by Adrian Levy
If he was to prioritise, the yatris presented the biggest headache. New Delhi had made it crystal clear to him that this year’s pilgrimage had to go off without a hitch, as much for political reasons as humanitarian. For Saklani that meant making sure all elements of the security protocol were in place and working, and he had sweated blood to ensure this. Truces had been hammered out with virtually all of the militant outfits in the valley, in return for taking down some prominent Indian security-force bunkers and pickets in Srinagar. Only the Movement – which he already regarded as one of the most troublesome ISI-sponsored Pakistani outfits – had defied him, angry that despite its repeated demands, security barriers still surrounded Hazratbal, a lakeside mosque in Srinagar, one of the state’s holiest. It had been subjected to an extended siege in October 1993, since when the security forces had guarded it. Saklani recalled thinking that he ‘half expected them to throw a spanner in the works’.
And now a group of foreigners had been kidnapped in the mountains above Pahalgam by an unknown outfit that Saklani suspected was an offshoot of the Movement. This suggested that his security measures were not working. Was the bombing at the bus station down to them too, he now wondered. ‘Damn them,’ he cursed under his breath as the helicopter lurched upwards, following the silvery rope of the Lidder River towards Pahalgam. A militant column was within striking distance of the pilgrims. What had happened to the army operation to pacify the area? There was no point passing the buck.
Looking down at the wild terrain, the endless gullies, the high-altitude meadows and jagged peaks, most of them obscured by shadow and dense forest, Saklani told himself that the task he had been given was an unrealistic one. Not even an army of the size that India had mobilised in Kashmir over the past six years could police this inaccessible landscape. This situation was never going to be resolved by a military operation. Whatever happened in these mountains would be determined by politics. He shuddered at the thought, before glancing down at the papers in his lap. According to police records, there were still thirty-five foreign backpackers out here somewhere, who would have no idea about the kidnappings. How would he find them? As Security Advisor to the Governor of Kashmir, he would feel the heat if any more went missing, especially from New Delhi, where Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s fragile Congress Party minority government was already on the ropes, with national elections due next year and the rising tide of violence in Kashmir weakening his authority by the day.
Prime Minister Rao had come to power in 1991, promising to expose and combat Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorist atrocities on Indian soil. For four years he had stood his ground, but increasingly Pakistan-backed terrorists in Kashmir had been pushing him onto the back foot, as was being noisily trumpeted by the right-wing Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s largest opposition group. The BJP cited the failure of Indian security forces to protect the Amarnath yatra for four years running as evidence that New Delhi was barely in control of the valley, so a successful yatra and a firm hold over events in Kashmir over the next weeks and months would determine Rao’s fate in the elections that were due in April 1996. Saklani quietly cursed the police and tourism officials who had allowed trekkers to go into the hills in the first place. There was a war going on, and he was constantly mopping up after abductions, bombings, skirmishes. What had they been thinking of? Were they engulfed in some kind of collective act of wish-fulfilment, hoping that by allowing holidaymakers to head off into the mountains the war would vanish?
Saklani knew better. He had served in Kashmir in 1961, 1962 and 1965. By the early 1980s he had risen to the rank of brigadier, and served in the Military Operations Directive at Army Headquarters. Promoted in 1985 to major general, he had spent another two years in Kashmir, keeping an eye on Chinese troops massing on its border. From 1987 to 1992, as Major General (Operations), he had been placed in the army’s Northern Command (in charge of Jammu and Kashmir state), and acted as Chief of Staff to the Lieutenant General, where he once again focused on Kashmir.
Saklani had fought against Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1971, accruing an impressive collection of medals, and considered he knew his neighbour’s feints and wiles well. Having chalked up more than forty years of service, he had retired in 1992 with a plan to spend his remaining years at Mhow, a garrison town created by the British that had become home to the Indian Army Signals Corps, the Combat School and the Infantry Training School. Mhow was less a city than an idea, a nerve centre whose name was actually an old British-era acronym for ‘Military Headquarters of War’. What better place could there be for a man of war to slow down, living monastically in a simple apartment above a carport, spending his last years teaching, mingling with a new generation of warriors in the pleasant climate of India’s central plains?
But in January 1993 he had got a call from South Block, the Raj-era Secretariat Building in Lutyens’ New Delhi that housed the Indian Ministry of Defence. ‘Sir, we’ve got a job for you,’ Saklani recalled an ingratiating voice saying. Didn’t these defence babus read the bulletins, Saklani had thought. He had retired. ‘It’s a prestigious posting, sir.’ He was out of it, he replied, finished with service. Down went the phone, but South Block had called again: ‘Come up to New Delhi.’ Saklani was done with the ministry, he said as forcefully as he could. He was committed to Mhow. Down went the phone. ‘The third time South Block rang, it was an order.’ A man of service, he packed a small bag, leaving behind his batman and his Spartan quarters, arranged even in retirement with simplicity and order: toothbrush, comb, shaving kit, soap. Cup, saucer and tea caddy, maps, magazines and an ashtray. A lifetime at war meant he had few possessions to take with him.
He was to assume the position of Security Advisor to the Governor of Kashmir. Back in a place he swore he had finished with, he had arrived in Srinagar to find a dinner invitation from Governor Girish Saxena, an old and much-admired friend. The one reason Saklani had finally accepted this job, which he had never sought and did not relish, was Saxena. Working for him would be an honour. India’s most accomplished spy chief, Saxena had run the country’s foreign intelligence service, and had not only advised prime ministers but been widely credited in military circles for hardening up the country’s defence posture, as well as dealing with India’s internal uprisings, with bloody gusto. ‘It was after dinner,’ Saklani recalled, ‘after I had agreed to stay, that Saxena let it drop. He was leaving Kashmir right away.’ Saklani tried to conceal his feeling that he had been ‘stitched up’.
There was no going back. There would also be no new governor for six weeks. Saklani had spent that time ‘on a recce’, touring the fractious state, becoming ‘more and more incredulous at just how appalling things were’. Despite the sheer number of soldiers, paramilitaries, police and intelligence agents, India’s tactics in Kashmir were piecemeal and confused: ‘So many different outfits were operating in the valley and following their own agendas that it was almost impossible to coordinate them.’ Caught off-balance by the flood of Kashmiris taking up arms from 1989 onwards, and the enthusiasm with which Pakistan had come to their assistance, India had thrown all it could at the militancy, without much forward planning. Now, in their attempts to control territory and win over sources, the military, police and intelligence services were tripping over each other. The only messages being received by the international community were of Indian aggression and human rights abuses. Such stories were being energetically promulgated by Pakistan, with several articulate young maulanas, including Masood Azhar of the Movement, detailing incidents with unnerving accuracy and dedication. Yet as far as Saklani was concerned, the situation in Kashmir was a simple matter of terrorism stoked by Pakistan. The devastating truth was that twelve thousand innocent people had been killed in the five years since Pakistan had started meddling, and that these days there were nine times more terrorism-related incidents in J&K than anywhere else in the world, most of it, in Saklani’s eyes, engineered by the ISI.
‘If I was
going to make any impact,’ Saklani said, ‘I would have to make significant improvements in the way the security forces worked together and the way we told the Kashmir story.’ He went to work at it in the early spring of 1993, establishing a five-storey home-cum-office off Church Lane, at the heart of a heavily fortified government compound squeezed between the parched Sher-i-Kashmir cricket stadium and the Radio Kashmir complex. He quickly became accustomed to being woken by the plock and phut of live rounds breaking his windowpanes, fired by militants from across the Jhelum River. But having lived his whole life under arms, a few wake-up calls did not bother him, and he soon established a routine. Between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. every day he saw members of the public, as he believed in keeping one door open, even as through the other the security forces rumbled with catch-and-kill instructions. At 10 a.m. he instigated a Unified Command, a daily meeting attended by all sections of the security services, from the police Crime Branch, Special Branch and CID to the uniformed departments, the army, paramilitary police and domestic and foreign intelligence. After four years on a war footing, it was the first time many of these agencies had even sat down face to face.
In March 1993 General K.V. Krishna Rao had arrived to replace Saxena as governor. Formerly India’s Chief of Army Staff, General Rao was one of the most influential military figures in the subcontinent. His greatest source of pride was his command of a division that had liberated much of what would become north-eastern Bangladesh during the 1971 war with Pakistan. Since retiring in 1983, ‘the Iron General’, as Saklani called him, had gone on to ‘restore peace’ in some of India’s most troublesome border areas: Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura. This was his second stint in Kashmir, and he was coming at it with a firm resolve to sort things out and stymie Pakistan’s operations in the valley.
The two generals’ mettle and the Unified Command had been tested almost immediately at Hazratbal, literally ‘the Majestic Place’, a marble lakeside mosque in Srinagar said to house a single hair of the Prophet Mohammed’s beard, a holy relic encased in a phial of gold. In October 1993 Hazratbal had become a haven for militants, who trusted that no government would want to be seen to defile a place so holy in order to evict them. Claiming to have received intelligence that these gunmen intended to steal the beard relic so as to inflame the feelings of India’s 120 million Muslims, Kashmir’s new governor ordered a siege of the mosque by two battalions. In 1963, the last time there had been rumours that the relic was under threat, Kashmir had been plunged into sixteen days of tumultuous rioting. Now an armed cordon surrounded the holy site, with eighty-six worshippers (and alleged militants) holed up inside, while PM Narasimha Rao in New Delhi faced by-election battles in four states where the Hindu nationalist BJP was gaining ground. On the eighth day of the siege, a Friday, thousands of Muslims headed for mosques across the valley to pray and protest, only for the Indian forces to open fire at Bijbehara, north of Anantnag, leaving fifty men and boys dead, and two hundred wounded.
Pictures of the massacre heaped more pressure on PM Rao. In Srinagar, a horrified Saklani brokered long rounds of talks with all involved in the Hazratbal siege, and these negotiations eventually ended the standoff a weary three and a half weeks after it had begun. This was seen as a victory for both the Security Advisor and New Delhi, whose objective all along had been to stamp their authority on a lawless holy place. To make sure things did not blow up again, a military bunker was set up outside the mosque. This inflamed the Movement, which would cite it as the reason for not observing the ceasefire of 1995, and attacking the Amarnath pilgrimage.
But in November 1993, Saklani had been elated at the outcome of Hazratbal. Three days later he was certain the tide was turning in India’s favour when news broke that Langrial, the famed Movement commander, had been captured. He told the officers gathered before him at the Unified Command meetings that the Movement was on the ropes, and his confidence seemed justified as the outfit struggled to reassert itself with the botched kidnapping and execution of Major Bhupinder Singh, an act of brutality that New Delhi was glad to hold up as proof positive of Pakistan-inspired barbarism.
In February 1994, after the Movement’s Kashmir commander, the Afghani, had been captured along with its General Secretary, Masood Azhar, Saklani had told the Governor that the outfit was all but neutered, since its most significant operatives were now behind bars. He had visited Masood in jail, to see what made him tick: ‘He sat there, very calm, his beard neatly combed, in a cell of twenty or so fighters, pleasantly chatting with me, telling me all that he had thought and done. Talk, talk, talk. He was such a talker. He told me how a Russian sniper had taken potshots, leaving him with a limp.’
However, in June 1994 it was Saklani’s turn to feel the heat. The Movement hit back, abducting Kim Housego and David Mackie from Aru, and demanding the release of Masood, the Afghani and Langrial. For more than two weeks New Delhi and the families of the hostages had pulled in opposite directions, David Housego urging action, while the huge military machine whose priorities were the annual Amarnath pilgrimage and roasting Pakistan was inclined to do nothing radical, fast. When the two Westerners had been released Saklani celebrated, although in truth he was not sure how it had happened, or if New Delhi was entitled to take any of the credit. As he saw it, this was David Housego’s single-handed triumph (and the army’s secret shame). And by the year’s end, although Saklani still felt India was winning, the official figures told a grim story: 6,043 killed in terrorist-related incidents in just twelve months, the worst year on record. More than four times as many civilians were dead as members of the security forces. Just to drive the knife in further as far as the locals were concerned, 75 per cent of the fatalities were Muslims. Every night he went to bed in his plain bedroom in Church Lane, General Saklani quietly cursed Girish Saxena.
Looking down through the helicopter’s window late on the afternoon of 8 July 1995, Saklani surveyed a steady stream of Hindu pilgrims. Army patrols were in position, and hundreds of Rashtriya Rifles were bedding down at Chandanwari, just in case things got choppy. He had spotted a few Westerners too, trekking or camping. But there wasn’t much he could do, other than circle above them. He’d inform the police of the locations when he got back to Srinagar, and they could send constables up on foot. He dictated some notes to his bagman, Altaf Ahmed, a police security official who worked in his office, and who was sitting behind him. A small man, Altaf did not attract attention, but he was capable of recalling everything anyone said and did.
Now that dusk was drawing in, Saklani turned to his pilot, Group Captain Jasminder Kahlon, and ordered him back to base. Kahlon was an ace, possibly the best India had, and Saklani liked being out with him and Altaf. ‘Just then, the Group Captain spotted a lone figure near Pissu Top,’ Altaf recalled. Swooping down, they saw it was a man, roughly dressed and limping badly, making his way down the mountainside beside a stream. ‘We thought he was some kind of Paki infiltrator,’ said Altaf. ‘His face was pitch-black.’ Saklani remembered: ‘I told Altaf to load a weapon and take that boy out.’ Kahlon advised caution. Something was not right. The man was flimsily dressed, without any kind of coat or backpack. He did not look like a mujahid. His face was striped with mud. But who else would be up here, and take such fright at seeing an Indian helicopter? What was a man in civvies doing at this altitude? ‘I can’t get in any closer,’ Kahlon said. ‘The downdraught might blow him over the edge, or the rockface might take out one of our rotors.’
On the ground, John Childs had been thrown into utter panic by the sight of the helicopter. ‘I had heard it first from a distance, heading down the valley along which I was making my descent. I was in really bad shape, and I thought I might be hallucinating. Without me seeing it, it seemed to turn around as if to leave. “Just my luck,” I said to myself. “They’ve found the hostages, and here I am left trying to escape on my own.”’ A few minutes later John heard the helicopter returning, and suddenly it reared up on him from over a ridge. ‘I was terrified. It w
as a big military thing, with gun muzzles poking out of the window and men dressed in uniform.’ In a split second John had convinced himself it was the Pakistanis, who had been searching for him on behalf of the kidnap party. He burrowed down behind a rock.
Inside the cabin, Saklani and Kahlon glimpsed the man’s face. ‘He was of European complexion,’ Saklani recalled. ‘That’s not a militant!’ Altaf shouted. Kahlon butted in: ‘He’s foreigner. Let’s get him.’ He delicately moved the chopper so its tail faced the man on the ground, showing him the saffron, white and green of the Indian Air Force insignia. John recalled the moment: ‘Stupidly, I was running away (as if I could get away!) when I saw them swing it around so I could see the flag of India.’ Saklani beckoned him over, but in a confusion between East and West, John thought he was being instructed to lie flat on the ground.
Then, with his usual poise, Kahlon gently brought the helicopter down, resting one of its runners on the hillside as delicately as if he were placing a glass of water on a mat. John said: ‘It was an incredible feat. One of the runners was still floating in the air, and the rotors were whipping just inches from the rock.’ Saklani threw the door open, and screamed above the rotors: ‘Now! Now! Now! Come now! What are you doing here?’ John shouted: ‘I was abducted! Save me! Please!’ Saklani couldn’t believe it: one of the hostages. ‘Oh the gods, this is a miracle, this is a miracle from the gods!’ he shouted.