This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Sakina Itoo, once the only woman minister in the National Conference government, was just twenty-five when her father, the state’s former revenue minister, was shot dead at point-blank range as he made his way home from the evening namaz. She was studying to be a doctor and reluctantly took his place in politics. Since then, she has been the victim of the most number of attacks on any politician in the Valley. Undeterred, she campaigns during every election in the remotest parts of rural Kashmir. On these journeys, she’s had explosives planted on the route of her motorcade, been shot at, ducked grenades and lost count of the number of times an attempt has been made to take her out. In one such attack, two of her bodyguards died saving her. In another, a young woman, a passer-by, was killed when police exchanged fire with militants determined to plant a mine in the path of her convoy. ‘My house is always under attack, sometimes they throw grenades, sometimes they fire at me,’ Itoo said to me during the assembly election in 2002 during which she was the victim of four militant attacks in ten days. ‘If my security had its way, I would not be allowed to step out. Once they kept me house-bound for four days. I told them I was not ready to stay locked up inside,’ Itoo said, her face betraying both fear and strength. ‘I said this will not do. I can’t give up politics and just sit at home. Baad mein Uparwaale ki marzi, what is destined for me will happen anyway.’ Did she not miss the relative safety of a more ordinary life, I asked her. ‘What I miss are the small things. As a student, I used to love going to a theatre and watching a movie. Now I can’t do anything like that. Being in politics here has finished my personal life.’

  ■

  If the willingness to engage with the electoral process in Jammu and Kashmir can literally be a deadly choice, across the ideological divide, the readiness to talk peace can be just as fatal. Seventy-year-old Abdul Gani Lone, a dove among separatist hawks, discovered that the hard way. I remember being there at the precise moment he was slain.

  It had been an annual summer ritual for twelve years now. A procession led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq to commemorate the day his father, the separatist politician Maulvi Mohammed Farooq, was shot. For years, government agencies argued that Umar’s father had been murdered by militants because they believed he was in covert negotiations with Delhi. Umar bristled at the explanation. ‘It’s really difficult to believe that when we see what followed the assassination,’ he retaliated, recalling how paramilitary forces had fired on the several thousand people accompanying the final march to the burial grounds. ‘There was firing at his funeral procession, sixty-five people were killed, the whole situation of Kashmir changed with that single event, but they have still not come out with the facts.’

  As the cavalcade of cars and buses crept its way through the narrow lanes of downtown Srinagar, supporters of the Mirwaiz, old women and young children among them, showered rose petals and almonds on the twenty-eight-year-old separatist whose father’s violent death had pushed him from being a computer engineer into the muddy waters of state politics. Soon, we were firmly in separatist territory, the grounds where the Mirwaiz’s father was buried were known in this part of the city as a ‘martyrs’ graveyard’. It’s here that militants and separatists alike were brought after their deaths. The media interest in the rally was because of its timing: Prime Minister Vajpayee was arriving in Srinagar the next day and the BJP government had been making a serious effort to get the Hurriyat Conference to the dialogue table. Little did we know that history was about to repeat itself in a bizarre and frightening manner. The unrest began when a group of young men, barely a handful among the few thousands who had gathered, began to raise slogans in favour of Pakistan. Chaos erupted as a fist fight broke out in the crowd, with the men finally being chased out of the grounds. This was a time when the Hurriyat Conference, the twenty-three-separatist-party conglomerate, was badly riven by a clash of ideologies and personalities. As things quietened down and the Mirwaiz began his speech, Lone was on stage with him.

  Over many years of reporting the conflict, I had got to know Lone rather well. His chequered career in politics began with the Congress; during the initial years of militancy in the nineties his newly floated People’s Conference briefly had its own armed wing; a decade later he was taking on the ISI and Pakistan and condemning the intrusion of jihadi mercenaries and foreign militants. In 2000, I had travelled to Pakistan to report on the wedding of his son Sajjad to the daughter of Kashmiri separatist Amanullah Khan—the cross-border wedding diplomacy was seen as a major political story. But once the song and dance had subsided what really grabbed the headlines was Lone’s unsparing condemnation of foreign militants who he said were not welcome in the Valley. At a tea party with President Pervez Musharraf, Lone told him that Kashmiris were exhausted and could not be expected to fight indefinitely.

  Perhaps these were the words that claimed his life. The rally at the Eidgah grounds was drawing to a close and along with other journalists we were heading towards the stands where our cameras were positioned, when we suddenly heard the sound of firing. Panic-stricken people began to run in different directions, one man suggested that maybe the shots were some sort of gun salute in memory of the Mirwaiz’s father. Another confirmed that two men wearing uniforms, their faces masked, had merged into the crowd before one of them pulled out a gun. For a brief moment, my cameraman who was on his first ever visit to Kashmir, was paralysed with shock. ‘Roll,’ I shouted, pushing him in panic, ‘roll!’ urging him to start filming. Right in front of us bodies were being heaped into the back of a car that was speeding away to the nearest hospital. As news of Lone’s assassination spread, I ran out of the grounds, racing my competitor from a rival network to the closest STD phone booth; mobile phone networks were still disallowed in the state.

  The assassination, said Vajpayee, as he arrived in Jammu later in the day, was because Lone had spoken for peace. His daughter, Shabnam Lone, told people who had come to condole his death to refrain from crying. ‘Look at his face,’ said Shabnam, holding back her own flood of tears, ‘it does not show fear, it shows knowledge. He knew the assassin had come, but he wasn’t scared. Look at him, it’s as if he is just sleeping.’

  That evening, his distraught son Sajjad broke down in tears of rage and blamed militants, Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, and Hurriyat hard-liner Syed Shah Geelani for his father’s murder. When the Pakistan-leaning Geelani arrived at the residence to offer his condolences, mourners and supporters physically threw him out of the house in full gaze of the waiting cameras. By next morning, whether from pressure, fear, or simply self-preservation, Sajjad retracted his accusation blaming it on his emotional fragility. Instead, he targeted the state government of Farooq Abdullah for not providing his father adequate security cover. But from that moment, he began his rather lonely voyage towards the promise of democracy, fielding proxy candidates in the polls of 2002 that took place just a few months after his father was killed. By 2014, he was an elected member of the legislative assembly, fending off the label of ‘traitor’ that ironically came from equal and opposite directions. Many of his own people charged him with ‘selling out’ after his much-publicized meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his praise for the BJP. Others in the rest of the country thought his antecedents made him inherently perfidious. The initial isolation of someone like Sajjad once again underlined the biggest error in India’s Kashmir policy—the failure to reach out and grab the hand that was being tentatively offered.

  Among the first separatists to unequivocally condemn all loss of life in Kashmir, Sajjad Gani Lone called upon ‘the liberal and emancipated silent majority…to isolate the hawks’. Like his father, he took on the militant-recruiting expeditions by jihadists, telling his people to beware. ‘Yeh log jo aap ke paas aate hain aur aap ko bolte hain ki humein ek baccha de do, shahadat ke liye, Lone sahib ki kasam, yahan jo khoon behta hai, is khoon ko bhi ye log bahar bechte hain (These people who come to you and say give us a child for martyrdom, I swear on Lone sahib, they will sell your blood fo
r their own agenda).’ Yet, for years, no one in government bothered to engage formally with Sajjad, not even when he wrote a lengthy vision document for the state as he continued to experiment with electoral democracy. In 2014, when he finally took the plunge and joined hands with the BJP, he defended his decision by pointing out that it was the only national party that had bothered to communicate with him in over a decade.

  VII

  Among the many strands of the Kashmir story that are worth remarking upon is the one where, in the mid-1990s, instead of trying to rehabilitate surrendered militants, the government decided to use them to form a pro-government militia that would be deployed to battle the insurgency. Operating on the ‘it-takes-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief’ principle, the government encouraged these men to use their months of training in militant camps across the border to now turn the tables at home. The much-feared Ikhwanis (Arabic for ‘brothers’), as they were known, killed hundreds of militants and provided crucial intelligence in anti-terror operations as members of the special operations group (SOG). But with the unfettered freedom to retain arms and weapons, a power they were often accused of abusing, they came to be as notorious and reviled among many Kashmiris as they were powerful.

  Kukka Parrey—at first a folk singer on Radio Kashmir, later a militant, an Ikhwan, and finally a legislator—was the best known of the gunmen who were co-opted by the government. In the nineties when he first turned trooper for India’s forces, you would find cryptic and coded references to him in radio frequency conversations: ‘This is Bulbul,’ the message would go, ‘ask Koel what song he is singing tonight.’ Bulbul was a military intelligence officer, Koel a veiled reference to Parrey.

  The strategic community gave Parrey and his men credit for helping the army decimate the Hizbul Mujahideen cadre effectively using their insider understanding and competitive guerrilla tactics. Police officers credited the Ikhwanis for creating a security environment that enabled the 1996 elections. But along the way these counter-insurgents went beyond the grasp of the law. They illegally felled and sold timber, their men would extort money from shopkeepers, vendors and bus drivers at checkpoints, and they were charged with a spate of extra-judicial killings. Finally, because violence always begets violence, Parrey was assassinated in 2003 by militants of the same Hizbul Mujahideen that he had taken on. His family furnished letters to show that his many pleas for greater personal security and a bulletproof vehicle had been ignored. But so unpopular was Parrey by the time he was killed that he was buried in the backyard of his own home instead of being allowed a place in the village graveyard.

  The Ikhwanis would argue that as they steadily outlived their utility they became the forgotten army. On the other hand, ordinary Kashmiris would say that they had never been brought to justice for the atrocities they committed. As with most other things in this conflict-swept state, both statements were true.

  Until the early 2000s, it was not uncommon to see Ikhwanis walking through the streets of Anantnag with AK-47s slung casually over their shoulders. At the time there were still an estimated 3,000 surrendered militants who had been allowed to retain their weapons. Most of them were on the temporary payroll of the special task force of the state’s police on a fixed salary of Rs 1,500 per month.

  I spent some time at the headquarters of the south Kashmir Ikhwan and as I interviewed a man who still called himself ‘chief commander’, his henchmen spread out in a protective ring around him. Some stared down at me from the roof where they stood guard. Their rifles, pistols, automatic guns were casual extensions of themselves. Every single one of them protested what they saw as a defamation campaign against them. The disagreement over whether they were victims or villains was evident during the watershed elections of 2002. Chief Election Commissioner James Lyngdoh—widely credited with having delivered the first fair and free election in several years—officially called for a lockdown on the uncontrolled movement of Ikhwanis on polling day. They were allowed to vote, but only on condition that they left their weapons at home. Lyngdoh went on record to say that ‘there are people who have surrendered their arms and come over to this side. But the public perception is that they have been misused for other purposes...’

  But as violence escalated in the next phase of the elections, the Jammu and Kashmir police chief blamed it on the confinement of the counter-insurgents. The utilization of these renegades in anti-terror operations, without subjecting them to the normal rules of the game, was a decision that proved to be more tactical than strategic. It would have some quick short-term gains but several long-term repercussions that were extremely damaging for peace in the Valley. They should either have been disarmed and provided with regular employment or recruited as full-time, legitimate soldiers of the army. The unleashing of unregulated armed militia further broke down trust among an already alienated people. The failure to create any other role or economic incentive for those who were willing to surrender left them disenchanted as well as vulnerable to militant violence. In the netherworld they came to inhabit, these men became hate figures for both ordinary Kashmiris and the militant groups they once trained with.

  Before he was killed in 2003 in a targeted terror strike, another Ikhwan, Javed Shah, spoke to me candidly of his many avatars. He had been a police constable, and later a Pakistan-trained militant. Soon after, he joined the ranks of the state’s counter-insurgents. He finally ended up as a politician who also edited his own Urdu daily. Shah admitted that some of his ‘boys’ had been guilty of extortion but argued that they had no dependable source of income. He blamed the government’s flawed policy for leaving surrendered militants with few options. ‘We are heroes, you know,’ he said to me. From which film, I asked, jokingly. ‘Like Shah Rukh Khan,’ he said. ‘Which film of Shah Rukh’s?’ I asked, now interested in the self-image he was drawing. ‘You know that film, Anjaam?’

  I hadn’t seen it. He elaborated, ‘In Anjaam, Shah Rukh Khan pleads with Shivani to tell him once, just once, that she loves him.’ ‘So no one says that to you,’ I pushed him to open up more. ‘Koi nahin karta. Na maa, na baap, no koi ladki (No one loves us. Not our fathers or mothers, nor any women. Even our neighbours call us traitors),’ he said, his voice cynical and resigned.

  Most worryingly, the Ikhwanis warned that many of those who had surrendered could end up returning to militancy because of shrinking options. Mehbooba Mufti, the leader of the People’s Democratic Party whose political slogan was the promise of a ‘healing touch’, said the absence of ‘normal’ options for a young man who wanted a second shot at life were so minimal that in many ways ‘he had become a suspect forever’. There were only two options that a surrendered militant had, she told me, ‘Join a government agency and pick up the gun or return to militancy and pick up the gun.’ One of the first decisions of the Mufti government, when elected in 2002, was to disband the special task force of counter-insurgents and merge them into the regular police force. But by this time the brutalities the Ikhwanis were blamed for had mounted and, as far as ordinary people were concerned, they remained grossly unpunished.

  Every honest election made an attempt to lift the shadow of the gun. But sometimes the ironies were staggering. In 2014, when the critically-acclaimed but contentious Bollywood film Haider portrayed Kukka Parrey on celluloid, in real life, his son Imtiaz was gearing up to contest assembly elections in Bandipora, his father’s hometown where the very mention of his name still provoked fear and anger. Sitting by Parrey’s grave, Imtiaz argued that history had been unfair to his father, while conceding that in today’s Jammu and Kashmir, battles would have to be won and lost by the ballot unlike the years that his father lived through when it was the gun that wielded power. ‘If my father’s legacy were only about violence, why would so many big leaders endorse me; why would I be as famous as I am?’ he asked as I persisted with questions about his father’s infamous past.

  A short walk away from where I was sitting with Imtiaz, people were queuing up to vote in sub-zero weather, the ser
pentine line making its own powerful statement about the redundancy of the boycott that had been called by the separatists. But in that same row of people was haunting evidence that the Valley’s past was still an open wound. One of the voters at the polling booth was a man called Abdul Rashid. He pointed to a patch of grass close by—the exact spot where his brother had been shot dead by Parrey’s band of renegades during the tumultuous years. He is still fearful of talking openly in public about it. At his home, he breaks down under the weight of that memory. Holding a photograph of his brother’s bullet-ridden body, he wept. ‘My brother did nothing, he was an innocent man.’ As he spoke, a small group of angry men entered the courtyard and started shouting angry slogans urging Rashid not to vote. But Rashid said he was counting on his vote to be an instrument of change. Both Imtiaz and Abdul Rashid—perpetrator and victim—were seeking a departure from a violent past in yet another reminder of how many destines are interlinked by conflict in this state.

  VIII

  Often forgotten by the media, paid lip service to by politicians in every election, and on the periphery of global attention, the Kashmiri Pandit community has every reason to be embittered. Their history, and with them the fate of the Valley, changed forever on 19 January 1990. This was during the first stages of militancy and there were reports of an imminent attack on the Pandits. Local mosques began asking them to leave their homes. On that night, thousands of Kashmiri Pandit families packed up and left in what would be the beginning of a mass exodus.

  The Valley’s separatists have always blamed the state’s governor at the time—Jagmohan—for engineering a divide between the Hindus and Muslims as part of the strategy to crack down on the calls for ‘azadi’. The Pandits themselves rubbish that theory. They were pushed out at gunpoint, they say, after communal threats and targeted killings. Decades later, more than six lakh Pandits remain dislocated and uprooted from their cultural and linguistic moorings, unable to return home and unable to feel at home anywhere else. In the immediate aftermath of their banishment, a majority of families were pushed into migrant camps where they lived for years in makeshift plastic tents and one-room tenements. Their memories of where they came from had photographic detail, infused with colours and textures and smells. But their children, they have always worried, will be strangers in their own land, never having known the idea of home. Like with the partition that separated Pakistan from India, many of those fleeing thought their departure was temporary. Some left in a panic without taking any belongings. One man I met had come away with only a picture of the Kheer Bhawani temple but told me his mind would not permit the peace of forgetting.