Authors: Adrian Levy
In 1991 his father had been arrested and tortured by ‘
behanchod
Indian soldiers’, he said, calling the troops ‘sisterfuckers’. After that the Tiger had gone to war, joining the Muslim Brotherhood in 1992, the same militant outfit Sikander had enlisted in during his college days in Anantnag. At first, all had gone well, with the Brotherhood claiming scores of hits against the security forces, who in the Tiger’s words were ‘
suor ka bacha
’, or sons of pigs.
‘But things changed in 1994,’ the Tiger reflected. ‘Our discipline eroded, and the true militancy became no more noble than mugging. We were
gandu
[arseholes], and badly outgunned by the Indian dogs.’ Not wanting to end up rotting among the faceless corpses stacked in mass graves all along the Line of Control, and disenchanted by the
azadi
cause, the Tiger and his followers had secretly agreed to switch sides after being approached by Indian intelligence agents who offered them money and protection to hunt down their former comrades. From now on they would be known as ‘renegades’, allowed to keep their weapons and any spoils they procured.
The existence of the Tiger’s group was secret, and vehemently denied by the Indian government. Although the Squad knew about the classified operation to recruit Kashmiris to spy for the security forces, which had commenced in 1994, they had had no idea that it had penetrated this far into the militant-infested Anantnag hills, or that it involved arming former militants as well as using them as informers. From what the Squad understood, the intelligence agencies had modelled the plan on a tactic used by India in Punjab state in the 1980s, when a Sikh insurgency had risen up, and fighters disgruntled with it were lured to the government side and deployed to crush their erstwhile comrades. The philosophy that underpinned the initiative, turning one community against another, was also a central tenet of the Game.
‘I’m the fucking law now,’ the Tiger says he told the police. He even has a laminated identity card bearing his photo, which he keeps in a
creased red-plastic shopping bag. Stamped by the 36th Battalion of the Rashtriya Rifles, the card describes him as a ‘Battalion Commander’ and gives the serial number of his rifle, which was bought for him by Pakistan when he went over the LoC to train during the early days of the insurgency. The Squad could not help but marvel at the irony of this. The force that was created to crush Kashmir’s insurgency, India’s brutally effective RR, had endorsed the Tiger and sanctioned his weapon, both of which had been tools of Pakistan, triggering a new kind of insurgency. According to the Tiger there were thirty-five men under him, spread across six or seven large villages and a number of hamlets, all militants who had flipped to the government side and were authorised by the RR to bear arms, carrying similar cards to prove it.
They were paid ‘two bottles of wine a day’ by the 36th RR’s Colonel Awasthi, for whom they ran a network of unofficial informers, villagers who received small amounts of cash for revealing whatever the Movement or HM was up to. Whenever the Tiger’s men got a call from one of these sources, they commandeered a fleet of taxis to get to the fight, since they had no cars of their own. Without mobile phones, they were dependent on the confused copper wires of India’s public call boxes to keep in touch with each other. And in a remote and under-resourced region riddled with poverty and petty village disputes, this DIY government hit squad also used their newly-gifted power to settle a lifetime’s worth of grudges.
The Tiger boasted: ‘I say to my boys, “Go into so-and-so village and start shooting those dog-fuckers.” Then we used to leave some of our boys behind.’ He dusted off his hands. ‘
Ragdoo
,
ragdoo
[smash, smash], they misbehave. And I come back and tell the people sitting in the ruins of their homes, “
Lath choos
[cocksuckers], unless you come over to my way of thinking, we’ll be back.”’ He said the speech normally sorted things out, as did the stories that had reached all of the villages across south Kashmir that government-paid renegades were permitted to do whatever they liked.
Strong-arming, informing and looting soon became wholesale killing. The Tiger said that in early 1995 the 36th Rashtriya Rifles had introduced a cash-for-corpses incentive scheme, in line with another
rule of the Game: My enemy’s enemy is my friend. ‘Now, for every body that I or my men dump at the local 36th RR camp, we are paid between ten thousand and twenty thousand rupees [between £200 and £400], depending on the seniority of the deceased militant. But no one examines the bodies, asks for debriefs or IDs, so we shoot whosoever we choose. And so long as the RR remains in power, no one is going to stop us,’ was the way the Tiger told it. He had taken to his task with gusto, carrying fat rolls of five-hundred-rupee notes, testifying to the eighty-nine kills he would personally rack up, most of which he could no longer put a face to. He became so valuable a resource that when he got shot himself in 1995, the army sent him to Srinagar, where he received medical treatment at the military hospital in BB Cantt, Indian Army headquarters. ‘Since we took over, we got rid of those
zinheke
[sons of whores] completely,’ the Tiger said, referring to the militants from HM and the Movement whom he had once considered as brothers.
This area in the upper hills was no longer a haven for Sikander or his men, the Squad could see. When they asked the Tiger what he knew about the hostages, he said he was sure they were heading this way. He recalled: ‘Our sources told us the kidnappers arrived here from the Warwan – end of September – and spent the first few days hanging around the upper forests. We climbed a few mountains and we found some freshly used militant hideouts where the bedbugs were full of blood. They had been there all right. We hung around for seven or eight days, waiting, but did not see them. We did hear them on the VHF sets, chattering, saying the hostages were healthy, but cold and hungry.’ He concluded that al Faran was intending to come down into town: ‘Those
halamke
[bastards] were heading for Anantnag town. But they would have to cross us first, and then we’d have them.’
Letting rip with a fusillade of shots, to show the conversation was at an end, the Tiger snatched back his paperwork, tossing his photo-ID and other assorted documents into the red shopping bag. ‘I only know bits and bobs,’ he said, shifting from one leg to the other, appearing to have become uncomfortable with this subject, having thought about it a little longer. ‘The hostages are a matter for the
higher-ups. You should talk to them. It’s their operation. We are not employed to think about stuff. We are wolves.’ In any case, he had to go. Every evening at dusk he drove in a convoy of taxis down the mountain to the nearest Indian paramilitary base at Vailoo, thirty minutes away, where he would spend the night in a bunker, drinking Old Monk rum with the soldiers and listening to the thwack and whizz of home-made mortars flying overhead. His new incarnation as a government killer had cost him dear. The Tiger had lost count of the number of relations, friends and neighbours who wanted him dead.
The Tiger’s gory grip on the forests and foothills east of Anantnag explained why the Indians had been able to gather so many sightings of the al Faran party in this area – the ones that had been leaked to the press and became coloured pins on Roy Ramm’s composite map. Contrary to what the Indian government was saying publicly, it had ears and eyes in villages at the previously hostile top end of the district, informers paid to work its beat, and gunmen to act on the intelligence, tipping the balance of power towards New Delhi. This change would force Sikander into a corner, the Squad concluded. They needed to move fast to secure a deal before he panicked. The key could be the renegade intelligence networks. If they extended across other hilly areas above Anantnag, and the Squad could get them to work for them, the task of hunting al Faran, or communicating with it, would be that much easier.
The renegades would not take orders from Crime Branch officers without being told to do so from above, so the Squad set off in search of the Tiger’s boss, Abdul Rashid, a thirty-two-year-old former government employee in Anantnag’s weights and measures department, hoping that he would either have the clout to make a decision, or could spill some useful intelligence. Like the Tiger, Rashid had joined the militancy in 1990, becoming a district commander in the Muslim Brotherhood before secretly defecting to the government side in 1994, when his new Indian handlers gave him a call-sign: the Clerk.
No longer welcome in his home town of Guri Draman, a bucolic village whose name means ‘colt grass’, the Clerk had sought sanctuary among the Indian paramilitaries in Vailoo, a two-street village of mercantile farmers, close to an ancient arched stone bridge over the Breng River. Everyone in the village loathed him. Stories were whispered of how one day he had ordered one of his men to pluck a neighbour’s baby from her house, and plunge it into a freezing water butt, holding it under until it stopped kicking, because its mother had given a bowl of drinking water to a bleeding prisoner he had had hog-tied to his jeep.
The Squad found the Clerk easily enough, since he had made so much money from his renegade activities that he had built himself a mansion, protected by imposing black iron gates and guarded by heavily armed Indian paramilitaries. Now, the Crime Branch detectives were held at those gates while guards checked their IDs, relaying their details to some distant controller over a state-of-the-art high-frequency radio set. Whatever he did for them, the state was clearly guarding the Clerk well. Finally they were given the nod, and the Clerk, sitting on his wooden veranda, beckoned them over, sipping from a cup of Lipton, but offering nothing to the members of the Squad, a deliberate act of discourtesy that would be understood by all Kashmiris, for whom the offer of tea was a customary greeting, like a handshake in the West, or even a kiss.
The detectives could see that the Clerk was a different proposition to the Tiger. Handsome, dressed in jeans and a crisp shirt, he appeared sophisticated and calm, although if only half of what they had heard about him was true, he was far more cruel than his lieutenant in Lovloo. When he was asked about al Faran, he became hostile. ‘Whatever my boys find is passed up the line to the Rashtriya Rifles,’ he said. His family, who today still live behind the big black gates in Vailoo, came out to listen. One of them recalled: ‘He told the visitors he was answerable only to his army handlers, just to keep things simple. If express permission was given by the higher-ups he could cast his mind back. But he had no such orders from the Indian Army or intelligence.’ The Clerk said he was too busy nowadays to talk to
policemen: ‘Kidnappers and foreign hostages are not my business. That’s further up the pay scale. I have only one task here. We have instructions to eliminate HM in Anantnag, wiping them out, leaving no trace, by the winter’s end.’ With that he stood up abruptly and was gone.
Faced with the renegades’ reluctance to talk about the al Faran operation, the Squad knew that they needed to find someone senior enough to be able to assist them without having to seek authorisation from the higher-ups. This was something of an outside possibility, as they were a secret force that in these early days the government wanted to remain obscure. The policemen worried too that they were dabbling in a shadowy world, which they had entered without permission or invitation. That was perilous in Kashmir, where curiosity often got people killed.
Leaving the wilds of Lovloo and Vailoo, the Squad headed down the Sosanwar Hills towards Anantnag, through an undulating landscape of unmade roads and silent pines. Village boys beat the walnut trees by the side of the road with long bamboo poles to bring down the autumn crop, and the Squad’s jeeps crunched over the broken branches. Occasionally they passed an isolated army camp or STF checkpoint, marked out by red-and-white fencing and bounded by sandbags, sentry posts and barbed wire. Empty beer bottles jangled from the fences, and signs declared ‘Army Helpline’, with a mobile telephone number scrawled beneath them. They wondered how many locals dared ring that number. ‘Make 1995 A Year With No Human Rights Abuses’ read a hand-painted sign just outside Achhabal, the site of a legendary Mughal garden designed in the seventeenth century by Noor Jehan, the wife of Emperor Jehangir. Once it had been a popular picnic destination for all races and creeds, but these days the grass was jaundiced, the fountains dry.
Several hours later, their journey prolonged by roads fractured by heavy military vehicles pounding along them, the Squad eventually reached Anantnag. Militants once controlled the town, and the security forces had had to be careful whenever they ventured beyond police lines. But now, in October 1995, everywhere the Squad turned
there was a renegade outpost, from which locals said rose the ferrous smell of blood. A sprawling wooden house once owned by Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) in the Janglat Mandi neighbourhood had been transformed into a massive interrogation centre. These days no one went near it unless they were dragged in by their heels, neighbours said. The renegades had another such place in Kadipora, Anantnag’s hectic market, where above a lintel beneath the veranda someone had scrawled words that remain there today: ‘We are proud to be Indians. Get them by their balls, hearts and minds will follow.’ Kashmiris who had become Indians for gold, the renegades did as they liked, and had set up their HQ in another illegally occupied Pandit mansion beside Mehndi Kadal (Henna Bridge), brazenly close to the central Saddar police station. Outside the building, the turncoats squatted under anti-grenade netting, and were even guarded by khaki-clad officers from the volatile police Special Task Force, whose bullet-pocked white Gypsy jeeps were prominently parked in front to show who was in partnership with whom. The STF was now almost as unruly as these Kashmiri irregulars, the Squad noted.
None of the mercenaries would talk to Crime Branch. The local cops admitted that they were not in control of them. One officer described how a particularly vicious renegade commander had taken up residence inside Anantnag’s Police Superintendent’s office, from where he held court with his feet up on the desk, making it impossible for anyone to investigate the six hundred or so killings his men were accused of carrying out: their victims included the town’s chief medical officer, a former member of the state assembly and a well-loved schoolmaster. It was the same in other towns too, the Squad heard. A police source in the Anantnag control room told them about a renegade called Fayaz who was known to have personally killed more than a hundred Kashmiris who may have been militants, or their distant relations, neighbours or friends, a kill rate verified by the RR. Now, Fayaz walked the streets of his home village ‘like a king’, and ‘even policemen looked down’. ‘Whatever Fayaz wanted he got, apart from Naseema, the most beautiful girl in the village.’ When she turned him down, he had her abducted and raped until she became pregnant. ‘To
prove his power, he then went after her sister too.’ The distraught family contacted the police. ‘The cops took the details, and then rang Fayaz, who charged into the village market. There he produced the eight-months pregnant Naseema, stripped her and shot her repeatedly in the belly before a large crowd, shouting, “We are in charge, and no one can touch us. This is what you get when you fuck with us.” Naseema with her unborn child died. Her sister is still with the renegades.’