This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

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  In many ways the most tragic aspect of Kashmir’s sorrow was that even the mourning for a dead child was not free from ideological politics.

  In May 2002 terrorists targeted a residential army camp in Kaluchak in Jammu. Unarmed women and infants were pumped with bullets by men who stormed into the family quarters. In the intensive care unit of the city’s main hospital were toddlers, some as young as two years old, strapped to tubes and wires. From behind the glass I looked on helplessly at Surya, a baby girl who was not yet three, her tiny face precariously held together by surgical stitches. Shrapnel had pierced through her lower jaw and ripped it open. Her left hand had taken a bullet and was missing two fingers. Doctors said it was a miracle that she had survived at all. In the adjoining room was nine-year-old Preeti who had taken a bullet through her chest. The oxygen levels in her brain had fallen and she was rambling incoherently about an uncle who had pleaded, ‘mat maro, mat maro’. At the cremation grounds I saw the body of Havaldar H. S. Chauhan brought out in olive greens and placed on the pyre beside that of his thirty-year-old wife and fourteen-year-old daughter. An ageing father who could barely walk performed the last rites. There was also Havaldar R. K. Yadav who had come to say farewell to his comrades but not before burying his four-year-old son. Six of the seven pyres lit that morning were of women who had been killed trying to shield their children from bullets.

  Back at the army camp, bloodstained school bags, orphaned dolls, a toddler’s pink lace dress were testimonials to lives cut short. At Nirmal Kaur’s home, the smashed photo frame of her two teenage children, Amandeep and Jitendra, lay on the floor. One of the three terrorists who had infiltrated the camp came charging into her house, chasing her right into the tiny bathroom where she ducked behind a metal bucket. As they shot at her, she screamed, her kids heard her cry for help and started shouting in panic as well. The terrorist turned his gun on the children and killed them. In another home an unarmed havaldar, Manjit Singh, wrestled with the gunmen but could not save himself or his family. One of his children was two, the youngest just two months old.

  Children and women, not defined as combatants by any code of war, had been at the epicentre of the Kaluchak attacks. Yet beyond stock condemnations, there was no outcry in the global media, no marches of solidarity, no moments of silence, and no mass protests as there would be several years later for the Peshawar school massacre in Pakistan.

  Even grieving dead children came with disclaimers and qualifiers in the vitiated atmosphere of Kashmir. Almost a decade later in 2010 when more than a hundred young boys died on the streets of Srinagar after violent clashes between those pelting stones and armed police and paramilitary, there was once again unwillingness in the rest of India to see the boys as victims of excessive force and poorly handled crowd management despite the clear asymmetry of power in the confrontation.

  The real story in that season of death was waiting to be told not so much on the empty curfew-bound streets of Srinagar but inside the over-burdened hospitals where the children of conflict were strapped to hospital beds.

  I met nineteen-year-old Munir Ahmad from the frontier district of Kupwara who was battling injuries from two bullets, one in the thigh, another in the ankle. A higher secondary student, he didn’t deny that he was part of a stone-pelting crowd. But when we met him, there was no bluster or sloganeering or uncontrolled rage. He whispered to us that he dreamt of being a schoolteacher. Munir could have been faulted for being a participant in the street violence, but there were far too many children I met in hospital whose only fault was that they had been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Fifteen-year-old Amir Ashar was leaving the local madrassa when a gunshot ripped open his leg and dislocated his hip. Halfway through recalling what happened to him, he stopped mid-sentence, his speech taken hostage by the trauma of the memory.

  The youngest victim was all of nine—Sameer Ahmed, who died during a funeral procession for one of the young men who had been shot. The last march drew thousands of protesters onto the streets and the police said Sameer had been crushed in the stampede. His family said he had been beaten to death. No matter which narrative you believed, that summer of unrest was a national crisis. Omar Abdullah, the chief minister, has often described those two months as his most difficult. Children and teenagers had become the face of the Kashmir tragedy.

  In fact, the two-month-old conflagration had begun with the death of seventeen-year-old Tufail Mattoo who was walking home from tuition, his books still in his hand, when a tear-gas shell accidentally hit him and split open his skull. He died instantly. His family had been planning a big celebration for his birthday that month. Now, all the windows of his house in downtown Srinagar were framed with giant sheets of white paper with ‘Wake Up’ scrawled over them. It was a call for justice by his parents; Tufail was their only child. His wise father, Mohammad Ashraf Mattoo, even in that moment of personal tragedy, spoke to me of how every such incident would only draw more young men armed with stones onto the streets. ‘These boys are young; some of their ideas may be half-baked. But if these things happen, of course they will be angry.’

  The paramilitary and the police defended their actions by pointing to the broken windows of their bulletproof vehicles. One man’s jaw was smashed and his teeth broken, another was in danger of losing his eyesight after a stone hit his cornea.

  Four years later, while travelling through Jammu and Kashmir for the state elections, I went back to Tufail’s house. In his room, several shelves were lined with textbooks—Tufail loved to read, even his school bags had been framed for posterity. Under a giant portrait of the young boy, his ageing father and I sat cross-legged on the floor and over salty tea and bread spoke about him. Mattoo had decided not to vote in any election till there was some punishment for those who had done this to his son. ‘Do you still believe in the system,’ I asked? ‘Yes, I still believe. This is a chance. It’s a golden opportunity for India. Justice is not just about human rights: it’s about democracy.’

  V

  In October 2010, just as the blustering, bombastic former president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, had launched his own political party and declared that he would return to Pakistan (as it turned out, he was placed under house arrest right after his return), I met him in London where, protected by the Specialist Protection Unit of the British police, he had lived in exile for four years in a three-bedroom apartment near the city’s Arab quarter. We spent an hour talking in a well-appointed drawing room that had, along with Persian rugs and leather chairs, on proud display a framed picture of him on the cover of Time magazine with a headline that read: ‘The Toughest Job in the World’. He did not hesitate to take absolute credit for a Kashmir peace formula that had come to be the informal frame of reference in all discussions on India and Pakistan’s troubled relationship. The broad contours of what was sometimes called Musharraf’s four-point formula were something like this: Borders would not be redrawn, the LoC would become the de facto boundary but it would be a soft and porous border. There would be increased autonomy on both sides of the LoC and a joint mechanism for some areas like tourism and culture. The Pakistanis pushed for demilitarization as well—a sticking point for the Indians. ‘Let me tell you, very proudly, these parameters are mine,’ he said boastfully, but in this case truthfully. ‘I realized when I was talking to everyone on the Pakistani side, on the Indian side, that the dispute is Kashmir. What is the solution? Not one of them ever gave me a solution. So that set me thinking.’

  Revealing that both countries had almost sealed the deal Musharraf said, ‘You ask me how close we were? We were as close as drafting the final agreement.’ I pressed him for more details. Were drafts physically exchanged on both sides? ‘Yes, of course, through the back channel.’

  Praising Manmohan Singh for his ‘sincerity and flexibility’, Musharraf insisted that had he remained at the helm of government in Pakistan both countries could have moved towards signing a final pact on
Kashmir. Minutes later, we got locked into an ugly argument about the Pakistan-sponsored Lashkar-e-Taiba terror attacks on Mumbai in 2008. ‘From our point of view anyone who is fighting in Kashmir—your part of Kashmir—is a mujahid who is fighting for the freedom and rights of the people there,’ he said without apology or embarrassment. ‘Using acts of terror that don’t even spare women and children?’ I retaliated, unable to keep my composure. ‘I think we are going to enter into a discussion where you won’t prove anything; I also won’t prove anything,’ he said tersely. The tension was palpable and was proof that Musharraf’s confidence about India and Pakistan ‘resolving’ Kashmir was severely misplaced. Not because his peace model was unachievable but because in a post 9/11 and 26/11 world, Kashmir was no longer the most central or intractable issue between the two countries—terrorism was. As a journalist I would always try to be as impartial and as objective as I could be on whatever issue I was covering but as an Indian and as a human being there could be no countenancing of terror, and terror attacks on India and Indians. When a former president and army chief of Pakistan spoke of the LeT’s ‘popularity with the public’ and argued that ‘to handle and deal with them requires some finesse’ as Musharraf did with me, it was impossible to not get worked up.

  For India, the terrorism unleashed by shadowy Islamist militant groups like the LeT and the Jaish should have been the cue to call for a review of a Kashmir policy that has over the years always failed to seize the moment with the more moderate and indigenous elements of the insurgency. The diminishing of the JKLF, for instance, is not necessarily a cause for celebration when you consider how pan-Islamic extremists, most of whom are foreigners linked to global terror networks, have completely hijacked what was once essentially a local uprising. Unlike now, in the early years it was easy for journalists to meet and interview various JKLF militants without fear of reprisal or violence. One of the JKLF’s chief commanders, Yasin Malik, was a scrawny twenty-year-old, who may have become a model instead of a militant had the elections of 1987 played out differently. Malik and his three friends became the first group (named HAJY after their initials) in the Valley to cross over into Pakistan for arms training. By 1990 he was in jail and in 1994, citing inspiration from the books he had read on Gandhi and Mandela, Malik announced a unilateral ceasefire and gave up the gun.

  At the entrance to Srinagar’s locality of Maisuma, where Yasin Malik lives today, the barbed wires and security bunker are vestiges of a past steeped in violence. An environment of perpetual protest and the frequent street clashes between police and young men here have earned it the newspaper sobriquet ‘Kashmir’s Gaza Strip’. The crowded, densely populated bazaar selling everything from spare parts to spices can empty out in seconds in times of trouble and curfew calls by separatists. My abiding memory of Malik’s home is of the effervescence of his three sisters, the relative silence of his father (who was a bus driver for the state government) and Malik’s own brooding intensity that perfectly complemented his uncombed hair, unkempt clothes and stubborn argumentativeness.

  All my conversations with Malik took place well after his militant years were over, and as I interviewed him several times, it was sometimes difficult to believe that this wiry, untidy bearded man had directed that bombs be thrown at the city’s Central Telegraph Office or subsequently masterminded the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed to push for the release of jailed militants. He was also charged with the murder of five unarmed air force officers, the first such direct attack on the armed forces. His early release from prison in 2002—on grounds of his ‘deteriorating health’—was hugely controversial given the gravity of charges he faced. It was clearly a gamble calculated to revive political activity in the violence-ravaged Valley. At the time, the JKLF enjoyed mass popularity and was the only group that stood for independence—the ‘third’ option—instead of accession to Pakistan. Still, no attempt was made by the government in Delhi to draw the JKLF into the dialogue process. Islamabad, by contrast, was swift and brutal in moving to decimate the JKLF whose independence motto was anathema to the Pakistani establishment. It propped up the pro-Pakistan terror group—Hizbul Mujahideen—to displace Malik and his men and to destroy their networks of support. It would have been an opportune moment for India’s intelligence agencies to engage with the relatively less religious and malleable separatist politics of the JKLF. Instead, the JKLF was allowed to crumble under a focused offensive from counter-insurgents armed by India as well as targeted assassinations by the Jamaat-trained, more lethal cadres of the Hizbul Mujahideen. Malik’s public rejection of the gun had already split the JKLF down the middle. Now, targeted by both India and Pakistan for very different reasons, it was gasping and spluttering for survival. Over the years, the JKLF found itself more and more marginalized. Many of the old warriors of the Valley who had survived, became small-time shopkeepers or traders in an effort to make an alternative life for themselves.

  On the other side of the border, in Rawalpindi, not far from Pakistan Army Headquarters, I once met a soft-spoken, nondescript young man who was a salesman in a shop selling data cards for mobile phones. As we got talking I discovered he was from Srinagar, a former militant with the JKLF, fatigued and worn out by years of relentless violence. He was keen to return, but unsure of the risks that might await him back home. Some of his co-conspirators from a past life had taken the plunge and returned after the Omar Abdullah government announced a new rehabilitation policy. But since not one of them had taken the official government-approved route back into India—choosing to escape the ire of Pakistani intelligence by sneaking in from Nepal instead—they were not entitled to any of the benefits the policy offered. They had been disillusioned in Pakistan but were languishing upon their return to Kashmir.

  I was in Muzaffarabad reporting on the much-publicized trip of the Hurriyat Conference to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and saw how stunned the security establishment was when Yasin Malik warned them not to romanticize militancy. It was definitely a strategic error for India not to negotiate with the JKLF at the right time; its collapse marked the ascent of Pakistan’s jihadist fundamentalists, most of whom had no previous roots in Kashmir, taking control of the insurrection, as the original insurgents lapsed into lives of retirement or irrelevance. One former militant told me the missed opportunity by Delhi had only fortified the power of the gun, because those who had surrendered it had been abysmally weakened. ‘We all decided on a ceasefire but since then we have lost 600 of our workers. They wanted an amicable solution but they have been killed only because they don’t have a gun,’ he said pointing to the more deadly nature of militancy now. ‘Earlier there used to be firing or ambush, now it’s become so bad that they take 125 kg of explosives and blast it on the roads, not caring who dies. It’s become ugly. It’s moved away from Kashmiris to international agencies that have their own vested interests. Call it pan-Islamic, call it fundamentalist, but in reality if the issues aren’t solved this will just carry on.’

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  It is outrageous of course that those who are culpable of murder and terrorism should lay claim to amnesty. If the spirit of justice demands accountability and punishment for soldiers when they violate the law, it is contemptible to argue that militants should be absorbed back into the mainstream without being made to legally account for bloodshed. But in Jammu and Kashmir the complicated challenges of war and peace have seen thousands of surrendered militants turn informants and renegades for the state, this time armed with an official licence to kill. Others have fallen quietly into the anonymous crevices of ordinary lives. And several have joined political groups, either mainstream or separatist. It is this last category that ends up slipping between two stools, viewed as treacherous by India and traitors by Pakistan, if they dare to talk peace. Like Shahid-ul-Islam, former militant and lawyer and present-day separatist who narrowly escaped an assassination bid by throwing burning coal at two men who had come to meet him right after he delivered a public speech calling for ‘peaceful dialogu
e’. Islam’s years as a commander of the Hezbollah (he trained in an arms camp in Afghanistan) helped him spot the pistol concealed under the bulky phiran worn by one of the men. In Srinagar, where he is now an aide to Mirwaiz Umar Farooq—the Hurriyat Conference leader and main cleric of the city’s Jama Masjid—he told me how difficult it was for the young Kashmiri men of his generation to extricate themselves from the terror trap they were ensnared in. ‘Sometimes people used to tell me this is not your cup of tea, you are not fit for it,’ he said, during an expansive interview, his sunglasses perched fashionably on his head. ‘Ajeeb lagta tha, kissi ek mahaul se nikal kar bilkul doosre mahaul mein jaana. Lekin aur koi chara bhi nahin thha, wapis ja nahi sakte thhe (It was strange to be in an environment I had never been exposed to but at the time I didn’t think there was any looking back possible).’ The first generation of Kashmiri militants had all had some exposure to mainstream politics. Shahid’s grandmother was a committed National Conference worker, his father a sports instructor who had taught Omar Abdullah at high school and bitterly opposed his son’s embrace of the gun. When he left the house for PoK to make his way into the training camps of the Harkat-ul-Ansar in Afghanistan, his heartbroken father told him, ‘Since you refuse to listen to me, you are not my responsibility anymore, now you are Allah’s amanat.’ Shahid was arrested in 1997 and though he is still an active political separatist, admits that rank outsiders have taken charge. ‘Revolution needs its own children. If it goes out of your hands, you can’t do anything, you are helpless. That’s what happened to us.’

  VI

  Whether you commit to the idea of India or remain a secessionist, in Jammu and Kashmir a career in politics is a likely pact with death.