The Meadow (75 page)

Identity card of Basir Ahmad Wagay, aka ‘the Tiger’, a field commander for the pro-government renegades whose territory spread from Lovloo to Mati Gawran, in Anantnag district.

Renegade commander Azad Nabi, call-sign ‘Alpha’, whose real name was Ghulam Nabi Mir. One of the most powerful renegades, he led pro-government militias in the hills above Anantnag.

Naseer Mohammed Sodozey, a treasurer of Harkat ul-Ansar, captured by Indian security forces in April 1996 and allegedly forced to confess that the hostages had been killed by the Movement on 13 December 1995.

Omar Sheikh, from London, arrested in Pakistan in 2002 in connection with the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl.

Masood Azhar (right) in Pakistan in January 2000, shortly after he was released from an Indian jail, after Pakistani militants, including one of his brothers, hijacked an Indian Airlines jet, forcing it down in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and holding the passengers hostage. Having led the Movement, he now formed a new
Jihadi
group – Jaish-e-Mohammed – accused of the kidnapping and murder of
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We began working as foreign correspondents in India during the hostage crisis in Kashmir. Returning regularly to the valley, we built long-standing relationships that would enable us, in 2008, to start researching this book and to attempt to exorcise the ghosts of 1995.

Fastidious reporting by a close group of Western journalists based in New Delhi, especially Suzanne Goldenberg of the
Guardian
, went some way towards the truth. We have gone back through the contemporary press cuttings to show what was known publicly, and to compare this to what was recorded in the covert police and intelligence files that would not surface until recently. In our attempts to create an accurate time line from the perspective of the Western authorities, we were assisted by internal documents from the so-called G4 countries – Britain, the USA, Norway and Germany – whose diplomats came together to attempt to gain the hostages’ freedom. Particular thanks go to Tore Hattrem, then a political officer in the Norwegian Embassy in New Delhi, and today Ambassador in Khartoum, and to Arne Walther, then Norway’s Ambassador in New Delhi, and today its Ambassador to Japan.

Back in 1995, the police and intelligence agencies in India were largely unapproachable. But over the last three years, serving and retired senior police officers from the upper echelons of the Jammu and Kashmir force have generously given us many hours of interviews, recollecting events from 1995, playing us tapes, showing us documents, notes and diaries. Rajinder Tikoo, who conducted the hostage negotiations until they collapsed in mid-September 1995, can
still recall sharply what it was like to deal with al Faran, and contributed greatly to the chapters that relate to the talks and their collapse.

Key to helping us understand the STF and the operation of the renegades was Deputy Inspector General Farooq Khan, who as a Superintendent of Police ran the first STF unit. Senior Superintendent of Police Ashkoor Ahmad Wani, who while stationed in south Kashmir worked closely alongside the STF and the renegades, explained his take on both outfits, and their failings. Countless former renegades talked to us too, in south and north Kashmir, including Ghulam Muhammad Lone (‘Papa Kishtwari’), Ghulam Nabi Mir (‘Alpha’) and Abdul Rashid (‘the Clerk’), in interviews that began in 1998, with the last taking place in 2011, by which time many of them had been killed or jailed.

We thank those still serving in the J&K force who worked on the al Faran investigation, and who later had
access to the detailed summaries and analyses of the case prepared for the police, the intelligence agencies and counter-militancy agencies, who took an enormous risk in opening up their files, sharing copies of their case diaries with us, allowing us to study key witness statements, maps and notes. In return for a guarantee of anonymity, they also helped locate their old confidential sources and agents, whose lives would be at risk if their identities were revealed. Thanks also to the J&K police officers who witnessed the events of 1995 at first hand while serving in Pahalgam, Bijbehara and Anantnag.

In Britain, Roy Ramm showed us a draft of his unpublished memoirs, which incorporate a journal he kept at the time of the hostage crisis.

In Pakistan, the late Benazir Bhutto spurred the writing of this book, as she was in government at the time of the crisis and suspected that the development of al Faran marked a significant step in the growth of global terrorism. Special thanks go to Pakistan’s erudite High Commissioner for Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the last indoor cigar-smoker in town. We are especially grateful to specialists, agents and federal investigators in Punjab, Rawalpindi and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier province) who gave us access to exhaustive files that chart the rise of Masood Azhar. They also introduced us to veteran intelligence sources in Karachi, Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the tribal areas who were close to Masood’s operation. Members of Masood’s various
jihad
fronts talked too, as did those close to them, sharing documents, speeches, diaries and recollections. It took a leap of faith for them to sit down face to face with us, as it did for several retired senior officers in Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate.

In India, among those who have retired from the intelligence community (assuming an old spook is ever let off the hook) was C.D. Sahay, who provided the most complete account of Masood Azhar’s interrogation and the decision to release him in 1999. He was also frank about the intelligence agencies’ perspective on the events of 1995, and the decision to let the al Faran kidnapping operation ‘run long’, so as to allow India to secure a moral advantage over Pakistan. C.D. Sahay was equally insightful on the priorities of the Rao administration in 1995, the role of intelligence during Governor’s Rule in Kashmir, and the significance of the
yatra
and the 1996 elections on government thinking about the kidnapping, although he will not agree with this book’s conclusions. Similarly, A.S. Dulat, who ran IB operations in Kashmir in the late 1980s and returned throughout the nineties, and who would go on to run both the IB and RAW, was insightful on the rise of the militancy and the shortcomings in New Delhi that led to the explosion of violence in the valley, although he does not agree with the J&K police assessment of IB’s failings. A.K. Doval, a veteran IB agent and brilliant field operative who went on to lead the Bureau, watched the Pakistanisation of the militancy from close up, monitoring the growth of infiltration from over the LoC, designing some of the most far-reaching counter-measures to contain it, and working to expose Pakistan’s hand using pro-government renegades. He also led operations on the ground during the Kandahar hijack fiasco of 1999, working with C.D. Sahay, and his candid reflections on this operation proved invaluable. Neither he, C.D. Sahay nor A.S. Dulat ever discussed with us the police’s findings concerning the transfer and killing of the hostages, and they are in no way linked to these events.

There are many in the Indian foreign service who provided tantalising details about dealing with the Western embassies that besieged them during the crisis, but all of them still work in government, and cannot be thanked by name. The Indian Ministry of Defence and the Indian Army declined to cooperate officially, but individual senior officers in the Rashtriya Rifles gave considerable time to reflect on counter-militancy activities and their work with the renegades. Thanks especially to Lt. General (rtd) D.D. Saklani, who talked frankly and at length about his dealings with al Faran. Late to the book but well worth the call was Nalin Prabhat, Deputy Inspector General for the Central Reserve Police Force in Srinagar, an unflinchingly honest commentator on the insurgency, the state’s successes and its profound failings.

Key among the former militants we interviewed in Indian jails was Naseer Mohammed Sodozey, in Ward 2 of Tihar prison, New Delhi, whose family were also generous when we visited them in Palandiri, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Naseer explained the background and training of Masood’s fighters, detailing his own induction into
jihad
and Kashmir, and maintained, in stories backed up by multiple sources, that he was compelled to create a fictitious ‘ending’ for the hostage drama, about which, in reality, he knew nothing. Weeks of torture, and the promise of clemency, he still maintains, elicited his cooperation in this deception.

Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial, aka Langrial Darwesh, who until February 2011 was held in Agra jail, gave permission for us to see his files and notes, helping us to understand the character of the men he served with, especially the Afghani and Sikander, whose family in Dabran were patient and welcoming too. In Baramulla, we also spent many days with Qadeer Dar, the retired commander of the Muslim Janbaz Force, who provided insight into his group’s kidnapping of Western engineers working in Kashmir in 1991. Today Qadeer is chairman of the People’s Rights Movement, a group of many thousands of former Kashmiri militants seeking rehabilitation into mainstream society. The recollections of many of his members were invaluable to our book.

Much help was given by two Kashmiri human rights groups, the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, which have opened up many previously remote and closed communities through their ongoing work to locate and map a network of mass unmarked graves scattered across the valley, and to chart cases of state-sponsored disappearance and torture.

A big thank you goes to Kashmiri human rights lawyer Parvez Imroz, president of the JKCCS. Winner of the eleventh Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, awarded by the European Bar Human Rights Institute, Imroz has continued working despite several attempts on his life and the murder of many colleagues. Thanks also to the indefatigable Khurram Parvez, the JKCCS’s programme coordinator, who could have quit when he lost a leg in an IED attack on his car, which claimed the life of a young female colleague. Thanks also to Parvaiz Matta, who accompanied us on many of our journeys into the mountains. The intrepid journalist Yusuf Jameel has always made time to listen and advise; and from the new generation of journalists, special thanks go to Showkat Ahmed and his excellent
Conveyor
magazine, Masood Husain and his incisive weekly
Kashmir Life
, the photographers Javed Dar and Faisal Khan, and especially to Yawar Kabli, who helped source photos despite the snowfall. There are many other Kashmiris we would like to name, who over the last sixteen years have advised and assisted us, but most of them would be embarrassed to be singled out, as hospitality remains the norm throughout the valley, despite what this story teaches us.