by Adrian Levy
Buchs asked Jane if she had seen the latest State Department advisory. Dated 25 November 1994, it read: ‘In July 1994, an American tourist was fatally shot in Srinagar, and in June 1994 militants held two British hikers hostage for 18 [sic] days before releasing them. These recent events demonstrate that the Kashmir Valley remains a dangerous place where terrorist activities and civil disturbances continue.’ Jane shook her head, explaining how she and Don had gone to the US Embassy in New Delhi but had been put off by the heat and the enormous queue. No matter, Buchs said. What mattered now was getting her husband back. He told her the in-country FBI agents had already been briefed, and that a second specialist team was shortly to arrive from the FBI offices in Quantico, Virginia.
Anything she could tell him about the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping would help, especially if she had any understanding of why they had been targeted. Jane had been thinking about nothing else. ‘I think we were scouted,’ she replied. ‘There were many people in the valley at that time, but the militants didn’t want the American women, the Japanese man or some of the other nationalities we passed – they were going, I think, for American and Brıtish men, and knew where to find them.’ She was convinced now that the kidnappings had nothing to do with their guides, Bashir and Sultan, telling Buchs, ‘They seemed very afraid of both the militants and the police.’
Buchs told Jane he would help her the best he could. He explained that Kashmir was currently under Governor’s Rule, and visiting the current incumbent, retired Indian Army chief General Krishna Rao, would be his first stop. Informing her that there were a dozen officials from the Indian security agencies asking to interview the women, he promised to act as liaison, so as to minimise the number of times they would have to retell their stories. But right now, he said as he got up to leave, his most immediate concern was tracing the family of the other American hostage, John Childs. No one knew anything about him, since he had been travelling alone and his passport was with the kidnappers. Throughout their meeting Buchs seemed nervous, Jane thought, and to be playing things by ear. But who else could she place her faith in?
Deputy Superintendent Kifayat Haider, the police officer responsible for the Pahalgam area, got the call about the kidnapping a few minutes after Jane, Julie and Cath had walked into Pahalgam police station on the afternoon of 5 July. He was, for once, at home with his family in Srinagar, squeezing in a few days off before the chaos of the annual yatra pilgrimage from Pahalgam, during which he and his officers would be responsible for the security of hundreds of thousands of Hindu devotees heading for the Amarnath Cave. That would no doubt be a four-week marathon of round-the-clock intrigue, threats and violence, so he had been glad to take a break – one that had now been interrupted. But Haider was philosophical. ‘Immediately I got the message, I knew this was a serious situation. And there was no point bitching about losing holidays. This was a policeman’s lot. Transferred willy-nilly. Called to duty at the strike of a match. Some dealt with it by drinking or screwing around. Others played golf. But no one ever got used to the pitch-and-putt of life in the force.’ The great Superintendent Farooq Khan, Haider’s role model, a Muslim officer who had been the first to lead a police anti-terrorist unit, liked to say the stress was enough to kill a man if the militants didn’t get him first. ‘And this from someone who had killed more than most since the troubles first bubbled over in 1989,’ Haider reflected.
From the moment he received the call, Haider was acutely conscious of a significant fact: since the foreigners’ FIR had been lodged at one of his police stations and the kidnapping had taken place in his district, he would get first shot at running this significant criminal inquiry. He knew also that as the victims were Western tourists and the alleged perpetrators Pakistani militants, it would not be long before a multitude of Indian security agencies were crawling over it too, not to mention the army. But with more than twenty years of service under his belt, many of them spent in the dirty business of counter-insurgency, tracking militant groups across the valley, coaxing villagers to give up vital information or dragging it out of them, he sensed that this was his moment to shine.
Appointed six months previously as DSP of police district Bijbehara (a town twenty minutes north of Anantnag), with a zone of responsibility that extended east to Pahalgam and beyond, Haider was aware that his background, although never publicly spoken about, imposed limits on his career. A Shia in a predominantly Sunni department, his religious beliefs (although he kept them to himself) would restrain him from ever getting higher than Senior Superintendent of Police, unless he got lucky. He had already begun to stamp his mark on his new district as a cogitator and agitator. Brusque and with a short fuse, the DSP was intolerant of slackness. Appearances were important to him. Chestnut brogues on his feet, brown baton tucked beneath one arm, khaki shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow, revealing muscly, hairy forearms, his trouser seams as crisp as a new five-hundred-rupee note, Haider wanted everyone to know that he was taking the force by the scruff of its neck and dragging it into the modern age, regardless of sectarian prejudices.
The old-style policing, remote, heavy-handed and mendacious, would yield nothing in these days of insurgency. He intended to encourage the people of his new district to tell him what they knew, holding open-door sessions of the ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ variety: the worthy and the poor ushered into his grand office to stand, caps in hand, before the acreage of his spotless glass-topped desk. Working out what people needed so he could provide it in return for information, once ensconced in Bijbehara DSP Haider had formulated a judgement on each and every case, however trivial, in exchange for fealty and intelligence. An old boy of Burn Hall School, the prestigious missionary establishment in Srinagar, this was Haider’s formula for staying ahead. ‘Doing humbly our task, to seek knowledge and light,’ as the school song went.
As Haider prepared to leave for Pahalgam, he summoned a staff officer to give a précis of what was coming down the police radio, hoping his men in the field had not failed him. ‘Did they find anyone to write up the FIR?’ he asked. The staff officer said it was waiting on his desk. ‘How about the witnesses, were they made comfortable?’ There was no information available. ‘First impressions,’ the DSP murmured to himself, imagining how the foreign women must have felt in the furnace of Pahalgam police station. He hoped someone had found them some chairs to sit on, and had thought to turn on the fan.
Fiddling with his slim gold lighter, he bellowed for his driver. ‘Fucking get a move on!’ Grouchily, he pulled a Classic cigarette from the packet and glanced down to see how many he had left. Two hours from Srinagar to Anantnag, then three more from Anantnag to Pahalgam – if they didn’t get tangled up in army manoeuvres. And he only had eighteen cigarettes, which worried him, as did the number of hours during which every piece of evidence could be corrupted or lost by incompetent subordinates, all fat fingers and sticky boots. The best he could hope for was that the capable Duty Inspector had remembered to offer the foreigners a cup of tea, and that his constables had not ogled the women too much.
Sitting in the back of his government issue white Ambassador car, the DSP applied himself to the bare facts. ‘Who or what the hell is al Faran?’ he wondered, contemplating the name on the kidnapper’s note. Haider had spent the best part of his career tracking Kashmiri and Pakistani militant outfits, and prided himself on having a deep understanding of the etymology of the militancy – he could spend hours berating his friends with the philosophical differences between the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan and the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind. But this name threw him off-course immediately. For years he had studied the competing ideologies of Hizbul Mujahideen and the Movement, but al Faran meant nothing to him. He could cite at least ten things that divided Mast Gul (the HM commander and leveller of the holy city of Charar-e-Sharief) from Sikander (the bomb-maker from Dabran who had roared up the Movement’s ranks). But al Faran? He could not summon up one iota of intelligence about where it
had come from or what it stood for, which led him to only one conclusion. It did not exist.
Pleased with himself, having calculated that al Faran was merely a front for someone or something, Haider reached Pahalgam after nightfall, striding into his police station and waking up the constables. ‘Bring in the witnesses!’ he shouted, meaning Jane Schelly, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley. ‘They took off in a taxi,’ the Inspector mumbled, unnerved by the sudden appearance of his senior. Haider exploded. ‘What kind of screw-up is this? Preserve the crime scene and all evidence!’ he shouted. He sat down at his desk grumpily, lighting up a cigarette before studying the brief FIR. This was a crime in the mountains, and it would need mountain people to solve it. ‘And few are better placed than me to conduct such an operation,’ he said to himself.
In his school days, Haider had trekked the Pir Panjal many times with his teachers. He liked to say that he could still draw a map from Pahalgam to the Line of Control via Kishtwar or Gulmarg, naming all the passes, concealed lakes and glaciers in between. He had grown to empathise with the impoverished groups that populated this harsh landscape, especially the gujjars, living as they did on the margins of society. They were like the Romany people of Europe, he would say. Insular and paranoid, they lived off their animals and from portering during the yatra. He understood their rich culture and social dynamics, as well as their migration patterns. He knew how to draw them out. Then there were the bakarwals and the dards, armed with their home-made knives and rifles, who most Kashmiris denigrated as thieves and murderers. ‘It was partly the prejudice of the urban classes, muddled with a grain of truth,’ said Haider. Dards had become renowned mercenaries, acting as trackers and hit-men for the security forces. ‘But they’d just as easily work for the other side, if the money was right.’ This was the privilege of the outsider.
As he pondered how he would roll out his operation, the DSP caught sight of a stack of yatra-related paperwork piled up on his desk. What about Amarnath? How would it affect things? This kidnapping could not have come at a worse time, he thought. He was under no illusions about the difficulties he would face over coming days. For the past four years this Hindu religious procession had been targeted by Pakistan-backed Kashmiri militant groups calling for azadi, freedom from the yoke of New Delhi. But this year the Indian government had negotiated ceasefires with all but one of these outfits, and saw it as imperative that the yatra went off without a hitch. In just a few days Pahalgam and the hills surrounding it would be thronged with hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims heading for the sacred cave. And keeping them safe, whatever he thought of the religious cheerleaders behind them, was his task.
What Haider always came back to was that before the uprising of 1989, the Kashmir Valley had been home to tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits, the indigenous Hindus with ancient roots in the state, and all communities had lived peaceably. The valley was crammed with masjids, shrines, temples and gurdwaras, representing each and every faith. ‘Even the bloody Jews staked claim to one tomb or other,’ the DSP liked to say. But since the troubles, the militancy had been turned into a nasty religious war by unseen hands in New Delhi and over the LoC in Islamabad, transforming the annual pilgrimage to the cave into not only an article of faith, but also a way of underscoring the Hindu government’s writ on Muslims in the valley. If the pilgrims’ arrival at the cave said New Delhi was winning, stopping them with bombs, mines and guns was a favourite militant tactic to show the azadi movement still had clout. Either way, Haider’s district had become a focal point for the terror, and this year, with the pilgrimage certain to be larger than ever, he girded himself for fireworks.
There were many agitating groups that needed to be watched closely. On the Hindu side there was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing religious and nationalist paramilitary volunteer force and welfare organisation that ran schools and programmes supporting Hindus all over the subcontinent. A Hindi mouthful, the group was known to everyone by its initials, the RSS, and its members were a regular sight in towns and villages across India, exercising in their tan shorts, caps and white shirts, like ageing boy scouts. Whether the yatra was officially on or off, RSS volunteers were always thick on the ground in Pahalgam during the pilgrimage season, urging devotees to come, saying they were not afraid to face the bullets and the bombs, as Kashmir was an integral part of India, and the Amarnath Cave their holiest shrine.
This year, things would not reach a climax until the full moon of 10 August, the most auspicious date on which to reach the cave, although a showdown in Pahalgam before then already seemed likely. According to Haider’s Duty Inspector, the RSS had arrived in town, and in force. ‘How will the pilgrimage impact on the kidnapping, and vice versa?’ the DSP wondered again. Would the priorities of New Delhi – to make sure the yatra went ahead unhindered – place the safety of the pilgrims before everything else? Or would a crime committed in the heights of the Pir Panjal compete for its attention, given the nationalities of those who had been kidnapped?
As Haider pondered these matters, an enormous explosion rattled his windows. Whoomf! His desk was shaken. Baton in hand, he raced out of the station, leading from the front. Whoomf! More blasts bellowed, with the unmistakable deep bark of IEDs. Pahalgam’s bus station had been wrecked, and five people had been killed outright, with twenty-three badly injured. Among the dead were a police constable and several newly-arrived yatris. It was already clear to Haider that he had a breakaway Islamic militant faction on his hands, who were against the ceasefire. And in the mountains, he thought, was another as yet unidentified faction, holding four Western prisoners.
On hearing the blasts RSS volunteers emerged from their lodgings, bamboo canes or lathis at the ready. Screaming crowds fleeing the explosions ran straight into them, and the RSS battered every Kashmiri they could spot. Hauling out local Muslim shopkeepers, breaking heads, the RSS rumbled through town. ‘Pahalgam’s going to hell already,’ thought Haider. The delicate balancing act of matching Hindu aspirations with Kashmiri sensibilities had been thrown off-kilter even before the yatra had started, unless DSP Haider could rein in the saffron vigilantes and stop the Islamic fanatics behind the bombings.
Back at the station, he contacted police headquarters in Srinagar. ‘I need men!’ he shouted into the radio. He got them from the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), a paramilitary militia deployed in Kashmir since 1990 to bolster the regular police in tackling counter-insurgency. Their commanding officer agreed to loan him 140 men. He was explicit in his orders: ‘If Haider says kill, you kill.’
SIX
The Night Callers
The Kashmir press pack had got wind of the kidnappings just moments after they had happened. Among the first to hear was Yusuf Jameel, the BBC’s man in Kashmir, who received a call on the evening of 4 July, shortly after Don Hutchings, Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and John Childs had been led out of the long grass of the Meadow at gunpoint. Srinagar-born, with more than a decade’s experience, Yusuf was professionally unflappable.
Many people in the valley knew Yusuf. A teacher’s son, he had graduated from Kashmir University with a degree in political science, to become a polished reporter who found it easy to cross the social, religious and cultural divides between East and West, and New Delhi and Srinagar. Equally at home in his tweed blazer or shalwar, he was someone who could make sense of the complexities of the Kashmir conflict for BBC listeners around the world. As a result of his prominence and accessibility, he got calls, often anonymous, from all sorts, including gunmen with uniforms and without, mostly urging secrecy.
Since 1989, being a journalist in the valley had become a deadly business. Apart from working in Kashmir’s brimming hospital emergency wards, where corpses collected like pencils in a jar, there was no other profession that brought a person so close to death on a daily basis. Reporters like Yusuf, working from their lair in the Srinagar Press Enclave, a warren of small, smoke-filled offices set back from Residency Road in the heart of the city, ste
ered a delicate path around the demands of the militants, with their guns and cudgels. Simple revolutionaries, Pakistan secessionists, Kashmiri nationalists and puritanical mullahs of every flavour and colour, from the hennaed to the greying, every one of them wanted to be depicted by the BBC as a leading man. It was the same with the Indian security forces, who similarly jostled for airtime and prominence, from the portly police officers bulging out of their khakis to the sallow-skinned Intelligence Bureau agents.
But even this old hand was disturbed by the night-time conversation that took place on 4 July, many hours before anyone else had heard about al Faran, and Jane, Julie and Cath had scrambled down to Pahalgam.
‘Jameel-sahib? Vaaray?’ the caller had started politely, asking after Yusuf’s health. The journalist thought he recognised the voice, its Kashmiri diction with a southern burr, but the man did not volunteer a name. ‘Vaaray,’ Yusuf replied cautiously. Yes, thanks, he was well.
‘How can I help you?’ he asked, hoping that here was a good story, but worried too that he knew the voice, and that it was one that always presaged grim news.
‘Aghwa karne wala,’ said the caller, using the Urdu word for kidnapper. Yusuf’s news antennae pricked up at the thought that he was being tipped off to a live abduction of some kind. ‘Details,’ he replied respectfully, realising that this caller sounded like Sikander, the Movement’s Anantnag commander. A key player in the insurgency rocking south Kashmir, he was one of the most wanted men in the valley. Unwilling to come to town unless it was a dire emergency, Sikander needed his mouthpieces in the media, and for a time he had called up Yusuf.
However, the BBC man was surprised, and a little frightened, to hear from him now. Their last conversation had been more than a year back, in June 1994, and it had not ended well, with Sikander physically threatening Yusuf for failing to report some story or other. ‘So why is he renewing contact with me now?’ Yusuf wondered.