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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 18, Dated 05 May 2012 |
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The Grand Kashmir Game
A meticulous investigation of the Al Faran kidnapping implicates India in the hostage deaths, says Riyaz Wani
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The beginning of the end Al Faran and the hostages, July 1995 |
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IN JULY1995, Islamic fundamentalist group Al Faran kidnapped six trekkers in the Pahalgam hills, demanding the release of 21 jailed militants. Am erican and British negotiators descended on New Delhi and Srinagar; bringing a renewed global attention to the situation in Kashmir. Local intelligence, the army, and the Jammu and Kashmir Police got busy tracking down the kidnappers. To no avail. One hostage escaped, another was beheaded. Mystery shrouds the fate of the other four, believed killed and buried high in the Himalayas.
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The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 - Where The Terror Began
Adrian Levy, Cathy Scott-Clark Penguin
544 pp; Rs 499 |
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The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 — Where The Terror Began challenges this sketchy narrative. After four years of dedicated research in New Delhi, Kashmir, Pakistan and the “so-called G4 countries — Britain, the USA, Norway and Germany”, investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark conclude that the four westerners were killed by forces loyal to the Indian Army.
The book’s baffling dénouement rationalises itself as a part of the ongoing “Game” in Kashmir. But its strength lies in the long, inexorable build-up to this finale that runs the full gamut of the state’s conflict, and the unsparing operation that has, in two decades, claimed nearly 70,000 lives. The game continues still, checking the Valley’s stumbling progress to normalcy.
The Meadow makes a crucial departure from other Kashmir narratives. There is no all-encompassing frame to comprehend the dizzying diversity of violence, its contentious historical explanation and contemporary geopolitics. It is a refreshing effort to nuance the debate with the myriad narratives that clash, overlap and merge into a frightful, muddled reality. The investigation reveals the kidnapping as a treacherous play of the conflict. Hidden in dark recesses, identities of victims and perpetrators fuse. The conclusions turn on their head conventional wisdom and the received truth of many well-documented, high-profile events. While blaming the army for deaths, the book also clouds suspicion over south Kashmir cleric Qazi Nisar’s murder that led to a full-blown pro-New Delhi armed insurgency. It claims the assassin, Hizbul Muja hideen commander “Umar”, had been “turned” by Indian intelligence.
The Meadow shines a bright torch on the cross-border sources of the violence — Pakistan’s Binori town and Afghanistan’s Yawar camp, staging posts of Afghan jihad through the 1980s now harnessed by ISI’s “Brigadier Badam” to foment militancy in the Valley. It draws an overarching portrait of Masood Azhar, the “portly cleric from Pakistan,” who becomes a lynchpin of the Kashmir campaign, and too towering a jihadi figure to be left in jail.
The spoilt son of a wealthy landowner from Bahawalpur, Masood was “capable of getting the youth hot and bothered”. He was the mouthpiece of a guerrilla outfit, which, together with Osama bin Laden, had fought Soviets in Afghanistan to a standstill in the late ’80s. In 1993 he, alongside Osama, provided Somalian Islamists with rocket-propelled grenades that brought down two US Black Hawks in the battle for Mogadishu, killing 19 American soldiers, wounding 73; an event that inspired the movie Black Hawk Down. It was Masood’s Jaish-e-Mohammad that staged a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001. As the editor of Voice of the Mujahid, he once wrote that Kashmiris were just too moderate “to mount the kind of total war that was needed if India was to be unseated”.
Once the Azadi campaign began in 1989 — a bloody conflict by 100 armed-to-teeth militant outfits — “the Game” had no boundaries. “India and Pakistan fought each other in the Valley by manipulating the lives of others. Everything that happened here involved acts of ventriloquism, with traitors, proxies and informers deployed by both sides, and civilians becoming the casualties,” the authors write. A leading hand, in the squad set up by the J&K Police to trace the hostages, reveals: “Pakistan tried something, India blocked it and turned it around, or the other way around, and there were so many angles to it, that really when you were playing it you forgot yourself completely, until it seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world”.
The authors’ Kashmir is not a simple moral world. Dominant discourse no longer dictates conventional roles for perpetrators and victims. On the Valley’s chessboard, each pawn can become a king and every square is a shade of grey.
Riyaz Wani is a Special Correspondent with Tehelka.
riyaz@tehelka.com
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