Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 18

When I saw the paper, though, it looked like it was written more by a diplomat than by an intelligence chief. 'This is a diplomatic story that you're writing,' I told him. 'I want you to include Kashmir in it. The last four paragraphs I will give you.'

He said okay, but when I sent it to him, he hemmed and hawed on Musharraf and we got stuck. 'Musharraf is finished here,' he told me.

'He may be finished there, but he's not finished in Kashmir,' I said.

'Do we have to use his name?'

'Yes,' I said. 'We have to mention his name.'

Finally he agreed.

Another of our meetings must be mentioned, which was sort of a track two of track two meetings. We were in Islamabad in 2011 for a two-day dialogue. On the second day, I was expecting the session to end a bit early so that we could take a round of the bazaar. It was June and it was hot, and Durrani had said, 'When this is over we must sit down together and have a chat.'

But it broke only at 5 p.m., and he said, 'I guess you'll go shopping now.'

'Yeah I was hoping to go shopping but it's become too late because at 6:30 p.m. I have to attend a c.o.c.ktail at our high commissioner's place,' I said.

'You're sure you're not going shopping?'

'I'm sure.'

'So,' he said. 'Would you care to have a drink?'

'General Saheb, it's five in the afternoon and so b.l.o.o.d.y hot,' I said. 'In any case, where is the drink here?'

'I've got a bottle in my car,' he said. 'If you're interested I'll bring it up to your room.'

He brought a bottle of Black Label, and at five in the afternoon we had a drink. We enjoyed taking digs at each other. 'Sir, I can never disagree with you,' I would say.

'Amarjit Singh, you're very smart,' he would respond. 'You always start by saying you'll never disagree with me, and after that you disagree with whatever I say.'

After our drinking session he dropped me to High Commissioner Sharad Sabharwal's place. 'Why don't you join us?' I said.

'No, no, I know this will be an exclusively Indian thing but do give the high commissioner my regards,' he said. The former ISI chief seemed to get along with all our high commissioners.

Most of the time Durrani and I discussed how bilateral relations could improve, and what were the chances on the Pakistani side. He was frank. He would ask about the chances on our side, and sometimes he would say, things are looking very good; and sometimes he would say, things are not looking so good, I don't think anything will move. That was his view when we last met in November 2014.

When I first went to Pakistan, I was invited by Salman Haider and I was sceptical I would get a visa. 'We will get it done,' he said. I got my visa, and I never had a problem getting one. India, on the other hand, is very stingy with the visas; General Durrani did not get a visa to visit India until November 2014. I think this phenomenon of India being tight with the visas is a post-26/11 phenomenon: because David Headley, the Pakistani-American who got a visa, came to Mumbai and did a recce for the 26/11 attack, n.o.body wants to take a call on giving someone with a Pakistani background or connection a visa.

As for me, I got my visa and I went with Salman and Paran to Lah.o.r.e in January 2010. We stayed at a guest house of the Lah.o.r.e University of Management Sciences (LUMS), which has a beautiful campus and can match any American university. We had taken a Pakistan International Airlines flight on Sat.u.r.day and on Sunday they took us sightseeing to the old fort and the mosque (there's also a gurudwara there). My maternal grandfather had a house in Lah.o.r.e so on that visit I asked the conference's coordinator, General Durrani (he was briefly the NSA in Pakistan in 2008), where 4 Zafar Ali Road was and whether we could swing by there. 'I remember it used to be near the ca.n.a.l,' I said.

'There's no water in the ca.n.a.l, only a ditch,' General Mahmud said. 'But yes, there is a Zafar Ali Road, we'll go via that side. Number four has probably changed.'

We had a look but I couldn't recognise the place. I was also keen to see the Government College, Lah.o.r.e, where my father studied, and also the great Aitchison College, but hardly had time to spend. We managed a bookshop and then it was back to the conference for two days.

Mani Shankar Aiyar was also there, and after one of our sessions in which I did a lot of blabbing he came up to me and said, 'What a useful life you've led, and what a useless life I've led.'

Former Pakistan foreign secretary Shaharyar Khan, whom Nawaz Sharif appointed the track two interlocutor with Satinder Lambah, was also at the Balusa conference. Our wives. .h.i.t it off pretty well. In fact I asked her once, 'Come to Delhi, come and stay with us.'

'Baba, you'll get me into trouble if I stay with a former R&AW chief,' he said.

There was also a fellow running a TV channel, Ejaz Haider. He called me up while I was in Lah.o.r.e and asked me to come on the show. I said, 'Sure, what's the big deal, who else will be there?'

'I'm trying to get Gen. Mahmud Durrani,' he said.

But Durrani wouldn't come on TV. He already had Mani Shankar Aiyar and Manvendra Singh, former BJP MP and son of Jaswant Singh, so I said, why do you need me, you've got the bigwigs.

'No, no, I need you, please come,' he said.

After the discussion on TV was over, he said to me: 'This is a big thing for me. This is the first time a R&AW chief has been on a Pakistani TV channel.'

On one conference I even visited Karachi, and one night Paran and I were invited, along with a few other colleagues, by Sherry Rehman, former amba.s.sador to the US and PPP MP, for dinner. It was at the poolside at her lovely home in Clifton, where she lived with her third husband, a most charming person, in great luxury and style. There were a handful of us and she had even invited her second husband to the dinner; she obviously knew how to deal with men. There was another TV journalist, Nasim Zehra, and they began calling me Casper, which I understand is the name of a friendly ghost on an American TV show.

Which goes to show you that for the Pakistanis, once a spook, always a spook.

This brings me to Yasin Malik, who went all the way to Pakistan to depose that he had never met A.S. Dulat, R&AW chief.

That was technically true: we had never met while I was at R&AW. However, we did meet when I headed the IB's Kashmir Group. Basharat Peer the writer has referred to Yasin as the Che Guevara of Kashmir, and in many senses he was a romantic in that he had taken to the gun and headed the JKLF, the first real militant group that dominated when the movement was full-blown in the 198990 period. If Shabir was the headmaster of the movement, then Yasin was its headboy. No one raised higher expectations, or disappointed more. He was a member of the leaders.h.i.+p of the JKLF known as the HAJY groupthe acronym standing for four militants, Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Mir, and Yasin Malik. The boss was Ashfaqwhose Dad came and held the important meeting with me during the Rubaiya kidnappingand he was considered a gutsy, courageous guy. Unfortunately, he was killed. In fact, JKLF boys now say that Ashfaq was angry with the Pakistanis and took them on, saying this was the Kashmiris' movement and so on.

In January 1990 Yasin partic.i.p.ated in the shooting of thirteen Indian Air Force officers who were waiting for a ride to their base in Awantipora. Four died, including a squadron leader. A few months later, he was arrested during a raid downtown; he jumped off a roof and hurt his ankle. He was arrested and eventually brought to Delhi, where he was kept in the Mehrauli sub-jail. People began meeting him here and he then came into the limelight.

The first occasion I met Yasin was in a house in Delhi. He was already there when I walked into the room, and the first thing he did was put his feet up on the coffee table and light a cigarette. I was not impressed and it did not bother me because by then I was familiar with Kashmiri gimmickry. Then he uttered the standard line that all the Kashmiri boys used, even Shabir, to the effect that they had nothing to say to me, all they wanted was freedom: 'Hum aap se kya baat kar sakte hain? Hum toh azaadi chahate hain.'

It is something my son wants too, I told him. 'Azaadi toh mera beta bhi chahata hain,' I said. 'Aur agar joh azaadi aap dhoond rahe hain, aapko mil sake toh main bhi naara lagaoonga ke hamein kya chahiye, azaadi. Woh azaadi aapko nahin milne wali hain. Ek azaadi hain joh hamare Const.i.tution ke dairey mein hain, uske baare mein sochiye.'

He was very sceptical about the whole thing but during the 199194 period he mellowed down and became a Gandhian. There were two reasons, each involving a doctor.

While he was incarcerated at the Mehrauli sub-jail, he was visited by Dr Farooq Abdullah. Farooq took him out on to the lawn, and said: 'Come on, let's do some plain talking.'

I don't know exactly what he said, but I was told Farooq gave Yasin a piece of his mind. And for two days after that, Yasin lost his appet.i.te and hardly ate. He was that demoralised.

The other reason was Dr Upendra Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit. Yasin developed serious medical problems and required a valve placement in his heart. Dr Kaul performed the heart surgery on Yasin. Dr Kaul would become extra-protective about his fellow Kashmiri: anyone critical of Yasin would not be allowed near him in the hospital. Because of that surgery the two had a special relations.h.i.+p: when, some years back, Dr Kaul's mother died, Yasin especially came down to Delhi for the cremation.

From 1991 to May 1994, when he was released, Yasin softened. Che Guevara became a Gandhi and began talking about giving up the gun and adopting peaceful forms of agitation. Upon his release he went back to Srinagar and he announced that he was giving up the gun and sitting on dharna. One day, while he sat on dharna outside his house, some boys from the Hizbul Mujahideen came in a three-wheeler autorickshaw, picked him up, took him somewhere and soundly thrashed him.

After that he never spoke of Gandhi, and he ended his dharna. Later dharnas were all held in Delhi, at Jantar Mantar, where Rajinder Sachar, the former chief justice of the Delhi High Court and human rights activist, and Kuldip Nayar, eminent journalist, would offer him juice for him to break his fast.

Many people, however, considered him a cold-blooded killer for his role in the killing of IAF officers. Years after Yasin was released, Sachar took him to the India International Centre for the weekly meeting of IIC intellectuals called the Sat.u.r.day Club. When Yasin entered there was an uproar. A lot of members, most of whom were elderly, objected and told Sachar: 'How dare you bring a killer to the IIC?' The two of them had to beat a retreat.

The second time I met him I realised he had a great chip on his shoulder: he thought that we were responsible for the break-up of the JKLF. What happened is that while Yasin was in jail another JKLF fellow named Shabir Siddiqui had formed a breakaway faction of the front. Siddiqui in fact was later killed in a shoot-out at the Hazratbal complex in 1996, when he laid siege to the mosque. Unlike the siege in 1993, the militants were not given safe pa.s.sage in 1996.

Yasin thought that we had set up Siddiqui as the leader of the breakaway faction. 'Yeh sab aapki game hai,' he said.

'Yasin Saheb,' I said. 'Aisa hai ki yeh hamari game nahin hai. Aap unse puchh lijiye. Aur main toh Delhi mein baitha hoon, aap Srinagar walon se puchhiye.'

We met once more after that but we never hit it off. His discomfort with me stemmed from the fact that he knew I talked to many Kashmiris, and he wanted an exclusive relations.h.i.+p. That was okay because Yasin was great friends with two other people: IAS officer Wajahat Habibullah, and my IB colleague Ajit Doval. I'd heard Wajahat speaking to Yasin over phone: 'Haan, phir sunao beta kaise ho.'

But for many years, Yasin was going nowhere. He was pretty unstable, not knowing which way he was to go. But because he was gradually the only one left talking about azaadi, he got a lot of support from expatriate Kashmiris. Either the expatriates would send him a lot of money, or in the case of Majid Tramboo and company, who came here and met us in 1994, urged us to give Yasin financial support. In fact, some of his colleagues began whispering allegations of misappropriation of money. His long-time sidekick, Javed Mir, fell out with him; Javed went over to the Hurriyat under the Mirwaiz.

This was one problem Yasin had with the Hurriyat: he could never come to terms with supremacy in the separatist movement. He was uncomfortable with the fact that the Mirwaiz was the Hurriyat chairman for many years; Yasin and Mirwaiz don't see eye-to-eye. Yasin was so opposed to Umar that from 2002 to 2003 he drew close to Sajad Lone. Both were anti-Hurriyat and anti-Mirwaiz. I was in the PMO at the time and Sajad suggested that he and Yasin could link up. 'That's a great idea,' I said.

'How do we go about it?'

'Get Yasin here,' I said. 'The three of us will get into a room and we'll stay there no matter if it takes 24 hours or 48 hours or whatever. We can find a formula which is acceptable to you guys.'

Sadly that did not materialise.

Bizarrely, the reason Yasin had to deny that he had ever met the R&AW chief had to do with a controversy in Pakistan and the United States that broke open in October 2011, called memogate. This involved a memorandum that had allegedly been written at the behest of Pakistan's then president, Asif Ali Zardari, and addressed to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. It spoke of the need to avert a military takeover of the civilian government following the deep unhappiness in Pakistan over the secret raid in May 2011 which led to the execution of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. The memo was with the Pakistani amba.s.sador in Was.h.i.+ngton, Husain Haqqani, and a Pakistani-American businessman named Mansoor Ijaz claimed that he was asked to deliver the memo to Mullen.

Ijaz fas.h.i.+oned himself after Farooq Kathwari, the Kashmiri- American who met me soon after I joined R&AW. He has claimed that he was the one who arranged the ceasefire announced by Vajpayee in 2000, shortly after Majid Dar defected to India, but this is a lot of nonsense. The fact is that Mansoor landed up here claiming to have contacts with Yasin and with Pakistan and that he could get a peace process moving.

Yasin, however, had a different take. He narrated a story that both he and Mansoor attended a seminar on Kashmir held in Gurgaon, near Delhi. Yasin says that Mansoor said something derisive about Kashmir, whereupon Yasin picked up a table lamp and hurled it at Mansoor.

That would have been the end of Mansoor but in 2011 he surfaced again with memogate; Mansoor wrote a piece in the Financial Times, which brought the whole affair to light and as a result of which Haqqani had to resign as amba.s.sador. Somewhere in the fallout of this whole memogate thing Mansoor mentioned Yasin, and took credit for introducing Yasin to R&AW during the time that I was chief. Yasin in his defence said he was pressured by R.K. Mishra, a well-known journalist involved in peace initiatives, to meet the R&AW chief, but refused to do so.

Then, inexplicably, Yasin went to Pakistan and deposed before the investigation that the Supreme Court was conducting. 'I have never spoken with the R&AW chief,' he said, which was true in the narrow sense that when we talked, I was not the R&AW chief.

But when I went over to the PMO, then another character who was a great pal of Yasin's popped up: a half-American, half-Kashmiri fellow by the name of Usman Rahim. He suddenly showed up, saying he was a great supporter and great friend of Yasin's, looking after Yasin's a.s.sets and property. Amitabh Mattoo, then an academic at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, came to me and insisted I meet Usman, so the three of us had lunch together.

After lunch Mattoo asked me for an opinion, and I told him: 'I'm not impressed. He doesn't understand Kashmir, he doesn't know Kashmir.'

Mattoo was very disappointed.

That was the only time I met Usman Rahim though I kept hearing about him until he was deported from India for being up to no good. I bring up Usman Rahim because of Yasin's marriage.

Yasin married a Pakistani named Mushaal Hussein Mullick, a very good-looking and smart woman. Her mother Rehana, a former member of the women's wing of the Pakistan Muslim League, is even smarter. They have a lot of influence on Yasin. Mushaal's brother, Haider Ali Hussein Mullick, is a professor at the Naval War College and a fellow at the Joint Special Operations University in the US. But more importantly, his mentor throughout his career has been David Petraeus, the former military commander who also served as CIA chief under Barack Obama.

Hence the talk here is that Yasin's mother-in-law is a big influence in his life. She's been to Kashmir, and she apparently holds all the levers and controls everything.

Though strange, one theory doing the rounds is that Yasin's marriage is a CIA operation to get him to marry a Pakistani girl. The reasoning is that this is to get Yasin dependent on someone they know and trust. That is the story, no matter how weird it may sound. And now, like the American Usman Rahim who is also married to a Pakistani, Yasin draws most of his strength from Pakistan.

No matter what is the truth in this, the undeniable fact is that Yasin Malik is no Che Guevara. Burnt out as a separatist, having lost his street power, he has been unable to master the art of politics; Yasin Malik may pretend to be a Kashmiri leader, but he can't suddenly become Farooq Abdullah. He is now a rebel without a cause gradually gravitating to his original moorings in the National Conference. I'll always think of Yasin as the James Dean of Maisuma.

Everyone gets taken up with James Dean at one point or another, and in this the venerable Agha Ashraf Ali was no different. When Yasin had begun his Gandhi phase, he one night landed up at Agha Saheb's house and narrated to the elder his change of heart. Agha Saheb was an educationist from an ill.u.s.trious family of Kashmir; he was a liberal and a s.h.i.+a, and three of his brothers had joined the civil servicesAgha Showkat Ali left the Indian Civil Service and joined the Muslim League in Pakistan following Part.i.tion; Agha Nasir Ali joined the IAS and became a secretary to the government of India, pa.s.sing away at the age of 96 in November 2014; Agha Muzaffar became chief secretary of Kashmir before s.h.i.+fting to Pakistan in the 1970s.

Agha Ashraf Ali himself was close to the future president, Dr Zakir Hussain, who was Jamia Millia Islamia University's first vice-chancellor for two decades from 1928; Agha Saheb taught courses at the university. He also served his state both as commissioner of education and as head of the education department of the University of Kashmir.

Agha Saheb was impressed with Yasin for several years, until he became disillusioned with his lack of direction and inability to grow as a leader, even though the two maintained relations to the extent that Yasin's wife and mother-in-law were occasional visitors to Agha Saheb's house in Rajbagh. I visited Agha Saheb when he turned ninety in November 2012. He is a fascinating man, a sharp intellect, and a reservoir of history, as well as being a committed Leftist and humanist. During the floods of September 2014, he was rescued from his rapidly inundated house in the nick of time: 'I escaped death by two minutes,' he told me when he reached Delhi, on his way to the US with his son Agha Iqbal Ali, a management professor at the University of Ma.s.sachusetts, but Agha Saheb because of his age and delicate health, never could make the long journey and spent the winter in Delhi itself.

In fact, during the 2014 parliamentary election I asked Agha Saheb who he would have voted for (it was increasingly difficult for him to walk around in his old age, so he did not). 'Farooq, of course,' he exclaimed, as if it was a no-brainer. 'He's the only one who can stop Modi.'

For many people, however, it is Agha Saheb's late son, Agha Shahid Ali, who is famous for his poetry, who comes to mind when you mention Agha Saheb. Some in the literary world believe that Shahid opened the gates for many young writers in the subcontinent; Kashmiris like Basharat Peer, who drew the t.i.tle of his book Curfewed Night from a poem by Shahid, are steeped in debt to this deep and original thinker. Shahid died at the young age of fifty-two in the US, where he lived and taught.

When I read his collection of poems The Country without a Post Office, I was struck that one of the early ones, 'Farewell', is actually a love poem to the Kashmiri Pandits. Or perhaps it is to IndiaPakistan. He says: 'In your absence you polished me into the Enemy./Your history gets in the way of my memory./I am everything you lost, you can't forgive me.'

Call it a love poem or an apology, he asks: why did you have to go?

Yet not all Kashmiris are like Shahid or even Dr Farooq Abdullah who told me Kashmiris had failed Kashmir and Kashmiriyat when they did not prevent the 1989-90 exodus of Pandits. Kashmiris are hypocritical. Like Yasin Malik or the Hurriyat Conference they mouth plat.i.tudes about how they feel incomplete without their neighbours who have gone away, and that they would love to have them back. But there are two things here: the damage to the Pandit psyche, and the Muslim fear of being swamped by non-Muslims.

The Kashmiri psyche has been shaken up. The Pandit used to think that because he was more educated than the Musalman, he was the real Kashmiri. That is one clock that truly cannot be turned back. The Pandit has to pay a huge price for the clout he once wielded in Delhi. They are no doubt smart but after deep introspection one has to admit that the Kashmiri Musalman outwits him. The converts are after all the same breed.

The fact is that Vajpayee never seriously talked about the Pandits. No Kashmiri has seriously talked about the Pandits except Farooq when he returned to power in 1996 and said his government would provide security, etc. Not much happened though, whatever his intention was. The Mirwaiz keeps talking about the Pandits, saying he'd like them to come back, and even Geelani has said, 'The Pandits are a part of us.' But since so many who were a part of you got b.u.mped off, it's not easy.

I would like to put on record the fact that though I'm no fan of Jagmohan, when he was governor in 1990 and I was heading the IB in Srinagar from 21 January to 7 March, I saw no evidence of him pus.h.i.+ng out the Pandits, as has been alleged by many Kashmiris. Pandits had started escaping before he was appointed. They were dead scared, because there had been targeted killings of Pandits (some of them IB officials, as mentioned earlier in the book).

My friend, lawyer Ashok Bhan, a Congressman, came to me one day suddenly in those dark days. 'Can you get me out of here,' he said. 'I'm under threat.'

'Okay, I'll get you out of here,' I said.

'No, today,' he said. 'I want to go today.'

'But what about your belongings, your furniture, your house?'

'I'm making arrangements for that, but can you get me, my wife, my family out of here?' he asked.

I gave him a car and sent him down to Jammu the same day.

Despite this threat, the IB was revived during those difficult days in 1990 by a couple of Pandits. We had three Kashmiri boys at the sub-inspector level: D.J. Handoo, A.K. Braroo, and R. Qazi. I called them the three musketeers. They were truly extraordinary gentlemen. They sneaked in and out of all sorts of places, and got the humint (human intelligence) flowing again. They rendered yeoman service to the nation.

All those who could afford to leave, left. A lot of others got stuck in camps in Jammu. And a few refused to leave. When you have terrorism of that kind, where people are targeted and the Pandit was being targetedwhat has happened ever since is that neither are the Pandits very keen to go back, nor have the Muslims been keen to bring them back. Yes, once in a while someone will make the nostalgic trip back to his former home, and his former neighbours will shed tears. But that is just in the moment.

The final Kashmiri insecurity, which they never talk about, is that there is a plan in Delhi to reduce Muslims to a minority in their homeland. The day that happens, they are finished. It took a Kashmiri a long time to tell me this. That's why they get worried whenever talk of abrogating Article 370 of the Const.i.tution (which grants special status to J&K, and allows for certain restrictive laws on residency). That's why the Kashmiri is very sensitive about the Amarnath Yatra, whose pilgrims and duration increase every year. They feel it may be a Trojan horse for repopulating the Valley.

It is not a coincidence that the Hurriyat, which sheds tears about being incomplete, does not have a Pandit member in its executive. It is not a coincidence that since 1996, there has not been a Kashmiri Pandit in the state cabinet. Till then, there had been Farooq's sidekick, P.L. Handoo, from Anantnag. Why didn't the Congress, under Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, not have a Pandit in its government? Mufti had Raman Matoo but he was a non-ent.i.ty.

There was one Kashmiri Pandit whom Prime Minister Vajpayee wanted me to regularly brief when I joined the PMO. This was P.N. Dhar. I first met Prof. Dhar at a Pandit wedding in Jammu in January 1989 when militancy was just beginning in the state. As Indira Gandhi's princ.i.p.al secretary, Prof. Dhar was a key advisor on Kashmir and played a pivotal role in the mainstreaming which resulted in the 1975 SheikhIndira accord. A sensitive man of great culture and wisdom, Prof. Dhar loved his homeland and despite all the tumult in the state never lost interest in Kashmir. His home in Old Delhi was a regular meeting place for Kashmiris including separatists. My friend Ashok Bhan told me that on the night of 24 December 1999, the night of the Kandahar hijacking, Prof. Dhar was dining with A.G. Lone in Delhi. Between 2001 and 2004 we interacted a great deal, and we got along well. He was never overly critical of the Musalman, was always balanced, and didn't have any grudges. He asked me about personalities, saying what do you think of Yasin Malik, or what's your view on Sajad Lone.

One day he landed up at the PMO and he could hardly climb up, being an octogenarian. 'What are you doing here?' I said, startled that he had bothered to come all the way.

'I'm going to meet the prime minister and I'm going to propose your name for governor of J&K,' he said.

I had a hearty laugh. 'It's never going to happen,' I said.

After Manmohan Singh became prime minister, Prof. Dhar visited Kashmir and gave him a report. Before he submitted it, he called me home and showed me the three-and-a-half page report. I was going through it and again I saw a paragraph which said it was necessary to send me as governor to J&K. 'Sir, this will not happen,' I said, embarra.s.sed.

'This is not Vajpayee, this is Manmohan Singh,' he said. 'Manmohan Singh has been a student of mine.'

That was P.N. Dhar.

When the Kashmiri Pandits are sent back, both sides should show extra sensitivity. Farooq Abdullah had said in 1996 that Pandits should be welcomed back and if necessary we'll build a separate colony for them. Again in 2014, the new BJP government was talking about setting the Kashmiri Pandits up in a high-security zone.

I don't think building a Chanakyapuri for Kashmiri Pandits is really the way to get them back. Those who want to go back must go to their own surroundings. A lot of Pandits used to live in Habba Kadal, so why not let them go back to Habbakadal, and live in the thick of security. Don't try to get 3,000 or 10,000 all at once. Let it be gradual. It's not necessary to build a Pandit towns.h.i.+p; that would be an artificial and insecure way of doing it and would also create community tensions. Those who go back should be willing to go back, and the Muslims should be willing to take them back. It has to be organic. There are some Kashmiri Pandits who are very well off. Vijay Dhar has rendered yeoman service in the field of education, setting up the first Delhi Public School in Srinagar. There are other wealthy Pandits as well who could help in setting up badly needed hospitals which could earn them huge goodwill, facilitating their return.

I don't think Kashmiriyat is dead, nor is Sufism. If we don't support the idea of Kashmiriyat or the Sufi tradition, it will fade out eventually, because radicalism is increasing.

Sheikh Saheb was said to be a pure Musalman but he kept the Jamaat-e-Islami at bay, telling them they were not going to meddle in political life. After him, Farooq was the same way and in fact more aggressive about it, saying that they should close down all the Jamaat schools and that if Delhi funded the state, it would set up its own schools. But he did not get that much support.

This is getting compromised. If you don't do anything about Kashmir, then more and more Wahhabism will come in, as petro-dollars, etc., with their mosques growing and the lectures from their mosques increasing. A couple of years ago I was leaving Srinagar on a Friday and I was startled. Every road I pa.s.sed had a loudspeaker blaring for the jumme ka namaaz. This never happened earlier.