During the week, Delhi’s Group of Interlocutors went public with their vision of a future for Jammu and Kashmir. You would have been better advised to thumb through The Meadow for understanding better the darkled past of the beleaguered state. Its authors, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, retell the story of the kidnapping of five western tourists in 1995, meticulously peeling away layer upon layer of deception shrouding their disappearance until you start to shudder in horror at the game the intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan are perpetually engaged in. At the end of 500 pages, you are left with an apocalyptic image of corpses littering the enchanting land of Kashmir and the ineffable brutalisation of its people. Can those who suffered immeasurably remain content with constitutional tinkering, which is what the Group of Interlocutors largely suggests?
In The Meadow, the first few moves of the game are of ISI’s Brigadier ‘Badami’, who has earned this sobriquet for his habit of quaffing almond milk. He offers a deal to Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil: could he for $25,000 a month inspire the Afghan war veterans of his outfit, Harkat ul-Mujahideen (HuM), to fight the Indian army in Kashmir, which is in tumult? HuM footsoldiers begin to cross the Line of Control (LoC) with devastating consequences in Kashmir. Singing paeans to their deeds is the editor of the Voice of the Mujahid, Masood Azhar, son of Master Alvi, a luminary of the Deoband movement and a friend of Maulana Khalil.
Azhar cuts a pathetic figure; he fails a 40-day basic course for militants but is despatched to the frontline to fight the Soviet army. One night, he steps out of the bunker to relieve himself, forgets the password required for exit and entry, and is shot in the foot by the sentry. For this egregious mistake, Azhar should have been doomed to a life of obscurity. Instead, he is made the editor of the Mujahid, underscoring the hierarchy of importance bedevilling even the shadowy world of terror. Azhar imagines and writes inspiring stories of daredevilry of jihadis even though many of them are shot dead as soon as they step on Indian soil, their bodies strung along the LoC as a reminder of the fate awaiting their replacements waiting to enter Kashmir.
Azhar’s yarns catapult him to the post of general secretary of the Harkat ul-Ansar (HuA), an umbrella group Brigadier Badami floats to consolidate innumerable militant outfits operating in Kashmir. But HuA’s military commander Sajjad Khan, popularly known as Afghani, deviates from Badami’s script in Kashmir and Azhar is despatched there to bring him back on track. The day following their union, the two HuA leaders fall into the dragnet of the Indian army. Once again, the hierarchy of importance creeps in. To the crestfallen Maulana Khalil and Master Alvi, Brigadier Badami suggests kidnapping of western tourists as a method to secure the release of Azhar. A new outfit, al Faran, under the local Kashmiri commander Sikander, is formed to execute the plan.
In July 1995, three western tourists, Don Hutchings, Keith Mangan and Paul Wells, and their partners are camping in the lush meadow of Lidder Valley, as too is John Childs, all alone. Gun-toting men saunter into the meadow, separate the men from their partners and march them up the mountains. But Childs soon escapes from captivity, prompting the gang to abduct two more foreigners, Hans Christian Ostro and German Dirk Hasert, who was trekking with his partner in the area.
The game is now truly afoot. Human beings are reduced to mere pawns, rooks and bishops on the chessboard called Kashmir, shuffled around and then sacrificed as faceless men in their lairs decide on their moves. Even the powerful become pieces on the board, as is Inspector General of Crime Branch Rajinder Tikoo, who is tasked with negotiating with the kidnappers. Aware of the game spymasters love to play, Tikoo takes the precaution of forming what is called the Squad, a team of crack cops drawn from the Kashmir police, for carrying out an investigation parallel to that of agencies reporting directly to Delhi. The Squad works its contacts in decrepit villages in the mountains, adopts strong-arm tactics to ferret out information, and plants moles in outfits of renegades or erstwhile militants whom the Indian agencies have employed to hunt terrorists battling the Indian state.
Call by call, over several anxious weeks, Tikoo persuades the kidnappers into scaling down their initial demand for the release of 21 prisoners to just four. However, Delhi is not willing to acquiesce in blackmail. Fair enough, you argue. Not so, thinks the gang’s negotiator, who reminds Tikoo that the Indian government had freed incarcerated militants to secure the release of the Indian Oil director K Doraiswamy and the daughter of the Indian home minister at the time they had been kidnapped. Indeed, the hierarchy of importance is as much present in the maze of security agencies as it is in the world of terror.
But Tikoo’s desultory tactics have reduced the kidnappers to desperation. For one, the beheading of Ostro, undertaken in pique, has incurred them the opprobrium of people. Second, holing out in the mountain in the impending winter appears a losing proposition for the kidnappers. They are willing to set free the surviving four hostages for Rs 10 million. Tikoo thinks he has triumphed until a Delhi-based newspaper publishes a story giving out details of the agreement with al Faran. To be portrayed a mere mercenary could not have been palatable to Sikander, widely viewed as a militant leader fighting for the freedom of his people. Betrayed, Tikoo proceeds on leave.
The Squad confirms the betrayal. Through its extensive network, the Squad discovers that Indian intelligence agencies have been all along aware of the hideout of the kidnappers, even taking aerial photographs of them. It also unearths that the weary al Faran has handed over the hostages to a renegade, Ghulam Nabi Mir, codenamed Alpha, for Rs 400,000. The Squad pursues the clues, tailing the hostages as they are ferreted away from one village to another, until their moles in Alpha’s camp stumble upon a Kashmiri who witnessed their killing deep inside a forest.
In 2010, the authors quote Tikoo saying, “The people who did this wanted to prove to the world that these fellows are mercenaries, no respect for anything, no cause…Somebody in intelligence did this, and he should be whipped and shot.” A member of the Squad describes the game thus, “Pakistan tried something, India blocked it and turned it around, or the other way around, and there were so many angles to it, that really when you were playing it you forgot yourself, completely, until it seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.”
Perhaps those who played the game of 1995 should read The Meadow to fathom the trauma of the families of hostages, who kept swinging for more than a year between hope and despair. You cannot but empathise with them, even as you pity India and Pakistan for becoming such a cruel caricature of the idea of a nation-state.
The author is a Delhi-based journalist and can be reached at [email protected]