Part 4 (1/2)

I spent my time those days sending these bodies down to Delhi. They were grim days.

When our new DIB, Rajendra Prasad Jos.h.i.+, visited Srinagar he saw that I was looking drawn. (Jos.h.i.+ had taken over from Narayanan after the formation of the new National Front government of V.P. Singh.) 'Aren't you drinking too much?' he asked one night before dinner.

'Sir, there's nothing else to do here,' I replied. I had n.o.body for company, n.o.body to talk to. My wife was in Jammu because my daughter was preparing for her cla.s.s 12 boards. n.o.body trusted anyone, n.o.body relied on anyone. Srinagar was like a ghost city.

We had a young domestic helper by the name of Farooq. We had hired him in the summer of 1989. My wife found him soft- spoken and a good worker. But when things got bad one of our chaps suggested I not let Farooq into the house. 'How do you know he's not been infiltrated here,' the colleague said. 'He's new here?'

'Yeah, if he's infiltrated, he's infiltrated,' I said. 'Now it's too late. Next you'll ask me to start looking for bombs under my bed.'

We had a gardener, Sultan Wani, and he had been kept because he turned the IB compound into one of the most beautiful gardens in Srinagar. He was so old that no one knew when he retired, but he kept working there. And someone suggested to me that he was not okay. 'What do I do with him?' I said. 'I can't afford to chuck out the old man.'

It was that kind of time, a bad time, and for me it came to an abrupt end. The day Jagmohan was appointed, Farooq Abdullah carried through with the threat that he had made to the new prime minister, V.P. Singhif the new government sent Jagmohan to J&K, he would quit. Jagmohan was the governor in 1984 who was sent to J&K to deal with militancy that had exploded in the Valley, knowing that Farooq would also resign. V.P. Singh had no choice, however, and when Jagmohan's appointment was announced Farooq quit.

I had been warned that I was also going to be removed, and the person who warned me was Vijay Dhar, a friend and a neighbour on Gupkar Road. Vijay was the son of amba.s.sador D.P. Dhar; the father was a confidant of Indira Gandhi, the son a confidant of Rajiv Gandhi. Vijay knew I was preoccupied during the Rubaiya kidnapping; it ended on 13 December at 5:30 p.m., and the next day he came and asked to have a cup of coffee. 'I just want to warn you that people in Delhi are gunning for you,' he said. 'You should be careful. You've been branded as a Farooq man.'

'Who are these guys?' I asked.

'Arun Nehru and company,' he said. This included the home minister, Mufti Sayeed, whose daughter's release I had worked for and who never really liked me; and Jagmohan, whose previous term had overlapped with mine and who didn't like how close I was to Farooq. I took it in my stride but that's exactly what happened. In early March I was relieved; and I only got to know that I was being turfed out to Delhi the day my successor, R.C. Mehta, was coming to Srinagar.

I got a call in the morning that R.C. was arriving and I didn't immediately get it; I said if he's coming, don't worry, I'll go and receive him at the airport. They said, no, he's going to be there for a while. That's when it hit me.

Actually I was happy to get out of there. When I reached Delhi I heard that it had taken them a while to find someone willing to go to Srinagar. In fact, Jagmohan, genius that he was, sent a message on the IB channel asking for K.P. Singh, who had been posted in Srinagar before me during Jagmohan's earlier tenure, to be posted again. Thus I knew that my time would soon be up. Trouble was that K.P. turned down the offer to return to Srinagar. He had done his bit. He told Jos.h.i.+, the DIB, 'Sir, I have already been there. Will you send whoever Jagmohan asks for?'

They tried a few senior officers and finally R.C. figured, 'Chalte hain.'

While I was in Srinagar, Jos.h.i.+ had said something that gave a way forward. Things were going badly in the Valley: Kashmiris began to sniff azaadi, for they were taken in by the ISI's bluff that if they started something big enough, the Pakistan army would come and liberate them from India, much in the way India had helped Bangladesh's liberation from Pakistan. Insurgency in Kashmir was masterminded by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and his henchmen as revenge for Bangladesh. Kashmiris were crossing the border in droves. The IB's sources dried up because no one would talk to us; no one wanted to be seen going to Gupkar Road. We were in a mess. The Pakistanis were enjoying watching Kashmir burn.

Thus, in 1990, we needed the army to contain militancy, but if it were not for the IB and the intelligence it provided the army wouldn't have known what to do: it would have been fighting blind. In that very difficult period the army operations were guided by the IB, and frankly I did not contribute anything because I had been pulled out: the successes in fighting militancy during that time were a tribute to the work by colleagues posted in Srinagar after me. They rose to the occasion and took out some key militants. Some militants got killed, some of them disappeared, and some went back to Pakistan, and that is what encouraged separatists like Shabir or militants like Firdous to come out of the shadows.

The way forward that Jos.h.i.+ inspired was that despite the killings and despite the IB being targeted, what was most important was for Delhi to reach out to the Kashmiris, and for the IB to do so too. Jos.h.i.+ knew that the IB never had the best reputation in the Valley since the time of Sheikh Saheb.

Perhaps Jos.h.i.+'s insight had to do with the fact that he wasn't like the rest of us. Jos.h.i.+ came to the Bureau late. He wasn't like those of us who had been earmarked right at the beginning of our service; he entered the IB at the level of deputy director, which was exceptional in our organisation because the IB likes people to grow from within. As a result, he had more experience than the rest of us of being a police officer in the field; combined with the fact that he was down to earth, simple and practical, it helped; he saw straight in many matters.

Jos.h.i.+ became chief quite by accident; though he was second in seniority to Narayanan (they were from the same batch), everyone a.s.sumed Narayanan would be in the saddle till he retired. But when V.P. Singh became prime minister he eased out Narayanan to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and made Jos.h.i.+ the chief. And in the one year that Jos.h.i.+ was in the saddleV.P. Singh was prime minister for just a yearhe made this point: we must understand that we have to reach out and befriend the Kashmiri so that he doesn't feel Delhi is always hostile to him.

When I returned from Srinagar in March 1990 I was asked to handle this, since it was a.s.sumed that I must know some people, though the fact was I knew n.o.body. I was wondering where to start when I was suddenly transferred to counter- intelligence. For most intelligence officers that would have been the end of their Kashmir experience.

What happened, however, is that V.P. Singh's government fell and Chandra Shekhar became the new prime minister with the support of the Congress party. He brought Narayanan back as the DIB. And as soon as Narayanan took over he called for me and said: 'You've had enough of a holiday, now come back and do some serious work. I want you to again take over.' And so I was put in charge of the IB's Kashmir Operations Group in December 1990, after a few months of counter- intelligence, and till the time I went across to R&AW eight years later I did nothing but Kashmir.

We began talking to Kashmiris. There were three types.

One type comprised Kashmiris who were on the periphery of the movement. They thought they were in the movement, but they weren't really because they weren't into killing people. These guys were close to the JKLF but they were not ideologues you could say they were hangers-on. Somebody who knew Yasin Malik, somebody who knew Shabir Shah, etc. They would visit Delhi and would come with stories and we would talk to them. They were basically general Kashmiris supportive of or sympathetic to the movement.

The second category was a readymade group of the people who really mattered, the people who were all in jail. By early 1990, the former Muslim United Front leaders who would later form the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, or the JKLF guys, were in different jails. We thus had the opportunity of reaching out to whoever we wanted to by visiting them in jail. Like Shabir Shah, Yasin Malik too was contacted when in jail.

The third category were the militants. Obviously, this was a slightly more difficult group, for how do you get to some boys who are in the field, or underground? Like Firdous and others, we got to them but it took time.

Eventually, there was n.o.body in Kashmir whom the K-Group did not reach out to. So, with that, besides the a.n.a.lysis and operations and other stuff that we did, we got very involved in talking to Kashmiris. And we spent a lot of time cultivating relations.h.i.+ps like the one with Shabir Ahmed Shah, the headmaster of the boys who took up arms in the late 1980s early 1990s.

Shabir had been in and out of jail since 1968, when he was only fourteen years old. The only Kashmiri who had spent more time in jail than Shabir was Sheikh Abdullah. The fact that Shabir was older than the new lot of militant boys and the fact that he kept going into and coming out of jail made him the object of respect and admiration of Kashmiri youngsters. Myths grew around him such as the one that he unfurled a Pakistani flag at an international cricket match between India and the West Indies in Srinagar in 1983. He wasn't even at the match.

But he didn't mind all the publicity and all the time in jail: it saved him from ever having to lay out an agenda or a roadmap to freedom. In fact, being in Jammu jail quite often during the 1980s put him in touch with Sikh boys who were jailed for Khalistan-related terrorism, most of them with the Sikh Students Federation. Hence some networking had started, which picked up pace in the early 1990s, between extremists from both Punjab and Kashmir. For Pakistan this was good news for they could try to exploit both together. However, what I understood from the Sikh boys later was that they got disillusioned with the Kashmiris pretty quickly. They said the Kashmiris were faint- hearted and talked big but would do nothing: 'In mein dum nahin hain, kucch nahin karenge,' they said.

In any case, Shabir and like-minded Kashmiri separatists formed the People's League in 1974 in protest against the negotiations that would lead to the accord between Sheikh Saheb and Indira Gandhi the following year. In late 1986, a close a.s.sociate of Shabir, Mehmood Sagar, was instrumental in patronising anti-India youth in Srinagar city while Shabir was in jail, leading to the formation of the anti-India Islamic Students League (ISL). Some of its members, like its general secretary, Yasin Malik, actively worked for MUF candidates in the 1987 state a.s.sembly election, and they were thrown in jail when they protested against the blatant electoral malpractices of those polls. The ISL would later morph into the JKLF while Shabir remained in the People's League. The ISL, however, had a close bond with Shabir, who was then the emotional voice of Kashmiri youth.

Shabir caught my attention in late 1988, when an interview of him by Zafar Mehraj appeared on the front page of the Kashmir Times. Shabir being underground made the interview big news. By that time he was also known as an Amnesty International 'prisoner of conscience': he was quite taken by such monikers. And then almost a year later he and his lieutenant Nayeem Khan were arrested at Ramban in Jammu while the two were making an attempt to cross the Line of Control to take charge of separatist activities in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The ISI guys were waiting for him and had wanted him to come across for a long time; he was a most sought-after separatist.

Years later various former comrades of his would allege that Shabir himself avoided going across because he lacked the courage to do so. Perhaps it would have put him to a real leaders.h.i.+p test; several militants later told me that once you go across, you don't know if you're going to be used or misused. Or perhaps he didn't want to get too tangled with the ISI because once you've been to that 'randikhana', it is very difficult to get back out. A Kashmiri militant once told me, guys who've come into proper contact with the ISI are never going to be in a position to work something out with Delhi.

And incidentally, Shabir is the only separatist leader who has never been to Pakistan.

When I started talking to Kashmiris then, the obvious choice to start with was Shabir. The entire JKLF leaders.h.i.+p at that point looked up to him (the Hizbul Mujahideen hadn't become the dominant group yet), he had his own militant tanzeem, and he seemed to have a certain amount of ego that we could ma.s.sage. The fact is that anybody who is somebody or who thinks he is somebody in Kashmir has a big ego. And at that point Shabir was the headmaster to the rest of the militants.

Yet even though I had no problem in walking into the jail where Shabir was being held, there was no guarantee that he would utter a word, much less begin talking to me. It would have been good to have an intermediary and I stumbled across one through a mainstream politician, Prof. Saifuddin Soz, who was then with the National Conference. Soz was a strange character: he would never look anyone in the eye when he spoke and instead directed his gaze at a point just above one's head. He was a complicated character, voting against his own party in 1999 and bringing down the one-year-old BJP government (which was re-elected anyway), for which Farooq threw him out of the party.

In the winter of 1990, however, Soz approached me and asked me for help with a friend who was in jail. 'Please help him, he's a personal friend of mine,' Soz said. 'And he could be of use to you also.'

'Whether he's of use to me or not, if he's a personal friend of yours we'll help him,' I said.

Soz's friend was a prominent businessman. At that time in Kashmiran unusual timethere were business people, some of whom money was extorted from and some of whom were giving money to militants. Some of these business people with links across the border were pivotal in sponsoring terrorism. The same people would help us in the government of India in our fightback against militancy. In the way that there were obvious separatists or obvious militants, there were also obvious business families involved in the same racket, in some aspect or another. Since they had public dealings, being businessmen, they were more easily approachable for the IB than a militant. Some of them were in trouble and they came to us; some of them we heard about and we approached on our own; some became friends. Obviously they will need to remain anonymous.

Soz's friend was part of a flouris.h.i.+ng business family and he was in jail because Jagmohan, despite his short tenure the second time aroundhe took over in January 1990 and had to resign in May due to the firing upon a procession of mourners of the a.s.sa.s.sinated Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooqzealously went after those he thought were funding and financing militancy. If there was an allegation against a business person, Jagmohan had that person picked up. Thus, this friend of Soz's from a prominent business family was thrown into jail and was there for five or six months before Soz finally came to me.

The businessman was eventually released and I went to meet him. He was distrustful of me and had lots of reservations about talking to the IB. Yet while he spoke little, he did mention to me that there was n.o.body better than Shabir at that point to target or talk to. 'He could be the answer to your problems,' this businessman suggested to me. 'If Delhi is serious about a dialogue with Kashmiris, then Shabir is the right person.'

That businessman was close to Shabir and remained so as long as Shabir was the focus of things in Kashmir.

Shabir was in jail with his lieutenant Nayeem Khan, who had left the ISL to join with Shabir in the People's League. Nayeem was a good, practical influence on Shabir, who had dreams and visions. Nayeem helped our cause as a voice of reason at Shabir's side because when we started talking to Shabir, the prisoner of conscience had typical Kashmiri reservations. 'What are we going to talk about?' he said to me.

'Let's talk about talking,' I replied.

When I say typical Kashmiri refrain, what I mean is that at the back of the Kashmiri mind are all the sacrifices they have made for their movement and all the deaths that have taken place; that all of it has only grown and multiplied; and that there has to be something shown for it. 'It has to be peace with honour,' Shabir would tell me. So from talking about talks, we began speaking about the futility of the gun, and then about peace with honour. It was a slow process.

Sometimes I met him in jail, bringing along a bottle of Rooh Afza and a box of grapes, and sometimes I met him at a Jammu nursing home. We began to talk of dialogue. I began to call him the Nelson Mandela of Kashmir, and he liked to be known that way. We spoke of a settlement with India and that he could become chief ministeror even prime ministerof Kashmir in the way that Sheikh Saheb was in the period 194753.

Once other separatists were released in 1993the MUF guys who formed the All Parties Hurriyat Conferencehe began to feel ready for release. We really ma.s.saged his ego, encouraging him to think that he had a monopoly on Delhi and that we wanted to see him as chief minister. 'Shah Saheb,' I said. 'Now we want to see you there. I want to come and stay with you.'

Shabir would laugh about it, but he was also concerned because he was going along with the flow and once in a while he would wonder whether he had gone too far or whether he had gone too fast, and where all this would end up. 'I will be responsible,' he said repeatedly to us, and insisted that there had to be peace with honour. 'Of course,' I said. 'If there's a dialogue, there has to be something for the Kashmiris also.'

The people around himNayeem, Shabir's commander-in- chief Firdous (who was caught by the army during those years), and even that businessman who put me on to himall wanted Shabir to move a little faster. Yet since he felt he was senior and superior to all the other separatists he wanted to wait till the government of India released the big-name separatists before they released him. Indeed, the last big name released before Shabir was Yasin Malik in May 1994, and in October 1994 Shabir was released.

When Shabir was out, he decided he would march to Poonch, then back to Jammu and then climb up through Bhaderwah and Kishtwar in Doda (a part of the Jammu region) on his way to Anantnag in south Kashmir. It was a good plan. By the time he reached Srinagar he was like the Pied Piper of Hamlin: everyone was following him. His each stop was thronged by excited Kashmiris. India Today put him on its cover on top of a bus. I was taken aback by the ma.s.sive reception and asked a Kashmiri friend, 'Is this guy really that big?'

The Kashmiri turned around and said: 'Look, there is a feeling that he has done a deal with Delhi and therefore he gives us a lot of hope. That is the reason so many people are backing him or following him.'