Authors: Steve Coll

On the Grand Trunk Road (31 page)

Soon Gill wanted to go to sleep. He poured a last whisky and recited more poetry. Then he shook my hand and said good night. Tomorrow, he reminded me politely, was another day of counterrevolution.

The Boys

We don’t call this mass action. We are playing and kidding with
our weapons.

—
Amir, Twenty-two-year-old Kashmiri guerrilla

T
he publicists over at the Party of God agreed one afternoon to take me out to see some of their kidnap victims in the Kashmiri countryside. They wanted to talk about their revolution and make me understand just how strong, righteous, and humane they really were.

We arranged to meet in the hallway of a public building in Srinagar, Kashmir’s once-idyllic summer capital. The separatist insurgency in Kashmir is such that it is possible to meet and commune with armed young Muslim guerrillas just about anywhere in the valleys that meander through the region’s snow-capped Himalayan peaks. The Indian government’s several hundred thousand heavily equipped counterinsurgency troops, non-Kashmiri and non-Muslim, are certainly a visible presence, but they generally have little clue as to what exactly is going on in the slum warrens and villages around their sandbag bunkers and barbed-wire encampments. Or, if they know, they prefer not to intervene casually out of fear of the consequences. So the guerrillas move freely through the civilian population with AK-47 assault rifles cradled beneath traditional draping Kashmiri
phirans.
They go shopping like this, hang out at garages, repair their motorbikes, and attend the extraordinary number of secret strategy sessions necessitated by the existence in Kashmir of at least one hundred fifty distinct separatist guerrilla organizations and factions. In this environment, meeting a conspicuously white man in a public building and taking him out to see a couple of kidnapped Hindus is no problem at all.

My escort was a clean-shaven seventeen-year-old who smiled and chattered a lot. I felt a little sorry for him because as much as the guerrillas are confident about their control of the Kashmir Valley, the foot soldiers they send to escort foreigners through enemy lines must be low indeed on the guerrilla organization chart. But my friend didn’t seem to mind. He was having fun. He climbed into the front seat of my hired Ambassador. I scrambled into the back with Ghulam Nabi Khayal, the Kashmiri journalist with whom I traveled regularly. Khayal’s credibility with both sides in the war made working in Kashmir a relative breeze. As we rolled out of Srinagar, he struck up a rapport with the young man from the Party of God, or Hizbollah, an affiliate of the notorious Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite outfit responsible for Western hostage-taking and other acts of political terrorism in the Middle East. The leader of Kashmir’s Hizbollah told me he met with and received training and support from brethren in the Lebanese Hizbollah, but despite all the talk of pan-Islamic holy war on both sides, it was hard to see that the two parties had much in common. For one thing, the Kashmiri version of the Party of God was not Shiite, it was Sunni. For another, it was not especially anti-Western—there had been no American troop presence in South Asia to stir its wrath. Moreover, the Kashmiri members had so many cousins in America that they seemed more interested in obtaining visas than in vanquishing the Great Satan. I had the impression that the Kashmir Hizbollah chose its affiliation primarily for the terrorist cachet, hoping the Lebanese party’s tough reputation might rub off on them. Besides, in South Asia people may find reason to treat each other brutally but they are almost uniformly hospitable to outsiders. In traditional South Asian culture, hospitality is a code of honor and any lapse can be a cause for shame. In tricky situations, I put my faith in the old codes, although there were times when I worried, in self-interest, about the degree to which modern ideology, particularly militant Islam, might be overtaking traditional attitudes. In any event, that afternoon in Srinagar, my young escort to the holy war offered no cause for alarm. We had talked for only ten minutes and were not yet out of Srinagar when he turned around from the front seat and announced, “My colleagues said I should blindfold you but I have not—because I trust you.”

For an hour we wound on narrow asphalt roads through ripe paddy fields. The air was cool and dry. It was a fine day for the harvest. Village women wrapped in scarves bent in the fields with sickles. Above them rose mountains cast violet and blue in undulating light and shadow. Occasionally we passed a dozen or more Indian soldiers on patrol, clad in full camouflage combat gear. They walked in rank along the roads with their weapons pointed forward. In search of an invisible enemy, they looked exceedingly anxious and unhappy. I thought inevitably of Vietnam and the predicaments of armies of occupation, for that is what the Indian counterinsurgency forces in Kashmir resemble these days. For the most part, the villagers paid them no mind and the soldiers kept to themselves. As in Sri Lanka, Kashmiris say the soldiers turn brutal most often in the night, when the darkness cloaks their faces and provides them a kind of moral and military parity with the invisible guerrillas.

We stopped the car in a grove of trees beside an icy, olive, swift-running river and began what became a two-mile single-file walk, with our escort at the lead. A weapon appeared in the boy’s hands and he moved confidently through bucolic scenes—children diving into river water from rickety footbridges and trees, duck families nesting beneath houseboats, bulls and cows wandering languidly along village footpaths. Villagers waved to our guerrilla, whether in affection or prudence it was impossible to tell. Our escort commandeered a river boat and stood at its bow as we were poled across. “Where we have taken them, even the angel of death cannot reach them,” he said dramatically over his shoulder.

In the rice fields beyond, bearded mujaheddin, or holy warriors, emerged from picket posts in the surrounding trees and approached with assault rifles. They patted us down and pointed us on to an isolated three-story brick house encased in trees beside a narrow, cold stream.

Inside we met Hizbollah’s military leadership. The oldest of them was twenty-six. They wore Western urban fashions—blue jeans, jacked-up athletic shoes, mirrored sunglasses—but also long Islamic beards. There was some discussion about my Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes and where these might be obtained. Laughs and emphatic soul handshakes were offered. We asked in ritual fashion to see their weaponry and they obliged with pride. There were the usual Chinese-made imitation Russian assault rifles, the kind originally supplied by the CIA to the Afghan resistance. Normally the Kashmiri guerrillas will trot out a few heavier weapons, such as mounted machine guns, land mines, or long-range sniper rifles, to impress visitors. But this time our hosts were concerned about their ability to break down quickly and move out with their hostages as soon as our interview was complete, so they did not have much of the top-drawer stuff with them. Shaheed-ul-lslam—a nom de guerre—Hizbollah’s acting chief commander (the real chief being in prison), did, however, have an impressive hunting knife, which he unsheathed conspicuously and fingered as we talked. I asked him about it and he said he acquired it in Afghanistan, where some of the Kashmiri guerrillas have sought training from their brethren in holy war.

“It is the same kind that Rambo uses,” Islam said with a smile. Rambo, you may recall, in one of his Roman-numeraled fantasy adventures, singlehandedly slaughtered dozens upon dozens of evil Afghan and Soviet Communists while attempting the rescue of a captured American military adviser. For this reason and perhaps others, among South Asian guerrillas, Rambo is hip.

The hapless captives, Mr. and Mrs. Wakhloo of Srinagar, sat on the carpeted floor of a damp, empty room downstairs. As Hindus, they were members of a religious minority in Kashmir, but they were also heirs to their community’s traditional role of privilege in the Kashmir Valley. This inheritance had now been taken from them by force by a gang of teenagers. The Wakhloos seemed understandably ambivalent about this meeting, anxious on the one hand to convey greetings and messages to relatives, but worried on the other about saying something that might annoy the boys with the guns. I had no intention of writing about the Wakhloos’ case at any length, and certainly no intention of giving public credit to Hizbollah for their civilized conduct of kidnappings. Many of the hundreds of Hindus who have been kidnapped at gunpoint from their homes by Kashmiri Muslim guerrillas eventually find their way home safely. Some, however, are murdered, shot and dumped by the roadside. Hizbollah had been attempting to negotiate an exchange of the Wakhloos for their imprisoned chief, and frustrated in this, they had apparently decided that a little publicity about what good souls they were might move the bargaining along. For my part, I had made the trip mainly to see how the guerrillas moved in the countryside, although if there was anything I could do privately to help the Wakhloos, I intended to try. For now, that meant walking through the generic script of an interview with kidnap victims as carefully and quickly as possible, with an eye less to the acquisition of information than to the preservation of good vibes all around. The Wakhloos, sitting cross-legged in purple and powder-blue salwar kameezes, did their part, saying how much they had come to understand the cause of their enemies and what nice boys the guerrillas were once you got to know them.

Mrs. Wakhloo had passed the time playing games with her captors—mostly puzzles and tic-tac-toe, she said. “They have been very good, very kind, no doubt,” she said. “I have been debating the Islamization of Kashmir with some of them. The situation of Kashmir is really grave this time. My heart bleeds, really it bleeds. But one should be able to talk freely, politically and otherwise. We may differ here in this room but I must say, the people of Kashmir, they are one. There are no conflicts. If there are some misunderstandings, they can be solved by dialogue.”

In this spirit, Hizbollah’s military commanders served us biscuits and tea on a plastic tray. But as the weight of the dialogue shifted to the knife-wielding acting guerrilla chief, Islam, the tone became more martial. I asked how he justified kidnapping civilians as a tactic of a supposed war of liberation.

“This is the first type of situation for us like this,” he answered uneasily. “They compelled us to do this. This is all for the exchange of prisoners. The Indians understand the language of guns. They don’t understand anything else. So now we will go to any length. We won’t stop now. India says it is ready to have talks around the table now. The Indian media are saying that they are ready to give us the 1953 position [full autonomy from New Delhi, except for defense, foreign policy, and communications]. But we are not interested. We have achieved something else—Kashmir is an international issue now—and to gain this we have had to sacrifice a lot. The army wanted to put the people under pressure but they failed in their efforts. Now they’re going in for a political solution. It will not work. Many politicians have come in and tried to activate the political situation, but they can’t come out in public or they will be shot.... We have sophisticated weapons now, the kind you will come to know about in the phase of guerrilla war. We are more organized now. We think a hundred times before we go into an action. Before, we were just playing.”

He added: “The people have to decide about their future, but we have to keep a check that our course is not a suicidal one.”

Translation: no compromise, no mediation by the traditional leaders, only war, dictated by the new generation. Among the Kashmiri guerrillas, this is generally what passes for revolutionary thought.

Whether they are from Hizbollah or Hizbul Mujaheddin or the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front or the People’s League or Al-Ummar or the Zia Tigers or any of the countless other factions and subfactions, the Kashmiri separatist guerrillas frequently refer to their warfare to date as “just playing.” By this they mean to boast that great feats of military prowess lie over the horizon, as opposed to the present state of grim, bloody military and political stalemate. But I always understood the references to “playing” in another sense as well. Not only in Kashmir but in much of South Asia, the present business of armed social and political revolution seems to be confused at times with adolescent coming-of-age fantasy. There is a Lord of the Flies feel to all of it. Teenagers in places like Punjab and Kashmir see themselves in the vanguard of change. The difference between them and teenagers elsewhere is that they can act on this perception with weaponry—and without much discipline. Unemployed, frustrated, politically aware, surrounded by an unmistakable landscape of recent injustice, they throw themselves into the fight, only half comprehending what those in the older generation—their parents and teachers and doctors—say about the goals of the ethnic, separatist political and religious struggle that is their inheritance. On the ground, weapons in hand, these young guerrillas may believe that they are serving the historical cause of their people, exacting revenge or finally replacing useless talk with meaningful direct action. But they do not convince you that they understand the difference between growing up and waging a revolution. And when you ask to be taken to their leaders, you find neither young people wise beyond their years nor adults immediately at hand to compensate. Other, that is, than kidnap victims.

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