gul, a Pakistani
fanatic owing allegiance to the Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan, and the other by
Mohammed Zubair of the Harkat-ul-Ansar, took shelter there.
The Harkat group was the first to arrive. It consisted of eighteen persons,
of whom fifteen were Pakistanis, two Afghans and one Iranian. Having
taken shelter with some Al Mujahideen Force and Al Barq activists in a
suburb of Srinagar called Awantabhawan, some of them fell within the
sweep of a cordon- and-search operation on 13 December. The security
forces had apparently been tipped-off about their presence and conducted a
search across a number of localities of Soura.The militants shot the leader
of the BSF section. The others cordoned off the area. The militants held out
for thirty-six hours till the Army came in and used a helicopter gunship’s
rockets to finish off the job. Seven of the militants were killed outright and
another four were reportedly buried under the debris of the razed house. A
woman died in the crossfire. The survivors of this group decided to seek
some rest and the best place, their leader Mohammed Zubair believed, was
Charar-e-Sharif.
A few days after the arrival of the Harkat group, Mast Gul and his lashkar
consisting of some twelve Pakistani nationals came to Charar as well. Gul,
whose real name is Mohammed Haroon, hails from Azad Kashmir, though
for effect he passes off as an Afghani or a Baluchi of the Mengal tribe and
resident of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. His presence in
the valley since 1993 was no secret, and he made sure that his photographs
and presence were widely known. The aim was to give a fillip to the
flagging spirits of the Kashmiri militants.
Like the Harkat group, Mast Gul’s lashkar was seeking rest and
recreation, having done some hard fighting. For Mast Gul’s Hizb, there was
another attraction at Charar. It was the home of a colleague of theirs, Zafar
Kawa. In an interview to the Srinagar daily Uqab on 7 April, Mast Gul,
described as ‘joint commander’ of the militants in the shrine, claimed that
he had entered Charar- e-Sharif to spend the month of Ramzan, which fell
in February– March, hoping to leave after Id. However, the Army had
cordoned off the town before they could leave, compelling the lashkar to
stay to protect the shrine, which the Indian authorities were bent on
destroying to defame his group.
Reports of the militants taking shelter in the town had been filtering out
to the administration. Most officials were aware that there was little or no
chance for an authorization to storm the shrine; so their attitude had been to
let the militants remain there through the winter, with the hope that they
would leave with the onset of better weather.
 The story, as revealed later by Harinder Baweja in India Today, was more
complicated. On 8 December 1994, a meeting of the united command
headquarters discussed the issue. Lt Gen. M.A. Zaki chaired the meeting
and gave instructions to the Army and the BSF to carry out operations
around the area, For reasons unknown, but probably related to the Army’s
growing reluctance to take orders from a person they perceived to be an ex-
Army officer, albeit a lieutenant general, this was not done. Thereafter on 2
January, the BSF was given categorical orders to set up posts in the hills
around the shrine. Apparently the BSF did not have the adequate strength
for the job, so Additional Director- General E. Ram Mohan approached the
commander of the 8th Mountain Division and was told that the Army would
act as soon as it got a new Rashtriya Rifles formation in the area.
On 21 January the IB sent a note to the Army, the BSF and Zaki,
informing them of the ‘large presence [in Charar] of militants including a
sizeable number of Afghans and Pakistanis’. Two weeks later, on 1
February, the warning was repeated and specific mention was made of the
fact that some 100 to 125 foreign mercenaries were staying at Charar and
openly moving around.
On 10 February, in a classic but transparent bureaucratic manoeuvre, the
Army sent a note to Zaki, observing the presence of the selfsame militants
and asking for an action plan to deal with them. Considering that the Army
was in charge of the anti- insurgency operations in the valley, and that Brig.
Mohinder Singh of the 56th Mountain Brigade had been briefed on the
presence of the mercenaries twice earlier, Zaki told the governor in a letter
dated 22 February that this appeared to be a case of passing the buck. At the
same time Zaki also asked Veerana Avelli, additional director-general
(CID), to send a reply to the Army. Avelli took the opportunity to remind
the Army that ‘the Army has been made responsible for counter-insurgency
operations in the valley. It was expected that the Army would have
formulated plans, and if assistance of the civil administration was required,
the same would have been requested for’.
The stage was now set for the tragic drama. In February, in sweeps in the
general area around Charar-e-Sharif, security forces killed several Hizb
activists. In retaliation, the Hizb laid an ambush on a convoy proceeding to
Yusmarg on 5 March, killing two BSF personnel.
The governor later claimed that Advisor (Home) Lt Gen. Zaki had only
thereafter ordered the Army to lay a loose cordon around the town. On 7
March, the Army occupied all but two of the hills around the town, local
authorities suspended bus services and an informal siege had begun.
As soon as the locals became aware of the Army’s presence, they
panicked and started dribbling out of the town and in two days, 25,000
persons, mainly women and children, had left. In a repeat of Sopur and
Hazratbal, the Army introduced a generous dose of ‘psy ops’ into its
activities. Locals were educated about the danger of HIV infection from
cohabitation with the militants, as well as their other misdeeds, especially
their misuse of places of religion. Army helicopters dropped leaflets in the
surrounding areas to send this message home.
On Saturday, 11 March, Lt Gen. J.S. Dhillon, the 15th corps commander,
declared that the Army had no intention of storming the shrine. At a press
briefing in Srinagar, he said the Army would patiently wait for the militants
to come out, adding that it was up to the residents of Charar to force the
militants to leave the town and vacate the sacred dargah.
The general’s assessment was that there were nearly a hundred militants
inside, most of them Pakistanis belonging to the Hizb, and that most of the
Kashmiri militants had left the town, leaving their arms behind. The role of
the Army, he declared, was to check all in-going and out-going traffic so as
to catch fleeing militants, and the Army was not going anywhere near the
town to avoid a confrontation that could lead to deaths of civilians of harm
to the shrine.
But even while denying a siege, the Army took steps to make it look like
one. Four trucks of the state food and supplies department, carrying
foodgrains, were stopped near the town and unloaded by the Army.
Likewise, other vehicular movement was discouraged, even though the
Army made no visible signs of actually moving closer to the town. The bus
services remained suspended, but water and electricity were not cut off.
 The statements and events that unfolded indicate that the Army now
began to see Charar as an opportunity to confront and defeat the most
vaunted of the militants, the mehmaan mujahideen.
However, the game was not that simple. Refugees from Charar made it
clear to their near and dear ones that the militants had in no way
misbehaved or hampered them in any way. Indeed they had behaved well
with them, respected the traditions of the shrine, and actually lived in a serai
next to the shrine.
The militants also decided to take defensive measures against a possible
Army assault. According to locals who had left, they had constructed
bunkers and begun mining the approaches to the town.
They got the powerful support of the Hurriyat when in his Friday, 10
March address at Jama Masjid, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq declared that the
Charar operation was part of an Indian strategy to desecrate places of
worship and showed a disregard for the sentiments of the Kashmiri
Muslims. On 13 March, a strike was called by the APHC to protest the
Army’s alleged siege action.
In stage two of the psy ops, the Army now came up with the soft line.
They offered safe passage to the militants out of the shrine. If all the
militants gathered outside the town, the administration was prepared to send
them across the LoC without any harm. This too-clever-by-half appeal
would have meant humiliation and defeat for the militants and
embarrassment for Pakistan, and the hardened occupants of Charar were not
about to oblige, as indeed even the Hazratbal occupants had not in 1993.
Stage three towards the end of April involved putting across the line that
there was a conflict between the local Kashmiri activists, Mast Gul and the
foreigners. One report, patently self- serving enough to be false, claimed
that Zafar Kawa, the senior- most local Hizb activist, had been brutally
thrashed and even executed by Mast Gul and his henchmen. In fact, on 30
March, a ministry of defence spokesman declared that serious differences
had emerged between the mercenaries and the Kashmiri militants, and that a
local battalion commander of the Hizb had been killed by Mast Gul.
 Indeed, soon it began to appear that the militants had turned the psy op
inside out. The demonstrations in Srinagar and Gul’s earlier meetings with
the media began to pay off. Instead of being painted as a villain, he began to
appear as a hero. This image got a further boost from a visit to the shrine in
mid-March by Abdul Ghani Lone and Shabbir Shah. His response to the
offer of safe passage, reported to the Srinagar press, was, ‘I will go where I
want to go and the Indian Army cannot prevent me from going anywhere.’
He made a counter-offer, saying that he would pay any Indian Army jawan
to surrender and arrange his safe passage to his home!
The Hizb now moved skilfully to exploit this sense of unity. In a
statement on 20 March, it declared that the struggle over Charar-e-Sharif
had united all the mujahideen groups under a joint command. The eastern
area was being looked after by the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, Hizbullah and
Hizbul Momineen; the western by the Hizb, Harkat and the Muslim
Mujahideen; the northern by Al Barq; and the southern by Al Jehad, Al
Fateh, Al Umar and so on. Actually, but for the Hizb and the Harkat, the
other forces were present only on paper.
Pakistan Day on 23 March was celebrated by top secessionist leaders of
the Hurriyat by their attending the reception at the Pakistan embassy in
Delhi. After the meeting, Shabbir Shah declared that Pakistan was the
greatest cushion that Muslims outside Pakistan had to fall back on for
support and moral courage. Dukhtaran-e-Millat activists hoisted the
Pakistani flag on Residency Road in Srinagar.
This burst of activity, as well as the appearance of the foreign media in
strength, alarmed the authorities. They banned all entry and exit of media
persons, foreign, local or national, not just into the town but its vicinity.
Talking to the refugees who were still trickling out, reporters pieced
together a picture of the town, which was deserted by the bulk of its
populace and barricaded by the mercenary groups who had constructed
sand- bag emplacements and mined its approaches. Security personnel were
still far from the town.
The situation was now verging on a crisis. On 27 March, New Delhi
despatched V.K. Jain, special secretary in the home ministry, and Madhukar
Gupta, in-charge of Kashmir affairs in the PMO, for a first-hand study of
the situation. After two days of meetings with the administration officials
and the northern Army commander Surrinder Singh, it was decided to send
additional forces for the cordon. Officials were worried about the possibility
of a sally by the militants from within, to inflict an embarrassing strike
against the pickets surrounding them, or a coordinated strike by militants
from outside the cordon as well.
Both sides were now girding up for action. The militants began a
systematic probe of the Army’s cordon by engaging the pickets in a long-
range duel with rifles and rockets. For its part the Army started its own
creeping movement by gaining control of the high ground overlooking the
town. At the end of the month, the militants imposed their own ban on
traffic into the town, believing that some of the locals they had allowed to
move back and forth freely may have been providing information to the
authorities. In one instance, a local was questioned by Gul, thrashed and
then executed on suspicion.
The situation remained in a state of impasse in April. A march by
Hurriyat leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Shabbir Shah was stopped by
the police on April 6 at the Bagh-e-Mahtab locality, six kilometres from
Srinagar. The authorities still maintained there was no siege and that their
strategy was to wear out the militants rather than undertake any direct
assault. Yet, the Army kept moving closer, and on 21 April, occupied
Nufulteng, the dominant hillock around the township. Barely 500 yards
from the shrine, it had been a bone of contention between the two sides, and
the Army had made several attempts to capture it in the preceding month.
Events were moving towards what turned out to be a confused climax.
On 27 April, the authorities renewed their offer of safe passage, which was
predictably rejected. For their part, the militants came up with a counter-
proposal, which too was dismissed. They wanted the Army to lift its siege
and allow the militants one month’s time to depart. This was in retrospect
probably the last opportunity to save the shrine.
The Army now stepped up the rhetoric, claiming that they had firm
indications, allegedly from wireless intercepts, that the militants intended to
blow up the shrine. This was probably another psy ops move. The Hizb
denied any such intention.
According to Mohammed Shafiq alias Abu Jindal, the Harkat activist
whom the Army managed to catch after the disaster, on Monday night, 8
May, Mast Gul set fire to some houses in the Baba Mohalla of the town to
create a diversion. The aim was to facilitate the escape of some important
militants, among them perhaps the Harkat’s Anantnag chief, Sikandar, code-
named Saba.
An unexpectedly strong wind spread the fire to other localities, and in a
few hours the conflagration engulfed a good part of the town. Fire-fighting
operations began at 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday, and the fire was controlled by 4
a.m. Till this point no one charged the Indian Army with setting off the
blaze, nor was there any assault on the militants’ positions.
This massive arson made the Army panic. It now felt that the only way to
protect the shrine lay in pre-emptive assault. It argued that with most of the
civilians having fled, there was no risk of harm to them, the factor worrying
Prime Minister Rao. However, New Delhi refused permission.
Nevertheless, the Army inched forward, occupying the heights of Talat-e-
Kalan and Waza Bagh. As it did so, it had its first direct engagement with
the militants. The firing in the south-east of the town continued till 10.30
a.m.
Wednesday, the 10th, was Id, often celebrated a day earlier in Kashmir.
Hurriyat leaders Abdul Ghani Lone, Shabbir Shah and Yasin Malik once
again began a march to the shrine but were stopped by the police. Most of
Srinagar was closed for Id. Though the fire had been controlled and the
shrine was safe, the smouldering embers posed a danger of reigniting in the
brisk wind. Not surprisingly, this is what happened that evening, gutting
some more houses in the Gulshanabad locality on the outskirts of the town.
Mast Gul realized that the time had come to leave the town. According to
Jindal, he summoned the Harkat commander Zubair Ahmad around 7.30
p.m. and ordered him to take his group out through the Traj Bal Nala. The
Harkat group, however, found that the route was impassable because of the
firing by Indian Army pickets. When they returned in the early hours of 11
May, they found that Mast Gul and his associates had vanished. Later it was
reported that he escaped through the Hapat Naar ravine, which begins at a
place two kilometres from the shrine and runs to the Chadoora area. From
there, he made his way to the Pulwama jungles.
At about 11 p.m., on Wednesday, 10 May, the Army pickets around the
town heard loud explosions at the rear of the Khankah mosque in the shrine
complex. A couple of hours later, the pickets noticed that it was aflame. It
was now Thursday morning, 11 May. The dargah adjacent to the Khankah
caught fire at about 2.30 a.m. and was reduced to ashes in half an hour. The
fire brigade was again called in, but the heavy firing from the shrine area
prevented their deployment.
At 5 a.m., the Army, still awaiting orders from New Delhi, decided to
move in. Formal permission arrived later. Firefights erupted as the Army
slowly made its way into the town, which was generously littered with
booby traps made of improvised explosive devices. In a couple of hours the
Army had gained control of the now gutted shrine.
The militants remained hidden in the 500 or so houses that had not been
destroyed. That night Abu Jindal and five others made an effort to go
through the pre-selected route. However, they were once again engaged. At
this point, the group disintegrated and Jindal found himself alone. When the
firing died down, he managed to escape and walked for some two hours and
reached a village. Here, he took shelter in the house of a local and got into
an argument with him, leading to his arrest. He was the biggest catch from
the group and the only source of information of what transpired.
Notwithstanding the seemingly inevitable nature of the event, Kashmir
erupted in a wave of protests. The rest of India, celebrating Id, was
remarkably calm. Curfew was clamped on all major Kashmiri towns, but
protestors defied it and police resorted to lathi charges and firing to break
some demonstrations. A 3000-strong crowd led by Shabbir Shah was lathi-
charged near Panzan in the Maisuma area as it was marching towards
Charar Yasin Malik led a similar procession in Budgam.
On Friday, the protests again welled up. The government placed the
Mirwaiz under house arrest, but across the state, crowds burned a hundred
schools and public buildings. Many demonstrations around the town were
staged by people who had lost their homes and livelihood
Meanwhile, isolated firefights continued in the town. The Army
systematically dismantled the booby traps and mines laid by the lashkars
and recovered the bodies of militants. They also came across a couple of
large caches of weapons that had been left behind by militants who may
have escaped by merging with the local populace.
There was no trace of the elusive Mast Gul. The government came under
withering criticism for letting him go: the Pakistani had managed to escape.
The men engaged in psy ops pitched in with a manufactured story claiming
that Gul, seriously injured, was still inside the town. On Friday, a mile-long
convoy of Indian and foreign journalists was taken to Gulshanabad Tokri,
overlooking the town. Army officials said that unexploded or undiscovered
booby traps prevented them from allowing them a closer view. On this point
they were not wrong. Firefights were continuing, and it was on this day that
the Army killed Zafar Kawa, the Kashmiri Hizb leader. Contrary to the psy
ops directors, the Kashmiri Hizb activists had engaged the Army in the
town and fought to death, allowing the Pakistanis and the Afghanis to get
away. The Army claimed that some twenty-seven militants were killed,
mostly Pakistani. Some accounts indicated that several of those killed may
have been locals and a few activists.
Brig. Mohinder Singh, commanding the forces in the siege, told
newsmen that the guerrillas set off timed explosions which started a blaze in
the mosque. Since it was a strong and windy night, the shrine had been
engulfed in flames. Made of walnut, it only took half an hour to burn. Singh
said that the Army moved in to cut off the escape of the guerrillas, most of
them from Azad Kashmir.
Local residents insisted that the Army assault had led to the destruction
of the shrine. They claimed that a helicopter had spread a mysterious
sparkling powder which had descended on the town and spontaneously set
ablaze a masjid at Bada Talab on 8 May. The militants, they claimed, tried
to prevent the blaze from spreading to the dargah. On 11 May again, the
mystery powder was spread and the shrine gutted. The locals displayed
what they said were mortar shells, used by the Army to reduce the town to a
shambles.
The bodies, ostensibly, of five of the militants, dressed in camouflage
fatigues, were laid out for journalists in the courtyard of a farmhouse. Their
AK-47 automatic weapons, decorated with coloured sequins, were lying
nearby. Officials claimed that all were foreign mercenaries, but some
journalists who had missed the photo-op went back later to find the bodies
in Alamdar Basti, an adjoining village, and women wailing that the men had
been from their village and were not foreign militants.
There appears to be little truth in the account of the helicopters and the
mysterious powder. There were many Hizb activists among the locals and
they probably decided to fabricate this account for the want of a better one.
But while the mystery helicopter and the powder are a figment of
someone’s imagination, the shells were not. According to knowledgeable
persons, they were parachute flares, fired sometimes through mortars to
light up an area of assault. But they are also very incendiary, and the
possibility that they contributed to, if not initiated, the conflagration that
destroyed the shrine inadvertently cannot be ruled out.
There is an equal possibility that the tragedy could well have been
sparked off by Gul’s effort to create a diversion to escape. The bombs
behind the Khankah were probably not meant to harm either that edifice or
the shrine, but to scare the Indian Army into thinking that its destruction
was imminent. But they set off the blaze. Whatever be the case, with so
much munition flying around a shrine made of walnut wood and adjacent to
a town largely constructed of wood, such a denouement seemed inevitable.
The Charar incident brought out the extent to which the five- year-old
movement had changed the character of the state and the nature of the battle
within. Unlike 1990, the main fighters and leaders were Pakistanis, but,
unlike 1965, quite welcome. Charar town folk played cricket with them
while a local shopkeeper had hosted Yunus and the whole group at his
house on Id.
More alarming was the network that the Hizb had developed to utilize the
services of the mercenaries. They ranged from schoolteachers who spoke to
visiting media personnel, complaining about helicopters that dropped gun-
powder, to more deadly logisticians like Abdul Hamid who kept the
militants supplied with ammunition. The local Jamaat activist, fifty-year-old
Abdul Ahad, living near the Khankah mosque, served as a senior adviser.
Equally impressive was the radio network. Neither Mast Gul nor the
Harkat had their own long-range radio. They used short- range sets to
communicate with their radio control, located at a clandestine centre in the
valley. For both the control was in Budgam. Mast Gul’s call sign was
Fighter and A-l, while the Harkat leader’s was A-2.
However, the Kashmir administration and the Army cannot escape the
responsibility for the manner in which the events unfolded. Charar-e-Sharif
appears to have all the hallmarks of an operation that went awry because of
poor control. The Army’s strategy smacked of brinksmanship which sent
the situation over the precipice, and the administration failed to exercise
adequate civilian control on an event that was not and should not have been
seen simply as a military exercise.
The big question is the strategic rationale of the operation. Having Mast
Gul and company hold fort in the dargah was anathema to the authorities,
but the consequences of any assault on the shrine were obvious. The second
big question is why the Army did not seek mediation through a civilian
intermediary to resolve the crisis as had been done at Hazratbal. In similar
circumstances, where there was fear of collateral damage, the Army’s
brilliantly executed Operation Sahayak in Sopur had deliberately worked
out a strategy of giving the militants sufficient time and opportunity to get
away so as not to have firefights in the town, whose consequences would
have been no different from what transpired at Charar.
While a certain cockiness may have led to the Army’s mishandling of the
situation, the militants appear to have been trapped in a situation which they
apparently wanted to avoid. Speaking to journalist Asha Khosa a week after
his arrest, Abu Jindal said that the militants were not keen to fight in the
town either but had been forced to because of a series of bad decisions,
compounded by poor intelligence. They had entered the town to rest
through the month of Ramzan, and the Army cordon had taken them by
surprise.
Depending on the somewhat fanciful Kashmiri villagers for information,
the militants assumed that they had been surrounded by a huge Army
cordon which was on the verge of launching an assault. Yet other leaders
persuaded them to stay put, believing that the Army would negotiate à la
Hazratbal. When the anticipated massive demonstrations in solidarity from
the Hurriyat and the local people failed to materialize, Mast Gul, Jindal
said, became moody and suspicious, even to the point of cooking his own
food.
It was only by Sunday, 14 May, that the Army gained full control of the
now devastated town. Journalists who went in saw potholes and dug-up
mines and booby traps, and evidence of the use of the shrine’s buildings by
the militants. The walls of adjacent buildings were painted over by wall-
posters declaring, ‘Kashmir banega Pakistan’ and, ‘Fateh ya Shahadat’
(martyrdom or victory), signed, ‘Lashkar Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’ Pakistani
and Jamaat flags fluttered atop several buildings.
On the psy ops front, the victory belonged to Mast Gul. On 13 May, the
Hizb circulated an audio-cassette to select journalists in Srinagar, with a
message from Mast Gul reporting that he was now back safe in his base
camp and would appear before them to reveal the truth about the episode.
On 26 May, the publicity- conscious guerrilla met a select group of
Kashmiri journalists. He claimed that the security forces started firing
mortars at the town on 10 May, which compelled his group to escape. He
disclaimed any responsibility for the fire and declared that he had few
problems escaping, though he acknowledged that he was close to the
positions of the Indian Army at times.
To put to rest criticism that he was an Afghan or a Pakistani, Mast Gul
declared that he was actually from the Chinar Parpe village in Azad
Kashmir, and thus had every right to participate in the Kashmiri jihad.
Accompanying him was a local Hizb leader, Riyaz Rasool, who declared
that the outfit’s supremo, Syed Salahuddin, had awarded Rs 1 lakh to the
Pakistani. A few weeks later, a Hizb press release to the Srinagar press
declared that Mast Gul had donated the prize money for the reconstruction
of Charar.
The Charar incident torpedoed the government’s plans to hold elections
in the state in 1995. Concurrent with the events in Charar, the
administration had been focusing on holding elections to the state
Assembly. Despite opposition from the Hurriyat, it had gone ahead in
delimiting the constituencies and preparing fresh electoral rolls and so on.
However, through the Charar events, the APHC gained enormous prestige
which it used to call a strike on the occasion of the visit of Chief Election
Commissioner T.N. Seshan on 27 May. A delegation of MPs from all
political parties visited the state and Charar-e-Sharif and uniformly
supported the view that elections could not be held in the prevailing
circumstances.
The government refused to hold a judicial inquiry into the event. The
only official casualty was Lt Gen. Zaki who resigned in late June following
the publication earlier that month of an interview in which the governor
claimed that his adviser (home) had ordered the Army in first and then
informed him.
As for Mast Gul, he surfaced in Pakistan at the end of July. The Pakistan
Jamaat-e-Islami chief, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, made sure that his outfit
derived its share of glory from its protégé’s adventures. From Chakothi,
through Azad Kashmir and in Pakistan, Gul got a hero’s welcome. Wearing
an Afghan cap, flanked by armed men and holding his weapon aloft, his
triumphal parade climaxed in a historic welcome in Peshawar, organized by
the Jamaat-e-Islami. Sitting behind a jubilant Qazi, Mast Gul travelled in a
motorcade to a rally where, in his speech to the 10,000-strong audience, he
called for trained volunteers for the jihad, declaring that sending in
untrained persons served neither the cause of jihad, nor Pakistan.

From the Jaws of Victory: Terrorist Defeat

Fortunately for India, after the heady triumph in Charar-e-Sharif, the
mehmaan mujahideen snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Even as the
embers of Charar cooled through the month of June, the stage was being set
for another tragedy, one whose full accounting is yet to take place. Ahmed
Omar Sheikh’s failed kidnapping mission was undoubtedly a major blow to
the Harkat. Within the outfit some kind of an internal debate took place, and
a hardline faction decided that they would take things into their own hands
to obtain the release of their chief commander, Langaryal, and General
Secretary Masood Azhar. They were, coincidentally, earlier members of the
Harkat-e-Jehad Islami, one of the two original constituents of the Harkat-ul-
Ansar.
Instead of putting off tourists, the happy ending of the Housego and
Mackie affair only served to lull others into a sense of complacency.
Though a war was being waged with full intensity, a steady stream of
western tourists kept coming to Srinagar John Childs, an engineer and
manager in the commercial products research division of Ensign-Bickford
Industries, an explosive products maker in the US, came to India in
connection with a business deal on 23 June. Work concluded a week later
and Childs, an avid trekker, decided to go on a six-day trek in the
Himalayas. On 1 July, he flew to Srinagar and from there hired a taxi to
take him to Pahalgam. Here, he hired a guide and a pony and purchased
essential supplies, and the next day they headed northwest on a hike to the
Lidderwat valley. On 3 July, he made a trip to a glacier and the next day, to
the Tarsar Lake which is at about 13,000 ft. The trips, left Childs slightly
mountain-sick. Weak with nausea, he lay down in his tent, planning to
return the next day.
In the evening, at about 6.30 p.m., his guide came to his tent, woke him
up and told him to get his passport as some people wanted to check it.
Seeing the frightened face of the guide, Childs realized that there was
serious trouble, but he thought it was merely the Indian Army checking
documents. When he got out of the tent, he saw a group of armed men with
four foreign captives: Keith Mangan and his wife, Julie, and Paul Wells and
his girlfriend, Catherine Moseley. After some indecision, the women were
left behind with one guide and the men marched three hours’ south to Aroo.
Along the way, Donald Hutchings of Spokane, Washington, was captured.
 After spending the night at Aroo, Childs’ guide, Bashir Ahmed Gania,
was left behind and the group began climbing up the mountains. The
militants did not mistreat their captives, but they were made to walk the
whole day, from 8.30 in the morning to 6.00 at night. They were not tied up
and passed the nights in Gujjar camps in tents.
The very first day, Childs begged the militant commander to spare him
for the sake of his two children but was rebuffed. After the initial panic, he
began contemplating escape. At about 2 a.m. on 8 July, he escaped with his
hiking boots strung around his neck. He had a clear idea of how he would
accomplish his task; most important, that he would initially ascend rather
than descend the mountain ridge, and hide during the day and move at
night. So, going uphill to about 14,000 ft, he hid himself in a snow cave.
This was his smartest move. When the militants discovered his escape at
about 7 a.m. they assumed he would head downhill and took off in that
direction. Childs’ good luck turned out to be bad for Norwegian Hans
Christian Ostro and German Dirk Hasert and his wife, Anna, whom the
militants now took hostage at a camp some three kilometres away.
Ostro, a young theatre director who had been introduced to the Kathakali
dance drama of Kerala by fellow Scandinavian Tom Fjerdefalk, was not just
a tourist. He had been in Srikrishnapuram, the village of the great Kathakali
artiste, Narayan Namboodiri, and was learning the art from a teacher. After
three months, his teacher was satisfied and he graduated. Ostro planned to
organize a troupe and take it to Norway, but before leaving he decided to
visit Kashmir.
News of the abductions did not reach the government immediately. It was
only when the women were released, a full twenty-four hours after their
capture, on Wednesday, 5 July, that they reported to the Pahalgam police
and then went to Srinagar to lodge a complaint. At the same time, the
kidnappers gave one of the guides a note for the authorities. The militants
said that they belonged to a group called the A1 Faran, and demanded the
release of twenty-one militants, including the top Harkat commanders, from
Indian jails.
 On 8 July, in Srinagar, police chief M.N. Sabharwal and Security Adviser
Lt Gen. D.D. Saklani received unconfirmed reports that a German had also
been kidnapped in the area. They decided to do an aerial survey to check
the situation for themselves. In the late afternoon, flying over a snow ridge
near Sheshnag, they saw a figure waving to them from the ridge line. As the
figure moved, the pilot kept track of him and at the nearest flat area, he
settled down near the exhausted man. Having hidden through the day,
Childs had decided to move down a bit and go across a canyon to another
ridge from where he could position himself to make a trek to Pahalgam that
night. The helicopter did not spot him at first and he frantically waved his
sweater to attract the pilot’s attention. The two officials initially thought
they had found the German. Childs informed them that he was an American
and that he had escaped from the militants.
Childs was debriefed for three days by Indian officials in the presence of
US embassy personnel. He told the authorities that the militant guerrilla
unit appeared to be a disciplined one and that he was convinced they were
getting their orders from Pakistan. He said that while not physically doing
so, they psychologically tortured the hostages by ritually slaughtering sheep
in front of them and so on.
The kidnapping came at a time when some of the parties to the Kashmir
conflict had their minds elsewhere. The governor was bent on pushing
through the elections, so rudely derailed by the Charar fiasco. Just before
the kidnapping, he had been preoccupied with meetings with a high-level
Union government team sent by the prime minister, under the leadership of
a minister in his office, Bhuvanesh Chaturvedi. The central team, including
Defence Secretary K.A. Nambiar, Home Secretary K. Padmanabhaiah,
Foreign Secretary Salman Haidar and Director (IB) D.C. Pathak was
perhaps the most high-level team to visit the valley in years. It was not just
on a fact-inding mission but came with a substantive agenda and visited far-
flung areas of Tangdhar, Anantnag and Doda. In addition to stepping up
security for the proposed elections, the team had discussed a Rs 1800-crore
package for the state to fund its annual plan as well as specific issues
relating to employment generation and better communications.
 For the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, the kidnappings, that, too, of
westerners and one of them an American, could not have come at a worse
time. Having gained great prestige because of the Charar fiasco, they were
keen to retain the momentum to check the government’s drive towards
elections. Just a short while before the kidnapping, US Ambassador Frank
Wisner had visited the valley and in an apparent shift of the US position,
backed the administration’s efforts to hold elections. As soon as news of the
kidnapping became public, the APHC condemned the action as un-Islamic
and declared that capturing innocent tourists and holding them hostage
could only sully the image of Kashmir’s struggle for freedom. They
demanded the unconditional release of the hostages.
Others, too, were discomfited Azad Kashmir Prime Minister Sardar
Abdul Qayyum Khan and JKLF Chairman Amanullah Khan also
condemned the abduction. Significantly, the Srinagar press reported on 8
July 1995 that Syed Salahuddin, the supreme commander of the Hizbul
Mujahideen, had condemned the kidnapping and asked for the hostages’
immediate and unconditional release.
At the end of the month, the mehmaan mujahideen hero, Mast Gul, too,
chipped in with his condemnation. Dressed in a sky-blue dress and flanked
by two armed men, the major told Pakistan TV that he who knew every
inch of the state of Kashmir, had never heard of the A1 Faran, an obvious
prop to the theory which Pakistani hardliners were peddling, that the group
was an Indian intelligence outfit.
Confronted with Childs’ escape, the militants declared their hand. In a
communication to the press in Srinagar on 10 July, the group said that they
were an outfit called A1 Faran and that they had an unstated number of
hostages. The government had till 15 July to release twenty-one jailed
militant leaders. Among them were the three ubiquitous names: Afghani,
Langaryal and Azhar. In the event of this not happening, the ‘Government
of India will be responsible for the consequent results’.
No one in Srinagar, or for that matter, Muzaffarabad, appeared to have
any control over the situation. To underline this, in a statement later in the
month, the group repeated its demand for the release of twenty-one
militants, rejected all appeals to free the hostages and tartly declared that
Islam sanctioned the death of infidels to free fellow Muslims. ‘Those who
criticize our act as un-Islamic are fools and do not know the Koran,’ they
declared through a press note in Srinagar.
The facts, as revealed later by Nasir Mehmood Sodozey, the finance chief
of the Harkat-ul-Ansar, was that the kidnapping was masterminded by the
Srinagar area chief of the outfit, Qari Zarrar. Nasir Mehmood, code-named
Aftab, and Mike, a resident of Nawab Goru village near Palandari in
Rawalkot in Azad Kashmir, had entered India in 1994 to establish channels
to pay the Harkat groups.
According to Mehmood who was arrested on 25 April 1996, Qari Zarrar,
acting on the orders of the Pakistani handlers, and bypassing the valley-
based leadership, including the Markaz Amir (centre chief), Mohammed
Zubair, had ordered a special lashkar led by his own associate, Abdul
Hameed Turki, to carry out the kidnapping in May 1995. The group’s
instructions, given by Zarrar who had earlier commanded the Harkat in the
Doda area, were to kidnap some foreign engineers working in projects in
the Jammu area; instead they had gone to Pahalgam, an area that Turki
knew well, and kidnapped Childs, Wells, Hutchings and Hasert.
Abdul Hameed Turki (from Turkey) who led this lashkar, had been one
of Langaryal’s closest aides since the days of the Afghan jihad. He had with
him Zubair Ahmed, Ali Hassan, Safdar, Abdullah and Abu Torab, all
Pakistanis. They were aided by the Harkat’s Kashmiri activist, Javed
Ahmed Bhat aka Sikandar, who was the Anantnag commander of the outfit
that had earlier been under Mohammed Zubair, now the Markaz Amir.
Zarrar, who operated out of a safe house in the Soura suburb of Srinagar,
maintained contact with Turki through a radio set and kept in touch with the
authorities through public telephones.
Using the alias Jehangir, he established contact with Saklani on 10 July
to inform him that the A1 Faran had the foreigners captive. Two days later
he called again and was told to maintain contact with Rajendra Tikoo,
inspector-general of police, who had been asked to coordinate the effort to
get the hostages released.
 The police officer was fluent in Kashmiri and Urdu and his first effort
was to confirm the veracity of the caller’s claim even while sounding
conciliatory. In his first conversation, he asked Zarrar for a list of the
militants whom the A1 Faran wanted released.
On Sunday, 16 July, to substantiate their claim, the terrorists released
individual pictures as well as a group photograph of the hostages. Posing
against a picture-postcard backdrop of snow- capped mountains stood the
four hostages and their armed captors in a formal group. They appeared
well clad and in good health. Later the authorities discovered that the
hostages had been marched from Aroo in a north-easterly direction, across
the route to Amarnath, to the Warwan valley. Through most of July and
August, they were confined to a rest house on the outskirts of Sokhniz
village.
In view of the common names appearing among those sought to be
released in the three cases of kidnapping, Indian authorities had little
hesitation in pinning the blame on the Harkat-ul-Ansar. Contact was
maintained and in a bid to encourage the group to think that the government
was negotiating in all sincerity, some ten of the twenty-one jailed militants
whose release had been demanded were shifted to Srinagar jail from places
of detention in other parts of the country.
The deadline came and passed and the frustrated guerrillas first conveyed
that they were extending the deadline for another twenty-four hours and
then, when that too expired, on Monday, 16 July, they sent a message that
the hostages could be ‘killed any time now’ They asked the Army to call off
its search efforts ‘as it is going to put the lives of hostages at risk’.
There was also an audio cassette with messages from the hostages to
their wives. Donald Hutchings assured his wife that he was being treated
properly and fed well by the militants, ‘but I don’t know whether I would
be killed today or whether I would be killed tomorrow. I don’t know what
will happen’. He went on to appeal to the governments of India and the US
for help. Paul Wells added, ‘The Government of India does not seem to be
sorting out the situation, we might be killed.’
 The government made it clear that while it was willing to release the
Kashmiri Muslims whose names figured in the list, it was not prepared to
do a deal for the foreigners. Since the Kashmiris had been included only to
lend respectability to the list, as it were, this offered little comfort to Zarrar.
At this stage there was an interesting side-drama. It was no secret that the
patron of the Harkat-ul-Ansar was Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of the
Jamiat-ul-ulema Islam, Pakistan, an ally of the then prime minister, Benazir
Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, and an adversary of the Pakistan Jamaat-
e-Islami and the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who were backing
the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen in Kashmir.
On 17 July, the day the second deadline expired, the Maulana told the
press in Islamabad that an unidentified person from Srinagar had contacted
him on phone at his home in Dera Ismail Khan on 14 July and then on 16
July. The man said he was part of the group that was holding the men
captive and wanted the Maulana to mediate a settlement. On the 19th in
Islamabad, the Maulana again met the press and told them that he had got a
call from the British High Commission on 13 July, asking him to help, and
that US Ambassador John C. Monjo, too, had called on him asking him to
use his good offices to resolve the crisis. For his part, he declared, he had
told the callers that they should release the foreigners on humanitarian
grounds, but they had not relented.
The Maulana applied for a visa to the Indian High Commission in
Islamabad, a step that puzzled officials because as per a convention among
countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC) nations, as a parliamentarian he did not need one. However, the
Maulana said that he was going to India on a private visit to condole the
death of Maulana Inamul Hassan of the Tablighi Jamaat and so, was
seeking a visa. After some hesitation, New Delhi granted it to him.
The Maulana arrived in India on 21 July, disclaiming any intention of
mediating without the Indian government asking him to do so. Talking to
newsmen in Delhi at the Jamiat-ul-ulema-e- Hind’s office adjoining the
Delhi police headquarters, the Maulana said that he did not know who the
A1 Faran people were and that it was possible that it might consist of
members of some old group familiar to him. He criticized the Government
of India for not taking any positive steps, without specifying what these
could be. Ominously, he noted that his gumnam (anonymous) callers would
not act against the hostages till his return to Pakistan from India on 24 July.
For some unexplained reason, the Maulana decided to leave a day earlier,
on 23 July. Before his departure, he told a news agency that he had not been
asked by the Indians to mediate on the issue.
According to reports in the media, the ministry of external affairs granted
the visa at the behest of the US ambassador and under pressure from the
then Pakistan prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. The ministry of home affairs
and the IB opposed the decision, but they were overruled. However, when it
came to permitting the Maulana a mediatory role, it was the home
ministry’s view that carried, and the view was that India should not touch
the Maulana with a bargepole.
A day before the Maulana’s arrival, on 20 July, the A1 Faran broke its
three-day silence and faxed a note to a foreign news agency. It rejected
appeals from different countries to free the hostages, saying that they would
not yield to any pressure and that these countries would be better served by
pressing India to concede their demands.
The same day they issued yet another statement claiming that two of the
captives had been injured in a twenty-five minute encounter between the
lashkar holding the hostages and the Army. They said that two soldiers had
also been killed in the encounter, and one of their own colleagues seriously
injured. The statement noted that despite this, ‘We were successful in taking
the tourists (sic) to a safer place alive.’
Security officials discounted this statement. An Army spokesman said
that no such clash had occurred and that the security forces were only
maintaining a surveillance and not planning any armed assault that could
endanger the lives of the hostages. This was not entirely true and there is
evidence that Army teams were conducting intense operations to locate the
hostages. The reason was that at the end of the month, the Amarnath
pilgrimage would begin. Yatris or travellers would arrive in Pahalgam by
bus and then trek to the cave temple of Amarnath, passing through the very
terrain where the kidnappings had occurred. The pilgrimage would
necessitate a major security operation, requiring great coordination and
deployment of tens of thousands of troops.
In 1994, as a response to the government’s refusal to remove bunkers
around Hazratbal, the Harkat-ul-Ansar and other militant outfits declared a
ban on the Amarnath yatra. Not only did they threaten to kill the yatris but
also Kashmiri government servants assisting the pilgrimage in any way.
However, after the removal of the bunkers, most outfits, including the Hizb,
had lifted the ban, but not the Harkat. Nevertheless, because of some tough
security measures, the yatra had been conducted safely, with some isolated
incidents of firing and grenade blasts.
On 7 July 1995, in a note published in the Al Safa, the Harkat reiterated
its ban on the yatra and repeated its warning to government servants and
shopkeepers. The statements said that a special force had been created
under Sidiq Babar to stop the yatra at any cost. Since the Harkat and the Al
Faran were the same outfit, this threat took on an ominous edge as the
kidnapping drama unfolded. The Harkat call took on a deadlier tone when
on 20 July, a bomb planted in an autorickshaw exploded in the Purani
Mandi area of Jammu, killing twenty persons and injuring fifty.
On 26 July, another bomb blast in Jammu took the lives of two persons,
injuring thirty-six. This time, the Harkat claimed responsibility and said that
it was part of its campaign to disrupt the yatra. The blast was set off near
the Ranbirshewar temple where several sadhus and pilgrims were camping.
A caller told a newsman in Jammu, ‘We wanted to prove we are capable of
striking at any place without hesitation if our ban is defied.’
The administration now began a massive exercise to ensure the security
of the yatra. The Army was given overall charge of the exercise in which as
many as 40,000 police, Army and paramilitary personnel were deployed.
While security up to Chandanwari, the last stop for buses, was a problem,
the biggest worry was the last thirty-two kilometres that the yatris had to
trek.
The Army worked on a plan that involved establishing pickets on the
heights along the route, as well as a series of checkpoints on it. Till
Chandanwari, the pilgrim buses would travel in convoys protected by the
Army, and beyond it, in groups escorted by the security forces.
The yatra formally began on 5 August with Mahant Deepinder Giri
departing for Chandanwari with the holy mace along with a convoy of
pilgrims. However, by 1 August some 6000 pilgrims had already reached
the base camp at Chandanwari. Ignoring the Harkat’s threat, locals, with
their ponies, flocked to the camp looking for pilgrims who wanted to hire
them. For many villagers, including shopkeepers, the annual pilgrimage
was the most important occasion for earning money.
On 7 August, as some 50,000 pilgrims at Chandanwari and Pahalgam
began the trek, the Harkat carried out several coordinated attacks on the
yatra. Early in the morning, two paramilitary personnel were injured when
their vehicle ran over a landmine laid the previous night at Siligam. Then,
in Pahalgam, two pilgrims were injured by a bomb that exploded at the rear
of a hotel. As a group of yatris began their trek and neared Saidbal,
someone tossed a grenade at them, but without causing any casualties. Near
Aish Muquam, from a distance, the militants fired towards a security picket
but to little effect. However, on 10 August, in Chandanwari, a bomb planted
in the tent of an official of the state government, Parminder Singh, exploded
killing him instantly. Fortunately, nothing else happened, and the yatris
returned from their trek on 9 August and the next day drove to Jammu.
On 5 August, the A1 Faran enacted a strange drama with a view to
disrupting the yatra as well as pressuring the authorities. The group released
a photo of two wounded hostages and claimed a third one was also sick.
There was a photograph of Donald Hutchings and Keith Mangam, lying
with their eyes closed and a bloody bandage across the latter’s chest. An
audio cassette was also released, with a message from Hutchings saying,
‘We were shot in the hills by the Army. I am critically injured and there are
no medicines available here. I am too weak to even speak . . .’ In its press
release, the A1 Faran claimed that the German hostage, too, was seriously
ill and could die for want of medicines. There was no response from the
authorities.
 Early on the morning of 13 August, on a path near Panzmulla village in
Anantnag district, a woman gathering firewood discovered the body of a
foreigner. He had been decapitated. His hands and feet were tied, and his
bloodied head nestled on his lap. It was Hans Christian Ostro, the
Norwegian.
The post-mortem that took place later in Delhi indicated that he had been
brought alive to the spot before being killed. Ostro had on him a bunch of
pictures from his Kathakali class and a letter written in Norwegian as well
as a note in Urdu from his killers, warning that the same fate would be fall
the other hostages if the government did not concede their demands. On his
stomach, one of the killers had carved the word A1 Faran in Arabic script.
None of the villagers living less than a kilometre away had heard anything,
though they admitted that militants had frequented the area which lay some
eight kilometres away from the Amarnath yatra route and on the edge of a
series of wooded hills that led to Doda.
Nasir Mehmood claims that both Zarrar and he were taken aback. When
they contacted Turki on the wireless, they got two different explanations.
The first was that Ostro was a difficult captive and had tried to escape
several times. The second was that he, Turki, had been troubled and not
knowing what to do, he had observed the Namaz-e-Isthekhana, a form of
prayer to leave the decision to Allah. The message he thought he received
through the process was that by killing Ostro, the lashkar would achieve its
goal. Later, the authorities found out that Ostro’s execution was carried out
by three persons—Mushtaq and Hashim from the Banihal area, and Zubair
Bhai, a Pakistani.
The Ostro killing sent shock waves across Norway, Kashmir and the
countries whose nationals remained in the hands of those who had carried
out this barbaric act. But the most discomfited were the Hurriyat
Conference and the Islampasand parties. Till now they thought it was some
kind of a drama staged by the Indian security forces, but the death of Ostro
changed all that.
The APHC called for a Kashmir bandh and it was supported by everyone,
including the Harkat-ul-Ansar, whose members comprised the A1 Faran.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq declared that the APHC wanted to show the world
that they did not support the act. The A1 Faran was not amused. In a poster
pasted on a pole in Anantnag, it chastised the APHC and claimed that Ostro
was a Jew, and so deserved to be killed. In a dig at the Jamaat- dominated
APHC, it wondered why no strike had been observed when Qazi Nissar had
been killed. In another statement it said it would give the background to the
kidnapping in a few days, declaring that the A1 Faran did not require
anybody’s certification. ‘We know what we should do; we don’t need
anybody’s advice.’
The morning after the killing, Zarrar had contacted Tikoo and angrily
told him that it was the government’s obstinacy that had led to Ostro’s
killing. He threatened to kill the other hostages one by one. Tikoo was
soothing. He told Zarrar that decisions were being taken at the highest level
and that there was no need for haste.
Instead of weakening the government’s resolve, the threat had the
opposite effect. The foreign governments too uniformly condemned the A1
Faran for the barbaric act. Home Secretary K. Padmanabhaiah met the
ambassadors of the concerned countries and briefed them on the situation.
Even the Organization of Islamic Conference pitched in with its
condemnation. In a statement from its Jeddah headquarters, the fifty-two-
nation grouping declared that the Islamic world would not appreciate
further brutal action against the abducted persons.
The government now began re-examining the option of staging a
commando raid to rescue the remaining hostages. Aerial photographs of the
region were gathered, sensitive wireless monitoring equipment set up, and
in a move to confuse the militants, on 16 August, news was leaked that the
government was reviewing the cases of fifteen of the militants for possible
release.
Twenty-four militants, not on the A1 Faran list, were released as part of
what was called a periodic review of such cases. In an interview with a TV
network, Governor Rao said that the hostages were alive and well. He said,
while military action for their rescue was a possibility, ‘you can’t do that in
the Himalayas unless you are sure you can rescue them without harming
them’.
To help the government track down the kidnappers as well as to assist in
hostage negotiations, Britain and the US sent specialists to advise in
negotiations with the hostages.
Personnel from the FBI and their British counterparts from Scotland Yard
arrived in India in mid-August. Later, media reports spoke of personnel of
the US Delta Force, the German GSG–9 and the Special Air Services of the
UK landing near Pahalgam for a possible rescue operation. Reports in the
British media spoke of special satellite pictures, detailing the movements of
the A1 Faran group, being made available to the Indian authorities by the
US. Other Indian reports claimed that the team was equipped with remote-
piloted vehicles and other surveillance equipment.
Anticipating military action, the A1 Faran’s command structure had
worked out a pre-arranged signal with its field unit, holding the captives. A
statement from the A1 Faran, broadcast by the BBC, that the hostages
would be killed ‘within twelve hours’, was actually meant to trigger their
execution.
On 20 August, an intermediary rang up the government to explain the
procedure and to say that the outfit’s command was on the verge of giving
such a statement in view of the plans, leaked to the media, about a
commando raid. The crisis management group concluded that given the
terrain, no one could guarantee the safety of the hostages. The raid was
immediately called off and the state police chief appeared on TV to provide
assurances that no such action was contemplated. The governor himself
made it clear that he preferred diplomatic action, rather than other means, to
free the hostages.
However, the A1 Faran leadership in Pakistan was not aware of what was
happening in Srinagar, and at 6 p.m. that day, it apparently ordered a
statement to be issued to the local press, saying that the hostages would be
killed ‘within twelve hours’.
This only confirmed what the Indian authorities knew. The government
now pulled out all the stops. The authorities informed the US Embassy of
this development, and they in turn called Washington DC. According to the
Times of London, White House officials woke up Benazir Bhutto and asked
her to intervene. Soon after a message was sent to the group, rescinding the
order, and someone claiming to represent the A1 Faran telephoned the
journalists, cancelling the release. Not surprisingly, the State Department
spokesman denied that Clinton had made any call relating to the hostages,
though he acknowledged that there was regular contact with Pakistani
officials to resolve the hostage issue.
This episode scared the western diplomats and negotiators. When the A1
Faran again established contact, they demanded proof that the hostages
were alive as a precondition for negotiations. The outfit agreed to provide
photographs and audio-tapes of the hostages.
Late on Tuesday, 23 August, the A1 Faran released a picture of the
remaining four hostages, looking grim and exhausted, and holding up white
sheets of paper with the date 18 August 1995 written in Urdu. They also
held up an Urdu paper whose date could not be verified because of the poor
quality of the picture. There were audio cassettes and messages from the
hostages:

‘My name is Donald Hutchings. This interview is taking place on August

18, 1995. I am fit and well and have no problems. Jane, I love you.’
‘My name is Dirk Hasert. Today is the 18th August, 1995. I am well and I
have no problems, and, Annie, I love you.’
(Voice in the background) ‘Speak!’
‘My name is Keith Mangam. Today is 18 of August, 1995. I am healthy. I
have no problems. Julie, I love you very much. Please pass on my love to
my family.’
‘My name is Paul Wells. Today is the 18 of August. I am fit and healthy. I
have no problems. Catherine, I love you. See you soon.’
‘My name is Donald Hutchings, speaking again on August 18, 1995. They
have just taken our photographs. With the photographs was a newspaper
dated August 14, 1995. We have more recent newspapers. Also with the
photograph was a sign dated August 18, 1995.’
According to Nasir Mehmood, the events in July and August deeply divided
Turki and Zarrar. By the last week of August, the latter became acting chief
commander of the outfit and at the suggestion of Tikoo, collected two radio
sets provided by the authorities and despatched one of them to Turki. Nasir,
however, instructed Turki to keep changing the frequency to avoid jamming
by the Army and also to shift their locations to prevent their detection by
direction-finding equipment. The steadfast refusal of the Indian government
to release the Harkat leaders and the intense pressure from friends and allies
eventually led to the group turning rogue. No one seemed to be backing
their actions, and in the first week of September, according to Nasir
Mehmood, a declaration on Radio Pakistan that neither the A1 Faran
militants, nor the hostages would be permitted to enter Pakistan brought the
morale of the lashkar down to rock-bottom.
Mehmood had instructed Turki that should the talks fail, he should kill
the hostages one by one but only after he was ordered to do so by either
Zarrar or himself. By the end of August, notwithstanding sightings
elsewhere, the hostages were still in the mountains around Pahalgam, and,
for a period, on the outskirts of Anantnag, though their exact location was
known only to the team that was holding them.
On 3 September, the militants broke the radio link, making it clear that if
the government wanted the hostages back alive, it should accept the
kidnappers’ demands. This new hard line was being masterminded by Aijaz
Ahmed Ahanger aka Nadim Zuber, a valley Kashmiri who had been asked
by Turki to talk to Tikoo. On 6 September, Zuber, presumably in Srinagar,
gave Tikoo an ultimatum—free the prisoners or else. The next day, there
was yet another run-in between the Army and the A1 Faran lashkar, holding
the hostages in the Pahalgam area. When Turki reported this to Nadim
Zuber, the latter issued a press note on 8 September, declaring that the
hostages would be executed if the ‘required persons’ were not released
within a day.
There was no response from the government and Zarrar once again took
charge of the negotiations but on a different tack. According to Mehmood,
Zarrar now decided to make the best of a bad situation and hinted in a
conversation with Tikoo that a Rs 5-crore ‘security deposit’ could be made
by the government and when the hostages were released, the money would
be returned.
However, the Hindustan Times got wind of this and reported on 16
September that the kidnappers wanted $5 crore or Rs 50 million as ransom.
The demand was actually for Rs 5 crore ($1.56 million), and Tikoo had
already beaten Zarrar down to Rs 2 crore. The government was in two
minds over this development. On the one hand, they feared that accepting
this trade-off would encourage ‘copy-cat’ kidnapping. On the other, the
monetary transaction did not involve giving up Langaryal and others.
Leakage of this to the newspapers enraged the Al Faran, and on the 19th,
it refused any more discussion on the issue. It told Tikoo that the Al Faran
was being made out to be a cheap mercenary outfit and it had decided now
not to accept any money. Nasir Mehmood, too, maintained that the
government misconstrued the ‘cash for hostages’ deal and said that the
negative publicity led to a weakening of Zarrar’s leadership position. The
outfit now reverted to the earlier demand: release of ten militants before the
release of the hostages. One casualty of this was Tikoo, who was now taken
off the negotiation process.
Contact beween the Al Faran and the government’s negotiating team was
broken off. The authorities kept their fingers crossed, believing that the
hostages would have developed human links with their captors that would
make the latter hesitate to execute them. Such captive-hostage psychology
was undoubtedly the view of the specialists from the US and UK, but they
were unable to provide any way out of the impasse.
The leadership was so divided that Mehmood sought to follow Markaz
Amir Mohammed Zubair and escape to Pakistan. He told his interrogators
subsequently that he was fed up with the whole thing and found that the
Kashmiri leadership of the Harkat, represented by Sikandar and Nadim
Zuber, had become ‘anti-’ Pakistani’. He went to Kupwara and attempted to
cross the LoC but was unable to do so.
When he returned, the outfit had another meeting of its top activists—
Zarrar, Javed Ahmed ‘Sikandar’, Nadim Zuber and Parvez Ahmed Baba.
The Pakistanis, Zarrar and Mehmood, were severely chastised for their
handling of the situation, and both put in their resignations as ‘chief
commander’ and ‘finance chief’, respectively. Sikandar and Nadim Zuber
were appointed to their positions.
It was around this time, according to Mehmood, that the jailed leaders,
Masood Azhar, Sajjad Afghani and Nasrullah Mansoor Langaryal, sent a
message imploring their comrades not to weaken their stand; otherwise,
they would lose all chances of leaving Indian jails alive.
By now even Turki was tired of the constant forced marches and the
frustrating negotiations. So he handed over responsibility of the captives to
Javed Ahmed ‘Sikandar’, who had been the Anantnag district chief of the
Harkat and was now the Markaz Amir or central commander as well.
Sikandar, in turn, deputed Daud who had succeeded him as the Anantnag
commander to look after them.
Through October there was no communication with the A1 Faran. The
authorities tried to gather information from villagers and shepherds, but the
information was fragmentary and of little use. In early October, the group
was seen in the Wadwan area of the Doda district, but by mid-October,
reports placed it back in the Anantnag district. Mehmood, however, later
disclosed that in September the hostages had been brought down to the
Kulgam area and in October to Anantnag town itself. Later, they were taken
to Kokernag. There were disquieting reports that all the hostages were not
well, that while some suffered from stomach ailments at least, the American
Donald Hutchings had suffered from frostbite.
Obviously something was wrong because in November, armed militants
took a doctor from the Larkipura village in south Anantnag. Reports said
that they told the doctor and his family that they needed his services to treat
the American who was suffering from frostbite. Earlier, apparently, the
militants had tried to get a leading orthopaedic surgeon from Anantnag, but
they did not find him home.
On 9 November, the A1 Faran suddenly established contact again, by
radio as well as telephone, to say that the hostages were alive, though one
of the Britons and the US hostage were ill. However, they said that the
captives were being looked after well. Five days later, on 14 November,
they issued a press statement in Srinagar, claiming that one of the two
hostages had been ailing for the past two weeks and was critical and
struggling for life. The statement went on to add that the A1 Faran was for a
purposeful dialogue to resolve the crisis but the Government of India was
prolonging the issue.
Three days later, on 17 November, another statement in Urdu read, ‘His
condition had deteriorated and he may die any time and the responsibility
will be on the Indian government. The family members of the tourist should
reach Srinagar immediately and in case he dies, the body can be handed
over to them.’ The statement added ‘we had informed the government about
the situation, But they do not seem to be interested in taking care of the
hostages. Their assurances in media only deceived the world.’
Taking this as the cue, the administration appealed to the A1 Faran to
release the sick hostage to enable him to get medical attention. Alternately,
they suggested that a competent specialist attend to the sick hostage. The
A1 Faran was not game. It declared that if the Government of India was so
concerned about the ill hostage, it could exchange him for Masood Azhar,
the Harkat-ul-Ansar secretary general. But the furthest the administration
was willing to go was making an offer, on 22 November, of a speedy trial
for Azhar in exchange for the ill captive. But nothing came out of this and
to underscore the tough line the government was taking, families of the
hostages, too, issued a statement on 24 November, which emphasized, ‘We
do not understand why you hold our innocent relatives hostage. Our
governments have said they will make no concessions to those who hold
their citizens hostage and that they will not urge other governments to make
concessions.’
With an impasse on all sides, the A1 Faran made its last communication
on 26 November. Nasir Mehmood was contacted by the Harkat’s supreme
commander, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, at the end of November and told that
the Harkat leadership was under pressure not only from the Pakistan
government but its Afghan friends as well. He told Mehmood that
Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Afghan mujahideen leader and his ‘ustad’ or
teacher, who ran the Khost guerrilla warfare centres, had come to Islamabad
and pleaded on behalf of the hostages at the urging of his ‘American and
British friends’.
(Confirmation of the pressure being put on the Harkat’s leaders through
secret negotiations at the US Embassy in Islamabad came through the
Sunday Times of London on 20 March 1998. According to a report by
Stephen Gray, the American efforts, accompanied by what the Harkat
perceived to be threats, led to a hardening of the organization’s stand and an
order, in early December 1995, for the execution of the hostages.)
With direct negotiations not working, the A1 Faran now called on the
Hurriyat to mediate. In early December, responding to an appeal by the
Hurriyat for the unconditional release of the captives, the A1 Faran said
‘We cannot do so unless our demands are met.’ However, it went on to add,
‘If the APHC mediate and get our jailed activists released, we will free the
hostages.’
This was the kind of situation that the Hurriyat wanted to avoid. It had
spent the better part of the previous three months denouncing the
kidnapping and claiming that it was the handiwork of the government and
its agents, or persons who were out to defame the Kashmiri freedom
movement. Aware that this was not the kind of group that could be
influenced by reason, it decided that discretion would be the better part of
valour. Two of its senior leaders, Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and
Jamaat chief Syed Ali Shah Geelani, made it clear that they would not
mediate on the issue as they wanted to have nothing to do with the
government.
This brought a harsh response from the A1 Faran. Terming the Hurriyat
as Indian stooges, a 4 December statement by the A1 Faran wondered how
the Hurriyat leaders proposed to fight for freedom if they lacked the guts to
mediate for the release of the hostages. Charging that the APHC leaders
were doing nothing but begging for freedom, the statement said that these
were the kind of leaders who never felt the pangs of conscience while
calling for ‘rampant hartals and throwing parties and leading a luxurious
life’.
 The hostages drama, tense and tragic, now began to take on a bizarre air.
On 7 December, UK High Commissioner Sir Nicholas Fenn received a call
from a person purporting to be an A1 Faran representative in New Delhi.
The person appeared to be more interested in recovering the cost of their
operation, than with their jailed colleagues. After a perfunctory appeal for
the release of the jailed leaders, the man spoke about the costs, in terms of
two of the abductors killed as well as money spent. ‘We have been treating
them as our guests,’ the man told Sir Nicholas, ‘and you can expect that we
have spent lots of money,’ adding egregiously, ‘We have also lost two of our
colleagues while defending your tourists.’ Thrice during the conversation,
he brought up the question of money.
The British envoy was polite but unyielding. ‘We don’t think it right to
accede to requests like this when our citizens are being held against their
will because it creates the very conditions for other citizens to be taken by
some other group for similar reasons,’ he told the caller. Sir Nicholas tried
to broach the issue of negotiations and release, arguing that it would be in
the interest of the organization to do so. But the A1 Faran man was
unmoved.
The next strange bit of news came from three mercenaries captured by 2
Rashtriya Rifles, following an encounter at Darban on the outskirts of
Anantnag on 4 December. In the clash, four jawans and four mercenaries,
including a man named Abdul Hameed, a Turkish national, were killed. The
Harkat had acknowledged that Turki and his men were part of their outfit.
On the basis of the interrogation of the captured men, an official spokesman
said that the captives had been handed over to local militants or abandoned
in the Himalayas.
The next development was even more baffling. In late December, reports
appeared in the media, citing police officers that the hostages had been
sighted in Anantnag district, well clad and apparently healthy and
accompanied by twenty armed men. This may have been a contrived report.
Actually, the worst had already occurred. At the time of the Darban
encounter, Turki and his men no longer had the hostages. They had been
given over to the locals under Javed Ahmed Bhat ‘Sikandar’, who was also
at the time the Harkat’s commander-in-chief. According to Nasir Mehmood,
the hostages at this time were being held in Kokernag. On 10 December,
Sikandar sent a message to Nadim Zuber to issue a press note to the effect
that the hostages had been captured by the Army in the same encounter in
which Turki had been killed. The whole thing appeared so implausible that
no one seems to have reported the press note. Then on 3 January 1996, the
A1 Faran issued another statement which was delivered to the local papers
in Srinagar and carried by them. They declared that the Rashtriya Rifles had
rescued the hostages during the raid in which Turki had been killed, and
they were now being held incommunicado at an Army camp in Hakura in
the Anantnag district. The Al Faran wanted to make it clear, the statement
added, that the Indian government wanted to malign Kashmiri freedom
fighters by issuing reports that the four militants were sighted in south
Kashmir along with twenty militants.
To add to this bizarre twist, the Harkat-ul-Ansar chipped in with its
statement later in the month, declaring that it was commissioning special
mujahid squads to rescue the hostages from the Indian Army!
However, it would appear that the hostages had been executed on 13
December. On 4 January, Ghulam Nabi Baba aka Parvez Ahmed Baba, a
top Harkat functionary, came to Srinagar from Anantnag. He told Mehmood
that after the death of Turki, the group had been very tense and had
indicated that it was under intense pressure from the Army. It asked
Sikandar to conclude the business one way or the other. According to
Mehmood, given the circumstances and the fact that the A1 Faran had
issued a press note to the effect that the hostages were in the custody of the
Army, Sikandar decided to order their execution. This was done in the
Magam area of Kokernag and the bodies were buried in the jungle
somewhere.
Even these developments had an enigmatic twist. On 16 February, Javed
Ahmad alias Sikandar was killed while setting up an improvised explosive
device in Ashshpora village near Anantnag. Just before his death, he had
given an interview to the Srinagar daily Uqab, in which he had reiterated
the story about the Army seizing the hostages. Rejecting the charge that the
A1 Faran was linked to the Harkat, he declared, on the contrary, that his
people had launched an operation to rescue the hostages from the clutches
of the Indians.
Ramzan came early in 1996, and those working to get the hostages freed
hoped to use the opportunity to persuade the A1 Faran to part with them.
Benazir Bhutto was under heavy American pressure in the holy month.
Nevertheless, she made the point: ‘We do not know whether this A1 Faran
is an Indian counter-intelligence unit or whether this unit is a breakaway
group of Kashmiri fighters.’
Addressing the congregation on the Friday before Id, Mirwaiz Umar
Farooq again appealed for the hostages’ release. Family members of the
hostages issued a statement appealing to the A1 Faran ‘to release our
beloved ones’. They also called on them to dispel rumours by providing
proof that the captives were alive. But even these hopes were dashed as Id
ended on 21 February and 1996 got underway. There was no contact from
the A1 Faran, and it appeared that they, along with their captives, had
vanished into thin air.
There was nothing through the spring and the summer. And then came
yet another twist to the already tangled tale. In May, the BSF G-Branch was
tipped-off in Srinagar that a top Harkat functionary had an affair with the
sister of a local carpenter and visited her occasionally. After watching the
house for a week or so, they were able to arrest Nasir Mehmood Sodozey.
‘Sustained’ interrogation resulted in information which suggested that the
hostages had been killed and buried months ago.
Mehmood confessed that he was a top activist of the Harkat, with the
radio call sign AA, often picked up by the Army signals intelligence. He
detailed the sorry story. Diplomats and other western officials were given
the opportunity to review the interrogation as well as question Mehmood.
In early June 1996, armed with Mehmood’s interrogation report and
backed by foreign experts and special tracker dogs flown in from abroad,
some 500 security personnel combed the Magam forests, some seventy-
seven kilometres from Srinagar, to see if they could find any traces of the
hostages or their remains. A five-member team of experts from British,
German and American intelligence as well as the IB and RAW also
participated in the search. Later, Mehmood was brought there to assist
them. However, nothing was found. Speaking on behalf of the four western
ambassadors who also came to Srinagar on receipt of the news, British High
Commissioner David Gore-Booth said, ‘After ten days of concentrated
effort, the searchers found nothing to confirm or contradict the suggestion
that the hostages may be dead.’
But till early August 1996, the governor, Gen. Rao was still claiming that
the hostages were alive. Speaking to the Srinagar- based correspondent of a
TV outfit, the general said that the hostages and their captors had been
sighted by villagers several times earlier that year in the mountain region
between Doda and the valley.
He made it clear that the instructions were that the security forces were
not to go near them so that no harm was done to the hostages. These were
underscored in view of the special deployment of forces for the elections.
According to the governor, the hostages appeared to be in good health since
they had little difficulty in moving around in the high mountains.
The governor maintained his earlier position that the only way the
hostages could be released was by exerting ‘diplomatic pressure’ on
Pakistan. His view may have appeared somewhat jaded, but they did find
ready echo in the views of US Congressman Bill Richardson, who had
made a fruitless trip to India and Pakistan to obtain the release of the
hostages. In July 1996, Richardson, who has since been appointed the US
ambassador to the UN, said that ‘constructive pressure on Pakistan is
important’ in securing the release of the hostages. Even while welcoming
the strong statement of Benazir Bhutto, demanding the release of the
hostages, Richardson bluntly pointed out, ‘No country, especially whose
citizens are being held hostages by the terrorists in Kashmir, is going to
want to get involved in the Kashmir issue unless and until the hostage issue
is resolved.’ In late August 1996, there was another sighting at the
Bajpathari area in Doda district. Reports indicated that some forest guards
and nomads had spotted a group of militants escorting two foreigners in a
meadow between Madhwa and Chatroo in the Kishtwar tehsil. Both were
sunburnt and were sporting long beards. However, the militants guarding
them had waved away the civilians.
In August 1996, the Kashmir administration set up a task force of
fourteen officers of inspector rank to search for the hostages or to locate
their remains. According to reports, the US FBI sought to be associated
with this force on a permanent basis by stationing an official in Srinagar.
But this move was opposed by the Indian security agencies.
The entry of foreign security agencies as well as the unprecedented free
run given to foreign diplomats to work with Indian security agencies had
caused considerable disquiet to the latter. In 1995, Manavendra Singh wrote
in the Indian Express that the narthern command chief, Lt Gen. Surrinder
Singh, was upset enough to propose putting in his papers. The general felt
that if the issue was negotiation, it was proper for the administration to be in
command, but if it were a matter of a military operation, it could only be
under the Indian Army, and specifically, the northern Army’s command.
The most distressed persons were the captives’ spouses. They had been
with the men when they had been captured. Jane Schelley, Donald
Hutchings’ wife, said on 14 July, over a week after her husband’s capture,
‘We sympathize with the sufferings of the Kashmiri people. But the
hostages are only innocent tourists and are not responsible for the situation.’
A year later, in 1996, three of the ladies—Schelley, Julie Mangan and
Wells’ girlfriend Catherine Mosley—were back, pleading for help in tracing
the missing men. They went to Anantnag and visited the house of Sikandar,
the Harkat-ul-Ansar chief who had died while fabricating a bomb earlier in
the year. This was a gesture of friendship to an organization that was the
primary suspect in the kidnapping.
On Friday, 25 October, they visited Hazratbal and mingled with the
pilgrims, distributing a pamphlet written in Urdu, requesting information.
Dressed in salwar-kameez, barefoot and with their heads covered, they also
tied threads and photographs of the hostages on the main gate of the shrine,
seeking the traditional minnat or wish-fulfilment.
In keeping with its public posture that it was not in any way involved, the
Harkat issued a statement, thanking the families for visiting Sikandar’s
house and condoling with his mother and declaring, ‘If any militant group
has abducted them as the Indian media is projecting, we appeal to them that
if they are true Muslims, for God’s sake and for the betterment of Kashmir’s
freedom movement, they should release them immediately.’ The statement
went on to express sympathy with the hostages’ families and said that the
identity of the kidnappers was not known. They once again raised the bogey
of the men being held by Indian secret services to discredit the separatist
movement. Frustrated by the lack of any development or sign as to whether
the hostages were alive or dead, in Islamabad, Jane Schelley proposed a
very small monetary reward for information.
This was probably a trial balloon for a formal proposal made by US
Ambassador to Pakistan Thomas Simons on 20 November. The message to
the would-be informants, Simons said, was: ‘Please come forward without
delay and tell us what you know. Your identity will be kept confidential and
for your cooperation you may be eligible for a substantial sum of money by
way of a reward.’ To prevent any deluge of fraudulent claims, he did not
specify the amount. But diplomats said that as per US law, the amount
could have been of the order of $2 million.
Indian authorities initially criticized the idea, with Chief Minister Farooq
Abdullah declaring that if there were any reward to be offered, it should be
done by the Indian government. However, following the US announcement,
the Jammu and Kashmir government followed suit with its own reward,
equivalent to $28,000, as well as the announcement of a hotline and mailing
address to collect the information.
The year 1997 also passed with no trace of the hostages. In September,
acting on a credible report that a grave in the cemetery of Akingam village
in south Kashmir held the body of one of the hostages, the police conducted
an exhumation. Experts from Scotland Yard and the FBI were present when
the examination took place with the medical records of Paul Wells and
Keith Mangan whose height approximated that of the exhumed corpse.
However, nothing matched and that lead, too, ran dry. But there were two
important arrests, that of Nazir Ahmed Nazar aka Nazir Chaan, a district
commander of the Harkat, and Ghulam Nabi Baba alias Parvez Ahmed
Baba, an erstwhile junior engineer in the J&K Power Development
Corporation, a top Harkat functionary and member of the Shoura-e-Jehad or
the top command body of the outfit, set up by the ISI in June 1996.
Intelligence officials say that Nazir Chaan’s account of the death of the
hostages is so far the most credible. A resident of Darban in south Kashmir,
he was one of the trainees of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s Kapran training
camp that the authorities destroyed in late 1993. Chaan was involved for at
least two months in late 1995 in keeping the ‘tourists’ in captivity at various
places in the Magam-Kokernag-Verinag-Kapran and Pahalgam areas of
Anantnag district. But he was not there at the time of their death.
Corroborating the account of Nasir Mehmood, he said the decision to
execute the hostages was taken after Turki’s death. Some time between
December 1995 and January 1996, the hostages were taken to a cave and
told that it was a tunnel. As they walked in, they were shot from the back.
The mouth of the cave was then sealed. The only eyewitness, according to
Chaan, was a local government employee who has since gone underground.
Ghulam Nabi Baba’s testimony, confirming the death of the hostages,
came from his proximity to the chief commander, Javed Ahmed Bhat
‘Sikandar’. He told the authorities that Javed had told him that the hostages
had been killed in mid-December by the Ibrahim group of the Harkat/Al
Faran. According to the authorities, all those who were involved in the
abduction of the hostages are now presumed dead, except the mysterious
‘Ibrahim’, a militant of Pakistani origin, who is believed to have escaped
across the LoC and is underground somewhere in Pakistan. The growing
mountain of evidence in support of the deaths has not stopped the relatives
of the hostages from returning to India. In June and October 1997, Jane
Schelley was in New Delhi and Srinagar. In November, Julie Mangan, Bob
Wells and Brigit Hasert, Dirk’s sister, were in Delhi after a nine-day halt in
Pakistan. Brigit, who had come for the second time, probably spoke for all
of them when she said at a press conference, ‘It is so frustrating because
you have nothing to take back home.’
 10
Lost Rebellion

On Republic Day, 1995, at the Maulana Azad Stadium in Jammu, before an

assembly of 30,000, Governor Krishna Rao, wearing his regimental cap,
inspected the assembled parade. Returning to the rostrum, he began reading
a speech from a prepared text. He had almost finished when, at 10.20 a.m.,
an enormous blast went off some twenty feet behind him towards his left.
The bomb was apparently placed near the amplifiers and the recording
equipment for the public address system, and among the eight people who
died instantly were three information department officials: A.K. Abrol,
Harbans Singh and Anchal Singh, and five home guard personnel with the
names of Phola Singh, Mohan Lal, Ved Prakash, Chaman Lal and Ram Pal.
The sound system went off and there was general panic. Even though he
sustained minor injuries, the general barely flinched. After a pause to
reassure everyone that he was fine, he raised his voice and continued to
read the last paragraph of his speech and ordered the parade commander to
prepare for the march.
At this point there was a blast outside the stadium, right across from the
rostrum. With the crowds restive and worried for the safety of the 5000
children who were participating in the parade, Gen. Rao called off the
function. Meanwhile, the third blast took place just two feet away from him
on the right. Once again he had a providential escape, though he was hit on
the head by flying debris. At this point the security staff insisted that the
governor leave.
Two hours later, a composed Gen. Rao met the press. In a statement, he
apologized for the security lapse and said that there would be a thorough
probe into the incident. A CBI inquiry was unable to get to the bottom of
the episode, and pinned the blame on two constables in the general’s
security detail. Immediately after the blasts, the Hizbul Mujahideen claimed
responsibility, but so did the A1 Jehad and the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen. The
next day the A1 Jehad attacked the other two organizations for claiming
credit where none was due, and said that it had the means to prove its claim.
A statement issued to the press by the Jammu chief of the outfit, Saifullah,
said that all the other tanzeems were lazy and were trying ‘to get mileage
through press notes while in reality they have no connections (with the
blasts)’.
Actually, the explosion had been carried out by Irfan Anwar, who was
arrested on 23 March 1995. His real name was Mohammed Irfan, and he
was a resident of Tanda village in the Gujarat area of Pakistan. An ISI
operative, he told the authorities that he had carried out over fourteen trans-
border operations. The bomb explosions on Republic Day had been planned
by the ISI’s Sialkot unit and executed with the help of the local Hizbul
Mujahideen. Two five-kg bombs that had gone off inside the stadium and
one ten-kg one that had detonated outside had been fabricated in Pakistan
and been brought to India on the night of 28 December 1994 and had been
laid well in advance of the function, with the use of a sophisticated timing
device.
The event presaged a difficult year ahead. Incidentally, 1993 had been
one of the toughest for the militants who were trying to cross the LoC.
Losses in terms of arrests and deaths in ambushes peaked with 284 militants
arrested, 275 killed and 460 weapons recovered. At the beginning of 1994,
these figures started to decrease and in 1996, the figures were sixty-two
arrested, eighty-five killed and 120 weapons recovered. Within the valley,
while 1993 topped in terms of weapons seized, 1994 was the worst year for
the militants. With the Indian security forces on the offensive, their losses
peaked. According to government statistics, 1667 militants were killed and
over 3000 apprehended.
For the security forces, however, 1995 imposed the heaviest losses. At a
year-end press briefing, police chief Sabharwal pointed out that 1995 had
been the bloodiest year of the conflict with 258 security personnel killed as
compared to 1,377 militants. The bulk of the dead security personnel, some
186, belonged to the Army, reflecting both the increased aggressiveness as
well as the new tactics of the militants.
As the attempt on the governor’s life showed, the practice of ambush and
the use of improvised explosive devices (IED) gave way to the use of the
‘sophisticated explosive device’ (SED). The changed tactics were
devastatingly evident in an incident that took the life of Brig. V. Sridhar, the
second seniormost officer to have died in the operations in the state.
On 20 March 1995, in the morning, two Nissan one-tonne trucks of the
Army were moving along the NH1A near the Jabla bridge, one and a half
kilometre away from Uri. Suddenly, there was a blast, but it went off a bit
too late, killing two civilians on the roadside and injuring two soldiers in
the second truck. The soldiers jumped off, anticipating an ambush, and sure
enough, they came under fire from a ridge. They returned fire and the
militants melted away.
Sridhar, who had taken command of the 12th Infantry Brigade in October
1993, was one of those hands-on soldiers who had to check things for
himself. He arrived at the place of the incident at about 9.30 a.m., gave
orders for the deployment of the QRTs (Quick Reaction Teams) and then,
on foot, moved towards the blast site. Just then a second SED was
detonated about fifteen metres away. The brigadier was seriously injured
and died in hospital a short while later.
The 9th Sikh Light Infantry, which moved into southern Kashmir on 4
May 1995, realized the deadly price the explosive devices could extract. As
part of the strategy to pervade the countryside, prior to the elections, the
unit had been asked to deploy in an area, south of Bijbehara, where there
had been no security forces earlier. On 28 May, the unit chief, Col. R.R.
Gaur, took two companies to Sirhoma village and supervised their
deployment in the are He stayed there for two days and was returning on 30
May when an SED was detonated under his jeep, killing him along with
sepoys Billa Singh, Sardul Singh, Jagroop Singh and Surinder Singh
instantly.
 This was just the beginning of the unit’s travails. On a patrol with his
company commander two weeks later on 15 June, Naik Dev Singh, a radio
operator, spotted an SED on the road. He shouted for the rest of the group
to take cover, but at that moment the mine was triggered, killing him and
injuring four jawans.
The following morning, the patrol commandeered a local taxi to take the
injured to the battalion hospital. Kamaljit Singh was asked to go along with
the group for protection. But as the car approached Narhon village, it, too,
was blasted by a mine, killing Kamaljit Singh, and two locals.
In June, Mian Altaf, a top Congress leader of the state, was injured in a
mine blast on the National Highway near Kangan, fifty kilometres north of
Srinagar. On 9 September, four Army personnel were killed and seven
injured in a blast in Keran, Kupwara. Two days later, five BSF personnel
were killed and several injured in Haihama in the same district. A month
later, in another blast on 14 October, two more BSF personnel died in this
frontier district.
Given their nature, the explosions took a heavy toll on the lives of
civilians. In the first six months of 1995, there were some 140 incidents of
mine and IED and SED blasts, killing forty-four non-combatants and
injuring over a hundred. In many cases, the civilians happened to be at the
wrong place at the wrong time; in other cases, they were travelling in
vehicles which were blown up. In one instance at Bajipur village in
Baramula district in April, seven children were seriously injured when a
landmine that they were playing with detonated. Later, three of them died
from their injuries. As a result of this, the village, which had harboured
mehmaan mujahideen for several years, was forced to request the
authorities to sweep the area clear of mines. In other cases, those who set
off the blasts knew that even though they were targetting security forces,
the chances of civilians dying were high. On 4 September, a powerful blast
from an explosive packed in a car went off in front of the State Bank of
India on Residency Road. It was pay day and scores of security officials had
come to withdraw cash for salaries for their units. Seven security personnel
died while at least seven other people who happened to be there also
perished. The Hizbul Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the blast.
However, two bomb blasts in Anantnag district were aimed specifically at
civilians. On 3 December, a bomb detonated at the Old Bus Stand of
Anantnag at about 3.30 p.m. The aftermath, eyewitnesses reported, was
sickeningly familiar: people running in panic; others with blood on them;
limbs and shreds of flesh strewn around. Thirteen people died and fifteen
were injured, all of them civilians.
The pattern of the blast was the same as the one that had taken place at
Mattan on 20 November. The explosive device had been placed in a drain
near the bus stand and detonated at a preset time; three persons had died
and twelve had been injured. The Hizbul Mujahideen did not claim
responsibility for this blast. But the security agencies pinpointed blame on
Sartaj Ahmed Salroo, the district commander of the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen,
who was also concurrently the Hizb chief. The aim of the blast was to
‘punish’ the residents for having acquiesced in pushing out the Hizb from
the town with the help of counter-insurgency militia.
The Jammu area was a major target of blasts, set off mainly by cross-
border saboteurs. On 4 February, in the border area of Palanwala, there
were five explosions near the Platan village, set off by a cross-border
infiltrator. The next day some children at a playground in the Trikuta Nagar
housing colony in Jammu spotted an unfamiliar object. As they tried to prod
it with a stick, it exploded, killing five of them and injuring three. The next
day there was another mine explosion in Palanwala, killing two Army
junior commissioned officers. Five days later on 10 February, four bombs
were found under a culvert in Sainik Colony in Jammu and defused.
In a bid to create chaos, Pakistani saboteurs patented another device that
used solar energy for detonation. The devices— actually crude rockets
mounted on pods—were aimed in the general direction of Army positions.
They were linked to solar batteries which would activate and launch them
as soon as the sun rose and charged the batteries.
There was also a visible shift in the Pakistani infiltration strategy. While
the high mountains and forests of the north were the best way in, they were
closed between October and May. Coming across the LoC from the Mirpur
side of Azad Kashmir offered all-weather routes as well as direct access to
the new areas that the ISI was concentrating on: Jammu, Udhampur and
Doda. The problem was that these routes were in areas that were cultivated
or had at least been cleared. Being at altitudes of 5000–7000 ft, they had no
weather-bound limitations but were better guarded. The means of getting
across this area was to begin unprovoked and indiscriminate firing across
the border with machine-guns, artillery and rockets to ensure that the Indian
soldiers kept their heads low. Infiltrators would move through the gaps
provided in the fire-wall. This was a dangerous and costly job. One count
by officials showed that in the first four months of 1994, fifty infiltration
attempts were detected, in which 200 infiltrators were killed and scores
arrested. In the same period about a hundred rockets were also fired across
the LoC.
By mid-1994, there were just two battalions of the Army, seven of the
BSF and one of the CRPF available for counter- insurgency operations in
Doda district, which was nearly as large as the entire Kashmir valley. The
main problem was the lack of a clear-headed strategy to deal with the
problem, but an equally important subsidiary reason was the turf battles
between the various Army formations and the BSF and the administration.
Within the Army there were differences over whether the area ought to be
the concern of the 15 Corps based in Srinagar or the 16 Corps
headquartered in Nagrota.
Another issue was the need for air support. Following the assassination
of Swami Raj Katal and Ruchir Kumar in May–June 1994, Rajesh Pilot had
spoken of the need to use helicopter gunships in the area. While this was a
logical solution to hunting the lashkars from the heights, the Army was not
too happy. It had no intention of using gunships in a routine fashion. It was
not even keen on using helicopters for liaison or observation, fearing the
Afghans, well-trained in anti-aircraft tactics. However, minus helicopter
support, offensive action in the mountainous terrain was tantamount to
chasing the will-o’-the-wisp.
In September 1994, the Rashtriya Rifles (RR) and the other forces—the
BSF, CRPF, Assam Rifles—were integrated to function as a counter-
insurgency force (CIF) under the command of Maj. Gen. Yogi Behl, who
assumed command of the newly created Delta (Doda) Force of the
Rashtriya Rifles. Since there had been little coordinated action in the past,
the impact of the force was immediate. In four months they were able to kill
fifty-eight militants, of whom ten were mehmaan mujahideen, and arrest
eighty-six. As the RR boosted its presence, problems cropped up with the
BSF. By early 1995, tension had reached a point where the BSF’s seven
companies in Doda slowed down their operations and senior BSF officials
wrote to the home ministry, demanding clarification of its role. Privately,
the BSF accused the RR of shirking deployments on the Pir Panjal ranges to
check the infiltration of the militants. The RR for its part felt that the BSF
was not contributing its mite to the strong combing operations in and
around the urban areas of Doda.
But even as the CIF bickered, the ISI was one step ahead, expanding its
presence in the whole Jammu region. Of particular concern was the Kathua
district bordered by Punjab and Pakistan. The LoC in Jammu had been used
by the smuggling fraternity for decades; now it was stepped up for use by
terrorists.
The regional demographics—with substantial numbers of Hindus living
side by side with the Muslims—gave their own character to the conflict in
the form of militant attacks on villages, mainly for the purpose of looting.
Sometimes, they met resistance. The most celebrated incident occurred in
Bagankote village in Udhampur district on 17 September 1994. About forty
Harkat-ul-Ansar militants were seen approaching the villages of Bagankote,
Dandakote and Baggudase. The group split into three and one of them
moved towards Bagankote. A retired Army havaldar, Gokul, and a friend,
Pannu, were the first to spot them and alert the villagers. They positioned
themselves for an ambush with a 12-bore shotgun. As the group
approached, the brave havaldar got up and fired both barrels, bringing down
two militants. Both Punnu and Gokul now pounced on the others in a hand-
to-hand fight and were killed by the more numerous and better armed
militants. By this time a group of fifteen ex-servicemen, some with twelve-
bore shotguns, and others with just lathis joined the fray. In Dadankote, the
villagers fended off the group and, faced with this resistance, the militants
retreated.
In its version of the events, the Harkat said they had been attacked by ex-
servicemen and ‘Hindu rabid activists’ and while conceding the loss of four
men, they claimed they had killed fifteen persons in retaliation. Actually,
just Gokul and Pannu died while the Harkat group lost four persons.
But more often than not, terrorists got away with their crimes. The
pattern was standard. Late in the night, they would walk into the village,
fire in the air and ask all the people to assemble in the village square. Then
they would systematically loot their houses and person of cash and
jewellery. Anyone resisting—and in a case in village Rajgarh in the
Kastigarh area of Doda in March 1995, it was two young men who did—
was immediately shot dead.
While mehmaan mujahideen formed the lead element in the guerrilla
groups, the ISI realized that they had to have local recruitment and
commitment if the operation was to be expanded and intensified. But,
except for the Jamaat-e-Islami cadres, the bulk of the people were
indifferent and had to be compelled through a variety of means to join.
As in the valley, dragooning locals at the point of the gun was the chosen
method. In June 1995, ten school-going teenagers were abducted by armed
men in Udhampur district and taken to training camps being run in the
higher reaches of the Doda district. Three of the youths escaped and
detailed their experiences. Around the same time, government officials also
received reports about the abduction of eleven youngsters from the Mohore
area and another twenty-one from Banihal.
It is not clear whether or not looting was part of the organization’s policy,
or just private enterprise on the part of the commanders. But in 1993–1995,
the militant strikes were almost always accompanied by systematic looting
of gold and jewellery. While Hindus were the main targets, Muslims were
not spared either. In 1994, there were some thirty incidents in which some
Rs 50 lakh worth of gold was looted, mostly in the form of jewellery, in
addition to cash and other valuables. The most dramatic strike, of course,
was on a treasury truck in Batote which was taking Rs 30 lakh as salary for
government staff in Gandoh on 7 December 1993.
The increasing criminalization was not particularly welcome to the
fanatical leaders of the Harkat in Pakistan. This began to affect combat
operations as the commanders were content to loot and leave the security
forces alone. Harkat Amir Maulana Shadatullah often wrote to his
commanders in the field and sent taped audio cassettes, exhorting them to
fight their jihad better. In a letter to the Doda commander, Abu Javed, in
1995, he wrote:

‘Last year, the ISI sent one and a half crores of rupees . . . but our people in
Doda embezzled the money. Someone took twenty lakhs, someone ten, and
all filled their stomachs and took it easy. But at every step we face
hardships, arrests, martyrdoms. Pick up the boys who are sitting in their
homes and tell them they must either fight, or pay one lakh to leave the
struggle. If they still resist, shoot them in the legs, for that is just in a
crusade.’

For its part, the government authorities tried another tack in 1995—to arm
the locals. The villages of Doda and Udhampur have many ex-service
personnel, and they became the core of village defence groups to fend off
militant depredations. The government created some hundred village
defence committees of which sixty were in Doda and the rest in Udhampur
districts. To these committees as well as to other locals some 11,000
weapons, mainly single-shot Lee-Enfield rifles, were distributed. Each of
the committees was headed by an ex-service person who was given the rank
of a special police officer or SPO as in Punjab and given a monthly salary
of Rs 1,500. However, Doda’s communal polarization prevented these
committees from being as useful as they could have been. Despite all
efforts, the bulk of the defence committees and their personnel were
Hindus. In Doda’s sixty- four village defence committees as of April 1996,
of the 549 members, only ninety-three were Muslim.
 The bombings, especially during the Republic Day function, was a
psychological setback to the administration and emboldened the militants
into action. On 21 February, a militant group ambushed a BSF patrol near
Bhalla in Bhaderwah, killing five persons and injuring three.
The CIF received information that this action had been executed by a
group of mehmaan mujahideen that consisted of Sudanese and Afghan
nationals. To root out this group, Operation Snowman was executed, using a
company each of RR and the Assam Rifles. The operation was based on
information from a Jamaat activist and was verified by intelligence sources.
On the night of 3 March, the Army team moved out and established a
cordon around a house near Banihal. As the assaulting group approached,
they came under fire from a guard post which was then knocked out by a
rocket launcher.
The militants in the house now engaged the Army team. Capt. Rakesh
Sharma of the 11th RR, who was also the cordon commander, led the
assault which ended with the killing of three of the militants and capture of
another along with a hoard of arms and explosives. Unfortunately, the
captain received a gunshot wound in the neck and died soon after. In a
parallel Operation Snowstorm around the same time, CIF forces moved into
the heights in the Udhampur–Doda border in a twelve-day sweep in
blizzard conditions. Two militants were killed and a cache of hundred
weapons captured.
However, the militants retained the power to inflict heavy casualties on
the security forces, whether on patrol or in pickets. In July 1995, a
temporary picket in Puneja village came under assault as masked militants
lobbed grenades and opened fire on them. Seven jawans were killed in the
gun-battle and five seriously injured in the two-hour encounter. The
militants melted away, anticipating the arrival of reinforcements.
Notwithstanding the enormous efforts made by the mehmaan lashkars,
they failed to effect any dramatic change in the situation. They were not
able to shut down the national highway to Srinagar and beyond, or the rail
links to Jammu or, for that matter, to expand militancy to a wider area
outside the valley. In the meantime, the Indian counter-attack reached them,
preventing any further gains.

Counter-attack, 1995–1996
India has often been compared to an elephant. The lumbering vegetarian
pachyderm is not a natural predator, yet, in fear or anger, it can and does
kill, often with the greatest brutality. For four years since the onset of the
Kashmir rebellion, the Indian security forces had responded with a tough
and sometimes brutal campaign of suppression. However, their actions were
more a primeval reaction than a systematic campaign to root out an
insurgency or, as the Army saw it, a ‘low-intensity conflict’.
In these circumstances, the bureaucracy, the intelligence apparatus, the
paramilitary organizations and the Army began to see Kashmir as the raison
d’être for rheir bureaucratic empires. Beyond stating that the conflict in the
valley was a low-intensity one, the Army had done little in 1991–93 to work
out specific tactics to deal with it. But its experiences in Nagaland, Punjab
and Sri Lanka had made it sufficiently wary of trying to replicate strategy
and tactics used elsewhere. By 1993, a doctrine did begin to shape up,
based on its institutional experience and history.
In Nagaland the Army had learnt that physical domination of each and
every village was one way to combat insurgency. Long experience had
taught the Army the value of the grid concept, which had been refined in the
Sri Lankan operation. The whole terrain was divided into a grid. Each node
at any given time would have a platoon-worth of ready-to-move soldiers,
the so- called quick reaction teams (QRTs) which would mutually reinforce
other nodes. All would be covered with heavier fire support and have
adequate logistics.
However, the grid often looked better on paper than on the ground. The
obvious reason for this was the terrain. While in the Wanni jungles of Sri
Lanka where the grid had been successfully applied, civilians and villages
were few and far between, the problem in Kashmir was the density of
population in most parts of the valley. In Sri Lanka attack helicopters and
artillery formed a key and deadly element that enabled heavy firepower to
support troops in the grid in minutes. In Kashmir this could not be so since
use of such weaponry would lead to enormous collateral damage. In
addition, as we have pointed out, the Army did not want to make helicopters
high-value targets for the militants. The grid, therefore, had to be more
densely packed. This is where the Army saw the role of additional forces
such as the RR.
One of the achievements of the new Krishna Rao administration in 1993
had been to seek and obtain permission from New Delhi to get all the
disparate security agencies to work in coordination with one another. But,
as we have seen, the unified command worked more in theory than in
practice. The 1993 order may have created a chain of command from the
governor, down to the adviser (home), corps commander and so on, in
practice. However, the Army was resentful of the induction of retired
officers into their command system. Increasingly, they saw the Kashmir
situation as a low-intensity conflict’ (LIC), and in such a situation they
believed that they needed the normal autonomous command and control
structure of the Army. When Gen. B.C. Joshi became chief of Army staff in
the summer of 1993, he began pushing a long held Army view that India
was involved in an extended counter-insurgency, akin to the Naga problem
in the North-East. For this, a new force was needed, something like the
Assam Rifles which would be permanently located in the area to combat the
insurgents.
The RR or National Rifles units would not incur the costs of a heavier
unit since they would be equipped for counter-insurgency operations. They
would be permanently located in ‘sectors’, with each sector being the
equivalent of a brigade with three battalions. The original authorization by
the V.P. Singh government in 1990 was for two sector headquarters; in other
words, six battalions. The general now wanted to boost their numbers by ten
more sector headquarters, thirty more battalions, equivalent to three
divisions.
In an act of brinkmanship, Joshi refused to provide Kashmir the Bareilly-
based 6 Mountain Division, promised by his predecessor Gen. S.F.
Rodrigues. Indeed, even the 39 Division that had been sent in early 1993
was ordered to return to its normal station in Pathankot. Joshi’s argument
was that committing these forces for counter-insurgency was a victory for
Pakistan’s covert war since this diluted the conventional deterrent posture
of the Army vis-à-vis Pakistan.
The validity of Joshi’s view depended on the assessment of the Kashmir
situation. Was it a ‘law and order problem’, albeit a serious one, or was it an
LIC? Behind the debate was an element of bureaucratic politics. The Army
wanted to man the RR force, but would have the ministry of home affairs
(MHA) to pay the bill. There was a hidden agenda as well—to find
promotional avenues and jobs for the officers and men. The home ministry,
influenced by the powerful IPS lobby, has historically resisted suggestions
that ex-service personnel be given preferential access to jobs in the
paramilitary organizations under their control. The MHA argued that there
was no need for any new establishment, and that any additional manpower
could become available through the BSF or the CRPF, over which they had
control.
The debate was not fully clinched in 1993, but early in 1994, Narasimha
Rao, in his usual style, gave a conditional three-year acceptance to the
Army proposal, even while leaving the issue of its funding hanging in the
air. This gave the Army enough room to execute its plan. Where the original
concept was to staff it primarily with ex-service personnel who were over
thirty-five years old and with regular Army officers on deputation, the Army
decided to bleed existing units of ten to twenty per cent of their personnel to
set up the RR in quick time. In any case, they argued, no ex-serviceman was
really keen on volunteering for another round of service or a field posting
after retirement.
This was not a problem for the large Indian Army. Each existing
regimental centre was given one or two RR battalions to raise in one year’s
time. In this period, the units were raised and sent to the Northern
Command where they got another four to six weeks for consolidation. All
of them were made to do a structured eight-week course in special counter-
insurgency schools, given another month to stabilize, and then sent into the
more dormant sectors in Kashmir to take up their duties. To provide some
experience base to the new force, it was decided to exchange six RR
battalions with an equal number of Assam Rifles units.
The new units came under two new counter-insurgency forces—Valley or
Victor and Doda or Delta. The former had its headquarters near the
Avantipur airbase in the valley, and the latter, at a new cantonment in Doda
town. They came under the normal command and control structure of 15th
and 16th Corps and were headed by a general officer commanding (GOC)
in chief of the rank of a major general. In terms of their location and use,
each of the units and sectors (brigades) was seen as being interchangeable
with a normal, equivalent Army formation and in some instances, GOC,
Victor Force would have two sector headquarters and a normal infantry
brigade in his charge.
The location of the force shifted the centre of gravity of deployments to
southern Kashmir and across the Pir Panjal to the Doda area. Unlike the
Army units which were rotated out of the valley at regular intervals, the RR
concept was to rotate the personnel after fixed periods of deputation. While
the 8th Mountain Division remained in the valley for the time being, the
19th and 28th Divisions continued their dual counter-insurgency and anti-
infiltration work, the RR provided the much needed manpower to dominate
each part of the valley in a counter-insurgency grid. While the essential
posture of the Indian Army remained defensive vis-à-vis Pakistan, Joshi
encouraged the forces to become much more aggressive in the field. The
new special forces were given the go-ahead to step up their unconventional
operations from their bases in northern Kashmir to areas that India called
‘Pakistan Occupied Kashmir’.
Another top-secret instruction authorized cross-border anti- infiltration
activity. Forward patrols could cross the LoC at places of their choosing and
lay ambushes at suitable sites. Each night as the troops fanned out across
the LoC for their night nakas, some units would launch carefully planned
manoeuvres that would land them across the LoC. Unsuspecting infiltrators,
with the guard down, could be trapped a kilometre or two before they
actually reached the LoC.
 By 1995, the Hizb was reduced to using the bomb and the IED. Only the
mehmaan mujahideen remained a force capable of giving battle to the
armed forces. The Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Lashkar-e-Taiba were the only
groups capable of a direct fight. Some of the fiercest combat took place in
the mountains of northern Kashmir in an area where the lashkars were able
to replenish their personnel, supplies and equipment from across the LoC.
In the Tregham area, the 6th Detachment of the Northern Command
Liaison Unit (NCLU) got information on 19 April that a group of
mercenaries who had recently crossed the LoC was hiding in a house at
Khumarial village. The 62nd Mtn Brigade deputed a platoon of the 12th
Maratha Light Infantry, headed by Major E.S. Ebrahim, and accompanied
by the NCLU personnel, to the village. With the help of locals, they
identified the house as the one belonging to Yusuf Peer, and set a cordon
around it on 20 April at 10.15 a.m. Realizing that they were surrounded, the
trapped mercenaries opened fire with a light machine-gun. In the meantime,
Maj. Ebrahim was tightening the noose. Peer and his family had abandoned
the house in the early hours of the morning, fearing just this. So, those in
the house consisted of the twelve who had come across the LoC.
At 12 noon, along with six Army personnel and supported by covering
fire, Ebrahim broke open the door and forced an entry into the house,
killing two of the militants in the process. The other mercenaries took up
positions on the first floor of the house and blocked any movement in that
direction. The major and his team now quit the house and took up positions
near an adjacent tree to continue the action. It was at this spot, as he was
planning to attack the house from another direction, that Ebrahim was shot
by a sniper from the house, even though he had on his helmet and
bulletproof jacket. He took a gunshot on the side of his face and died
instantly.
By 1 p.m., the Maratha LI platoon had been reinforced and there was no
chance for the militants to escape. Some civilians were asked to go in and
demand their surrender. They went in and came out after a while and said
that the militants had declined. With Ebrahim dead, the management of the
situation was taken over by Lt Col. M. Girdhar of the 19th RR who had
reached there with a platoon. There was no alternative to blasting the house
down, and so the Army teams began directing their rocket fire to the roof of
the building which caught fire and collapsed. Five of the militants, who
now attempted to flee, were gunned down and the others were buried in the
debris. Among those killed was Sher Khan, who was identified as an Azud
Kashmir national, specializing in making IEDs.
Operations, now based on intelligence, were often short and intense. The
experience of the second regiment of the Parachute Regiment (2 Para) was
probably typical. By 1995, with the RR coming in, additional deployments
were used to cleanse areas where militants formerly had a free run. Among
these areas were the southern parts of Kashmir, especially the south-western
areas of Anantnag and Pulwama districts. The unit was sent in July 1995,
and after a month’s course at the Counter-Insurgency School near
Udhampur, it was spread in Shupian and Rajpora tehsils of the Shupian
district. Its task was to interdict mehmaan mujahideen movements in the Pir
Panjal range leading to Doda, as well as to root them out in the Shupian
area.
In its somewhat short seventeen-month tenure, it conducted ninety-three
operations, roughly five or six a month, recovering roughly the same
number of weapons in that period. The number of militants killed totalled
thirty-one while the battalion lost five men in the period of its deployment.
The battalion launched covert operations across the Pir Panjal range and
in the Shupian area, and by early 1996, it had made its mark. Indeed, the
battalion’s record claims that because of its efforts, there were no incidents
during the general elections of May 1996 and the turnout was as much as
forty-one per cent.
Operationally, 2nd Para’s finest hour was during Operation Shatrujeet.
Based on intelligence, the unit’s commanding officer, Deepak Sinha, led
two of his companies and two of 23 Punjab to an area 13,000 ft near village
Tatjan in the Pir Panjal range. The aim was to destroy a training camp run
by the Hizbul Mujahideen. The force was divided into two columns and
moved off from its base on the night of 30 July towards the area. While one
column was to surround the camp, the other’s task was to establish ‘stops’
to trap militants who might try and escape eastwards and raid adjoining
villages to scoop up any militants hiding there. After a tough ten-hour climb
in pitch darkness, the Paras and the men of the 23 Punjab established
themselves around the suspected camp at 3 a.m. Covered by light machine-
gun and air-burst rocket launcher fire, Maj. Ajoy Mukherji’s D company led
a quick assault that overran the camp. Seven militants were killed, including
the officiating Hizb divisional commander, Farooq Ahmed Lone.
There was little rest for the team. They returned on the evening of 31 July
and the next day they were off on another mission. In an operation earlier
that year, the intrepid major led an assault in which he confronted Bashir
Afghani, a leading Harkat commander. As the Army report after the incident
notes, ‘the man with the quicker reflexes won’. Six months later, the same
major was involved in another raid and bested a foreign mercenary in yet
another raid and in a hand-to-hand combat.
The newly created 9th Special Force’s unit carved out a special role for
itself. The SF operations were distinct from those of other para commando
operations as the SF operated autonomously with special equipment, and its
strikes were based on precise intelligence gathered through surveillance that
involved technical and human intelligence.
Typical of their operations was the one in June 1995 in which Capt. R.S.
Gill lead his team through bad weather towards a mehmaan mujahideen
hideout in the Shamsabari range, to the west of Kupwara, that had been
located after extensive surveillance. Moving at night in a thick jungle and
through bad weather, the team climbed up a steep nallah to the hideout.
Near the hideout Gill shot the sentry and then, lobbing grenades, moved
against a group of militants, firing from a protected position and killing
them. At one point he ran out of ammunition and killed the last militant by
strangling him with his bare hands.
Two months later, Maj. Kaluvakolan Bhushan led the 9th SF Alpha team
in another operation on the hideout of a mercenary group, located in a cave
at an altitude of 9,500 ft and surrounded by dense jungle. The commandos
took off in the dark and reached their target at 2.30 a.m. on 26 August. As
the major’s five-man squad stealthily approached the cave, one of the men
slipped and this alerted the mehmaan mujahideen sentry. Instead of taking
cover, Maj. Bhushan after lobbing a grenade, charged towards the cave
even as his team JCO cut down the sentry with a burst of his AK–47.
Meanwhile, in the darkness, at the mouth of the cave, Bhushan was caught
in a vicelike grip by one of the mercenaries, but superior close-combat
training won as the major bodily lifted the Afghan and threw him down the
precipice, killing him. Then he lobbed another grenade, killing two more of
the militants. Entering the cave with his AK–47 blazing, he succeeded in
killing another two, accounting for a total of five of the six Lashkar-e-Taiba
(LeT) mujahids who had been hiding in the cave.
The sheer grit of the special forces brought victory but also extracted a
price. Capt. Arun Singh Jasrotia, who received the nation’s highest
peacetime gallantry award, the Ashok Chakra, for a similar action the next
month, got it posthumously. Precise intelligence information in September
1995 had pinpointed another cave shelter of the LeT, located similarly high
up on the mountain range rising up from the Lolab.
Jasrotia and his team worked out a plan that involved climbing up a
7000-ft high steep mountain face through the night and ending in a pre-
dawn strike on 15 September. The team reached its objective and
surrounded the camp-site, but just as the captain readied for an assault, he
was spotted by a guard who began firing at them. Aware that the whole
operation was at risk if they were pinned down there, Jasrotia tossed a
grenade and charged at the man. In the process, he killed him but also took
a bullet in the shoulder.
Just then another militant pounced on the wounded major, snatched away
his gun and tried to bludgeon him with it. But the captain managed to get
out his commando knife and killed him swiftly and expertly. Picking up his
gun, he now moved to the cave. A militant hidden there fired a burst of gun
fire that hit his stomach and chest. But the commandos finished the job,
killing two more militants. The tough captain hung on for ten days before
dying en route to Delhi for treatment. In some instances, highly risky covert
ops were undertaken, where the Paras sometimes dressed like locals and
conducted long-range forays, preying on the mehmaan mujahideen. In
August 1996 in two such ambushes, two SF personnel by themselves
accounted for nine hardened militants. Naib Subedar Vinod Kumar led a
team through Menganwar forest in Kupwara and laid several ambushes.
When a militant scout walked into one such ambush, Kumar killed him with
his pistol which had a silencer. The rest of the group followed and Kumar
shot the first two men before they realized what was happening. There was
another group of militants nearby and they began firing at the SF position.
Kumar gathered his team and they moved under cover, using night vision
equipment to track the group which broke contact and fled, leaving behind
two more dead.
In one incident, paratrooper Udai Singh was part of a team laying an
ambush in the Putushai Nar bowl in Kupwara. At about 5 p.m., he spotted
four militants approaching. As they came closer, Singh shot two with a
pistol which had a silencer while the other two began firing at them. As the
rest of the squad moved to kill them, they came under fire from the rest of
the militants. Udai and his team mate decided that the only way to save
their men was to charge frontally. But as they did so—and Udai shot the
two dead—a militant RPG rocket exploded near them, injuring Udai and
blinding him for life.
Specialized operations of this nature also found the Indian Navy in
combat in the valley at the beginning of 1995. They came through their
Marine Commando (MARCO) units, which are adept in the use of sea
chariots (Prahars) and fast fibreglass boats (Gemini). In the riverine terrain
of the valley, their expertise and assistance were invaluable in commando
operations. Lieutenants Samir Mittal and Gaurinandan Salkar were awarded
the Nao Sena (Navy) Medal for gallantry in such operations.

Intelligence
Given its location and history, Kashmir was a field well trod on by
intelligence agencies of both sides. One measure of this was the freedom
with which the pejorative ‘agent’, Indian or Pakistani, was used in
connection with Kashmiri leaders. As a practical strategy, of course, the
military intelligence formations of both sides found it necessary to maintain
an active presence.
The Military Intelligence (MI) Directorate in South Block, New Delhi,
ran the Army’s intelligence set-up which was located in the Northern
Command at Udhampur and called the Northern Command Liaison Unit
(LU). The LU’s field operations went down to the usual Army chain of
division and brigade. Their main, or to be precise, only job was obtaining
data on the Pakistani order of battle and other tactical information of
military significance. They ran agents across the border for the purpose and
collected information through Signals Intelligence.
The MI monitored the tri-service Signal Intelligence Directorate and an
enormous volume of information came to them from this source. It had a
strong presence along the border for eavesdropping on Pakistani field
communications, with listening posts atop the heights, with such colourful
names as Amar, Akbar, Antony (after a Hindi film), as well as at places like
Pir Badesar near Nowshera and Patni Top.
The authorities were quickly able to adapt surveillance to local needs.
The Sri Lankan experience had a sobering effect on the Indian Army since
their Soviet tactical equipment had proved to be quite inadequate in coping
with the traffic of modern, sophisticated sets, mainly of Japanese and
American origin, which had the capability of burst communications and
automatic encryption.
While the Kashmiri militants were novices, the seasoned Pakistanis and
Afghans maintained good radio security. While a lot of traffic on hand-held
VHF sets could be easily detected, high-grade traffic using burst
communications techniques and encryption were very difficult to detect,
leave alone decode in time, to be of tactical value. With the conflict
becoming more of a ‘proxy war’ directed by Pakistan, radio
communications became a key element in militant strategy. The ISI helped
establish a sophisticated network that had major nodes in the valley districts
and in Doda, with smaller ‘repeater’ stations at strategic heights to enable
smooth links to the two master-control facilities in Azad Kashmir. Local
lashkars communicated to one or the other nodes which, in turn, were
linked to Pakistan.
For a variety of reasons, in the main bureaucratic politics, almost all
military and signals intelligence facilities and activities were duplicated by
the IB and RAW. Indeed, sceptics believed, perhaps correctly, that the two
agencies and the MI often shared the same agent with the Pakistanis. The
1990 rebellion changed a lot of things; there was a qualitative rise in the
level of risk as well as the monetary rewards available for those willing to
work for the intelligence services of either India or Pakistan.
With the Indian position appearing shaky, many of these mercenary
agents became unreliable or unwilling to provide information to what
appeared to be the losing side. Some of the guides were taken in by the
propaganda of the jihad, while others were tempted by the money Pakistan
was pouring into the ‘cause’. Yet others were coerced by the gun and
blackmail to do the needful. At the outbreak of the rebellion, the Indian
intelligence network in the valley had been reduced to its minimal strength.
Not only had its IB personnel been systematically assassinated, but the local
police, the real key to intelligence gathering, was paralysed. The collapse of
the local police led to a cessation of information flow. While before
December 1989, the police did manage to score occasional victories, after
J.N. Saksena’s takeover as police chief, they were sidelined and rendered
ineffective. Consequently, even if the security forces found out the real
name of a militant, they had no information on what he looked like or
where he resided.
By 1992, some of this damage had been repaired and routine intelligence
work resumed. In great measure this was the result of the work of Governor
Saxena and BSF Inspector-General Ashok Patel, who revitalized the G-
Branch of the organization into an elite counter-insurgency force whose
main task was to gather intelligence and act on it. The beginnings were
modest: in the main, captured militants were ‘turned around’ through some
hard persuasion. These formed the corps of ‘cats’ or spotters who were, in
turn, used in massive cordon-and-search operations to track down other
militants. Initially, the semi-trained Kashmiri militants did not need too
much persuasion to switch sides, fear alone being sufficient to persuade the
militants to do so. But later, as militancy became better organized and the
militants more seasoned, the situation became grimmer and torture was
freely employed. Neither the BSF no any other outfit had trained
interrogators or understood the concept of professional interrogation.
Unlike Punjab, where intelligence information so gathered had a domino
effect on eliminating the terrorist threat, in Kashmir, the arrest, detention
and elimination of one leader often led to the emergence of another. This
was a tribute to the wider base of support for the Kashmiri rebellion as well
as the ISI which had, by creating multiple groups, taken precautions to
ensure that no one person’s arrest would lead catastrophic consequences for
the group or formation.
Nevertheless, arrest and interrogation did have an impact and lead to
immediate and sometimes disastrous losses for a particular outfit. Writing in
the News of Islamabad in February 1995, Kamran Khan noted, ‘The
Harkat’s operations in the held Kashmir had come under heavy pressure
because of the arrest of S. Khan [Sajjad Khan alias Sajjad Afghani], one of
its key commanders in Srinagar last year. (Harkat commanders) said that S.
Khan’s brutal interrogation led the Indian Army to some of Harkat’s hide-
outs in the valley.’ By 1997, signals intelligence became a major means of
tracking militant lashkars or key operatives. In this cat-and-mouse game,
the security forces remained poorly equipped. While the ISI supplied the
militants state-of-the-art equipment, the Army lacked adequate number of
sophisticated direction finding equipment. Their problems were often
compounded by the terrain which created false radio echoes preventing
them from pinpointing a transmitter.
With the expansion of militancy, intelligence operations became more
complex. Militants moved not just across the LoC into the valley, but to
safe houses in Jammu, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Calcutta and Delhi or to Dhaka
and Kathmandu. The IB coordinated the nation-wide counter-intelligence
activity and kept the Army informed through the Northern Command
military intelligence set-up.
Black Operations,‘Cats’ and Counter-Terror
As the intelligence agencies gained confidence, they began to
systematically counter the ISI-sponsored groups in a cat-and- mouse game.
Indian intelligence had considerable experience in ‘black operations’
against internal insurgents from the days of the Naxalites. Being
underground, many of the militant outfits had been using the Srinagar press
as their bulletin board to announce victory, commemorate a death or
criticize another tanzeem. Newspaper editors did not dare to question any
release for fear of retribution and usually published anything that looked
authentic.
But soon it became clear that two could play the game. State agencies
learned to manipulate and destroy groups by generating suspicion and
deepening factionalism. A curious game preceded the deaths of two leading
militants, responsible for a spate of murders and assassinations across India
—Hilal Ahmed Baig and Sajjad Ahmed Kenoo of the Ikhwan-ul-
Muslimeen.
Baig, as we have seen, had been operating at the behest of the ISI and
from 1990 had largely stayed in Pakistan, acting more as a coordinator of
the ISI’s activities in India than as a Kashmiri militant. Adept with the
telephone and press statement, it were Baig and Kenoo who had staged
‘Tiger’ Memon’s alleged video- news conference in Srinagar in October
1994.
In early 1995, the Srinagar Times reported a press statement in which
Baig expressed astonishment at his and Jamshed Sheerazi’s expulsion from
the Ikhwan by Mitha Sofi, a district commander. Baig, or whoever it was
that issued the statement, went on to praise himself and Sheerazi as great
mujahids and asked people not to be taken in by opportunists like Mitha
Sofi. Considering that Sheerazi, alias Kukka Parray’s Ikhwan-ul-
Muslimoon was now working with the authorities, this statement was
curious to say the least.
Niyaz Ahmed Niyazi alias Mitha Sofi, a resident of Ali Kadal in Srinagar,
was a third-level functionary of the organization in 1992–93, with the title
of ‘Chief Organizer’. With the arrest of Javed Ahmed Shalla and Yasin
Bhat, he and Sajjad Ahmed Kenoo, who was at the time Anantnag district
commander, moved up the ladder. Mitha Sofi, now known as Niyaz
Ikhwani, denounced Baig and responded through a press note that he was
committed to the truth, even if he were to be hanged for it. Relations
between Baig and Ikhwani did not improve. In May 1995, they had another
spat through the press, in which the latter criticized Baig for accepting the
idea of granting special status to Ladakh. No one knows who was issuing
the statements and on whose behalf, but it did disturb the militants.
There is evidence of ‘black operations’ in the elimination in June 1995 of
Shamsur Rehman, the Amir-e-Alla or supremo of the Lashkar-e-Taiba
(LeT) in the valley. The story, as detailed by Col. R.P.S. Dhillon of the RR
to the local press, was that in the area of Ganderbal, Sumbal, Hajan,
Safapora and Manasbal, the LeT had become increasingly unpopular for
their brutal behaviour and attempts to recruit local youth forcibly. The
murder of sixteen-year-old Safeena Rahim and Hajra Begum, a mother of
five children, by the LeT had enraged the people of Gutlipora village in the
area.
According to Dhillon, one day a voice with a Kashmiri accent came over
the Army communication channel on the wireless and purported to provide
precise details of the movements of the Lashkar supremo and his group.
Based on the information, a cordon was laid trapping Rehman and his
lashkar at Arizal village on 28 June. In the resulting encounter, two Aghan
nationals including Rehman were killed.
The blackest of black operations have been the ruthless counter-terrorist
activities undertaken by state agencies through their counter-insurgents in
Srinagar. Ashok Patel and Governor Saxena had instituted a policy of using
‘turned’ insurgents as informants. There are indications that they may have
also initiated a policy of using some of these ‘cats’ to liquidate militant
leaders and harass their overground infrastructure. Not a few of the killings
attributed by the militant groups to their rivals may have been the
handiwork of these people. Suspicion lingers over the state agencies’ role in
the elimination of Dr Guru, Dr Ashai and H.N. Wanchoo. Shades of the
CIA’s Operation Phoneix had been visible in Operation Tiger in 1993 when
several suspected militants were eliminated mysteriously. But there was no
direct evidence of State involvement.
There was another problem—the use of terror tactics by the security
forces. Some tactics were not specific to Kashmir as they have been used by
the police across the country as a means of obtaining information: if a
suspect is difficult to trace, hold his family hostage till he surrenders. Shock
the suspect with a thrashing, or rough up his wife or parents before him. If
the person is a Naxalite or a ‘terrorist’, use ‘refinements’ such as ‘the roller’
or electric shocks. Inevitably, when pitched into Kashmir and asked to fight
insurgency, the security forces used the methods they knew.
The lesson from Punjab was the need for ruthlessness. Dead men tell no
tales and cannot avenge themselves. When, in the late 1980s, the Punjab
police officers who interrogated terrorists found themselves and their
families threatened, and on occasion, killed, they decided to terminate the
problem by killing the terrorists. So after interrogation, it became routine to
execute the terrorists and declare that they had died in encounters, or at the
hands of their compatriots in ambushes when they were being taken to
recover hidden weapons or simply that they ‘escaped custody’.
Many arrested militants in Kashmir reportedly died in the same way.
Mohammed Yakub Sheikh alias Parbat of Larmganipora, Wanpor, in
Anantnag was taken into custody during a cordon-and-search operation on
27 April 1994. Two hours later, his body, with bullet wounds, was handed
over to his family. According to the authorities who provided some details
because it had been mentioned in a Human Rights Asia Watch report,
‘When he was being taken to recover more arms and ammunition, on the
same day, he tried to escape custody of the Army. While fleeing he was
asked to stop. When all verbal persuasions (sic) to stop him failed, he was
fired upon which led to his death.’
In the case of the death of Khurshid Ahmed Bhat alias Khalid Javed, the
chief of the Al Jehad Force, on December 1995, there were several
witnesses, including presumably the people who had sheltered him. A BSF
party arrived in the Butyar area of Srinagar and surrounded a house. A man
and his son were brought out of the house and beaten by the BSF soldiers
who demanded information on Javed. When the man’s wife came out to
plead with the officers, she was assaulted, as was her daughter who
followed. Javed walked out to surrender. He was beaten up and bundled
into a BSF vehicle and taken away. Next morning, BSF soldiers came to the
area, fired a few shots in the air and left. Later, the J & K Police came and
said that a body had been found and they needed someone to identify it. It
was Javed who had apparently been beaten further.
According to Human Rights Watch which documented this case, the
commander of the BSF unit, one ‘Peter’ Sharma, came to Bhat’s family and
offered money to induce them not to take the case to court. The government
spokesman claimed that Bhat had been killed in an encounter.
But there have been instances of panicky militants, primed on
propaganda of the torture they would face if arrested, on occasion taking
their chance to beat an Army cordon by lobbing a grenade and making a run
for it. Most people trapped in cordon-and- search operations kept their
heads down, and all they heard sometimes was some firing. They presumed
that the person who died was arrested before being shot. On the other hand,
security forces have spoken of the stubbornness with which militants
trapped in a house or in an underground shelter have fought and refused to
surrender, knowing fully well the consequences of their action.
While few tears would be shed for the militants who lived by the sword
and died by it, the case of Ghulam Ahmad Bhat, who was killed by soldiers
of the same BSF unit that killed Khalid Javed, is stark in its brutality. He
was deaf and dumb since the age of four, and on 21 December 1995, at
about 10 a.m., he was standing along with his mother in front of a lane,
watching out for a procession planned for Khalid Javed. However, a
crackdown had been ordered, and the BSF troops entered the
neighbourhood. Seeing the BSF soldiers, the people ran helter-skelter and
Ghulam Ahmed panicked and began running with his mother chasing him.
Ghulam stopped and tried to explain to the soldiers that he was deaf and
dumb, and then kept on running.
His mother told Human Rights Watch:
‘Three soldiers came after him, and one fired a machine- gun burst, killing
him. One soldier kicked the body to make sure he was dead. I began crying,
but the soldiers would not allow me to take Ghulam’s body. About half an
hour after he was shot, two or three BSF soldiers came to the area. One put
a pistol on Ghulam’s chest; and the other one put bullets in the pocket of his
pheran. At 2 p.m., the crackdown was lifted, and the Jammu and Kashmir
police arrived. They screamed at the BSF that the boy was not a militant
and that they should not have killed him,’

‘Official’ vigilantism’s most notorious example was an attempt on the life

of Yusuf Jameel who worked for the Telegraph (Calcutta) and was a stringer
for Reuters and the BBC. In 1990, he had been arrested by an Army unit,
taken to Kupwara, interrogated, and later released.
But in 1995 Jameel survived a far more dangerous attack. A woman
wearing a burqa arrived at Jameel’s office, bearing a parcel which was
addressed to him. She claimed she was an activist of the Dukhtaran-e-
Millat, the women’s wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, and that the parcel
contained a book for review. Jameel was not there, but two young men
came by later to confirm that the parcel had indeed been delivered. Jameel
and two photographers, Mushtaq Ali and Habibullah Naqash, arrived soon
after. Jameel undid the wrapper and saw it was a book in English on the
Kashmir situation. He then put it aside since he was busy. A little later,
however, his colleague Mushtaq Ali casually picked up the book and
opened it. As he did so, it exploded, killing him. Jameel and Naqash
escaped serious injury.
Zafar Meraj, another valley-based journalist, survived a shooting a few
months later. He had gone to Hajan with some other journalists to interview
Kukka Parray, the counter-insurgency leader, and was returning when, nine
kilometres before reaching Srinagar, at a place called Shalateng, they saw a
cream-coloured Ambassador car with its hood up. As they approached, they
were ordered by an armed man to stop.
The men claimed they were from the Hizbul Mujahideen and Meraj was
asked to accompany them while his companions were told to move only
after an hour. He was taken away in the Ambassador and after a while the
men removed their masks and told him that they were with Parray and that
they would let him go soon. The car stopped and at that point a minibus that
had been following drove up and parked across the road. The men asked
him to go in the bus which would give him a ride back to Srinagar. As he
walked across, a boy from the bus levelled his AK–47 and opened fire.
Meraj was hit in the stomach and back and fell on the road. With great
difficulty he managed to get back to Srinagar and walked into the
emergency department of the hospital. Though seriously injured, he
survived.
As the counter-attack developed, those perceived to be part of the
overground leadership structure of militancy became targets. Mian Abdul
Qayoom was the president of the J & K Bar Association, an outfit almost
completely controlled by the secessionists. Qayoom did not hide his
political sympathies for the Jamaat-e-Islami, and for this he was detained
for two years before being released on Supreme Court orders.
Under Qayoom, the J & K Bar Association was a thorn in the flesh of the
authorities because of its petitions, complaints, resolutions and lists of
alleged human-rights abuses by Indian security forces. As a result of this,
his house had been raided several times by the police and the BSF.
On 22 April 1995, two young men came to his house in Srinagar and
asked him to represent a friend whose case, under TADA, was being heard
in a Jammu Court. When Qayoom asked them for the papers, they said their
father, who was waiting in a car outside, had them. Qayoom told them to
meet him in his office, in a room adjacent to his living quarters. He entered
the office from an inside door just as one of the men came in from the front
door, and as he turned to take his seat, he saw the man had a pistol in his
hand. Two shots were fired. One missed him but the other punctured his
stomach, injuring him seriously.
A similar attack took the life of Jalil Ahmed Andrabi, a prominent
human-rights lawyer and activist of the JKLF. On the morning of 29
January 1996, two persons arrived at his house and said they had to discuss
a case with him. Apparently, this was to confirm Andrabi’s presence at
home since one of them left, saying he had to get their mother and sister
who were waiting in a taxi outside. But he returned with a third man. At that
point, suspicious family members started questioning the men who abruptly
left. Locals said that they got into two taxis in which there appeared to be
more men, some with arms.
The next day, the sequence was repeated with two men first coming to
the house and then leaving to return with two other men in a taxi. One of
the men, it was later alleged, appeared to be wearing a uniform and had a
weapon under his pheran. From a window upstairs, Andrabi took
photographs of the persons in the taxi. When the men saw this, they left.
On 8 March, Andrabi’s car was intercepted near his home at 6 p.m.,
allegedly by an RR unit. The following day, the Bar Association filed a
habeas corpus petition, charging that the Army had taken him into custody.
The Army denied it. On the morning of 27 March, a gunny bag containing
the body of a man was found on the banks of the Jhelum river. It was
Andrabi. In 1997 the Army told a court in Kashmir that a major wanted in
the case could not be traced since he had retired from government service!
Among the major targets for harassment have been the leadership of the
Hurriyat—Geelani, Lone and Prof. Bhat, though not its chairman, Umar
Farooq. While Geelani had been imprisoned several times, the authorities
left him alone to conduct his activities, which ranged from providing
guidance to the Hizbul Mujahideen to campaigning against India through
the press and pulpit, as well as by meeting foreign diplomats and media
persons.
Not surprisingly, Geelani is not universally liked in Kashmir. There are
obvious Jamaat-haters like Kukka Parray, who are political opponents, as
well as the JKLF, but there are also influential security forces officials who
have not been above giving Geelani a carefully calibrated taste of the
medicine his mujahideen had been dishing out for so long.
Geelani has not been bombed or assassinated; instead, he has suffered a
great deal of damage to property. His ancestral house at Dooru in Sopur was
blasted on 19 December 1994 by a charge placed on the outside, causing it
to collapse. Later, a missile was fired at his Srinagar house while the homes
of two of his brothers were also gutted. On 1 January 1995, he said, some
200 Army jawans along with three or four pheran-clad Kashmiris had
entered his house and allegedly tried to gun him down. He had by then been
hidden in another room and the door was bolted.
In an act of supreme irony, in 1996, Geelani and Lone asked the
authorities for arms to protect themselves from the counter-insurgency
militia. However, the police responded by offering them protection through
its own personnel, pointing out that there was no legal provision for
providing arms to private guards. Aware that police guards would also be
jailers of sorts and keep an eye on their activities, the two leaders declined.
When asked about this, state police chief Sabharwal tartly wondered at a
press conference why the two were refusing a police guard since the
chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, had one.
But not all unexplained deaths could be attributed to vigilantism.
Speaking to the Pakistani media in February 1994, Syed Salahuddin had
expressed concern at the agents infiltrating their ranks. The Hizb, he said,
had caught several such persons and taken action against them. In July
1995, the Hizb executed three of its personnel—Sohail Ahmed, Latif
Ahmed Sheikh and Sajjad Ahmed Bhat, with their bodies being dumped in
the Kanikachi area of Rainwari in Srinagar. A Hizb spokesperson later told
the Greater Kashmir newspaper that the action had indeed been carried out
by his organization. He said that Bhat alias Raja was a platoon commander
of the outfit who had been arrested by the security forces and then released
after five months. He rejoined as a deputy commander. The other two were
his friends and associates. They were discovered to be in contact with a
BSF officer, and upon interrogation, confessed that they had been working
as ‘spotters’ for the government. In recent years, as the Kashmiri militancy
split with large chunks going over to the government as ‘counter-
insurgents’, there have been a spate of revenge killings that have spared
neither women nor children of one side or the other.
From Insurgency to Counter-insurgency
In 1995 and 1996, with an increasing number of surrenders taking place,
Indian security agencies began systematically to organize these militants
into counter-insurgency teams to attack and wipe out the militant
infrastructure, both above and underground. Given the number of groups
and their size, and the free movement of the media, it was next to
impossible to conceal their presence or their links with the State. Indian
officials saw their role as being legitimate in a low-intensity conflict such as
the one they felt that they were involved in.
The key to the rise of these groups lay in the incessant quarrels between
the various tanzeems. Differences in a major movement are natural.
Kashmiri politics has always been unusually factious, but with the outbreak
of the rebellion, this gained tremendous virulence. Political parties vied
with each other to set up tanzeems, and in no time they were as busy
fighting India as one another.
In these circumstances, it was easy for the security forces to interpose
their own formations and add their own twist to an inter-group quarrel. This
well-tested technique had been used effectively to destroy the Naxalite
movement in Bengal in the 1970s and in Kashmir, intelligence was soon
having a field day. Indian security agencies now began to use the tactic to
carry out assassinations and roil the atmosphere between the various
tanzeems. Beginning with individual assassinations, worked through
‘turned’ militants or ‘cats’, the Indian security forces turned entire groups,
giving birth to their own tanzeems. At the beginning of 1994, the
administration sought to get the Union government’s authorization to
control such groups. Permission was given only in 1995 and the groups
integrated into the overall counter-insurgency plans of the security forces.
The original sin, as it were, lay with the Jamaat-e-Islami and its Hizbul
Mujahideen. Riding high in 1990, it used the force of guns and
assassinations to ensure that the Kashmiri struggle for azadi would become
a movement for merger with Pakistan. To this end, it ruthlessly gunned
down the pro-Indian politicians as well as personalities such as Mirwaiz
Maulvi Farooq who could diminish the aura of the mujahids. Then it turned
on the JKLF.
The armed rebellion of 1990 had been born of a cynical arrangement that
eventually extracted its price. The JKLF, which believed in independence,
took up the gun provided by the Pakistani ISI whose own aim was to ensure
the accession of Kashmir to Pakistan. As soon as Pakistan realised that a
mass revolt was on, it duped and ditched the JKLF, as in the killing of
Mushir-ul-Haq. They also began a campaign of betrayal and assassination
of the JKLF’s pro-azadi cadre.
The Jamaat’s bid for hegemony did not halt at the JKLF. It wanted
complete domination over all other tanzeems and clashes with the Ikhwan-
ul-Muslimeen, the Al Umar Mujhaideen, the Al Jehad, the Muslim Janbaz
Force, the Al Barq and others became common. Indeed, the bid for
ideological purity also led to the replacement of its own commander-in-
chief, Mohammed Ahsan Dar, in 1991.
In a leader on 30 August 1994, the Greater Kashmir said that the
infighting had generated cynicism and disillusionment, and raised ‘grave
doubts about our national goals and objectives . . . [and] dreams of a slavery
free Kashmir look merely like a day dream now’. The article went on to
point out that even taking into account ‘Indian perfidy’, there was no
adequate explanation for the clashes and conflicts between the various
groups. The article provided a fairly accurate picture of the situation when it
noted that seemingly inexplicable quarrels lay along the fault-lines of
ideology, regional parochialism, religious bigotry and past political
affiliations. ‘We are now the worst foes to each other,’ it lamented.
The ISI heroically strove to forge unity between the various groups
minus the JKLF. The Tehreek-e-Jehad of 1990, the United Jehad Council of
1991, and in its own way, the Hurriyat of 1994, were efforts towards this
end. In 1996, the Shoura-e- Jehad was floated with Abdul Hamid Wani aka
S. Hamid of the People’s League (Shabbir) as its chairman. However, it was
dominated by the Hizbul Mujahideen and among its other participants were
the Harkat-ul-Ansar and the Tehreek-ul- Mujahideen and the revived A1
Barq. These were all attempts to coerce, push and prod the factious
Kashmiris towards a united ‘liberation struggle’.
As for the Hurriyat, it has managed to become an umbrella of most
secessionist or pro-independence formations, but it lacks the authority to
control the gunmen as incidents proved time and again. All that it has been
able to do is to issue press statements and declarations and interact with
foreign diplomats.
For the Indian intelligence organizations and the security forces, this
situation was a boon. The ISI may have been too clever in allowing ‘a
hundred flowers to bloom’ by arming every group or faction that arrived at
its doorstep. But it soon realized that there were fundamental differences of
opinion among many of these groups which often tended to use their arms
to settle scores. While ideological tanzeems like the Hizb maintained better
discipline, their rapid expansion diluted the quality of the cadre. In addition,
arrests and killings by the security forces also deprived the azadi movement
of some of its better leaders. Since they were functioning underground and
in difficult circumstances, their public voice was through press releases and
statements.
In 1992, with the Hizbul Mujahideen trying to assert its dominance,
tension among the militants became noticeable. Every prominent outfit
seemed to have problems with them. Clashes led to killings and abduction
of cadre, and in Srinagar in July, to the burning down of a library and an
attack on the central office of the Jamaat in Batmaloo. The Ikhwan, the Al
Jehad and the Al-Barq, all complained of the Hizbul Mujahideen’s
overweening ways and, more seriously, of the killing and kidnapping of
their cadre. The year 1993 was no different. In April 1993, JKLF leaders Dr
Guru, Maulvi Ghulam Mohammed Mir, Imam of the Hanifa Jama Masjid
and Riaz Ahmad Lone, a zonal commander, died at the hands of the Hizbul
Mujahideen. In Srinagar, the distance between the Hizb and the JKLF
widened with the release of Yasin Malik, and the repeated attacks on him by
what the JKLF said were Hizb cadre and the armed clashes between the two
outfits. It seemed apparent in Srinagar that by 1994, whatever was left of
the armed section of the JKLF was actually working in tandem with the
authorities. The quarrel between the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen and the Hizbul
Mujahideen was on similar lines. The end result was the creation of a
splinter group, calling itself the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon (there is no
difference between the two words as Muslimeen and Muslimoon are both
plural for Muslim). Headed by Jamshed Sheerazi alias Kukka Parray, it
became the most effective instrument for counter-insurgency in the strategic
area around the Wullar Lake.
Kukka Parray, a resident of Hajan, was a folk singer and dancer, earning
his living by performing at marriages and festive occasions. With the
outbreak of the rebellion, he joined the Jammu and Kashmir Student’s
Liberation Front, and when that organization split, he followed Islamists
like Hilal Baig into the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen. He has claimed that he
began his anti- Hizb drive following the killing of Manzoor, a local B.A.
student, by the pro-Islamic outfit in 1992. Parray was originally a ‘source’
cultivated by the BSF and handed over to the RR. Beginning with a band of
sixty men, he was aided in building up a thousand-man ‘private army’ or
counter-insurgency group which was funded by the administration. By
1995, the group had all but driven out the Hizb from Hajan and the Sumbal
Sonawari tehsil.
In 1994, the pre-existing faultline between northern and southern valley
politics was widened by the assassination of Qazi Nissar at the hands of the
Hizbul Mujahideen. Its long-term result was the alienation of the people of
the area of Anantnag from militancy. Among the more important of the
groups was a south Kashmir branch of the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, led by
Liaqat Khan alias Hilal Hyder, and a dissident faction of the Muslim
Mujahideen, headed by Nabba Azad, who more or less neutralized all
opposing militant groups in the town. In Pulwama, ‘Papa Kishtwari’ led the
Al Khwaja Commando Force, and in Dooru, Geelani’s home village, a
force led by Samad Khan became dominant.
By this time, the activities of the counter-insurgents had become
sufficiently dangerous for the Hizbul Mujahideen. Its deputy supreme
commander, Ali Mohammed Dar aka Burhanuddin Hajazi, put on a brave
face to tell the people, through a statement published by all the local Urdu
dailies on 4 January 1995, that the outfit had a ‘secret plan’ to counter the
depredations of the gunmen who had put on the garb of the mujahideen. But
they were whistling in the dark. All they had was a plea that people pick up
courage and refuse to bow before India’s latest tactic.
A major factor for the establishment of counter-insurgency groups lay in
the need of the surrendered militants to protect themselves from their
erstwhile colleagues. In the early years of militancy there were few
surrenders, but beginning in 1994, they began to increase by leaps and
bounds, with some 800 militants laying down their arms in 1995 alone.
By and large, in the early 1990s, militants initially welcomed back their
released comrades, especially since their release was often procured by the
abduction of important officials or persons. But later, undoubtedly at the
instance of the handlers in Pakistan, they became suspicious and instituted
counter-intelligence procedures. Militants who asked too many questions,
or those whose actions were seemingly inexplicable, came under suspicion.
This often meant torture and execution in the most brutal way.
On 15 August 1995, the governor announced a formal policy of
welcoming surrenders, though he did not speak of amnesty being
automatically granted. For each UMG/GPMG, the government offered Rs
8000, for an AK, Rs 5000, for short-wave radio sets, Rs 2000, Rs 1000 for
smaller arms and explosive devices, Rs 500 per grenade, Rs 200 for short-
range rockets, and one rupee per round of ammunition. The government
also promised a stipend of Rs 1,500 per month for six to eight months to the
surrendering militants.
Subsequently, in September, the Army succeeded in persuading sixty-one
Gujjars of Malangam village, north of Hajan, to surrender. Belonging to the
various pro-Pakistan groups, the Gujjars turned in forty-seven AK-series
rifles, one Pika MG, and a sack full of ammunition. All of them were
promptly inducted into a village defence force. This was a pay-off of sorts
for Rajesh Pilot’s activities and the efforts made by the authorities to woo
the Gujjars, based on the premise that the rebellion in Kashmir was
confined to the valley’s Kashmiri Muslims.
 The following month fourteen more people signed up, and in the
neighbouring village of Aragam, eighty-four militants formally pledged to
end their careers. Of these, the bulk were Hizbul Mujahideen cadre, twenty-
nine were from the Al Barq and the others were a scattering of JKLF, AI
Jehad, MJF and Harkat-ul- Ansar members. They also gave up fifty-six
AK–47s, fifteen pistols, a rocket launcher and rockets, and a wireless set.
Just a couple of hours’ march from the LoC, the Malangam area had been
the site of a number of encounters between the mehmaan mujahideen and
the security forces in 1993 and 1994. The Gujjars had joined the militants as
mercenaries, starting as guides, and later as militants. Their defection to the
authorities was undoubtedly a major blow to militancy in the area.
This development brought a significant problem in its wake. What was to
be done with the militants who surrendered, now targets of their erstwhile
compatriots? While in Malangam and its environs, the ex-militants had the
numbers and the terrain to provide protection to themselves, elsewhere
others clamoured for protection and clustered around the security force
camps, hoping to prevent retaliatory attacks.
The solution was obvious. Arm them. However, this required sanction
from the powers that be and that was not easy to get. But in many instances
the security forces did not wait for a formal sanction as they realized that
the Kukka Parray model could be built elsewhere by cultivating ex-
militants who could be armed both for their own protection as well as to
assist security force operations.
Since its birth was more spontaneous, Kukka Parray’s Ikhwan has been
the most well-organized of the groups. It later developed political roots in
the form of the Awami Party which Parray now represents in the new
legislature. Control over the counter-insurgency groups has been exercised
by various intelligence agencies they are attached to as well as some of the
special forces units that are now permanently located in the valley.
With the emergence of a popular government, pressure to dismantle these
militia was intense. Their existence detracted from efforts to revive the J &
K Police. The Army dismantled several of the groups operating under its
aegis, and the authorities thereafter decided to absorb most of them into the
BSF, the CRPF and the state police.

The Jammu and Kashmir Police

Another element, perhaps the most important, in the counter- attack strategy
was the revitalization of the Kashmir police. The key lesson of the success
of the anti-terrorist operations in Punjab had been there since 1992–93, but
this was not easy to implement in Kashmir since the level of popular
support for the insurgency had been much higher, as had been the
proportion of the disaffected force. The police leadership had not done
much to resolve the situation, and the mutiny of April 1993 only deepened
suspicions. However, most senior security officials were united in their
belief that if the Kashmir insurgency was to be quelled, the local police had
to play a lead role.
To this end, in 1994, the J & K Police set up a two-battalion special task
force (STF) under Farooq Ahmed. Simultaneously, the state CID was given
a boost and special operations groups (SOG) were set up in each district of
the state to lead police operations. Taking a leaf out of the book of the
Punjab police, the state police chief, Sabharwal, instituted a system of cash
rewards for important catches. Another important decision, to underscore
the return of the J & K Police to centre stage, was coordinating official
briefings on the activities of the security forces through police officers.
The authorities were not yet comfortable giving the Kashmir police too
much leeway, but most of the STF personnel were Muslims from Jammu
and the northern border regions of the valley, that is, in the main, non-
Kashmiri Muslims. This generated suspicion of the predominantly Kashmiri
Muslim officers of the police force, who though inactive, were not above
passing information to militant groups.
The STF/CID combination became active in 1994 and began to play an
aggressive role in locating terrorists. In September that year, they were
successful in tracking down one of the leading ISI operatives, Ayaz Ahmad
Abbasi, a Lahore resident who had been active in the valley. A raid on his
hideout became a firefight in which two STF personnel were injured and
Abbasi killed. The police chief gave the injured personnel a Rs 50,000
award as well as commendation certificates.
By the end of 1995, the police force had helped arrest 426 militants, of
whom fifty hard-core militants were killed; thirty-two taken into custody
and nearly a hundred assault rifles and pistols seized. Among the major
successes of the new SOGs of the J & K Police in early 1995 was the
capture of Sajjad Ahmed Kenoo, the head of the valley-based Ikhwan,
though Baig remained its Amir-e-Alla, or supreme commander. Along with
him, the police seized Rs 27 lakh for disbursement to valley tanzeems. But
in June 1995, he made a dramatic escape from jail. With the help of some
local police officers, he walked out of the Rangreth Jail near the old airport
of Srinagar by mingling with visitors!
After his escape, he tried to unite the Ikhwan, hard hit by Kukka Parray’s
defection and Mitha Soft’s strange behaviour. Failing this, he and Hilal Baig
consolidated the remnants of their old group into the Jammu & Kashmir
Islamic Front (JKIF). The JKIF was responsible for the bomb blasts in
Delhi’s Connaught Place and Sadar Bazar.
On 8 January 1996, two days after the Sadar Bazar blast in Delhi, Kenoo
returned to Srinagar from Delhi. He went to the house of Hilal Ahmed
Baig’s sister at Dilsoz Colony in the Natipora area of the city. It was here, at
about 3.30 p.m., according to reports, that he was trapped by a police
cordon. When he tried to escape, he was gunned down.
The ultimate proof that Hilal Baig remained true to his master, the ISI,
came six months later in July when he, too, was tracked down by an SOG
unit to a house in Parimpora on the outskirts of Srinagar. In the early hours
of 17 July, the police surrounded the house and called on Baig to surrender.
He refused and died fighting. Later that day, the five major leaders of the
Hurriyat—the Mirwaiz, Lone, Geelani, Abbas Ansari, Abdul Ghani Bhat
and Yasin Malik—joined the funeral procession and heaped praises on the
man Indian officials say was responsible for fifty killings and was an agent
of the ISI. Baig had returned to India from Pakistan via Nepal in mid-1995,
following the splits in his outfit, and along with Kenoo, had consolidated
the erstwhile Ikhwan in the JKIF.
STF/SOG successes brought the dormant J & K Police to life. On 10
September 1995, they led a raid with the help of the CRPF and back-up
from the Army on two Hizbul Mujahideen hideouts in Chukpora across the
Jhelum from Srinagar in Badgam district. Four Afghan nationals, three
security personnel and an equal number of civilians lost their lives.
According to Inspector- General of Police (Kashmir Range) P.S. Gill, the
operation was based on a tip-off to the state police about the hideouts which
were being used by a Hizb team which had, among others, five Afghan
nationals. In the three-hour long encounter, Gill emphasized, each of the
three security forces lost one personnel each. He noted that this was the first
time that the J & K Police, not just the SOG, had been associated with a
major anti- insurgency operation in the state. A month later in October, the
SOG in another operation killed two Afghan Harkat-ul-Ansar operatives,
Umar Bhai and Chand Bhai. These two were working out of the Bandipur
area of north Kashmir, coordinating Harkat movements across the state. The
most dramatic, indeed shocking, sign of the J & K Police’s aggressive
posture came with the final sequel to the Hazratbal drama. Following the
killing of Mohammed Idris by Hizbul Mujahideen cadre on 10 February
1995 at the gates of the dargah, the authorities strengthened the J & K
Armed Police guard around it. The Hizb even charged that it was now being
guarded by a ‘joint BSF and JKLF force'.
Actually, in a loose arrangement with the authorities, the JKLF was
allowed the run of the shrine. In early 1996, the area was controlled by
Shabbir Siddiqui and Basharat Raza, the latter being one of the militants
who had been part of the group in the 1993 siege. However, nominally at
least, the J & K Armed Police, housed in nearby barracks, were responsible
for the security but were stationed at the periphery of the shrine.
Both Siddiqui and Raza did not belong to the mainstream JKLF. During
the 1994 split of the organization, they had backed the Karachi-based
chairman of the JKLF, Amanullah Khan, over the valley-based leadership of
Yasin Malik. In fact, it was Yasin Malik’s decision to expel Shabbir Sidiqui
from the JKLF that triggered off his split with Amanullah.
The Malik-Siddiqui differences were nothing more than a clash of two
strong egos, but the former cleverly used it to assert the leadership of the
valley cadre. Initially, Javed Mir backed Siddiqui. However, he later
switched sides and returned to Malik’s fold. Siddiqui and his colleagues felt
that Malik’s joining the APHC was a sign of his having come under the
influence of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Amanullah, who saw himself as
Kashmir’s supremo, was, in any case, not willing to see any person or
organization supplanting him.
In a visit to New Delhi in March 1996, Siddiqui held a press conference
where he criticized Indian authorities for wasting their time and money on
negotiating with former militant leaders, and argued that a three-way
dialogue between Pakistan, India and the ‘people of Kashmir’ was the only
formula that could resolve the problem. Siddiqui insisted that neither the
Hurriyat nor the JKLF (Yasin Malik) were representative of the people.
At Hazratbal, the J & K Armed Police and the JKLF followed a ‘live and
let live’ policy. But relations between the two were not very good. Many of
the armed police personnel were Gujjars from Kupwara and not particularly
fond of the Kashmiri militants. In turn, the militants looked on the J & K
Armed Police as little better than traitors and often taunted them for being
Indian quislings. Yet while the armed police were aware that many of the
militants had hideouts and arms nearby, they did not interfere with their
activities. Many suspected that the Siddiqui group had been propped up by
the Indian authorities and, in fact, been allowed to police the shrine
informally. However, this relationship started fraying when the Army-
backed counter-insurgency group, the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, began to
assert its presence in the shrine, leading to altercations and occasional
exchange of gunfire.
There was no single major reason for the breakdown of the status quo on
24 March 1996, Members of the JKLF (Amanullah) were holding a meeting
inside Hazratbal. While the militants had been carrying weapons in and out
without objections from the armed police picket, on that day, according to
one version, the armed police guard objected to an explosive device being
carried in. Another version says that some JKLF people planted a mine near
an armed police bunker and the police officer in charge demanded its
removal.
Whatever may have been the case, there was an altercation and soon,
what appeared to be a minor quarrel, escalated into a firefight in which the
armed police gunned down Basharat Raza and seven other militants. In the
exchange of fire, Sub-Inspector Amanullah Khan also died. No one is sure
as to who fired first. The bulk of the armed militants fled into the shrine and
when the armed police, aided by the BSF, surrounded the dargah, another
siege occurred. Top police officers rushed to the shrine and tried to persuade
the militants to give up. However, the JKLF militants demanded the
withdrawal of the armed police and the BSF as a precondition for vacating
the shrine. Negotiations stalled and the security forces gave them forty-
eight hours to surrender.
The authorities imposed a curfew around the shrine’s environs and
refused to permit the media into the area as demanded by the besieged
militants. The JKLF (A) supporters managed to stage two or three small
demonstrations, but there was also a counter-demonstration in favour of the
policemen, led by Din Mohammed Cheeta, a Gujjar National Conference
leader from Kupwara. Negotiations resumed the next day through five
mediators, including members of the Muslim Auqaf Trust and the JKLF
faction chief, Siddiqui.
That evening, the militants agreed to leave the shrine on assurances of a
‘safe passage’ to their office building in two houses near the southern gate
of the shrine, one of them forcibly seized from its occupants by the JKLF
(A). Eighteen of them streamed out a little after 8 p.m. with their weapons,
while two remained to show the Imams that the relic had not been touched.
Three weapons seized from the police personnel were given back and the
group returned to their ‘office’.
The impression seemed to be that a deal had been struck to restore the
situation to what it was before the 25 March events. However, Governor
Krishna Rao declared the next day that there had been no deal and that the
militants had come out on their own. State government officials said that
the militants, were ‘in custody’, but pointedly refrained from claiming that
they were under arrest.
In fact, the armed police had established a discreet cordon around the
JKLF office building. After remaining silent for two days, even while
privately maintaining that there was no surrender, Siddiqui told the media
that the government had indeed agreed ‘that the status quo ante would be
restored, but we have in effect been arrested’. In the early hours of 30
March, the armed police stormed the buildings, and after a short firefight,
blasted a structure with rocket fire, in the process setting two other
buildings ablaze and gutting them. Twenty-one of the militants were killed,
including Siddiqui, and the entire Amanullah faction of the JKLF was
wiped out.
Officials later claimed that the militants were getting set to again occupy
the shrine and that they had acted to prevent this. An official spokesman
said that after vacating the shrine, the group had moved into its ‘office’ and
then begun threatening locals who had persuaded them to leave the shrine
earlier. They also threatened the Auqaf Trust officials and, as a result of this,
a decision had been taken to get them to vacate the building. The police had
therefore cordoned off the house and demanded that the militants vacate the
building and surrender their weapons. Three militants accepted the terms,
while three women and two children left the building. The rest decided to
stick it out and were killed in the ensuing firefight.

Transparency
No matter what posture New Delhi took publicly, pressure from the US had
some important consequences. Some were beneficial. Others negative. One
of the salutary developments was forcing the government to act against the
flagrant abuse of human rights in the valley. Notwithstanding protestations,
the Government of India had done virtually nothing from 1990 to 1992 to
act against cases of ‘excessive use of force’, custodial deaths and torture.
 It was not that the Government of India or its officials were sadists, but in
the absence of time or the qualities to provide more imaginative leadership,
they left the fate of the state to the BSF and the Army. Nominally, Girish
Saxena was in charge, but with the total collapse of the civil administration,
he was bereft of means to check the security forces. Then, when charges of
human-rights abuses surfaced, the guilty government first bent over
backwards, to protect its instrumentalities that had by brute force prevented
secession, and later began taking token action to stem the pressure.
The US and other countries, as an American official phrased it, ‘put a
mirror’ in front of India’s face and compelled it to see what was happening.
The result was action across the board. The Army tightened its procedures
and the Army chief Joshi issued his ‘Ten Commandments’ on how soldiers
should behave, printed on a card carried by all soldiers. Army court martials
also came up, with tough sentences for errant personnel.
Another beneficent consequence was the so-called policy of transparency
that allowed virtually any diplomat or organization to tour the valley and
meet the leaders. Its origins again lay in external pressure. Western print
media had unrestricted access, but they found little use in retelling the same
story again and again. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and
other western human-rights organizations had been issuing reports, largely
based on Indian media write-ups, on human-rights violations. However,
they were not permitted by the government to conduct any independent
investigation.
At the same time, the United Nations Human Rights Commission had
been pressing India to allow it to send in its commissioners. To deflect the
pressure, in February 1994, members of the European Union troika,
consisting of the envoys of Belgium, Greece and Germany, visited the
valley. Later other groups went, including in April, a large delegation from
Islamic countries. The envoys were briefed by administration officials and
met local journalists, human-rights activists and APHC leaders. At the same
time, permission was given to the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) to visit the vale and propose ways and means for improving the
condition of the jails and detainees. As part of this exercise, an ICRC team
led by David Delapraz visited Srinagar and Jammu in March 1994 and
submitted a set of proposals for monitoring the conditions of the jails.
Beginning in 1995, the ICRC began the systematic implementation of these
proposals. Officials, some of them Urdu speakers, have since undertaken a
series of planned visits to the valley, where they have had individual
interviews with detainees, thereafter providing the Government of India
with a confidential report.
In October 1994, military attachés from twenty-one countries were also
taken to the valley. The attachés were briefed by the governor as well as the
Army authorities, and shown the captured arms and taken to meet some
families of ex-militants living in special enclaves. Such measures helped
India’s case, enhanced her self-image and helped reduce the excesses that
had featured in the military campaign in the valley. The campaign had a
pay-off in getting sufficient support from the international community to
prevent Pakistan from pushing a resolution condemning India at the annual
meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva in
early 1994. At the end of the year, Pakistan tried again through the
Organisation of Islamic States to move a resolution condemning India in the
UN General Assembly, but that move, too, failed.
Earlier that year, the OIC, at a meeting in Islamabad, had set up a contact
group to promote the right of self-determination for the Kashmiris. In early
October, in anticipation of the General Assembly session, the OIC contact
group met in New York. But quite a few OIC members demurred from
pressing it to the point of a resolution. The result was that Pakistani
diplomats were unsure of the fate of the resolution and decided not to move
it. The pro-secessionist elements were naturally dejected, but, in a strange
twist to the tale, now started blaming the US for this. The Kashmir Times
reported on 12 November that Maulana Abbas Ansari held America
responsible for the non-tabling of the resolution while Shabbir Shah blamed
countries for having a ‘vested interest’ in economic relations with India and
America.
All these activities suddenly seemed to give the Government of India
more confidence. A measure of this was its treatment of the Kashmiri
political leadership. The release of Malik, Shah, Geelani and Lone was
followed by permission to the Hurriyat leaders to travel to Casablanca to
attend the OIC summit in mid- December. In the past, the Government of
India had accused the OIC of interfering in India’s internal affairs. But now,
as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq indicated, the government had, for the first time,
allowed Kashmiri representatives, Maulana Abbas Ansari and him, to attend
an international conference.
The pro-secessionist analysts did not know what to make of the shift in
the Indian stand, and the government’s relaxed attitude to the anti-Indian
resolution adopted by the OIC conference. Some fondly believed that the
Government of India was compelled by international pressure to change;
other, more realistic assessments were that by doing so, India would
successfully stamp the Hurriyat with the mark of being fundamentalist and
damn it in the eyes of the West.
Whatever it was, it worked, and by 1996, ‘transparency’ had become an
important weapon in the government’s policy. Home Secretary K.
Padmanabhiah boasted on the eve of the September elections that year that
as many as 119 diplomats and 113 foreign journalists had already visited the
state.

The Enigma of Victory

On 26 January 1997, when Gen. Krishna Rao once again stood up to take
the salute at the Maulana Azad Stadium in Jammu, he was conscious of
what had been wrought in the state the previous year. Pakistan, he declared,
‘had lost the proxy war in the state, and it was now time for it to desist from
continuing its evil machinations’. No blast or untoward incident marred the
flag-hoisting ceremony or the splendid parade.
Across the Pir Panjal, at the Bakshi Stadium in Srinagar, there was
another solemn function where National Conference leader and Public
Works Minister Ghulam Mohiuddin took the salute and unfurled the
Tricolour. Appealing to the militants to abandon their path, he urged the
‘misguided youth’ to resolve their problems through democratic means.
 From 1992, the idea that elections could be an anodyne for the valley’s
ills had been an item of faith in New Delhi, pushed first by Governor
Saxena and then by Krishna Rao. But all efforts had been in vain with one
event or the other foiling the plan.
The most embarrassing failure came in November 1995 when the three-
member Central Election Commission (CEC) rejected the Union
government’s recommendation that elections take place in December. After
a three-hour meeting in New Delhi on 10 November, the commission said
that ‘the sum total of factors available at present in the state of Jammu and
Kashmir are not consistent with the conduct of a free and fair elections’.
Two days earlier, the commission team had visited the valley to assess
the situation for itself and heard out various parties and individuals on the
issue. A major contributory factor was the refusal of Farooq Abdullah’s
National Conference to participate in any electoral exercise. Between 1992
and 1995, Abdullah had gone along with efforts to promote elections, but he
had been disillusioned by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s pusillanimity. In
November 1995, when the government agreed to call for elections,
Narasimha Rao promised Abdullah a generous autonomy package that
would help his party’s campaign. However, when the prime minister spoke
to the nation, curiously enough from Burkina Faso where he was on an
official visit, there was no reference to the promise. Perhaps the strongest
reason for the CEC decision was the recommendation by Krishna Rao that
elections were not viable without the participation of the National
Conference. The CEC’s decision was subsequently criticized by the
Supreme Court for arrogating the power of deciding the timing of the
elections, instead of merely conducting them properly.
The Election Commission thereafter decided on a trial run of sorts when
the general elections to parliament were scheduled for the summer of 1996.
However, stung by Narasimha Rao’s perfidy, Abdullah refused to
participate since the government had given no commitments on
‘autonomy’. The contestants in the elections were a motley crowd of
counter-insurgents, Congressmen and others. Though the National
Conference formally sat out the elections, it could not but have been
discomfited by the surprisingly high voter turnout in the elections.
The Election Commission undertook a massive exercise to ensure that
the poll was conducted in a ‘free and fair’ manner. Not only was security
tightened, but some 10,500 personnel were flown in from Delhi to conduct
the poll. Each of them was given a bulletproof vest and an insurance policy
of Rs 5 lakh. Some 300 bulletproof cars and ambulances were also
distributed across the state.
Predictably, the Hurriyat called for a boycott. But the influence of the
outfit appeared limited to the Srinagar area. JKLF leader Yasin Malik and a
hundred supporters sat in a day- long protest inside the Jama Masjid on 30
May; outside, his supporters Javed Mir ‘Nalqa’ and Shakeel Bakshi were
arrested when they tried to lead rallies. Official figures claimed that
downtown areas like Zadibal, Idgah, Khanyar, Habba Kadal and
Amirakadal reported fourteen to twenty per cent voter turnout while in the
outlying areas of the Srinagar district such as Ganderbal and Kangan, it was
as high as fifty and sixty-five per cent. In Anantnag and Baramula, the
turnout was forty-three per cent and thirty-five per cent as compared to five
and 5.48 per cent in the 1990 elections.
These were official figures and in all likelihood, the turnout was lower,
probably averaging twenty-five per cent, perhaps even lower in some urban
areas where secessionist support runs high. In rural areas it was higher since
the counter-insurgency militia and the security cover of the armed forces
provided an opportunity to the voters to cast their vote, even though the
average voter was not particularly concerned with the general election’s
outcome.
Seeing this as a victory, the Army’s Srinagar corps commander, Lt Gen.
J.S. Dhillon went on record urging the government to press on with the state
assembly elections. In his view, delay would result in a loss of momentum
of the process of normalization in the state. On 6 July, H.D. Deve Gowda
became the first prime minister in a decade to visit the valley, in order to
underscore the government’s seriousness in pushing the political process
ahead. On 7 August, the Election Commission announced a four-phase
election schedule for the J & K Assembly. Polling would take place
between 7 September and 30 September on four different days to ensure
adequate security.
The National Conference was now on the horns of a dilemma. Abdullah,
urged on by his district committees, decided to contest, with or without a
commitment of autonomy from New Delhi. There was another major factor
influencing Abdullah—the emergence of the United Front government in
New Delhi, one which was favourably inclined towards greater autonomy
for the states. Deve Gowda pledged that the J & K government would get
‘maximum autonomy’ after assuming powers.
The parliament and assembly elections did not merely mark the return of
Abdullah and the National Conference. In a courageous gesture, many
relatives of those slain by the militants, too, participated. Among the
contestants in the parliamentary elections was Sarla Taploo, widow of Tika
Lal Taploo, the BJP leader who had been killed in Srinagar in 1989. Sakina
Masood, the daughter of the slain former Assembly speaker Wali
Mohammed Itoo, participated in the polls.
The result of the elections was a resounding victory for the National
Conference. It won fifty-seven of eighty-seven seats in the state, with the
Congress winning seven, BJP eight, JD five, BSP four, Panthers one,
Congress(T) one and Independents two. There were two other victors: the
CPI(M)’s redoubtable Yusuf Tarigami, one of the few leaders who had
remained in the valley all through the rebellion, and Kukka Parray, now
leader of his own Awami League. Turnout was higher, probably averaging
thirty per cent, a respectable figure considering the circumstances.
Many voters charged that they had been coerced to participate.The
international press, which was out in full force, scooped up every statement.
The security officials claimed that all they had done was to provide security
to the polling booths and on occasion to voters to reach the booths. But the
important point was that no one claimed they had been coerced to vote for
this or that candidate.
The task before the security forces was stupendous. They had not only to
guard the 6500-odd polling booths, but the polling personnel who had been
sent in from across the country. For the task, some 50,000 additional forces
were sent into the valley. Militants made a considerable effort to block the
process. The Shoura-e-Jehad coordinated this effort. But it was a pale
shadow of its earlier manifestations. The chosen method seemed to be to
lob grenades or fire at passing cars of candidates or at the sites of their
meetings. Twenty-one National Conference workers died, as well as the
father-in-law of Yusuf Tarigami. As the major target, Abdullah was
provided with the highest level of security. His fifty-vehicle motorcade had
several bulletproof cars and jeeps and as many as 300 security personnel.
As for the Hurriyat and leaders like Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah, all they
could do was to sit on the side-lines and offer token protest.
On 9 October 1996, Farooq Abdullah was sworn in as the chief minister
of Jammu and Kashmir for the third time. Overcome by emotion, he broke
down in tears and declared, ‘The last drop of my blood will go to defend
India. Kashmir has been, is, and always will be, part of India.’ It was a
dramatic moment. Six years ago, under circumstances that were not quite
honourable, Abdullah had quit the same office. In subsequent years, he had
been reviled, disgraced and written off variously as a ‘playboy’ or a
‘stooge’ of India. But that day he appeared a winner, a true son of Sheikh
Abdullah. He had undertaken the most gruelling campaign of his career,
escaped grenade attacks twice and lost a score of his cadre to militants’
bullets. The drama of the swearing in was underscored by the presence in
Srinagar of national leaders from almost all political parties in India,
barring the BJP.
The Farooq Abdullah government took office, with its primary political
platform being its commitment to political autonomy for the state so as to
preserve its unique status within the Union of India. Abdullah told
Padmanand Jha of Outlook that he viewed autonomy as defined by the 1952
Delhi Declaration, arrived at between the National Conference and the
Government of India, which conceded charge of defence, communications
and foreign affairs to New Delhi, leaving the remaining administrative-
matters in the hands of Srinagar.
 Shortly after taking over as chief minister, Abdullah constituted a Jammu
and Kashmir Autonomy Panel, chaired by Karan Singh,who was the former
maharaja of Kashmir as well as its post-independence head of state as Sadr-
e-Riyasat and later, governor. Another panel headed by Balraj Puri was
given the job of examining the issue of regional autonomy: whether or not
Ladakh, Jammu, and even Poonch, Rajauri and Doda could be given greater
autonomy vis-à-vis Srinagar.
In July 1997, Singh resigned for unstated reasons, and was replaced by
Ghulam Mohiuddin, a confidant of Farooq. Till the end of 1997, the panels
had not submitted their reports. Indeed, political lassitude and
administrative paralysis seemed to have once again settled upon the state.
 Conclusion

Between 11 and 13 May 1998, some twenty-four years after it first showed
it could do so, India conducted five nuclear weapons tests. This was an
eventuality that the US had worked hard to block. From 1990–94, the US
had linked its non-proliferation efforts to the rebellion in Kashmir, arguing
that the consequent Indo-Pakistan tensions had made it a potential
flashpoint for a nuclear war. The corollary of this argument worked thus:
Kashmir was the only outstanding Indo-Pakistani dispute, and its resolution
would remove any incentive for either state to hold nuclear weapons. This
displayed a superficial understanding of the Indo- Pakistan problems, and
conveniently ignored evidence that the US had in abundance, of the
Chinese aid to Pakistan’s missile and nuclear weapons programme and the
larger dynamics of South Asian security.
From the moment India’s tests were announced, there was little doubt in
most minds that Pakistan would follow suit. Home Minister L.K. Advani’s
statement that the nuclear tests had brought a qualitatively new stage in
Indo-Pakistan relations and that Pakistan should ‘roll back its anti-India
policy, especially with regard to Kashmir’, was merely the red rag to the
bull. More so because on 23 May, Advani was given back charge of the
Kashmir portfolio that had been taken away from the home ministry in
1993. On 28 and 30 May, Pakistan conducted a series of what it claimed
were six nuclear tests.
Once it had decided on retaliation, Pakistan played its cards with
characteristic brashness. On the eve of its tests, Pakistani officials rang
alarm bells across the world with a bizarre claim that India was about to
attack Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. The aim was to heighten fears of a
nuclear war arising out of the tense Indo-Pakistan situation.
 Initial moves by the Permanent Five in the UN Security Council—US,
Russia, UK, France and China—and the Group of Eight that included
Germany, Japan and Italy, indicated that the Pakistani strategy was working.
Officials such as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Japanese
Prime Minister (at the time foreign minister) Keizo Obuchi began to speak
of the immediacy of resolving the ‘root cause’ of the Indo-Pakistan conflict
—Kashmir.
From Pakistan’s point of view, however, the move did not quite gain the
needed momentum. The big powers decided instead to focus on attempts to
roll back the nuclear situation and actually took, from India’s point of view,
an unexpectedly soft line on Kashmir. The communiqué, issued after the 4
June meeting in Geneva, called on India and Pakistan to find ‘mutually
acceptable solutions, through direct dialogue, that address the root causes of
the tension, including Kashmir’, a formulation that New Delhi could live
with, anyway.
In subsequent days it became clear that the big powers had decided that
for the moment, at least, there was little to be gained from pressuring India
on Kashmir, even though Japan declared that it would be seeking to host an
international conference to suggest ways to resolve the dispute. In July,
visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott bluntly told Pakistani
officials in Islamabad that they should not assume that Pakistan could
leverage US anger against India to its own advantage on Kashmir.
Pakistan was not about to give up so easily. Through the months of June,
July and August, lashkars in the pay of its intelligence services began a
systematic series of massacres of the minority Hindu community in the
mountainous area across the Pir Panjal range. The aim was to shock as well
as to conduct an ethnic cleansing of the minority community in certain
strategic areas.
In January and April 1998, there had been three incidents of massacre of
the minority Hindu community—at Wandhama village near Srinagar, at
Prankote, and at Thub village in the Udhampur district, with a combined
toll of sixty-two persons. In all three cases, there was evidence that the
villagers had in the past cooperated with the militants and that the
massacres were a deliberate and ruthless tactic to draw attention to the
state’s inability to cope with the situation.
On 19 June, just a little after noon, five terrorists drew up near a tea stall
on the Doda–Dessa road near Champaneri village where a wedding party
was waiting for a bus at a wayside stall. After separating the men from the
women, they began to fire at the group, killing twenty-five out of the thirty-
two males. On 28 July, sixteen people were killed in Horan and Saravan
villages in the Thukari area of Doda. Capping these incidents were the 2
August killings in which a total of thirty-one people were gunned down in
two separate assaults in Kalaban and Shatrundi hamlets in Chamba district
of Himachal Pradesh.
The massacres marked both the failure and success of the Indian security
forces. The very success in containing the militants in the valley pushed
them to the hilly tracts of Doda where they attacked unprotected villagers
for political effect. As usual, the state was a step behind in anticipating the
development, notwithstanding clear signals that this would happen. The
Doda– Udhampur districts are a vast mountainous tract, as large as the
valley. Currently, the districts are being looked after by the equivalent of
two brigades of the Rashtriya Rifles. Early in 1998, some six battalions of
the paramilitary forces were redeployed from the region to the Surankote
area near the LoC in Poonch, where militancy seemed to have gained
prominence. Officials complained that in view of the inadequate security
forces, they had not been able to develop an adequate security ‘grid’. The
government has now begun working on a plan to relocate far- flung villages
with the aim of providing the inhabitants better protection as well as to deny
lashkars access to food and supplies.
Speaking to journalists in April 1998, shortly before the end of his five-
year term, Krishna Rao noted that during his first tenure, in the late 1980s,
there were an estimated 200 militants. But the state government’s request
for just twenty-four companies of the CRPF was refused because it was felt
that the situation in Bihar was more alarming. The inability to anticipate
problems remains a major failure of the Indian State. It is not as if the
problem of militancy in the Doda area is insurmountable. It is just that more
blood has to flow before the mandarins in the home ministry get their act
together.
What the security forces are capable of achieving is evident from the
tight control they have established over militancy in the valley. This was
brought out by the swift retribution that visited the terrorists who
perpetrated the Wandhama massacre. Using signals intelligence and other
sophisticated surveillance techniques, the Army tracked down the gang
responsible for the crime, and in a series of operations between 8 and 21
February 1998, it wiped them out. Most of the eleven killed were Pakistani
nationals, with a few Afghans. Within the valley at least, the chances of a
mercenary group being able to operate freely are not very high.
The special operations group, criticized for brutality and its arbitrary
ways, has proved effective in arresting or eliminating top leaders of the
principal outfits, some within months, if not weeks of their return from
Azad Kashmir. Srinagar, once the heart of militancy and a sanctuary for
militants, has become a death-trap. The surviving leaders, mainly Pakistani
militants, remain in the high mountains and forest sanctuaries of north
Kashmir and the Pir Panjal, where they are exposed to lethal Army sweeps.
The year 1997 saw the deaths of Mohammed Yusuf Ganai aka
Naseebuddin Ghazi, the one-time deputy supreme commander of the Hizbul
Mujahideen, and its intelligence chief Fayaz Ahmed Mir. But the outfit that
had the greatest losses was the Harkat- ul-Ansar. In March, its commander-
in-chief Mohammed Arif Hussain Qazi aka Haji, hailing from Jammu, was
killed. In May, Qari Zarrar, a Pakistani national who had been chief
commander of the outfit and had masterminded the kidnapping of six
western tourists in 1995, was killed in Doda. In June, chief commander
Nayeem Khan alias Saifullah, a Pakistani, was killed. Then in November,
its senior leader, Ghulam Nabi Baba alias Parvez Baba, was arrested, and
later that year, factional fighting resulted in the death of Aamir aka Abul
Fazal, a Kashmiri who had headed the outfit before Saifullah.
On 17 April 1998, the SOG tracked down the elusive head of the Shoura-
e-Jehad, Abdul Hamid Wani aka S. Hamid, to his father-in-law’s house on
the Buchpora outskirts of Srinagar, According to relatives, Hamid, an
associate of Shabbir Ahmad Shah, was taken away by the police at 11 p.m.
Some gunshots were heard, and later they were informed by the station
house officer at Soura that his body had been delivered to the police station.
Officials claimed that this was the ‘greatest achievement of the year’.
Four months later, in the early hours of 9 August, the police achieved
another signal success when it succeeded in eliminating Ali Mohammed
Dar aka Burhanuddin Hajazi, the deputy supreme commander of the Hizbul
Mujahideen. Tipped off by the Army’s signals intelligence, the SOG squad
tracked down Dar, a former sub-inspector of the J & K Police and an uncle
of Master Ahsan Dar, to a rented house where he was living with an
associate and a bodyguard. All three died in the gunbattle, though,
somewhat predictably, the Hurriyat claimed that he had been killed after his
arrest.
One consequence of the failure to keep the fires of insurgency burning in
the valley is the Pakistani decision to add some fuel directly. Beginning
with bombardment of Kargil town in April 1997, Pakistan began a
systematic bombardment of the Indian positions on the LoC, using artillery,
mortars, air-defence cannons, and Chinese ‘Red Arrow’ missiles and
machine guns, an action that peaked in August–September 1997, and then
again in July 1998. Indian officials said that the aim was to aid infiltrators
to get across the LoC. But then, as now, there was a political goal as well.
The 1997 attacks were timed to coincide with the build- up for a meeting
between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Inder
Kumar Gujral at the UN General Assembly session in New York, an
occasion when both leaders were also slated to meet US President Bill
Clinton.
In 1998, there was a qualitative change in the situation, brought on by the
May nuclear tests. On 28 July 1998, on the eve of the meeting between
Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee, a Pakistani
barrage of bombardments, begun in early July, peaked and the targets
shifted inwards, hitting positions as far away as twenty kilometres behind
the LoC. The result was an unprecedentedly high level of casualties, both
Army and civilian. At the meeting held on the summit of the South Asian
Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Pakistan had come
prepared to torpedo the talks with its demand that India and Pakistan
discuss Kashmir to the exclusion of everything else. It called on India to
abide by an eight-point set of ‘confidence-building measures’ that included
the withdrawal of the Army from Srinagar, thinning of forces across the
valley, and a recognition of the Hurriyat as the ‘representatives of the
Kashmiri people’.
Whether India ought to accept the Pakistani view that Kashmir is the
‘core issue’ and give it primacy is a problem that has bedevilled the
government for some time. There has been a point of view, articulated by
former Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit, that India call the Pakistani bluff and
agree to this, since India’s case on Kashmir is inherently strong. However,
governments of the day, advised by a timid ministry of external affairs,
worry that any exclusive meeting on Kashmir could result in a build-up of
intense pressure on India to make unwarranted concessions to Pakistan. In
October, after much prodding from the US, India agreed to discuss Kashmir
in an exclusive meeting, which would be one of a series covering a range of
Indo-Pakistan issues.

In July 1998, the rebellion became a decade old, if we count its beginning
as the JKLF’s ‘declaration of war’ in 1988. In this period, it moved through
three clearly defined phases. The first in the period 1988–1991 was the
great rebellion led by the youth of Srinagar against Indian authority, for
what they called ‘azadi’. The second was Pakistan’s usurpation of this
revolt between 1991 and 1993, using the Hizbul Mujahideen and other pro-
Pakistan groups to marginalize the advocates of azadi. Currently running is
the third phase, which is a proxy war against India, being fought in the main
by mercenaries originating in Pakistan. That these persons often see
themselves as mujahids serving the cause of pan-Islamic ideals means little
to anyone but themselves. For the ISI, they are cannon-fodder and for the
Indian security forces, the enemy. Not surprisingly, Kashmiris are paying
the highest price in this conflict, caught between the grindstones of the
Pakistani mujahideen and the Indian security forces. Till July this year,
going by official figures, a total of some 20,000 persons had died, of whom
just about half were combatants. This does not tell the whole story of those
who were injured, battered and beaten, raped and molested by members of
both sides in what cannot be anything but a dirty war.
Pakistan’s neurotic obsession with Kashmir has been matched by New
Delhi’s singular inability to forge a policy that is more effective in
anticipating developments, sensitive to human rights, and consequently
more attuned to winning back the hearts and minds of the Kashmiri
Muslims of the valley. Into his second year as chief minister, Farooq
Abdullah remains India’s major, albeit flawed, asset. He has been unable to
revitalize the administration, and the enormous efforts of the security forces
and their sacrifices are wasted in the desert of bureaucratic ineptitude and
apathy, both in Srinagar and New Delhi.
Fighting the rebellion has not been an easy experience for Indian security
forces. One reason was that the battle was fought in the full glare of media
attention. The valley is proximate to both New Delhi and Pakistan, and the
local press in Srinagar, the heart of the rebellion, has been functioning all
through. National newspapers and news agencies, too, competed with each
other to report on the conflict which naturally focused on the human
tragedies that inevitably accompany a guerrilla war. In Kashmir, because of
the constant attention of the media, human-rights issues enjoyed a
prominence, not visible in the North-East where the security forces have on
occasion got away with major excesses without the kind of media exposure
seen in the valley. These reports were picked up by international human-
rights bodies and the issue assumed a larger dimension.
The security forces reacted at first with bewilderment and then some
anger. But over time, they adjusted their strategies. The Indian Army has
cracked down hard on rape and molestation, even if its track record on
custodial deaths needs improvement. One measure of the changed attitude
of the Army leadership is that they have willingly provided me with a list of
personnel, tried for human-rights violations. I was free to name those who
were convicted, leaving out the names of those who received lesser
punishments such as a reprimand.
However, the BSF, which has been accused of some of the more
notorious cases, remains a problem. While the Army has, at least in Jammu
and Kashmir, adopted a tough line on human- rights violations, the BSF
remains unchanged. This seems to be the obvious conclusion from the near-
uniform aquittal of BSF personnel accused of the more egregious violations
of human rights. But the BSF may have merely taken its cue from its parent
home ministry. Till the mid–1990s, the annual report of the ministry listed
the number of people punished for excesses but as of 1997 it has stopped
doing so.
Though the Kashmiri rebellion has failed, great effort is needed to restore
peace in the state. The first priority, of course, is to defeat the continuing
Pakistani proxy war, being conducted, as was pointed out, by fanatics and
mercenaries in the hire of its intelligence agencies. But this cannot be
achieved unless much more is done to win back the alienated people of
Kashmir. The second task is to leach away the enormous number of
weapons that have been pumped into the state by Pakistan. As the table
given in the book indicates, this is an infusion that has not shown any signs
of abating.
India’s solution to the Kashmir problem, though only indirectly offered,
is to partition the state along the present LoC. This was the line of reasoning
pursued from the time of Jawaharlal Nehru who agreed to a ceasefire in
December 1948, months before an Indian spring offensive would have
cleared Pakistani forces and irregulars out of most of the territory they had
seized. In the Indo-Pakistani negotiations in 1963, the only time when the
two countries discussed the issue with a degree of seriousness, various
options for partition were examined.
During the 1972 Simla talks, a victorious India pushed for partition along
the line held by the forces of the two sides. This was arguably the major
motive in India’s gamble of backing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and releasing
90,000 Pakistani soldiers who had been taken prisoners-of-war. Bhutto
agreed to work on the idea and to the change of nomenclature from
‘ceasefire line’ into ‘line of control’—the former denoting a military
situation, the latter a boundary formed with a degree of voluntary
acquiescence.
For twenty years thereafter, neither side took the opportunity to hold the
other up to their common commitment made in Article 6 of the Simla
Agreement, to arrive at ‘a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir’. The
1990 valley rebellion and Pakistan’s, support for it, in violation of the
agreement’s basic premise that the dispute be resolved through peaceful
means, was the final nail in its coffin. Like the UN resolutions, the Simla
Agreement is now a dead letter. Since then several proposals have come up,
including one that calls for tripartite talks between the Kashmiris as
represented by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, India and Pakistan. But
Pakistan and the Hurriyat insist that their maximum demand be the basis of
negotiation. There is sound strategy in opening negotiations with an
adversary who holds the main cards. But what was once an opening gambit
appears to have become an interminable endgame.
Is there, then, no solution to the Kashmir problem? In my view, none in
the near future. The only chance of a settlement that would satisfy all
parties would come when India and Pakistan are more closely aligned to
each other than they are today. In other words, mature liberal democracies
where the rights of individuals, regardless of nationality, origin, religion and
ethnicity are upheld in practical terms, not merely on paper. This may sound
like asking for the moon. Perhaps it is. But there is indeed a lesson in the
way another tangled problem that of Alsace- Lorraine, involving Germany
and France—was resolved. An area that was a battleground for centuries is
now a sleepy backwater because Germany was forced to abandon its
militaristic ways and become another democracy in western Europe.
India and Pakistan are formally democracies, but it is no secret that they
have a long way to go before they can be termed ‘mature’. Both are beset
by powerful forces of religious fundamentalism, overlaying chronic poverty
and illiteracy. To forcecast a liberal democratic future for either of them,
especially Pakistan, requires great optimism. But then, that is the only way
to look at the future.
 TABLE 1
Region-wise population of Jammu & Kashmir (1981 census)

Source: Census of India

(No census was held in 1991 because of the uprising)
 TABLE 2
Arms Recovered: 1988–98(Till July 15)

Source: GOI
 TABLE 3
Casualties: 1988–98

Source: Government of India (GOI)

 The Aftermath

By the end of the 1990s, the Indian state realized that it had done all it could
to defeat and contain the rebellion; thereafter, it needed a deal with Pakistan
and the separatist politicians in the Valley to reach closure. There was a new
government in New Delhi, headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Its
seasoned leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was one of the founders of its
predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, was ideally suited to help shift the
Indian paradigm, because he had spent a lifetime at the head of a movement
that was seen as bitterly hostile to Pakistan. As prime minister he had also
proved to be remarkably clear-headed and stubborn in his pursuit of peace
with both Pakistan and China.
On 20 February 1999, Prime Minister Vajpayee journeyed to Lahore, as
part of the inaugural journey of a new bus service. The following day, in a
dramatic and significant gesture, Vajpayee visited Minar-e-Pakistan, a
monument erected to honour the founding of the state. The Lahore
Declaration summed up the outcome and put forward a transformative
vision of the Indo-Pak relationship. Besides agreeing to ‘resolve all issues
including Jammu & Kashmir’, it also, for the first time, addressed the issue
of their nuclear status. The two sides signed a far-sighted MOU that
detailed the steps they would take to reduce the risk of war in general and
nuclear conflict in particular. But this bonhomie turned out to be transitory.
Unfortunately, Pakistan was deeply divided between the civilian
government of Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Army, headed by Pervez
Musharraf. The two now began to work at cross purposes. While Sharif
accepted a far-reaching offer of friendship from Vajpayee, Musharraf
plotted a military manoeuvre that would upend the efforts and lead to
Pakistan coming, once again, under the sway of its Army.
 This was Pakistan’s Operation Badr, designed to covertly occupy areas of
the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) in the Kargil area. The Indian
and international response to the Kargil adventure undid the Pakistan Army.
As in 1965, the Indian Army surprised them with its determined—but
calculated—response. Within two months, most of the intrusions had been
cleared out, albeit at a high price of over 400 casualties. The price paid by
Pakistan was higher. Not only did it lose 700 of its soldiers, it also lost the
trust of the world community, especially its neighbour India.

The Coup and the IC-814 Hijacking

The positive trajectory of the Nawaz–Vajpayee period was lost in the
treacherous snowy heights of Kargil. It was given its final burial with Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif being overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf in a
bloodless coup. It soon became apparent that though India had foiled the
Pakistani plan in Kargil, it had suffered serious erosion in another sector—
the Valley of Kashmir. Among the many urgent measures New Delhi had
taken was to shift the entire 8 Mountain Division from the Valley to the
Kargil– Dras area. Other troops, too, were stripped from deployment in the
Valley. The disturbance of the grid led to a resurgence of militancy in the
area.
Figures for 2000 showed that 638 security forces personnel were killed
that year, a marked rise on the 555 who died in 1999; there was a sharp
increase in the casualties of the militants as well—1808 died in 2000,
compared to 1184 the year before. This represents the peak for the
casualties suffered by the security forces throughout the conflict till now.1
Though the coup in Pakistan had portentous consequences for India–
Pakistan relations, it was overshadowed that year by another event related
to Kashmir—the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight IC-814—which led
to the release of Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq
Ahmed Zargar. This was the last of the several attempts that have been
described in the book, by the associates of Masood Azhar, to secure his
release.
 The death in June 1999 of Sajjad Ahmed Khan, aka Sajjad Afghani—the
erstwhile commander of the Harkat ul-Ansar in Kashmir, during an
attempted escape from Jammu’s Kot Bhalwal high-security prison—is
suspected to have triggered the hijacking.
Afghani died following a scuffle when the authorities discovered a tunnel
leading out of the prison on the night of 14 June 1999. Azhar’s associates in
Pakistan would have viewed this as an execution by the Indian authorities.
Acting on the fear that a similar fate lay in store for Azhar, the hijacking of
the Indian aircraft was planned.
Azhar and Afghani’s arrest had led to the collapse of the Harkat ul-Ansar,
which had split back into its constituent Harkatul-Jihad Islami and the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The hijacking was carried out by the Harkat-ul-
Mujahideen faction, and its main leader was Ibrahim Azhar, Masood’s
brother. This time, their operation had fewer flaws. Instead of five hapless
foreigners, they had an Indian aircraft and 130 Indian nationals hostage in a
territory of their own choosing—Afghanistan. Indian capitulation was
inevitable. Following his release, Masood Azhar founded the Jaish-e-
Muhammad.

The Two Ceasefires

The year 2000 was momentous for Jammu and Kashmir. In March,
President Bill Clinton made his historic visit to New Delhi, signalling a new
approach of the US towards India. In June, the ruling National Conference
(NC) party took up discussion on the State Autonomy Committee report in
the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, wherein they raised the
demand for a return to the pre-1953 situation in which the Union
government would have authority only in the areas of defence, currency and
foreign policy. A resolution supporting the demand for autonomy was
passed but this was almost immediately rejected by the Union government,
which was moving in another direction, as it became apparent a month later.
On 24 July 2000, Abdul Majid Dar, the operational chief of the Hizbul
Mujahideen announced a unilateral ceasefire and a willingness to talk to
Indian authorities. The Government of India accepted the call, which had
probably been worked out through backchannels. Initially, the
organization’s supremo, Syed Salahuddin, supported the move, which was
opposed by Pakistani militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Hizbul
Mujahideen was suspended from the United Jihad Council, which operated
out of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.
On 3 August, New Delhi upped the ante by having an Indian team led by
Union home secretary, Kamal Pande, talk to a delegation of Hizbul
Mujahideen commanders in Srinagar.2 But on the same day, from
Muzaffarabad, Salahuddin demanded that Pakistan be introduced as a third
party to the talks. When this did not happen, he announced a withdrawal of
the ceasefire.
This period now saw a campaign of murder and massacre patently aimed
at foiling the peace process. In March, on the eve of Clinton’s visit, thirty-
five Sikhs were massacred in Chittisinghpura. Later, on 1–2 August 2000,
in a bid to derail the ceasefire, some 100 people, mostly non-combatants
and some of them pilgrims to the Amarnath shrine were killed; and on 10
August, a bomb in Kothibagh, Srinagar, killed fifteen, of whom twelve
were policemen and one a photojournalist. Ten people were killed in the
Doda district in November. Fifteen persons were killed in February 2001 in
Rajouri, another fifteen in July and yet another fifteen in August in the
Doda district. All these attacks were the handiwork of Pakistani groups who
also intensified their strikes on the security forces.
Though the security forces, too, ensured a steady toll of the militants, the
Vajpayee government persisted in trying to find a political settlement. Later
that year, on the eve of Ramzan, which fell in November, Prime Minister
Vajpayee took another stab at trying to negotiate directly with the Valley
militants. He ordered the Indian Army to declare ‘non initiation of combat
operations’ (or, NICO), another phrase for a ceasefire.3 NICO meant that
the Army would remain in its camps and all roadblocks and checkpoints
maintained by the security forces would be removed. The government
hoped that it would be able, in the interim, to kick-start the negotiating
process. The government also tried to initiate dialogue with various parties
in Kashmir by appointing K.C. Pant, deputy chairman of the Planning
Commission, as its interlocutor. Two extensions were given to the NICO
ceasefire, but no significant breakthrough was achieved. Effectively foiled,
the government terminated NICO on 23 May 2001 and decided to reach out
to Pakistan.

The Agra Summit and the Parliament House Attack

There were high expectations from the summit at Agra, from 14–16 July
2001, between Prime Minister Vajpayee and the Army chief of Pakistan,
Pervez Musharraf, who had taken the title of ‘Chief Executive’. At one
level, the summit was one of a series of summits that the leaders of the two
sides have held in the past. However, there was special significance in that
it represented a forward move from the historic Lahore summit that had
been disrupted by the Kargil War and Musharraf’s coup. Paradoxically,
though the summit failed, it was successful in enabling both sides to get a
better measure of each other’s perspective.
The failure of the summit led to an intensification of militancy. The worst
attack came on 1 October 2001, when a Pakistani Jaishe-Muhammad
militant drove an SUV loaded with explosives into the J & K Assembly
building. He detonated the vehicle at the gate, killing thirty-eight people,
while his three partners sought to take control of the building; they were
gunned down thereafter.
But the real catalyst was the 13 December attack on the Parliament
House in New Delhi. India began to mass its Army on the Pakistan border.
Following 9/11, the US had given Musharraf a ‘with us or against us’
ultimatum and was pressing him against the Taliban. With Indian forces
readying for war, Musharraf made his speech on 12 January 2002, declaring
that Pakistan rejected terrorism ‘in all its forms and manifestations’ and that
it would ‘not allow its territory to be used for any terrorist activity
anywhere in the world’. He banned five radical Islamic groups and arrested
some 2000 suspects, including Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar. But
Musharraf was merely buying time. He gave the Taliban sanctuary in
Pakistan, enabling it to reconstitute itself, and also quietly allowed the
Kashmir groups to resume operations soon. On 14 May 2002, thirty-four
persons, mainly the wives and children of military personnel, were killed in
an attack on Kaluchak cantonment in Jammu. Despite having a fully
mobilized Army in the field, India did not react.
Events such as these extracted a price from those separatists who sought
to move towards a peace deal with India. On 21 May 2002, at an event
marking the assassination of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq in 1990, gunmen shot
and killed Abdul Ghani Lone, a founder member of the Hurriyat and the
leader of the People’s Conference. The following year, on 23 March 2003,
gunmen caught up with Abdul Majid Dar, who had sought peace in 2000,
and who had been expelled from the Hizbul Mujahideen in 2002. He was
killed at his ancestral house in Sopore. It is almost certain that both had
been killed at the instance of the ISI.
In July 2002 the government had a new interlocutor, BJP general
secretary, Arun Jaitley. This seemed to signal that the government was
willing to rethink its total rejection of the State Autonomy Committee report
in 2000. As such, his brief was to see how this report could be broken down
into digestible portions from the point of view of what the BJP was willing
to accept. But clearly, he made little headway, because seven months later,
in February 2003, the government decided to appoint N.N. Vohra as the
new interlocutor.
The 2002 Elections
The 2002 elections in Jammu and Kashmir were another watershed. Despite
the violence that led to the deaths of 600 people, the turnout was a
respectable 44.3 per cent and was termed by some foreign observers as
‘relatively fair’.4 The NC, led by Farooq Abdullah, saw its seats come down
from fifty-seven in the house of eighty-seven the 1996 elections, to just
twenty-eight. The Congress saw their seat share rise from seven to twenty.
But most significant was the rise of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s People’s
Democratic Party (PDP), which got sixteen seats. The BJP won just one
seat, down from the eight it had held earlier. One reason for this was the
split in the party and the formation of the Jammu Mukti Morcha, a
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-backed body that called for the
trifurcation of the state.
Eventually, a coalition of the Congress and the PDP took office, with
Mufti becoming chief minister for a three-year period till 2005, and then
handing over to Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress, who became the first
Congress chief minister since Syed Mir Qasim in 1975.
Mufti launched a new ‘healing touch’ policy that reduced the harassment
that the ordinary Kashmiri faced at the hands of the security forces. His
party came up with a ‘self-rule’ concept, which would empower the three
regions of the state without advocating secession or any dilution of India’s
sovereignty. In 2008, the party formally unveiled a document outlining its
self-rule framework. One of its key recommendations was that Article 356,
relating to the imposition of President’s rule, become non-applicable to J &
K. It was proposed that governors would be rotated between Jammu and
Srinagar, and economic integration across the LoC was emphasized.
Approaching a Settlement: Vajpayee Architects the
Manmohan–Musharraf Entente
After the near war in 2002, there was a lot of rethinking in both India and
Pakistan. Prime Minister Vajpayee decided to double down on his policy of
reaching out to Pakistan via Kashmir. In his speeches during his visit to the
Valley on 18–19 April 2003, Vajpayee offered the hand of friendship to
Pakistan and reached out to the new PDP-led government. He said the
issues relating to the state could ‘be resolved if we move forward guided by
the three principles of Insaniyat (humanism), Jamhooriyat (Democracy) and
Kashmiriyat (the traditional Hindu–Muslim amity)’.5
Facing constant US pressure and with the desire to have a successful
SAARC summit in Islamabad in January 2004, Pakistan offered a unilateral
ceasefire on the LoC and in the Siachen Glacier area in November 2003,
and India quickly accepted the offer.
This set the stage for a successful summit in Islamabad, where the South
Asian countries agreed to set up a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA)
by 2016. The more important issue from the J & K point of view was the
bilateral meeting between Vajpayee and Musharraf. Here, President
Musharraf ‘reassured Prime Minister Vajpayee that he will not permit any
territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any
manner’. In turn, India agreed to respond to all issues between the two
countries ‘including Jammu and Kashmir’ through a composite dialogue to
resolve all bilateral issues. Ironically, this is about the time in September
2003 when the Hurriyat split—between Mirwaiz’s faction and the one led
by Geelani, which now calls itself Tehreek-e-Hurriyat Azad Jammu &
Kashmir. The key difference between the two factions was about their
willingness to talk to Indian authorities; the former was willing, while the
latter was not.
In January 2004, the deputy prime minister, L.K. Advani, was named the
prime minister’s special emissary to meet the Hurriyat (Mirwaiz). Advani
hosted two rounds of talks with them in New Delhi, but little came of this
as the BJP lost the 2004 general elections. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
also met with them in May and September 2005. But the talks did not move
forward because of Hurriyat pusillanimity. Singh also met leaders like
Sajjad Lone and Yasin Malik in order to expand the reach of the peace
process beyond the Hurriyat. In June 2005, Hurriyat (M) leaders and Yasin
Malik, who had left the outfit, travelled to Pakistan through the Srinagar–
Muzaffarabad road. Permitting the delegation, particularly Malik, to travel
on this road to Pakistan signalled the desire of the government towards
promoting reconciliation.
The period between 2004–07 inaugurated a period of relative calm in
India–Pakistan relations. Measuring by the deaths of security force
personnel, the numbers began to go down from 2004 (325 killed), 2005
(218), 2006 (168), 2007 (121), and it kept going down till it reached
seventeen in 2012. The deaths of civilians, too, went down from 658 in
2003 to sixteen in 2012.6 The ceasefire not only helped reduce the
infiltrators (who would use the firing as a cover to enter) but also enabled
India to erect a fence along the LoC, which substantially enhanced the
Army’s ability to detect and intercept infiltrators. But eventually the
militants were able to work out tactics to breach the fence, evade the
thermal-imaging sensors and radars and come inland. Of course, this was
always a hazardous exercise, with many of them paying the price. But what
this did was also significantly reduce the amount of arms and ammunition
coming into the Valley, as groups had to be smaller and more agile.
Both sides eased up on visa norms and groups of Indian and Pakistani
tourists began to circulate back and forth between the two nations. India and
Pakistan opened up the LoC for Kashmiris on both sides. The two sides
inaugurated a cross-LoC bus service from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad in
April 2005, and trade was subsequently initiated on this and the Poonch–
Rawalkot road. A similar opening up of the border has taken place with the
restoration of the rail line between Jodhpur and Karachi, bus services
between Amritsar and Nankana Saheb, in addition to the older Lahore–
Delhi bus and the Samjhauta Express train.
Speaking in Amritsar in March 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
said that he envisaged ‘a situation where the two parts of Jammu and
Kashmir can, with the active encouragement of the governments of India
and Pakistan, work out cooperative, consultative mechanisms so as to
maximize the gains of cooperation in solving problems of social and
economic development of the region’.7
This was, in essence, the brief he gave to his special envoy Satinder
Lambah who had begun backchannel talks with Tariq Aziz of Pakistan.8 But
there was a bottom line made clear to Islamabad at the outset: There would
be no redrawing of borders. What could happen was that the boundary
could become soft through cross-border communication and commerce.
Later that year, Musharraf published his memoir, In the Line of Fire,
providing an outline of his four-point formula. The first was a version of the
1950s Dixon Plan, to identify subregions that needed resolution, which
would really be the Vale of Kashmir. The second was the demilitarization of
the region(s), which would mean pulling out military forces and ending the
‘militant aspects of the struggle for freedom’. The third was the introduction
of self-rule in the identified regions (read, the Valley) without providing it
international character. The fourth was to set up a joint management
mechanism among India, Pakistan and the Kashmiris to oversee this self-
rule.
There was a wide gulf between what Manmohan Singh saw as a
consultative mechanism to ‘solving problems of economic and social
development’ and what Musharraf wanted in the supervisory mechanism to
oversee self-governance. But in other areas, Lambah and Aziz worked out
compromises on the issue of demilitarization, the issue of subregional
autonomy and the concept of self-rule.
The two sides came close to an agreement, but in the end they faltered.
By the time Lambah and Aziz had an agreed formula, Musharraf’s grip on
power had begun to loosen. Had an agreement been reached at the end of
2006, history may have been different. But it was not to be.
The India–Pakistan peace process saw the hardliners being sidelined, but
they were hardly silent. In April 2007, to mark his return to the Valley
following cancer surgery in Mumbai, Syed Ali Shah Geelani held a massive
rally in Srinagar’s Idgah Maidan to announce his rejection of Musharraf’s
four-point proposal. Parallel to the process with Pakistan, N.N. Vohra had
been working hard to encourage the separatists to also enter the dialogue.
The government came up with the roundtable concept to involve all shades
of Kashmiri opinion in dialogue. They first met in February 2006, and the
Hurriyat had promised that they would attend the second meeting in May,
but they eventually decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
The second roundtable set up five working groups, the first to promote
confidence-building measures to heal the wounds of the insurgency, the
second to strengthen relations across the LoC, the third for the economic
development of J & K, the fourth to ensure good governance and the fifth
for Centre–state relations and to examine issues relating to autonomy.
The first four groups quickly did their work, which was discussed in the
third roundtable that met in April 2007, but the fifth one, headed by Justice
Saghir Ahmad, took its own time.9 Eventually, it submitted a report in 2009
in which it side-stepped the main issues, dealing neither with the separatist
demands, nor Article 370, nor the NC’s call for greater autonomy as per its
2000 resolution in the state assembly and nor the self-rule issue floated by
the PDP. Its recommendations sank without a trace.10
An interesting sidelight to these issues was the May 2007 visit to New
Delhi by Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, the Mujahid-e-Awwal (the first
mujahid) of the Kashmir rebellion in 1947. He had served as the president
of Azad Kashmir (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, or POK) thrice and as prime
minister from 1991–96, with his son also occupying the latter office in 2006
and 2010. In New Delhi, the Sardar came out as a strong supporter of the
peace process and as an advocate of the ‘slow and steady’ approach towards
resolving the J & K issue. He termed the UN resolutions obsolete, and he
called for a programme for Pakistani militants to return home and the
Kashmiris in POK to come back to the Valley.
Not surprisingly, even as these efforts were on, terrorist strikes aimed at
derailing the process also occurred. In April 2006, amidst efforts to start
talks with the moderate faction of the Hurriyat, thirty-five Hindu civilians
were killed by terrorists in the Doda and Udhampur districts. In May, a
suicide attack targeting Chief Minister Azad at a Congress rally, on the eve
of the roundtable conference, succeeded in killing five people and injured
several, including the IG of Police, K. Rajendran. In June 2006,
unidentified gunmen, most likely belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba,
kidnapped ten Nepali and Bihari labourers, and a local Muslim Rashtriya
Rifles soldier in Kulgam. The soldier was tortured and beheaded, and all the
others, except a Muslim, were killed. On 11 July 2006, there were five
grenade attacks targeting tourists in the Srinagar area, leading to the deaths
of six persons.
Terror strikes across India also continued, though it was not always clear
who the perpetrators were. A major attack on the Shramjeevi Express near
Jaunpur led to thirteen casualties; worse was a series of blasts on the
Samjhauta Express that ran between India and Pakistan; most of the victims
were Pakistani. There were attacks on Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad,
allegedly by Hindutva terrorists. But the most serious attack took place on
11 July in Mumbai, when a series of seven bomb blasts took place in local
trains, killing 209 persons and injuring over 700. The authorities blamed
Pakistan, but subsequently an Indian Mujahideen man claimed
responsibility.
India and Pakistan now experimented with a joint antiterrorism
institutional mechanism to identify and implement counterterrorism
initiatives and investigations. Little came out of this somewhat bold
experiment though.

The Amarnath Agitation

The Amarnath controversy was triggered by a decision of the J & K
government, in May 2008, to transfer 39.88 hectares of forest land near
Pahalgam to the Amarnath Shrine Board in order to set up temporary
facilities for the Hindu pilgrims who visit the Amarnath Shrine every year.
This triggered a huge demonstration in the Valley, led by the Hurriyat, who
charged that this was but a step to alter the demography of the Valley. The
government revoked the transfer in July 2008.
 In the meantime a counter agitation had begun to protest the revocation
of the transfer, led by the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti, a platform with
twenty-eight other groups, whose real leadership was in the hands of the
Sangh Parivar, who instituted a road blockade of the Valley, leading to
shortages.11
This, in turn, tipped public opinion in the Valley in favour of the
separatists and even brought the two factions of the Hurriyat under one
umbrella organization led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The demonstrations
became even larger and the separatist leadership— Geelani, Yasin Malik,
Shabbir Shah, the Mirwaiz and others— who had been lying low for a
while got a new lease of life. They organized a ‘Muzaffarabad chalo’ march
from Srinagar to the capital of POK, which was blocked by the police, and
in an incident of firing, Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz was killed.
Many more died as the authorities sought to gain control of the situation.
The PDP withdrew support from the Congress-led government, which
decided to resign. In any case, the state assembly elections were due later in
the year.
This was perhaps the first public protest where new media played a role.
Abusive messages targeting the state Congress leadership led to a
temporary ban on SMSs. Pictures and videos posted on YouTube and
Google gave the protest a venom that the state had not seen before. It also
saw TV channels in Jammu and the Valley being used to fan the fire.
The agitation finally ended when, in a compromise decision, the
government agreed to allow the Amarnath Shrine Board temporary use of
40 hectares during the yatra period. There were questions, though, about
whether the issue was mishandled by the governor, Lt Gen. (retd) S.K.
Sinha and the Congress–PDP coalition government.12
In the midst of all this, there was one important change: the Central
Reserve Police Force replaced the Border Security Force (BSF) in the
principal towns of the Valley. This was part of a reform process that saw the
BSF being designated as a border guarding force and the CRPF being given
internal security duties. The switchover had actually begun in 2004, starting
with Srinagar. The BSF had been in the state from the outset, when they had
been thrust into the fight, untrained. As this book describes, they had
eventually succeeded in wiping out the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front
(JKLF) and imposing heavy attrition on the Hizbul Mujahideen. But their
record on the human rights front was none too good. While the Army did
punish excesses committed by their personnel, the BSF dragged its feet.
There has been no real closure in most of the cases described in the book.13
The changeover led to some dislocation of the security grid, though, by
now, the J & K Police had become the major mainstay of counter-militancy
operations, especially in the urban areas of the Valley.

The Elections of 2008

Three months after the agitation and violence came the state assembly
elections. Despite a call for a boycott by the Hurriyat, people turned out in
greater numbers than ever before. The 63 per cent turnout was 17 per cent
higher than it was in 2002, and spoke for itself.
The NC bagged twenty-eight seats, the number it held earlier, the PDP’s
tally went up from sixteen to twenty-one, while the Congress came down
three seats to seventeen. But the big gainer was the BJP, whose tally went
up to eleven from the lone seat they had held earlier. An NC–Congress
coalition government was formed under the leadership of Omar Abdullah,
Farooq’s son and former Union minister.
The turnout, despite the divisive Amarnath agitation, indicated that the
public wanted peace above everything else. It was also a dividend of sorts
from the peace process with Pakistan, which had seen a steady decline of
militants entering the Valley and the consequent decline of violence.
Pakistan, itself, now entered an even more turbulent phase. In March
2007, Musharraf got into a wrangle with Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry,
leading to a debilitating lawyers’ agitation. In July 2007, the Pakistan
Special Forces’ storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad led to the jihadi
violence spreading across the country and turning on the Pakistani state that
had nurtured it in the past. In early November, Musharraf declared
Emergency and suspended the Constitution and, later in the month,
demitted office as the Army chief.
In December that year, Benazir Bhutto, who had returned after general
elections were called, was assassinated. In February 2008, the general
elections took place, and the PPP got 118 seats against Nawaz Sharif’s
Pakistan Muslim League (PLM-N)’s eighty-nine. The PML(Q), or the
‘King’s Party’, associated with Musharraf, got only fifty. Resisting
American pressure to back Musharraf, the two leading parties, the PML(N)
and the PPP, agreed to form a coalition. Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of
Benazir, and Nawaz Sharif agreed on Yousaf Raza Gilani as the prime
minister. Immediately, the two victors set about undercutting Musharraf,
who, facing impeachment, resigned from his post as President in August
2008. Following this, presidential elections were held, which were won by
Zardari. But within two years he saw his powers being whittled through a
constitutional amendment and a steady attrition imposed by the Army.
Initially, Zardari signalled a desire to pick up where Musharraf had left off
in his dealings with India. But it became clear that he did not have the
support of the new Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, whose
previous job had been as the ISI chief from 2004–07. With Kayani as the
ISI chief, the Pakistan Army had decelerated its support to the Kashmir
jihad, but with him as the chief, the Army was not willing to back the larger
scheme initiated by Musharraf to wind down tensions with India.
One manifestation of this was the November 2008 terror attack in
Mumbai, which clearly had ISI’s fingerprints on it. The Pakistani
establishment braced for an Indian response and came under enormous
American pressure to act against its jihadis. The Pakistani support for
terrorist acts in other parts of India declined consequently, and the attacks
subsequently limited themselves to the cross-border area in Jammu,
focusing on the police and the Army, rather than non-combatants. But the
scale and audacity of the Mumbai attack, as well as the fact of its clear links
to some Pakistani officials, have poisoned relations between the two
countries since.
The Shopian ‘Rape’ Case (2009) and Machil (2010)
Less than a year after Omar Abdullah took office, the Valley was rocked by
what is known as the Shopian rape case. Two young women, sisters-in-law,
failed to return from their orchard. On 30 May 2009 their bodies were
found a kilometre apart. The locals alleged that both had been raped and
killed by the security forces. The police initially denied the rape charge, but
eventually they filed an FIR of rape and murder, triggering off widespread
protests across the state.
An inquiry into the Shopian incident by Justice Muzaffar Jan confirmed
the charge. Violence rocked the state through the month of June, with the
Hurriyat, again, leading the protests, which were put down with a heavy
hand.
The case took a dramatic twist when it transpired that the vaginal swabs
of the women had purportedly been tampered with. The Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) joined the investigation and concluded that six doctors
had fudged the evidence while preparing the post-mortem report. The CBI
held that neither woman had had been raped, and both had probably
drowned. Following this, journalist Harinder Baweja reported that the
fudging of evidence had been done at the behest of the Majlis-e-
Mashawarat, an organization that was leading the agitation against the
security forces, and that the CBI had audio tapes to prove it.14 Like many
other such incidents, there was really no closure for the stakeholders, with
one side believing that justice had not been done, and the other declaring a
closure based on evidence.
In early 2010, the Indian Army claimed to have killed three infiltrators in
the Machil sector in Kupwara. It turned out later that the encounter was
fake and three civilians had been lured into an Army camp on the promise
of jobs and murdered instead.15 This triggered a series of protests,
especially since the Army seemed to be trying to cover up the affair. In one
incident in June, seventeen-year-old Tufail Mattoo, who was playing cricket
nearby, was killed by a tear-gas shell. This set off a cycle of violence with
more deaths followed by more protests. More than 100 civilians died in the
subsequent violent protests leading to stone-pelting and arson.
The Army subsequently convicted six soldiers, including one officer, and
sentenced them to life imprisonment for the staged killing. However, in
2017, their sentence was suspended by an Armed Forces Tribunal. Just what
this means is not clear.16
The conflict has changed character in broadly every decade since 1990.
One feature of this has been the reduction in the allegations against the
Army from 1170 in the 1990s to below ten in each of the years between
2009–10. In March 2018, the Union government claimed that of the
seventeen cases alleging human rights violation by the armed forces in the
2015–17 period, twelve were found to be false. Yet, this affirmation was not
the full picture. With the police forces now in the vanguard of most counter-
militancy operations, there were charges against them, especially the
Special Operations Group and its successors, which are parts of the J & K
Police.
Among the cables that surfaced through WikiLeaks, was one dated April
2005, which stated that based on 1500 prisoner interviews in the 2002–04
period, the International Committee of the Red Cross had concluded that
prison abuse, including torture, was a continuing feature in Kashmir. This is
probably a reality that has not gone away, even today.17

The Decline of Militancy

Militancy, as we indicated earlier, continued to decline through 2011. By
the end of the year the authorities assessed that militancy was really a
problem only in the core districts of Srinagar, Baramulla, Kupwara and
Pulwama. In that year a record 10 lakh tourists visited the Valley—way
more than had visited it in its peak before the militancy. Indeed, the police
chief, Kuldeep Khoda, claimed at the end of 2011 that no civilian had been
killed in the Valley that year. He also said that the police was acquiring non-
lethal weapons and equipment to deal with crowds, and was planning to
train some of their units in handling violent civil protests.
 In the meantime, the government had, in October 2010, appointed
another set of interlocutors—journalist Dilip Padgaonkar, educationist
M.M. Ansari and Delhi Policy Group trustee Radha Kumar—to try and
push forward a settlement. For the first time the interlocutors were not
government officials, retired or otherwise. Their broad recommendation
was that the state should not be divided, the distinctive status under Article
370 be upheld and the aspirations of ethnically diverse regions—Jammu,
Kashmir and Ladakh and other subregions—be addressed. They felt that to
this end a constitutional committee be set up to review all the acts and
articles of the Constitution of India that had been extended to the state after
the signing of the 1952 agreement. The interlocutors made heroic efforts to
open a dialogue with the Hurriyat and the JKLF, but failed. These groups
demanded that the political prisoners be released, bunkers removed and
draconian legislation, like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)
and the Public Security Act (PSA), be reviewed prior to their commitment.
From 2010 onwards, setting aside the rancour of 26/11, India resumed
official relations with Pakistan, though it was clear that the Mumbai attack
remained a major issue. American pressure played a role since the US,
committed to withdrawing from Afghanistan, wanted to stabilize the
situation in the region. This came at a time when Pakistan began to face a
major challenge from the terrorist actions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban
Pakistan. Formal official talks began in 2012. By this time, there were
reports of several incidents signalling that the ceasefire along the LoC was
not all that healthy.
In 2013, the hanging of Afzal Guru, a peripheral player in the 2001 attack
on the Parliament House, led to another surge of public protests, though a
prolonged curfew prevented the worst. The hanging occurred almost thirty
years to the date of the execution of Maqbool Butt, and it was not surprising
that Guru was also seen as a martyr to the Kashmiri cause. The event
contributed to the further alienation of the Valley’s Kashmiris, and eroded
the support of the NC.
Stone-Pelting and Next-generation Militancy
The declining militant violence paradoxically led to a greater level of public
violence. People, especially young students, felt freer to come out and
protest in the open, and the security forces found themselves constrained,
because instead of guns, their opponents were using stones. The militancy
was mutating into what can be termed ‘violent civil protest’.
The Amarnath agitation, the protests against the Shopian rape case, the
Machil murders and the hanging of Afzal Guru saw the large-scale
participation of people, mainly the young, in the Valley, and the use of
stone-pelting to attack the security forces. While there may have been a
couple of hundred stone-pelting incidents in 2008 and 2009, they rose to
over 2000 in 2010, leading to more than 5000 arrests. A more alarming
feature were the public protests that arose at the site of an encounter. People
raised slogans, pelted stones, even while the security forces were involved
in a gun battle with the militants.
This was a challenge that the authorities were clearly unused to. Shooting
at armed militants was a straightforward affair, but how could you shoot at
young boys and girls who were pelting stones? This was also a morale issue
for the forces, since the stones, while not lethal, could seriously injure a
person. One major problem was that the Indian security forces were simply
not equipped to deal with the violent civil protest. They were oriented
towards dealing with militants and guns, and lacked both equipment and
training for this new kind of violence.
Confronted with this dilemma, the security forces sought non-lethal
alternatives, and what they settled on were shotguns that fire pellets. Now,
anyone familiar with such guns knows that they have pellets of varying
sizes, from the tiny birdshot to the larger buckshot capable of killing a deer.
Thousands of people have been injured by these guns and hundreds have
received eye injuries, some of them serious enough to cause permanent
blinding. Some people even died after being shot by such guns. Potentially,
even a tear-gas shell can kill if fired at close range straight into a crowd.
The issues with the pellet guns were their quality—were the police using
the right kind of shells? And were they being handled properly? Instead of
being fired at face level, they ought to have been targeting the feet of the
protestors, and that, too, at ranges of 20–30 metres. But this is easier said
than done, and in the heat of the moment these things are difficult to
control.
It is surprising as to why these were chosen, because a report of the
Bureau Police Research and Development (BPRD), a police think-tank, on
ways to deal with non-lethal protest in February 2011, did not even consider
pellet guns. The BPRD had recommended water cannons, tear gas, the
stinger device and dye-marker grenades, tasers and lasers, net guns and
stink bombs. Plastic bullets were also considered, but the report said they
had not been tested in India.
The police were clearly not trained to deal with this shift in the nature of
the violence. More important, their leaders did not realize that the new
situation required a parallel approach that emphasized riot control along
with combating militancy.

The AFSPA and the PSA

A lot of the ire of J & K opinion has been targeted on the use/ misuse of the
Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Public Security Act. Former
Union home secretary, G.K. Pillai, was honest enough to admit in a
monograph on the AFSPA: ‘Certain clear cases of human rights violations,
where the armed forces have stonewalled all attempts to investigate and
punish those who are obviously guilty, have only strengthened the
widespread perception that the AFSPA is for the protection of the armed
forces personnel— and thus encourages human rights violations.’18
The application of the AFSPA has, of course, been criticized in other
states like Manipur, Nagaland and Assam, and also because it has been
widely misused and has encouraged a climate of impunity among the
security forces. The act is meant to provide immunity to military personnel
while conducting counter-insurgency operations. It indemnifies them
against accidental killings, or even errors, that can lead to deaths. But it
cannot and should not be used to protect those who have wilfully done
something illegal. Sadly, the Army has used the AFSPA to prevent justice
from taking its course, as in the Pathribal case, in which the military dilly-
dallied for five years, and it was only in 2006 that the CBI determined that
the five persons shot by the Army as militants responsible for the
Chittisinghpura massacre, were, in reality, local villagers.19
A report by journalist Naseer Ganai citing a Rajya Sabha question in
January 2018 noted that the J & K state government had sent a request
seeking sanction for the prosecution of Army and central paramilitary
personnel in fifty cases since 2001 and that the Union government had
denied permission in each instance. Some of the cases were in relation to
killing after abduction, ‘outraging the modesty of a woman’, disappearances
of civilians, rape and torture. Indeed, it is believed that no case seeking
sanction for prosecution has been approved by the Union government to
date.20
As for the PSA, it is similar to the National Security Act, in which people
can be detained for months on end without any judicial process. Tens of
thousands of people have been detained in J & K under this act. But in the
case of the PSA, the courts have not been entirely quiescent. A report in
Greater Kashmir revealed that between 2008 and 2017, 1706 detentions
had been quashed by courts, pointing to the misuse of the act. In 2012, the
act was diluted to prevent its application to minors, and the detention period
was reduced to three months, from the earlier period of one year. But in the
high tide of civil protest in 2016 and 2017 over 1000 persons were detained
under the act.

The State Assembly Elections of 2014

The elections took place after the victory of the BJP in the Lok Sabha
elections. Predictably, the separatists called for a boycott of the elections.
Not surprisingly, the NC–Congress alliance came apart before the elections.
The BJP ran a hard campaign seeking to capitalize on its win in the Lok
Sabha polls, terming its campaign ‘Mission 44’, the number of seats they
needed to get a majority in the eighty-seven-member J & K assembly.
But the elections brought surprises for everyone. What Mission 44 did
was to push some boycotters to participate in the elections out of fear of the
BJP. The result was higher polling percentages in the urban constituencies
of the Valley, which had been prone to de facto boycotts in the previous
elections. The overall turnout clocked in at 66 per cent, the highest ever.
The PDP, which had expected to come close to thirty-five or so, ended up
with the same number of seats the NC had in 2008—twenty-eight. The
BJP’s tally went up to twenty-five, largely in the Jammu region, at the
expense of the Congress. The NC, which was expecting a washout, actually
managed to get fifteen seats and the Congress twelve. Ironically, the
Congress was the only party that won seats in the Valley, Jammu and the
Ladakh subregions. While the BJP swept the Jammu region, it drew a blank
in the Valley and Ladakh. The NC and PDP had failed to get a presence
south of the Pir Panjal.
The way the results were structured, the best coalition available was that
of the PDP and the BJP. The two quickly came up with a Common
Minimum Programme, and the BJP agreed that Mufti Mohammad Sayeed
could be the chief minister for the entire six-year term instead of rotating
the office between the two coalition partners.
Mufti managed to make this unlikely coalition work for the two years he
was chief minister before he passed away in January 2016. His successor,
daughter Mehbooba Mufti, delayed her entry into office till April, in part
because she was aware of the growing disquiet within PDP ranks relating to
the coalition.
Burhan Wani, Operation All-Out and ‘Surgical
Strikes’
The BJP government in New Delhi, which was also part of the coalition in
Srinagar, had definite ideas about how to deal with J & K and Pakistan. The
goal was to deliver what, in its opinion, would be a coup de grâce to the
militant movement. This envisaged a two-stage process—isolating and
neutralizing the Hurriyat by refusing any talks with them and aggressively
prosecuting them on account of illegal funding, and by undertaking a
draconian police/Army campaign with the suggestive title ‘Operation All-
Out’. As the Army chief, Bipin Rawat, pointed out, those who were
obstructing the security forces during security operations were nothing but
‘over ground workers of terrorists’, anyway.21
In 2012, as we previously noted, came the historic low when eighty-four
militants and seventeen security service personnel were killed. Numbers,
especially of security force personnel killed, started rising sharply
thereafter. But the big jump came in 2016, when the numbers of security
force personnel went up to eighty-eight and those of militants killed were
165. In 2017, the number of militants killed was 213 and security personnel
killed was eighty-three. As of 26 August 2018, sixty-two security personnel
and 144 militants have been killed.22
The crackdown on the so-called ‘overground workers’ (OGW) used the
National Investigation Agency to investigate and arrest several Kashmiri
businessmen and associates of the Hurriyat leaders on account of illegally
funding the insurgency. Among those caught were Nayeem Ahmad Khan,
Salahuddin’s son Syed Shahid Yusuf and Geelani’s son-in-law Altaf Ahmad
Shah, aka Altaf Funtoosh, and his aide Peer Saifullah.
In December 2015, Modi’s dramatic gesture of landing in Lahore on 25
December to felicitate Nawaz Sharif on his birthday came apart when
Pakistani militants penetrated the border a week later and attacked the
Pathankot Air Force Station. This triggered a shift in New Delhi’s stance,
characterized by a refusal to have any dialogue with Pakistan, even while
seeking the international proscription of Islamabad on the issue of
terrorism. It is another matter that in this period, Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif steadily lost authority and was eventually forced out of office
through a questionable quasi-legal process.
The PDP alliance with the BJP had its own blowback. Referred to earlier
as the ‘soft’ separatists, the PDP had attracted a certain kind of a Valley
Kashmiri, especially in its southern districts, who was not quite hard-line,
but who could not stomach the NC either. Many of the young who had
enthusiastically backed the PDP in the elections now began to drift to the
militant fold.
These young men helped revive the Hizbul Mujahideen. The most
charismatic of these was Burhan Wani, who had joined militancy in the
tumultuous days of 2010 at the age of fifteen. He became the most well-
known face of militancy after he posted a picture in July 2015 on Facebook
of himself along with ten other militants dressed in combat fatigues and
posing with assault rifles in an orchard.
It is not clear whether he was actually involved in any specific militant
operation, but he certainly became the revived Hizbul Mujahideen’s poster
boy and recruiting agent. He would routinely upload video messages
promoting the ‘movement’ and attacking those who stood in its way.
Realizing that his fame was encouraging local youth to join militancy, the
government targeted him and succeeded in killing him in an encounter on 8
July 2016.23
Wani’s death led to massive protests in the Valley, with his funeral alone
drawing 2 lakh people. Schools were burned down and police stations and
security forces were attacked; the latter retaliated, often with pellet guns,
leading to blinding and injuries of the protestors. More than ninety people
died in the subsequent unrest and 15,000 civilians and 4000 security
personnel were injured in the two-month-long cycle of violence. At least
1000 were hit by pellets in the eyes, causing an international furore.
The symbiotic relationship between armed militancy and violent civil
protestors was not a happy one for the security forces. General Bipin Rawat
was not wrong to warn of the dangers of civil protestors foiling security
operations. This was brinksmanship that could come undone if a grenade
were to go the wrong way or if an AK-47 were misdirected.
The dilemmas posed by stone-pelting protestors were manifold. Take two
instances in 2018. In one, in January, the Army killed two persons when
they had to confront a stone-pelting crowd in the midst of a security
operation in a village in the Shopian district. In April, an Army operation
was disrupted by stone-pelting locals. A soldier and four civilians were
killed in the melee that enabled the three militants, who had been forced to
hole up by the security forces, to escape.
As far as Pakistan was concerned, the government’s signalling was not
very clear. It made a big fuss over the September 2016 Uri attack and
launched a retaliatory self-described ‘surgical strike’ eleven days later.
Considerable use was made of the so-called ‘surgical strikes’ in the Uttar
Pradesh state assembly elections that the BJP swept a few months later.
Pakistan blandly denied that such strikes took place at all.
Whatever be the case, the deterrent effect of the strikes faded out when
little or nothing was done after a much more serious attack by Pakistani
militants on a military formation in Nagrota, the headquarters of a key corps
deployed in Kashmir a few months later. Two years later, in February 2018,
the Sunjwan Army camp was attacked by another group of Jaish militants,
leading to the deaths of five Army personnel, including two junior
commissioned officers. There was no Indian response.
Ironically, the net result of the blood-and-iron strategy of the government
has been an increase of the number of militants. Before the new government
took office, Ministry of Home Affairs figures show that militancy was on a
downward trend. But from 2016 onwards there has been a sharp rise in the
violence.24
Given the head count of militants killed, there should have been no
militants left in the Valley. But, of course, that has not happened. In May
2018, for example, where the security forces killed thirty-four militants
since the beginning of the year, forty-eight new recruits had taken to arms.
In 2017, eighty-six of the 200-odd militants killed were locals. But 126
Kashmiris are believed to have joined the ranks of militancy.25
 In June 2018, journalist Muzamil Jaleel came out with a series of reports
based on a study of J & K militancy by the state police department. The
report gave a picture of the new-age militancy that Burhan Wani
represented. These are among its findings:

1. Emotions, rather than any Islamist ideology, were the key driver in the
recruitment of new local militants. These emotions were heightened
following an encounter or a killing of a militant and amplified by his
funeral. This led to a surge of new recruitments that took place, in the main,
from an area within 10–15 kilometres of the encounter site, or the house of
a killed militant.
2. Of the 467 local militants who joined militancy since 2010, as many as
354 came from south Kashmir. The epicentre of the new militancy were
areas around the Shopian, Kulgam, Awantipora, Anantnag and Pulwama
districts. The older areas around Srinagar, Bandipore, Sopore and Kupwara
continued to provide recruits as well.
3. 32 per cent of the new militants had passed class ten, 19 per cent were
undergraduates and 7 per cent were postgraduates, with a like number of
people who had no formal education. Most had never been to a madrasa or
a dargah and were products of state government schools.
4. 65 per cent had displayed religious inclination, 10 per cent were
‘academically inclined’, 3 per cent were drug addicts and 22 per cent
‘vagabonds’.
5. 25 per cent had access to social media in 2010, a figure that went up to
30 per cent in 2014 and 70 per cent in 2015.
6. Because their motivation is emotional, most of these young militants are
rarely trained and use guns snatched from security forces. A majority are
quickly hunted down and killed, usually near the place they were brought
up in.

Simultaneously, things on the LoC also heated up. In 2015 the government
adopted a strategy of ‘massive retaliation’ along the LoC whenever Pakistan
resorted to firing. As a result the situation went from bad to worse and, at
the end of 2017, the government reported that where Pakistan had broken
the ceasefire 228 times in 2016, they had upped the ante to 771 violations in
2017. In the first five months of 2018, even these figures shot up, with India
recording more than 1200 violations. This led to massive dislocations of
populations along the LoC and the deaths of civilians and security
personnel on both sides.
As for the Hurriyat, the events of the past three years helped it unite
under the leadership of Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the banner of the Joint
Resistance Leadership (JLR). Actually, the JLR was set up to oppose a
proposal to resettle Pandits in the Valley in special camps along with ex-
servicemen. But the Burhan Wani protests gave it considerable wind, as did
its leadership in opposing talks with interlocutor Dineshwar Sharma. But, as
in the past, the JLR did not create events, it was merely carried by them.

The Kashmir Treadmill

The rebellion seems to be lost in a downward spiral. Violence begets
repression, which exhausts itself to the point of a ceasefire, when an
interlocutor is appointed to find a way out. He, in any case, is predestined to
failure, and then we go back and repeat the cycle, with the overall situation
a little worse than before.
This time around, in October 2017, the government first announced that
former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma would be the
government’s ‘special representative’ to carry forward the dialogue with ‘all
sections of the people’. Sharma, however, was given no clear mandate and
it was clear that his main goal was to calm down the situation, rather than
trying to resolve anything.
Only six months later, on 16 May 2018, did the Union government use
the occasion of the month of Ramzan to declare a ceasefire. Of course, it
came with all the caveats that the forces would retaliate against any action
of the terrorists, and so on. At the end of May, things came full circle when
the two countries agreed to implement their tattered 2003 ceasefire. This
came through backchannel talks between senior military officials on both
sides.
The India–Pakistan reset may have been initiated by the dialogue
between the National Security Advisers of the two countries in Bangkok in
December 2017. On 19 May 2018 Modi had personally paid a visit to J &
K, but just for a couple of hours, to inaugurate some projects, that, too, by
remote control from Srinagar. Speaking for the first time since the Ramzan
ceasefire, all that the prime minister had to say was to call on the
‘misguided youth’ to shun violence and join the mainstream. He lamented
that ‘every stone or weapon picked by the youth of the state is only meant
to destabilize their own state’.26
But this ceasefire also looked doomed. The opponents of the ceasefire,
almost certainly a clutch of separatist militants and Pakistanis, sharply
upped the violence by taking advantage of the Army stopping its cordon-
and-search operations. Then, in a coup de main, Shujaat Bukhari, a senior
journalist and editor-in-chief of Rising Kashmir, was assassinated on the
eve of Eid on 14 June 2018. He was the first journalist to be killed in a
decade, and his murder was clearly intended to shock.
To cap these developments as it were, in June 2018, the BJP withdrew
from the coalition government it had formed with the PDP. As a result, the
state once again came under Governor’s Rule. The unlikely coalition of the
BJP and the PDP did last two years, but eventually, the BJP seems to have
calculated that it was paying too big a political price in propping up the
PDP-led government. The Kathua rape case of January 2018 had roiled ties
between the local unit of the BJP and the PDP, and the Central leadership of
the BJP probably felt that there was little point in going into the coming
general elections as a coalition partner of the PDP.
This was, however, a clear abdication of the role of the party as the head
of the Union government, whose larger task is to preserve the sovereignty
and integrity of the country. Following the retirement of Governor Vohra on
23 August 2018, the Government of India appointed Satya Pal Malik, a
politician who has a socialist background. Malik’s choice is unusual since
he is neither a former bureaucrat nor does he belong to the military.
Resolution: The Long and the Short of It
A long look back at the J & K situation makes it clear that the only way to
deal with it is through dialogue and negotiation. This process must be
synchronized in such a way that the both the Valley and the Pakistan
element are dealt with together. Privileging one over the other will not
work.
In the period 2004–06, India and Pakistan found themselves in a sweet
spot and could move forward with out-of-the-box options. One big reason
was the legacy of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, which was built
upon by the one headed by Manmohan Singh. But perhaps more important
was the fact that the Army chief of Pakistan was the same person who was
its civilian head of state and government: President Pervez Musharraf.
In great measure, what New Delhi needs to deal with is both sentiment
and reality. In today’s connected world the meaning of azadi is somewhat
ambiguous. At one level, there is greater interdependence of town and
country, regions, subregions and nations, while, at another, the cyberworld
links us in unimaginable ways in the 21st century. It is significant that the
peace process reached its pinnacle in the 2004–07 period, and that the
starting point was a SAARC summit that committed the region towards
creating a South Asian Free Trade Area which would mean zero tariffs and
the ability to move freely in the entire South Asian region. Embedding a J &
K process within a larger South Asian one that would not touch the existing
boundaries, and yet make them irrelevant, is not all that far-fetched or
fanciful.
But it requires application and expending a large amount of political
capital in both India and Pakistan. The larger-than-life figure that has shown
the way is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a product of the RSS, who journeyed to the
Minar-e-Pakistan, and when foiled in Kargil, reached out again to
Musharraf in Agra, and failed again. But he still persisted and finally
brought him around. Of course, external circumstances played a role, they
always do, but they cannot trump the role played by a great individual.
 Modi, too, reached out to Pakistan but was spooked by a minor attack on
an Indian airbase and did a U-turn. Subsequently, he has been unable to
fulfil one of the key conditions towards restoring normalcy in J & K—
making a deal with Islamabad.
This brings us to another problematic legacy of the present government
—the conflation of militancy with terrorism. Aimed at a domestic
constituency, it has actually boxed in the government itself. You can
negotiate with militants, as Vajpayee had sought to do in 2000, and as Modi
himself was doing with the Naga insurgents, but you cannot talk to
terrorists. This is presuming the government understands that terrorists are
those who attack non-combatants, and militants are those whose normal
targets are the state or symbols of the state.
There is another major problem when we think of the Modi government
leading any kind of a peace and reconciliation process in Jammu and
Kashmir. One of the BJP’s core issues is the need to eliminate Article 370
from the Constitution, a legacy of its predecessor organization, the Jana
Sangh. Offering lesser autonomy to the Kashmiris provides the government
little room to initiate any kind of a political dialogue with the Kashmiri
separatists.
Even so, there are short-term measures that need to be put in place. The
first among these is the need to ensure that the Acts like the AFSPA and the
PSA are not seen as instruments of oppression but as unfortunate
necessities. This requires the government to insist on draconian safeguards
for draconian legislation. As of now, there are no provisions to prevent the
misuse of the provisions of the legislation.
Expert committees such as the Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Committee, the
Administrative Reforms Commission and the Justice Hegde Commission
have recommended the repeal of the AFSPA. There are many areas of the
act that can be fixed—for one, denying sanction to security forces to shoot
and kill even when they are not in danger; and second, by providing a
review mechanism to decide whether or not a particular case is fit for the
application of the act.
 The Army and the security machinery in general, too, need to understand
that oft-stated principle, that the key to winning a counter-insurgency
conflict is in winning the hearts and minds of the people. A 2010 RAND
Corporation study of thirty counter-insurgency campaigns across the world
showed that only eight had succeeded. It noted that repression and
punishment provided only temporary relief. But what was important was
material support from neighbouring countries, and that this support often
trumped popular support for the insurgents.27 Essentially, there is no
avoiding dealing with Pakistan.
Given the Kashmir story, the government would even now be advised to
look at this issue of better ways of dealing with violent civil protest.
Standard operating procedures are needed to ensure that lethal force is used
only when there is a serious and imminent threat to life and property. The
challenge is to tire out the mob, not decimate it. And force should be used
proportionately, not as a punitive measure.
Riot police in many other democratic countries often deal with mobs,
some of whom toss stones and Molotov cocktails at them. Dealing with
such challenges requires much greater concentrations of the police at given
locations, the provision of protective gear and training and conditioning to
deal with the mob on a sustained basis. If the police personnel are too few
or ill equipped, it only adds to the problem because security forces often
feel threatened and open fire as a defensive measure, to protect themselves.
In his study The Changing Face of War, the Israeli military historian
Martin van Creveld analysed several counter-insurgency campaigns. He
commends the British approach in Northern Ireland, where after initial
errors in the early 1970s, the British settled for the long haul, with a
strategy that emphasized staying within the framework of law, avoiding
torture, illegal killings and arbitrary punishments. There were excesses, but
they were quickly checked. Significantly, van Creveld is harsh when
speaking on the tactics of the Israeli Defence Forces, who killed hundreds,
blew up the houses of many suspected terrorists and broke the arms and
legs of protestors, all to defeat the First Intifada in the late 1980s. As we
know, the Israelis have not succeeded, whereas there is now peace in
Northern Ireland.

Notes
1. ‘Fatalities in Terrorist Violence, 1988–2018’, Jammu and Kashmir Data
Sheets, South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), https://bit.ly/2Phs29a. The
portal also has a list of fatalities from the Ministry of Home Affairs data.
We have, however, used the SATP’s own data.
2. Shujaat Bukhari, ‘Centre, Hizbul commanders hold talks’, The Hindu, 4
August 2000, https://bit.ly/2wbIBur.
3. ‘Vajpayee announces ceasefire in J&K’, The Hindu, 20 November 2000,
https://bit.ly/2Mkgnbz.
4. ‘One election that wasn’t rigged’, The Economist, 10 October 2002,
https://econ.st/2L1GDlv.
5. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ‘Statement by Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari
Vajpayee in Lok Sabha on his two-day visit to Jammu & Kashmir’, 22
April 2003, transcript, https://bit.ly/2wsE33T.
6. ‘Fatalities in Terrorist Violence, 1988–2018’.
7. Manmohan Singh, ‘PM’s speech on launch of Amritsar– Nankana Sahib
Bus Service’, 24 March 2006, transcript, Amrtisar,
https://bit.ly/2MAbhIw.
8. Satinder Lambah, in conversation with the author, sometime in 2008, in
New Delhi. Being a part of the National Security Advisory Board in the
2004–07 period, I was involved in the shaping of that policy.
9. ‘Square the roundtable’, Hindustan Times, 26 April 2007,
https://bit.ly/2BUj6Uu.
10. A.G. Noorani, ‘A cruel hoax’, Frontline 27, no. 3 (30 Jan.–12 Feb.
2010), https://bit.ly/2ofin6E.
11. A.G. Noorani, ‘Why Jammu Erupts’, Frontline 25, no. 19 (13–26 Sep.
2008), https://bit.ly/2ohFC02.
12. ‘Congress plays blame game on Amarnath land controversy’, Times of
India, 30 June 2018, https://bit.ly/2wrCF0o.
13. One major incident, for example, remains unpunished. See Majid
Maqbool, ‘At Bijbehara, Site of 1993 massacre, the Killing of 43
Kashmiris Is Still a Raw Wound’, Wire, 22 October 2017,
 https://bit.ly/2wmszPb. In another instance, the BSF said that it had
punished several personnel for the massacre of fifty-five civilians in
Sopore in January 1993, but the maximum punishment they suffered was
dismissal from service or loss of seniority. See Shafaq Shah, ‘All guilty
were punished: BSF Report’, Greater Kashmir, 18 December 2017,
https://bit.ly/2ofGz95.
14. Harinder Baweja, ‘Exclusive: Shopian truth nailed’, India Today, 13
February 2010, https://bit.ly/2PhkLVS.
15. Peerzada Ashiq, ‘Six Army men sentenced to life in Machil fake
encounter case’, The Hindu, 7 September 2015, https://bit.ly/2PebfD6.
16. ‘Machil “fake” encounter: Tribunal stays life term to 5 soldiers, gives
them bail’, Hindustan Times, 7 September 2018, https://bit.ly/2yZNfNl.
17. Nick Allen, ‘WikiLeaks: India “systematically torturing civilians in
Kashmir”’, Telegraph (UK), 17 December 2010, https://bit.ly/2OMYrHP.
18. G.K. Pillai, ‘Preface’, in Armed Forces Special Powers Act: The Debate,
ed. Vivek Chadha (New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and
Analyses, 2013), p. vii.
19. ‘Pathribal encounter is cold-blooded murder, CBI tells court’, The
Hindu, 20 March 2012, https://bit.ly/2wfmgNp.
20. Naseer Ganai, ‘In 20 years, Centre Denied Prosecution Sanction under
AFSPA in all cases recommended by J&K Govt against Armymen’,
Outlook, 20 January 2018, https://bit.ly/2Dv1Aq4.
21. ‘J&K stone-pelters will be treated as jihadis’ aides: Army chief’, Times
of India, 16 February 2017, https://bit.ly/2LyNaEA.
22. ‘Fatalities in Terrorist Violence, 1988–2018’.
23. Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu, ‘How Burhan Wani was killed in encounter on
July 8 last year: An exclusive account’, India Today, 8 July 2017,
https://bit.ly/2Jfhu7U.
24. Annual Reports for 2017–18, 2016–17, 2015–16, Ministry of Home
Affairs, New Delhi, https://bit.ly/2AqYnFe.
25. Figures from Asit Jolly, ‘Young Guns in the Valley’, India Today, 20
May 2018, https://bit.ly/2NqxuVV.
26. ‘Every stone, weapon raised by misguided youth destabilises Kashmir:
PM Modi’, Times of India, 19 May 2018, https://bit.ly/2LAiUcN.
27. Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke and Beth Grill, Victory Has a
Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsuregency
(California: Office of Secretary of Defense by the RAND National
Defense Research Institute, 2010), pp. xxi–xxii.
Jammu and Kashmir governor Jagmohan meeting the public in early 1989.
Manoj Joshi
Lt Gen. M.A. Zaki, a Hyderabadi. Muslim was 15 Corps commander at the
outbreak of the rebellion. He returned as security adviser to the governor in
1993.
Manoj Joshi
Girish Saxena, former chief of India’s external intelligence, was governor
from mid 1990 to early 1993. In 1998, Saxena returned for a second term.
Former Army Chief Gen. K.V. Krishna Rao (left) was not an easy governor
(1993–1998) to deal with, but his steely grit helped turned the tide.
Hizbul Mujahideen supreme commander Syed Yusuf Shah, aka Syed
Salahuddin, was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1987 state assembly
elections. He is currently living in Pakistan.
Left to right: Maulana Abbas Ansari, Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat, Syed Ali
Shah Geelani, Abdul Ghani Lone and Qazi Nisar, shortly after their release
in 1992. The fi rst four are the core of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference
chaired by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.
JKLF leader Abdul Hamid Sheikh was in detention in this hospital when he
was exchanged for Dr Rubaiya Syeed who had been kidnapped by his JKLF
associates in December 1989. This event was the catalyst that sparked the
rebellion.
One of the early killers, Jammu and Kashmir Student’s Liberation Front
member Javed Ahmed Shalla , who was involved in the execution of Vice-
Chancellor Mushir-ul-Haq. He was arrested and then exchanged for Indian
Oil manager K. Doraiswamy in 1992.
By special arrangement
The security forces have been forced to improvise or use obsolete
equipment, as shown in this Srinagar scene with a World War II scout-car in
the foreground. Leave alone bulletproof jackets, even a bulletproof helmet
was not available.
The end of a typical army operation. This was in the Poonch area in 1995,
resulting in the killing of two militants and the arrest of four along with a
goodly haul of weapons.
Kashmiri militants in training, ‘somewhere’ in the mountains in the early
days of the rebellion.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police strikes in 1990 and 1993 caused great
concern, but were handled with reasonable ease.
The Charar-e-Sharif, the shrine of Shaikh Nooruddin Noorani, Kashmir’s
greatest Sufi saint. It was destroyed in a battle between a band of militants
and the army in May 1995.
JKLF chief Mohammed Yasim Malik with US ambassador Frank Wisner in
Srinagar in July 1995.
The ISl used a faction of the Hizbul Mujahideen to assassinate Maulvi
Farooz, the Mirwaiz of Kashmir in May 1990. Their aim was to eliminate
all streams of moderate or nonmilitant political opinion:
By special arrangement
Pakistan Army’s Special Services Group commando, Mohammed Khalid,
arrested in Kupwara in 1995.
Death and destruction have stalked Kashmir since the JKLF launched its
‘war of liberation’.
lmiah Gabriel Hurriyat, alias Abu Adam, a Somalian or Eriterian, killed in
an encounter.
Mohammed Masood Azhar, the Pakistani general secretary of the Harkat-
ul- Ansar, whose arrest in February 1994 in Anantnag triggered the July
1995 kidnappings.
By special arrangement
Ahmed Umar Sheikh, the LSEeducated terrorist of the Harkat-ul- Ansar,
whose carefully staged kidnap of foreign tourists in Delhi failed in October
1994.
By special arrangement
Abdul Hameed Turki’s fanatical determination to rescue his former
commander Langaryal from Indian custody led him to the July 1995 kidnap
of fi ve foreign tourists. His death in December 1995 reportedly triggered
their execution.
This picture was sent by the terrorists to show that they had the group that
comprised (from left) Keith Mangan of the UK, Dirk Hasert of Germany,
Hans-Christian Ostro of Norway, who was beheaded in August 1995, Paul
Wells of the UK and Donald Hutchings of the US.