by Adrian Levy
At three o’clock that afternoon, just nine hours until the deadline expired, the Press Enclave in Srinagar received a call about another photo drop. Later, the journalists crowded around the photograph: five solemn-faced trekkers squatted before a spectacular mountain backdrop, a crest of sharp peaks that someone speculated looked like Sheshnag. Behind the captives stood eight militants, their faces partially obscured by shawls, their guns raised. The message was clear: the hostage party had moved into the heights, which placed them at least forty or fifty miles north-east of Pahalgam, a hard five- or six-day trek from the nearest town. Yusuf Jameel had an idea: maybe they were heading for the Warwan, a remote valley parallel to the Lidder Valley that was so difficult to reach that most trekking guides in Pahalgam never went there. He had heard rumours that militants were using the Warwan Valley as a back door into Anantnag town, in south Kashmir. He had another reason to think of the inhospitable Warwan. Kim Housego and David Mackie had almost certainly been held in the remote valley, judging by the detailed description of their route they had given after their release. And his experience of the past six years told him that once militant outfits had a route or an arms cache or a safe house that they trusted, they would use it over and over again.
Yusuf and his friend Mushtaq Ali scanned the hostages’ faces in this latest photograph. Keith, on the left, still wearing Julie’s purple bomber jacket, had a resigned expression. Next to him was Dirk, now wearing a borrowed trekking jacket to ward off the falling temperatures. In the middle was Hans Christian, still in his white-and-purple batik shirt, and beside him crouched Paul, hugging one knee, his hands pushed into his sleeves to protect them from the chilly air. To the far right sat Don in his fleecy blue climbing hat and Gore-Tex trousers, a gun muzzle grazing his chin, quietly self-contained. When she saw the picture in the newspapers the next day, Jane noticed straight away that he was no longer wearing his black-and-yellow Casio altimeter. Small things could sting you. ‘They must have stolen it from him,’ she thought, and worried about what else they might have taken.
Yusuf and Mushtaq turned their attention to the kidnappers. Most of them had scarves wrapped around their faces to disguise their identities, but Yusuf was certain, judging by their sizes and shapes, that Sikander was not among them. It was possible to match some of the figures who had appeared in the earlier two photographs. The face of one militant of middling height which had been scratched out in the first pictures was now partially visible in the latest one. He was easily identifiable because of the distinctive white-and-red-striped band he wore around his waist like a belt, over fawn-coloured kurta pyjamas and a military-style coat. Another long-haired militant in a black kurta, a bayonet fixed to the end of his Kalashnikov, whose profile had been just about distinguishable in the first set of shots, was now standing front-on, making his height and build easy to judge. They were making mistakes, Yusuf thought, if anyone with a sharp eye among the authorities was bothering to look.
But his overriding feeling on seeing this new picture was how young the kidnappers looked. They reminded him of the thousands of teenage Pakistanis who volunteered to fight in Kashmir, only to be mown down shortly after they crossed into Indian territory, even as the Pakistani army laid down covering fire. These kids, lured into a fight unprepared, had an estimated life expectancy of less than twelve weeks.
Some of the al Faran team did not look as if they were cut out for tough weeks up in the mountains. Only the one at the centre of the picture stood out. Taller, paler-skinned, more self-assured than the others, he had a grey scarf wrapped over the lower part of his face, and was raising his Kalashnikov to the sky: a real man of war. Maybe he was an Uzbek or a Chechen. A growing number of them had been heading for Kashmir since the end of the Soviet–Afghan conflict. The kidnappers would need veterans like him if they were going to see this one through.
Over in Church Lane, a phone rang in General Saklani’s office. It was the Security Advisor’s public line, a number that was often printed in Kashmiri newspapers. Altaf Ahmed picked it up and heard a curt, accented male voice demanding to speak to Saklani, and no one else. Altaf motioned to his boss, who was sitting at his vast glass-topped desk.
The General grabbed the handset. At first there was no sound but heavy breathing. Then came a question: had India agreed to the demands? It was someone purporting to be from al Faran. Saklani said nothing. The voice at the other end of the line reminded him that in only a few hours the deadline would run out, and told him they would be forced to start killing the hostages unless the prisoners were freed. Saklani closed his eyes. ‘Let’s slow things down,’ he said. He was an old hand at prevarication. ‘Thank you for thinking of me, and for calling. But you’ve contacted a tiddler. I’m too far down the food chain. I’ll need to speak to the Governor, and he’ll have to call New Delhi, and from New Delhi a view will be taken. And then New Delhi will call us, and we’ll pass it up the line. You must call back in two hours. I’ll put my best man on this. Call back on this number. One hundred and twenty minutes.’ He had them, he thought. Al Faran wanted to negotiate, and that meant they didn’t intend to kill anyone – yet.
Saklani shouted at Ahmed, ‘Get Tikoo!’ He was referring to the head of Crime Branch. This was a job for the Kashmiri police.
Midnight in India was 8.30 p.m. in Norway. The deadline was at hand. Hans Christian Ostrø’s close-knit family had gathered at a private address in Oslo. His mother had come up from Tønsberg, his sister Anette had flown in from Sweden, his maternal grandfather Ole Hesby had been brought over by car, and his grandmother had been collected from the hospital. All of them were now sitting with Hans Christian’s estranged father, Hans Gustav, around a phone, the number of which had been given to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian Ambassador in New Delhi. ‘Nothing. There was nothing,’ recalled Anette. ‘I was staring at it, willing it to ring. But no news came. We decided to stay up through the night, because we were certain Hans Christian would be awake too. Awake and, knowing him, plotting.’
TEN
Tikoo on the Line
Rajinder Tikoo, the Inspector General of Crime Branch, known in Kashmir as the ‘IG Crime’, was a fleshy man with a quiff of sleek brown hair. Classically educated, Tikoo was as at ease among the Elizabethans as in the abstract universe of pure maths, but he was also capable of the rough stuff, and was regarded within the force as a pro interrogator. Tikoo was a subtle thug and an elitist democrat, a remorseful tyrant and a scientific plod. Among his staff there were committed loyalists who would do anything for him. But he also had his enemies.
Curious Tikoo, who regarded himself as something of a Renaissance man, had two favourite hangouts, both of them on Maulana Azad Road, a main thoroughfare that cuts across Srinagar city. The first, his official place of work, was in the west, a pipe-tobacco-scented office in Srinagar’s Crime Branch headquarters, overlooking Jehangir Chowk, one of the city’s most choked traffic intersections, in the shadow of the Budshah Bridge flyover that crosses the Jhelum River. Like much of the infrastructure available to the Jammu and Kashmir Police, this low-lying, cream-coloured brick structure topped by a ruby-red tin roof dated to the days before Partition in 1947, and had barely changed since then. The phones were erratic, the electricity intermittent and many of the windows were broken (making the building miserably cold in winter, when most of the authorities decamped to milder Jammu). Every inch of space was crammed with files, their pastel-coloured cardboard covers and loose sheaves of paper bound together with leather straps and string.
Tikoo’s office opened directly onto a wooden veranda that ran the length of the building’s frontage, giving its inhabitants a bird’s eye view over the guard posts, reinforced walls and nests of coiled barbed wire, designed to keep out militants, mortars, mobs or anyone else with a grudge. Although caretakers did their best to keep Crime Branch spruced up, arranging straggly hibiscus plants in blood-red pots, Tikoo preferred the view from his other regular haunt, the clubhouse of
the Kashmir Golf Club, which lay at the other end of Maulana Azad Road, in the eastern part of the city. Most weekends, IG Tikoo could be found there, or out on the fairways that were surrounded on three sides by a canal fed from the Jhelum River and nearby Dal Lake.
That was where Altaf Ahmed found Tikoo after his boss dispatched him to track down the IG Crime a few hours before the kidnappers’ deadline expired. ‘The Security Advisor has an urgent message for you,’ Altaf said cryptically. ‘It’s a sensitive job.’ He had to go to Saklani’s office in the Church Lane zone immediately. Tikoo felt put out. He and Saklani were well-acquainted, but they were not friends. In fact, Tikoo suspected that the Security Advisor had no friends. In the IG’s mind, the Security Advisor was simply a piece of New Delhi-engineered artillery, a man enslaved to the chain of command, someone who spoke army-ese, a cocktail of Dickensian English and military acronyms that characterised a life spent in itchy puttees, while the IG Crime loved trashy detective fiction, his pipe, his whisky and his golf magazines.
Luckily, as far as Tikoo was concerned, up until now their worlds had remained largely separate, the IG getting on with the gritty business of running down Kashmiri militants and criminals, while Saklani counselled the Governor from the tranquillity of the Church Lane zone. ‘What the hell does Saklani want with me now?’ Tikoo thought.
He called his driver. A white Ambassador swept up to the front porch of the clubhouse and three armed bodyguards in crisp uniforms, cradling semi-automatics, sprang out and saluted. Tikoo slid onto the back seat, lined with white terry-towelling to soak up the summer humidity. Inside, the car smelled of gun oil and naphthalene.
There was another problem with Saklani, Tikoo said to himself as his driver carved up the traffic, forced by a cumbersome one-way system to make thirty minutes of a ten-minute journey. Like most Kashmiris, Tikoo regarded the Security Advisor as the public face of the notorious ‘Governor’s Rule’, the system that had upended local democracy back in 1990, replacing the authority of the elected State Assembly with the say-so of one New Delhi-appointed apparatchik, the implication being that Kashmiris could not rule themselves. Coming from a family of Pandits, the ancient sect of Hindu Brahmins that claimed thousands of years of uninterrupted connections to Kashmir, Tikoo resented this blanket assumption. With their aquiline noses and pale complexions, Kashmiris (native Pandits and Muslims alike) liked to say that their DNA was in part derived from Alexander the Great, who invaded the subcontinent in 327 BC, reaching as far as modern-day Taxila, now over the Line of Control in Pakistan. Kashmiris also believe that the snow-scented air and the aromatic herbs that infuse the local Himalayan waters might also have contributed to the difference between their looks, mores and manners and those of the Indian masses, baked and boiled on the plains to the south.
Since it had been invoked five years back, in Tikoo’s opinion Governor’s Rule had only served to stoke rebellion among Kashmiri nationalists, by making their case that New Delhi was acting like a colonial power, denying Kashmiris their right to self-determination and encouraging misrule by the New Delhi-wallahs sent up from the south, whose soldiers and security apparatus indiscriminately brutalised local people. As a result of Governor’s Rule, many aspects of life in Kashmir were now dictated from afar. Government offices were filled with Indian appointees, and Kashmiris complained that they were treated like second-class citizens: unemployed, ignored, corralled, harassed, with anyone who protested imprisoned or silenced for good. ‘A curious feature of Governor’s Rule,’ Tikoo used to lecture his Kashmiri friends as they strolled down the fairway, ‘is that transparency is not available. Governor’s Rule is a one-horse show. Governor is at the top.’ He would drive his point home, selecting a club from his bag. ‘A few advisors like Saklani are below. These people call the shots and issue statements left and right, without even verifying the facts, because they know they are not accountable to the people of Kashmir. Rule of law is bypassed. The courts are manipulated.’ His playing companions would nod.
Under Governor’s Rule, Tikoo maintained, it was the spies who really governed. ‘A standard intelligence set-up will only give inputs, while the outputs come from the political set-up, who decide what to do with the hunches, whispers and surmises.’ Tikoo liked to describe how in Western democracies intelligence agencies only advised, while the buck stopped with the politicians, who decided whether to act or not. ‘But now with Governor’s Rule, the intel boys feed and direct the powers in New Delhi, giving them the what-could-be-happening and suggesting the what-should-be-done. They are the research, the advisors and the implementers. What’s the policy? It’s the spies’ policy.’ This was not, Tikoo would say, harking back to his Jesuit education, what Plato had intended when he wrote The Republic, the thesis on the nature of justice and democracy that he had studied at school.
And now here was Saklani sending orders. Tikoo repeated Altaf’s words: ‘It’s a sensitive job.’ He already had a demanding job, having been made the IG Crime Branch just four months back, sporting the single star above a crossed sword and baton on his epaulettes. The new posting, which meant he was in charge of all major criminal cases, was one that he relished after twenty-five years’ service. With his remit to investigate serious crimes – murderous, mercantile, political, religious and secular, as well as wrongdoings that crossed borders – he did not need any more duties, unless he was offered the position of Director General of Police, which he hoped to become some day – but that was not in the gift of Saklani.
Waved through the security cordon at the top of Church Lane, Tikoo’s Ambassador came to a halt in the gravel outside Saklani’s office-cum-residence, where the Security Advisor was waiting for him on the steps. ‘We only have two hours,’ Saklani said, looking anxious. He immediately turned to walk into the building, beckoning Tikoo to follow. To Tikoo, Saklani seemed to be stringing out the orders without explaining the context, like Sadashiv Amrapurkar hamming it up as Commissioner What-Not in Mohra, the Bollywood smash from the year before. ‘The phone upstairs will ring,’ said Saklani. ‘My security officer will pick up the receiver and pass it to me. He is not to be allowed to talk to the caller. Understand? I will introduce you. And then you take over.’ Tikoo did not understand. As they mounted the wooden stairs to the first floor, Saklani finally spat it out: ‘Al Faran. They have made contact and want to negotiate. You will be our point man with them. Find out what they want. Get to the bottom of this nasty business.’
Tikoo felt trapped, and wondered how to react to the order that would involve him conducting telephone negotiations with the outfit that had kidnapped the Western trekkers. As IG Crime Branch he had followed events closely over the past ten days, and had dispatched his best team up to Pahalgam to have a sniff around, sidestepping the Deputy Superintendent of Bijbehara, Kifayat Haider (an officer he believed was too self-regarding), on whose patch the crimes had been committed.
Now Tikoo was being thrust into the hot seat, just a few hours before the midnight deadline set by al Faran. He feared that he was being set up as the fall guy, given little time to do the job properly, but taking the blame if the whole thing went belly up. ‘For God’s sake,’ he started to say, forgetting where he was, ‘why don’t you get the Int. Chief to do it?’ he said, referring to Gopal Sharma. The twilight world was Sharma’s speciality, and he was better placed to understand the nuances thrown up by any dialogue with al Faran (he was also somebody Tikoo would not mind throwing to the wolves). ‘The Int. Chief is tied up right now,’ responded Saklani, tightly. ‘You are the right man, that is to say the best man.’ He paused before delivering the coup de grâce. ‘The hostage-taking is a crime, a crime of the tallest order. As Inspector General of Crime Branch it is your duty to take the lead.’ For a minute the two men stared at each other. Then Tikoo backed down. ‘He was my senior. I had no choice.’
One hour to go. Tikoo, feeling ‘more nervous than I had been in years’, wondered what he would say to the kidnappers. He had been in the force since 1970
, and now felt as he did back then when he first graduated into the elite Indian Police Service with three all-important letters following his honorific, rank and name: Shri ASP Rajinder Tikoo, IPS.
Thirty-five minutes to go. Saklani was still talking on the phone with some other army-wallah. Was there actually going to be a briefing, Tikoo wondered. ‘Time was ticking, and I was worried that no one had told me what the government line was. What were we willing to offer? How were we to respond if the kidnappers said they were already killing hostages?’ He was not a trained hostage negotiator, although over the years he had had some experience of dealing with kidnappers. But then, he didn’t believe in over-preparation. He was an instinctive detective who vested much in hunches, and whose contribution to the force had been as a moderniser and galvaniser, qualities he now tried to tell himself had directly led to his being here, waiting for Saklani to get off the phone.
Twenty minutes to go. Why was he here? To Tikoo this assignment looked like every other job he’d ever been given by New Delhi: ‘a bear trap’. He suspected that Saklani might be distancing himself from the messy front end, with all its potential hazards and pitfalls, letting a Kashmiri take the fall. Although, he thought, it was something that a Kashmiri should even be in on such a high-level operation. When the militancy had taken hold in 1989, the Kashmiri police force had been shattered by it. Ramshackle, underfunded and poorly armed, fighting with Second World War carbines and First World War strategies, it had initially been overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of highly motivated Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters flooding into the region, armed with Pakistani semi-automatics and American RDX explosive. Kashmiri police officers and constables were required to crack down on a local nationalist movement that in many instances was led by neighbours and former schoolfriends. Many policemen with deep roots in the community found their loyalties painfully divided, and some defected to the militants. Without proper training, or protection, and labouring beneath a weak leadership, those who elected to fight for the state sometimes responded to the insurgency with a terrible malice and ill-discipline.