Clinton was traveling to Pakistan after his stay in India, and Indian pundits on television speculated endlessly about whether he would come down hard on Pakistan’s new military ruler for his country’s support of the Muslim guerrillas in Kashmir and whether the State Department would be repulsed enough by the killings into declaring Pakistan a “terrorist state.” But the Americans themselves seemed to have some doubts: journalists from The Washington Post and The New York Times among other major American media covering Clinton’s visit, had been skeptical of the Indian version. There seemed little reason for the guerrillas to kill Sikhs just before Clinton’s visit, an act that would inevitably lead to international outrage and thus discredit their cause.
It was what intrigued me about Chitisinghpura, and so when the “Breaking News” caption appeared on the edge of the screen, and the home secretary himself appeared to make a statement about the Sikh killings, I was both surprised and curious. Clinton was still in India at that time, and the home secretary had some of the breathless eagerness of the Indian reporters covering the president’s visit. The Indian security forces, he announced in a jubilant tone, had made a “major breakthrough.” They had arrested a native of Chitisinghpura village called Yaqub Wagay, who had provided valuable information about the Muslim guerrillas responsible for the killings, and “follow-up action” was expected at any time.
It was around this time, two days after the killings, that Muslim men started disappearing from the villages around Chitisinghpura. At least three of the disappearances followed the same pattern: A red Maruti van with civilian number plates arrived in a village, and armed men suddenly emerged from it to grab an individual, usually tall and well built.
The small, cramped van was used to abduct Bashir Ahmed and his friend Mohammed Yusuf Malik, sheep and cattle traders in a village called Hallan. The same red Maruti was spotted waiting on the lonely willow-lined stretch of road outside the walled compound of Zahoor Ahmad Dalal’s house in a suburb of Anantnag, the second-largest town in the valley, minutes before Dalal stepped out to go to the mosque for evening prayers on March 24.
Dalal, twenty-nine years old, slightly plump with flushed red cheeks, had done very well with the small cloth-retailing shop he suddenly inherited when his father died on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1984. Business hadn’t been easy in the last ten years of endless curfews and regular strikes, but Dalal had not only survived but actually flourished. Inside his large compound, he had built several warehouses, planted rosebushes, dug a fishpond, and very recently built a new house adjacent to the old one where his widowed mother lived. His sister’s marriage—always an onerous task in subcontinental families—was happily arranged in Anantnag. He regularly made the long journey to Delhi to order fresh stock; his warm, ebullient manner had earned him many friends in the valley, including the Indian paramilitary men who sat in the bunker near his house.
The visit to the mosque was part of a routine, and he dressed casually for it: nylon slippers and track suit bottoms under a checked shirt and maroon wool jumper. When he didn’t return home that evening in time for dinner, his mother and uncle thought that he might have gone to visit one of his many friends in the area.
They began to worry later that evening, after the friends and relatives they contacted said they hadn’t seen Dalal. On the morning of March 25 Dalal’s uncle, Nissar, went to the local police station. The inspector there suggested that they might want to wait before registering a first information report. Anantnag is the stronghold of “renegade militants” called Ikhwanis, former guerrillas who after being captured or surrendering worked for the Indian Army and who often kidnapped and killed for money. It was likely that they had seen the affluent and unprotected Dalal as a good source of easy money. The police inspector was being pragmatic; why register an FIR and endanger Dalal’s life when fifty thousand rupees as ransom might bring him back unharmed?
Dalal’s uncle heeded the advice and immediately went to the headquarters of the Ikhwanis, a minifortress in the heart of the old town, and then to the headquarters of the Special Task Force, an Indian anti-insurgency organization that was known to hire the “renegade militants.” No one at these places had either seen or heard of Dalal. At the police headquarters, the superintendent of police, a reputedly ruthless man named Khan, was not present. His superior officer told Dalal’s uncle that if the Indian Army had kidnapped his nephew, there was nothing anyone could do and sent him away. At five o’clock in the evening, Nissar returned to the police headquarters and was informed that the superintendent was busy, along with units from the Special Task Force and the SOG, busy supervising an “encounter” with guerrillas in a village called Panchalthan, thirty kilometers from Anantnag, and that there might be some news of Dalal’s whereabouts when they returned.
The morning of March 26 brought the news of the deaths of five of the seventeen men allegedly responsible for the Sikh killings. I saw the news in curfew-bound Jammu, where angry Sikhs had been rioting for three days. For a brief moment Chitisinghpura was back on the front pages of the Indian papers. There had been a four-hour-long “encounter” between the guerrillas and the police and army in Panchalthan on the early morning of March 25, a few hours after the disappearance of Dalal. The army spokesman said that all five men were “foreign mercenaries,” belonging to Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist outfits; the most important piece of evidence they presented was the army fatigues the five men were dressed in, the uniform the original killers of the Sikhs had been wearing. The police issued a separate statement in which Yaqub Wagay was mentioned as having provided the information that led the police and the army to the hideout of the mercenaries, a hutlike shelter for shepherds on top of a steep hill that had been shelled with mortars during the encounter. Later in the evening the police released three black-and-white photographs of three of the five dead men. The bodies were “roasted and disfigured beyond recognition,” reported The Kashmir Times, but the army fatigues were unmistakable, looking almost brand-new.
Dalal’s uncle met Khan and the men from the Special Task Force when they returned from Panchalthan. They hadn’t seen Dalal. By now Nissar was beginning to panic; on the previous day he had heard about the disappearance of Ahmed and Malik, the sheep and cattle traders from Hallan, a little before the time Dalal left his house to go to the mosque, and he had heard about the red Maruti van.
Two days later he ran into a group of Gujars from the villages around Anantnag. Two of their friends, both called Juma Khan, had gone missing. The Gujars weren’t involved in any guerrilla activity but still faced much harassment by Indian security men since their long beards, hooked noses, and tall frames made them look like Afghans. They told Nissar that they had gone in a procession to the government’s local headquarters in Anantnag to lodge a complaint about the missing men they suspected had been abducted by the police or SOG.
Before the day was through, and purely by chance again, Dalal’s uncle encountered another Gujar, this time from Panchalthan; he had a disturbing story to tell about the “encounter” that had kept Khan, the notorious police officer, from his desk for so long the previous day.
Panchalthan lies at the base of the thick hilly forests that line the valley of Kashmir on its southeastern side. Some miles south is the region of Doda, where some of the most vicious battles between the guerrillas and Indian Army have been fought. Hardly a day goes by without either of the two combatants lapsing into massacres or rape or arson or torture, and the knowledge weighs heavily on those traveling through the heavily militarized and isolated area around Panchalthan.
The road is unpaved, and its perennially dug-up appearance made me worry about the possibility of land mines placed by guerrillas to ambush the military convoys that regularly make their way to the ordnance depot near Panchalthan. The day before I visited in late May, the ordnance depot had been attacked with rocket grenades, and the resulting tension was palpable. Women in long black veils walked quickly, as if seized by silent panic. In bazaars along t
he road, sullen men lurked in dark, bare shops. Tense pedestrians avoided all conversation, never forming groups, eyes always averted from the army men in the makeshift bunkers at every street crossing and bend in the road.
The closer we got to Panchalthan, farther from the nearest town, past the hostile army men at checkpoints, who pretended not to understand why we were going to Panchalthan and insisted on searching the car, one hand wrapped around the triggers of their guns, the greater my fear. And it was shared by the Kashmiri driver and journalist I was traveling with. Far too many journalists investigating strange events in remote parts of Kashmir had been killed.
But the villages along the broad valley seemed peaceful; a few hay-topped houses spread across shimmering fields, where women in colorful head scarves sang traditional songs as they planted the paddy and then, as dusk fell, sat cross-legged upon little Kashmiri rugs to sip salty tea from samovars.
A hill, uncultivated for the most part and rising almost vertically from the base of the valley, looms over the village. On the top—known to the villagers as Zountengri (“Hilltop of the Moon”)—are two wood and mud huts used as shelters by Gujar shepherds from the village. The land slopes down steeply from here to the valley; as a military position, it is close to invincible. Nevertheless, it was here, according to both the army and the police, that the five “foreign mercenaries” were trapped and killed and vast quantities of arms and ammunition discovered in an operation that lasted four hours, and from which soldiers and police emerged unscathed.
In a previous “encounter,” not far from Panchalthan, the army had bullied the villagers into acting as human shields as they attacked a guerrilla hideout; in remote places on the valley, you did what the men with guns instructed. But on this more recent occasion the villagers weren’t asked for their help.
In the early hours of the morning of March 25 they had been woken by the noise of gunfire. It went on for some time, and then, abruptly, there were some big bangs, mortar shelling. When the firing stopped, it was light, and some of the villagers ventured outside their homes. They saw four soldiers dragging large kerosene canisters up the hill. As the villagers watched, two of the soldiers stopped and partially emptied their canisters before trudging on.
A few minutes later the villagers saw smoke arise into the misty morning air; they heard the sound of crackling wood. Not long afterward the army men summoned the elders of the village. Although scores of men from the army and the Special Operations Group stood idly by, the commanding officer asked the villagers to remove the bodies of the “mercenaries” from the smoldering huts.
The men went in to find five completely charred and disfigured bodies dressed in army fatigues on the ground. All of the dead men looked as if they had been tall and well built, quite like the guerrillas from Afghanistan and Pakistan the villagers had seen before. They noticed that one of the bodies was headless; they saw a tree trunk and two logs of wood soaked in blood. Then, as the soldiers watched impatiently, the villagers carried out the bodies and, after the briefest of religious ceremonies, buried them in separate graves around the hill.
The Gujar shepherd from Panchalthan whom Dalal’s uncle met up with was one of the men who had helped bury the bodies. And after the man finished telling his story, Dalal’s uncle pulled out, very tentatively, a photo of his nephew he had been carrying everywhere with him. He asked the Gujar if any of the men he helped bury resembled the man in the picture. The Gujar stared hard at the creased photo of Dalal, and then abruptly started to weep.
After the army and policemen left in a convoy from Panchalthan that morning of the “encounter,” the villagers returned to the huts on Zountengri and found a pit full of fast-burning clothes and shoes. They quickly put out the fire and retrieved whatever they could. It was among these scorched scraps that Dalal’s relatives found the maroon jumper and checked shirt he had been wearing when he left his house for his evening namaz three days before.
That evening the family formally went into mourning. There was no point in investigating the identity of the killers, or the circumstances of the killing; they were only likely to bring more trouble upon themselves. Sympathetic Kashmiri Muslim officials at Anantnag provided the family with facts—the red Maruti was one of the many “seized vehicles” kept at Anantnag police station and had been signed out on March 24 for “operational purposes” by a Sikh officer of the SOG—but didn’t encourage them to follow it up. Instead the family’s efforts were now aimed at retrieving Dalal’s body from the remote grave at Panchalthan and giving him a proper Islamic burial.
This wouldn’t be accomplished for nearly two weeks, however, and would never have happened at all had the Gujars not initiated, in a bold pursuit of justice, unusual for Kashmir, yet another series of horrific events.
In the same pit of half-burned belongings, a Gujar called Rafiq, the son of one of the two missing Gujars, had discovered his father’s identity card, ring, shreds of clothes, and shoes. He had been looking for his father for some days, and it was purely by chance that he thought of coming to Panchalthan. His discovery had been the first sign that the five dead men had been civilians, among the seventeen who had disappeared after the killings in Chitisinghpura.
For the next few days, the Gujars, always close-knit as a community, walked fifteen miles each day to the government’s district headquarters in Anantnag to appeal for the bodies’ exhumation. At first, the government officials kept stonewalling them: The relevant officer isn’t present; he is very busy. But on March 31, the Gujars managed to extract an order from the chief judicial magistrate for a public exhumation of the bodies. It was a major victory. Tens of thousands of Muslims had been killed by Indian security forces in Kashmir in the previous decade, but there had rarely been a postmortem or exhumation.
That wasn’t the end if it, however. The army controlled the road to Panchalthan and refused to let anyone through. The civilian administration in Anantnag, too scared to take on the army, was still waiting to know if the Gujars would be allowed to pass when the villages near Panchalthan were visited by kinds of terror, armed men from the SOG who beat up the Gujars and threatened to kill them if they went ahead with their attempts to exhume the bodies.
The Gujars, buoyed by their victory in obtaining the exhuming order, decided to protest the harassment by the SOG. They began the long walk to Anantnag on the afternoon of April 3. The procession included relatives of the two killed Gujars, Rafiq walking in the front, and other sympathetic villagers. The news of the killings in Panchalthan had gone around, as had the unexpected news of the Gujars’ exhumation order, and the crowd swelled and swelled after each village.
By then numbering five thousand, the procession crossed three army checkpoints without much trouble. But at a little village called Brakpora, at a little dirt road crossing hemmed in by shacks selling grocery, men from the SOG were waiting for them.
Rafiq, the first man to establish a connection between the half-burned personal effects at Panchalthan with the five missing men, was one of the first to be shot. In the end, nine men died in the firing, so ferocious that the doctors in the local hospital removed twenty bullets from the groin of one corpse.
The unprovoked firing made the national news—in the usual vague terms: “Eight people killed in police firing”—but the army still would not allow the civilian officials to enter Panchalthan. Finally, on April 6 and 7, the bodies were exhumed and, though badly defaced, were identified by relatives of the five men. The first grave revealed a chopped-off nose and chin of a Gujar who was found buried in a separate grave. Dalal’s face had been partly gouged away; he had no bullet marks on him; he may have been burned alive. The last body was headless—the head couldn’t be found—but the relatives identified him by his trousers, which he still wore under the army fatigues.
The government officials at first refused to part with the bodies and then relented after demanding that the relatives perform the burials secretly that same night. The government made few other concessi
ons to outraged public opinion. Khan, the police officer who had jointly led the operation with an army brigadier, was suspended from active duty, but he was reinstated very soon afterward and then awarded a president’s medal for courage displayed in an earlier operation. Other officials were merely transferred out of Anantnag.
Accusations were formally lodged against the SOG men who had fired on the Gujar demonstrators. On April 11, the government announced a special investigation into the Panchalthan killings. But the government refused to charge anyone with murder until DNA samples taken from the dead men were matched with those of their supposed relatives.
The DNA tests seem subsequently to have been forgotten until March 2002, when The Times of India, India’s leading newspaper, revealed their results. Apparently, the results had been officially sent to Kashmir the year before by a laboratory in Hyderabad but were suppressed by the local government because they exposed a clumsy attempt by Indian officials to fudge the samples taken from the relatives of the five murdered men.
The turnover of atrocities in Kashmir is so high, and the situation in general so murky, that it is hard to get to the truth. Few people in India even talk of Chitisinghpura anymore. And the forgetfulness and murkiness will remain. Such killings are soon supplanted by something bigger; there is the usual exchange of allegations between India and Pakistan, the usual outrage and condemnation around the world, and no more than a few people know what is really going on.
The government remained steadily indifferent to the several requests from human rights organizations and Indian political parties for an independent probe into the massacres of the Sikhs. In the Indian Parliament, the Union law minister asked members from opposition parties to drop their demand for an inquiry into the recent killings since it only helped Pakistan “point accusing fingers at India.” A spokesman for the BJP exhorted members of Parliament to instead “concentrate on exposing the evil designs of Pakistan.”
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Page 19