Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 4

I spent my time those days sending these bodies down to Delhi. They were grim days.

When our new DIB, Rajendra Prasad Jos.h.i.+, visited Srinagar he saw that I was looking drawn. (Jos.h.i.+ had taken over from Narayanan after the formation of the new National Front government of V.P. Singh.) 'Aren't you drinking too much?' he asked one night before dinner.

'Sir, there's nothing else to do here,' I replied. I had n.o.body for company, n.o.body to talk to. My wife was in Jammu because my daughter was preparing for her cla.s.s 12 boards. n.o.body trusted anyone, n.o.body relied on anyone. Srinagar was like a ghost city.

We had a young domestic helper by the name of Farooq. We had hired him in the summer of 1989. My wife found him soft- spoken and a good worker. But when things got bad one of our chaps suggested I not let Farooq into the house. 'How do you know he's not been infiltrated here,' the colleague said. 'He's new here?'

'Yeah, if he's infiltrated, he's infiltrated,' I said. 'Now it's too late. Next you'll ask me to start looking for bombs under my bed.'

We had a gardener, Sultan Wani, and he had been kept because he turned the IB compound into one of the most beautiful gardens in Srinagar. He was so old that no one knew when he retired, but he kept working there. And someone suggested to me that he was not okay. 'What do I do with him?' I said. 'I can't afford to chuck out the old man.'

It was that kind of time, a bad time, and for me it came to an abrupt end. The day Jagmohan was appointed, Farooq Abdullah carried through with the threat that he had made to the new prime minister, V.P. Singhif the new government sent Jagmohan to J&K, he would quit. Jagmohan was the governor in 1984 who was sent to J&K to deal with militancy that had exploded in the Valley, knowing that Farooq would also resign. V.P. Singh had no choice, however, and when Jagmohan's appointment was announced Farooq quit.

I had been warned that I was also going to be removed, and the person who warned me was Vijay Dhar, a friend and a neighbour on Gupkar Road. Vijay was the son of amba.s.sador D.P. Dhar; the father was a confidant of Indira Gandhi, the son a confidant of Rajiv Gandhi. Vijay knew I was preoccupied during the Rubaiya kidnapping; it ended on 13 December at 5:30 p.m., and the next day he came and asked to have a cup of coffee. 'I just want to warn you that people in Delhi are gunning for you,' he said. 'You should be careful. You've been branded as a Farooq man.'

'Who are these guys?' I asked.

'Arun Nehru and company,' he said. This included the home minister, Mufti Sayeed, whose daughter's release I had worked for and who never really liked me; and Jagmohan, whose previous term had overlapped with mine and who didn't like how close I was to Farooq. I took it in my stride but that's exactly what happened. In early March I was relieved; and I only got to know that I was being turfed out to Delhi the day my successor, R.C. Mehta, was coming to Srinagar.

I got a call in the morning that R.C. was arriving and I didn't immediately get it; I said if he's coming, don't worry, I'll go and receive him at the airport. They said, no, he's going to be there for a while. That's when it hit me.

Actually I was happy to get out of there. When I reached Delhi I heard that it had taken them a while to find someone willing to go to Srinagar. In fact, Jagmohan, genius that he was, sent a message on the IB channel asking for K.P. Singh, who had been posted in Srinagar before me during Jagmohan's earlier tenure, to be posted again. Thus I knew that my time would soon be up. Trouble was that K.P. turned down the offer to return to Srinagar. He had done his bit. He told Jos.h.i.+, the DIB, 'Sir, I have already been there. Will you send whoever Jagmohan asks for?'

They tried a few senior officers and finally R.C. figured, 'Chalte hain.'

While I was in Srinagar, Jos.h.i.+ had said something that gave a way forward. Things were going badly in the Valley: Kashmiris began to sniff azaadi, for they were taken in by the ISI's bluff that if they started something big enough, the Pakistan army would come and liberate them from India, much in the way India had helped Bangladesh's liberation from Pakistan. Insurgency in Kashmir was masterminded by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and his henchmen as revenge for Bangladesh. Kashmiris were crossing the border in droves. The IB's sources dried up because no one would talk to us; no one wanted to be seen going to Gupkar Road. We were in a mess. The Pakistanis were enjoying watching Kashmir burn.

Thus, in 1990, we needed the army to contain militancy, but if it were not for the IB and the intelligence it provided the army wouldn't have known what to do: it would have been fighting blind. In that very difficult period the army operations were guided by the IB, and frankly I did not contribute anything because I had been pulled out: the successes in fighting militancy during that time were a tribute to the work by colleagues posted in Srinagar after me. They rose to the occasion and took out some key militants. Some militants got killed, some of them disappeared, and some went back to Pakistan, and that is what encouraged separatists like Shabir or militants like Firdous to come out of the shadows.

The way forward that Jos.h.i.+ inspired was that despite the killings and despite the IB being targeted, what was most important was for Delhi to reach out to the Kashmiris, and for the IB to do so too. Jos.h.i.+ knew that the IB never had the best reputation in the Valley since the time of Sheikh Saheb.

Perhaps Jos.h.i.+'s insight had to do with the fact that he wasn't like the rest of us. Jos.h.i.+ came to the Bureau late. He wasn't like those of us who had been earmarked right at the beginning of our service; he entered the IB at the level of deputy director, which was exceptional in our organisation because the IB likes people to grow from within. As a result, he had more experience than the rest of us of being a police officer in the field; combined with the fact that he was down to earth, simple and practical, it helped; he saw straight in many matters.

Jos.h.i.+ became chief quite by accident; though he was second in seniority to Narayanan (they were from the same batch), everyone a.s.sumed Narayanan would be in the saddle till he retired. But when V.P. Singh became prime minister he eased out Narayanan to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and made Jos.h.i.+ the chief. And in the one year that Jos.h.i.+ was in the saddleV.P. Singh was prime minister for just a yearhe made this point: we must understand that we have to reach out and befriend the Kashmiri so that he doesn't feel Delhi is always hostile to him.

When I returned from Srinagar in March 1990 I was asked to handle this, since it was a.s.sumed that I must know some people, though the fact was I knew n.o.body. I was wondering where to start when I was suddenly transferred to counter- intelligence. For most intelligence officers that would have been the end of their Kashmir experience.

What happened, however, is that V.P. Singh's government fell and Chandra Shekhar became the new prime minister with the support of the Congress party. He brought Narayanan back as the DIB. And as soon as Narayanan took over he called for me and said: 'You've had enough of a holiday, now come back and do some serious work. I want you to again take over.' And so I was put in charge of the IB's Kashmir Operations Group in December 1990, after a few months of counter- intelligence, and till the time I went across to R&AW eight years later I did nothing but Kashmir.

We began talking to Kashmiris. There were three types.

One type comprised Kashmiris who were on the periphery of the movement. They thought they were in the movement, but they weren't really because they weren't into killing people. These guys were close to the JKLF but they were not ideologues you could say they were hangers-on. Somebody who knew Yasin Malik, somebody who knew Shabir Shah, etc. They would visit Delhi and would come with stories and we would talk to them. They were basically general Kashmiris supportive of or sympathetic to the movement.

The second category was a readymade group of the people who really mattered, the people who were all in jail. By early 1990, the former Muslim United Front leaders who would later form the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, or the JKLF guys, were in different jails. We thus had the opportunity of reaching out to whoever we wanted to by visiting them in jail. Like Shabir Shah, Yasin Malik too was contacted when in jail.

The third category were the militants. Obviously, this was a slightly more difficult group, for how do you get to some boys who are in the field, or underground? Like Firdous and others, we got to them but it took time.

Eventually, there was n.o.body in Kashmir whom the K-Group did not reach out to. So, with that, besides the a.n.a.lysis and operations and other stuff that we did, we got very involved in talking to Kashmiris. And we spent a lot of time cultivating relations.h.i.+ps like the one with Shabir Ahmed Shah, the headmaster of the boys who took up arms in the late 1980s early 1990s.

Shabir had been in and out of jail since 1968, when he was only fourteen years old. The only Kashmiri who had spent more time in jail than Shabir was Sheikh Abdullah. The fact that Shabir was older than the new lot of militant boys and the fact that he kept going into and coming out of jail made him the object of respect and admiration of Kashmiri youngsters. Myths grew around him such as the one that he unfurled a Pakistani flag at an international cricket match between India and the West Indies in Srinagar in 1983. He wasn't even at the match.

But he didn't mind all the publicity and all the time in jail: it saved him from ever having to lay out an agenda or a roadmap to freedom. In fact, being in Jammu jail quite often during the 1980s put him in touch with Sikh boys who were jailed for Khalistan-related terrorism, most of them with the Sikh Students Federation. Hence some networking had started, which picked up pace in the early 1990s, between extremists from both Punjab and Kashmir. For Pakistan this was good news for they could try to exploit both together. However, what I understood from the Sikh boys later was that they got disillusioned with the Kashmiris pretty quickly. They said the Kashmiris were faint- hearted and talked big but would do nothing: 'In mein dum nahin hain, kucch nahin karenge,' they said.

In any case, Shabir and like-minded Kashmiri separatists formed the People's League in 1974 in protest against the negotiations that would lead to the accord between Sheikh Saheb and Indira Gandhi the following year. In late 1986, a close a.s.sociate of Shabir, Mehmood Sagar, was instrumental in patronising anti-India youth in Srinagar city while Shabir was in jail, leading to the formation of the anti-India Islamic Students League (ISL). Some of its members, like its general secretary, Yasin Malik, actively worked for MUF candidates in the 1987 state a.s.sembly election, and they were thrown in jail when they protested against the blatant electoral malpractices of those polls. The ISL would later morph into the JKLF while Shabir remained in the People's League. The ISL, however, had a close bond with Shabir, who was then the emotional voice of Kashmiri youth.

Shabir caught my attention in late 1988, when an interview of him by Zafar Mehraj appeared on the front page of the Kashmir Times. Shabir being underground made the interview big news. By that time he was also known as an Amnesty International 'prisoner of conscience': he was quite taken by such monikers. And then almost a year later he and his lieutenant Nayeem Khan were arrested at Ramban in Jammu while the two were making an attempt to cross the Line of Control to take charge of separatist activities in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The ISI guys were waiting for him and had wanted him to come across for a long time; he was a most sought-after separatist.

Years later various former comrades of his would allege that Shabir himself avoided going across because he lacked the courage to do so. Perhaps it would have put him to a real leaders.h.i.+p test; several militants later told me that once you go across, you don't know if you're going to be used or misused. Or perhaps he didn't want to get too tangled with the ISI because once you've been to that 'randikhana', it is very difficult to get back out. A Kashmiri militant once told me, guys who've come into proper contact with the ISI are never going to be in a position to work something out with Delhi.

And incidentally, Shabir is the only separatist leader who has never been to Pakistan.

When I started talking to Kashmiris then, the obvious choice to start with was Shabir. The entire JKLF leaders.h.i.+p at that point looked up to him (the Hizbul Mujahideen hadn't become the dominant group yet), he had his own militant tanzeem, and he seemed to have a certain amount of ego that we could ma.s.sage. The fact is that anybody who is somebody or who thinks he is somebody in Kashmir has a big ego. And at that point Shabir was the headmaster to the rest of the militants.

Yet even though I had no problem in walking into the jail where Shabir was being held, there was no guarantee that he would utter a word, much less begin talking to me. It would have been good to have an intermediary and I stumbled across one through a mainstream politician, Prof. Saifuddin Soz, who was then with the National Conference. Soz was a strange character: he would never look anyone in the eye when he spoke and instead directed his gaze at a point just above one's head. He was a complicated character, voting against his own party in 1999 and bringing down the one-year-old BJP government (which was re-elected anyway), for which Farooq threw him out of the party.

In the winter of 1990, however, Soz approached me and asked me for help with a friend who was in jail. 'Please help him, he's a personal friend of mine,' Soz said. 'And he could be of use to you also.'

'Whether he's of use to me or not, if he's a personal friend of yours we'll help him,' I said.

Soz's friend was a prominent businessman. At that time in Kashmiran unusual timethere were business people, some of whom money was extorted from and some of whom were giving money to militants. Some of these business people with links across the border were pivotal in sponsoring terrorism. The same people would help us in the government of India in our fightback against militancy. In the way that there were obvious separatists or obvious militants, there were also obvious business families involved in the same racket, in some aspect or another. Since they had public dealings, being businessmen, they were more easily approachable for the IB than a militant. Some of them were in trouble and they came to us; some of them we heard about and we approached on our own; some became friends. Obviously they will need to remain anonymous.

Soz's friend was part of a flouris.h.i.+ng business family and he was in jail because Jagmohan, despite his short tenure the second time aroundhe took over in January 1990 and had to resign in May due to the firing upon a procession of mourners of the a.s.sa.s.sinated Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooqzealously went after those he thought were funding and financing militancy. If there was an allegation against a business person, Jagmohan had that person picked up. Thus, this friend of Soz's from a prominent business family was thrown into jail and was there for five or six months before Soz finally came to me.

The businessman was eventually released and I went to meet him. He was distrustful of me and had lots of reservations about talking to the IB. Yet while he spoke little, he did mention to me that there was n.o.body better than Shabir at that point to target or talk to. 'He could be the answer to your problems,' this businessman suggested to me. 'If Delhi is serious about a dialogue with Kashmiris, then Shabir is the right person.'

That businessman was close to Shabir and remained so as long as Shabir was the focus of things in Kashmir.

Shabir was in jail with his lieutenant Nayeem Khan, who had left the ISL to join with Shabir in the People's League. Nayeem was a good, practical influence on Shabir, who had dreams and visions. Nayeem helped our cause as a voice of reason at Shabir's side because when we started talking to Shabir, the prisoner of conscience had typical Kashmiri reservations. 'What are we going to talk about?' he said to me.

'Let's talk about talking,' I replied.

When I say typical Kashmiri refrain, what I mean is that at the back of the Kashmiri mind are all the sacrifices they have made for their movement and all the deaths that have taken place; that all of it has only grown and multiplied; and that there has to be something shown for it. 'It has to be peace with honour,' Shabir would tell me. So from talking about talks, we began speaking about the futility of the gun, and then about peace with honour. It was a slow process.

Sometimes I met him in jail, bringing along a bottle of Rooh Afza and a box of grapes, and sometimes I met him at a Jammu nursing home. We began to talk of dialogue. I began to call him the Nelson Mandela of Kashmir, and he liked to be known that way. We spoke of a settlement with India and that he could become chief ministeror even prime ministerof Kashmir in the way that Sheikh Saheb was in the period 194753.

Once other separatists were released in 1993the MUF guys who formed the All Parties Hurriyat Conferencehe began to feel ready for release. We really ma.s.saged his ego, encouraging him to think that he had a monopoly on Delhi and that we wanted to see him as chief minister. 'Shah Saheb,' I said. 'Now we want to see you there. I want to come and stay with you.'

Shabir would laugh about it, but he was also concerned because he was going along with the flow and once in a while he would wonder whether he had gone too far or whether he had gone too fast, and where all this would end up. 'I will be responsible,' he said repeatedly to us, and insisted that there had to be peace with honour. 'Of course,' I said. 'If there's a dialogue, there has to be something for the Kashmiris also.'

The people around himNayeem, Shabir's commander-in- chief Firdous (who was caught by the army during those years), and even that businessman who put me on to himall wanted Shabir to move a little faster. Yet since he felt he was senior and superior to all the other separatists he wanted to wait till the government of India released the big-name separatists before they released him. Indeed, the last big name released before Shabir was Yasin Malik in May 1994, and in October 1994 Shabir was released.

When Shabir was out, he decided he would march to Poonch, then back to Jammu and then climb up through Bhaderwah and Kishtwar in Doda (a part of the Jammu region) on his way to Anantnag in south Kashmir. It was a good plan. By the time he reached Srinagar he was like the Pied Piper of Hamlin: everyone was following him. His each stop was thronged by excited Kashmiris. India Today put him on its cover on top of a bus. I was taken aback by the ma.s.sive reception and asked a Kashmiri friend, 'Is this guy really that big?'

The Kashmiri turned around and said: 'Look, there is a feeling that he has done a deal with Delhi and therefore he gives us a lot of hope. That is the reason so many people are backing him or following him.'

Shabir was the right man at the right moment. Kashmiris had gone through almost five years of unrelenting violence without any of the azaadi that the ISI had promised them. They wanted relief and they wanted peace with honour. Shabir tapped the sentiment and in Baramulla he made a speech where he said that he had come with a needle and thread, looking to sew together a peace. It seemed that in 1995 he would seize the moment and give Kashmir a new direction. He had even gotten married in 1995, something that not only ended his penchant for repeatedly going to jail but also fuelled his personal ambition. He spoke to his friends about the possibility that he could win a n.o.bel Prize.

And then, nothing happened. Shabir began to have second thoughts and he began backtracking.

Some of it was his own fear of stepping up to the plate, and some of it was Delhi. In March 1995, for instance, Shabir came to Delhi and he met a whole bunch of politicians, including those in the ruling Congress party, those in the Left, and even Vajpayee, who was then the leader of the opposition. While he was in Delhi he told us that he needed to go to Kathmandu, and he asked me to facilitate the trip. 'I'm going to meet Mehmood Sagar,' he said, referring to his Pakistan-based senior colleague in the People's League. Sagar used to own a shop in Maharaj Bazaar, and in 1987, boys would congregate there before they crossed the LoC. Shabir apparently wanted to consult his senior colleague, who was himself now across the LoC. 'I can only meet him in Kathmandu,' Shabir said. 'So I must go to Kathmandu.'

I judged that it was no big deal. If we were to do business with him then we should let him go, even if it was obvious that Sagar would not be the only person he would meet. It would be Mehmood Sagar-plus; the ISI would want a word or two as well. 'No big deal,' I thought.

I was overruled by my panicky bosses in Delhi. 'No, no, this is very risky,' they said. In intelligence work, you have to follow the chain of command. And so Shabir, who was in Varanasi on his way to Kathmandu, was called back.

Shabir never let me forget that. 'Aap humko trust nahin karte,' he said. To put it in the words of George Tenet, we should have taken that chance to check him out.

As Shabir began to lose steam the people around him became increasingly disillusioned. As 1995 progressed, all that Nayeem and Firdous ever saw was Shabir having a ball, travelling around India and meeting politicians and activists, going to places like Calcutta and Trivandrum and being feted as The Next Big Thing From Kashmir. The prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was thinking of a breakthrough in Kashmir (he had already had a breakthrough in Punjab with the 1992 state a.s.sembly elections), encouraged the political cla.s.s to pump up Shabir. Shabir even set up shop in Delhi: he established the Kashmir Awareness Bureau in south Delhi's Malviya Nagar, and it was inaugurated by I.K. Gujral, a later prime minister. It was part of Shabir's getting known in Delhi and becoming a part of the political firmament.

And all that Nayeem and Firdous ever heard from Shabir was how he should get the n.o.bel Prize. This didn't help the militants who wanted to join him overground. They were in a more precarious position because the lifespan of a militant was two to two and a half years before they would get b.u.mped off by the army or the police or somebody else. They needed a dialogue to begin, and a peace initiative to work. We even suggested to Shabir that he depute a team to continue the dialogue on his behalf but to no avail.

Narasimha Rao was so keen to rope Shabir into playhe didn't like Farooq much and wanted to see a fresh leaders.h.i.+p in Kashmirthat I was sent by the DIB to brief him on Kashmir before he left on a foreign tour as prime minister in November 1995. It was the only time I ever met the man, who also never looked me in the eye, but asked me: 'How necessary is Farooq for the revival of the democratic process in Kashmir?'

Narasimha Rao was obviously looking towards a state a.s.sembly election in J&K the following year and it was clear that he was placing great hope in Shabir. He had even asked me to introduce Shabir to his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, another future prime minister. And to cap it, on that trip to Africa, when the prime minister was in Burkina Faso, he announced that the government was willing to discuss any kind of political arrangement with Kashmir; any quantum of azaadi. 'The sky is the limit,' were his famous words. He was signalling to Shabir that he was ready to give Kashmiris peace with honour.

Shabir, however, did not see it that way because he did not check Narasimha Rao out. For some reason he thought Narasimha Rao's offer of the sky was for Farooq and the National Conference to draw them in and thereby legitimise elections. That was the unintended consequence of all this: Farooq and his party worried that they could get left behind in New Delhi's attempt to woo the separatists and so they jumped into the fray in the 1996 state elections. And since Shabir dithered, the National Conference won big and formed the government.

The dithering in 199596 did not go unnoticed by Shabir's lieutenants, who ultimately got disillusioned with himFirdous before the elections, Nayeem after the elections. Firdous and several other militants we were speaking to in fact decided to no longer wait for Shabir to make up his mind and in early 1996 they came overground, laid down arms, and began peace talks with the government of India. This was also a setback to Shabir because he believed he had a monopoly with New Delhi. When Firdous and other militants began a dialogue then Shabir began to think that Delhi was double-dealing with him.

As mentioned earlier, perhaps Shabir felt things were going too fast and he didn't feel he knew where it would all end. It was basically a matter of he not having faith in himself.

The irony is, because of the way we pursued him and the offer that the prime minister made, things opened up in Kashmir. More and more Kashmiris began to come forward and the National Conference won power; so that by the time of the next election in 2002, Shabir had missed the bus. There were more players and he was no longer a big deal. Had Shabir jumped into the fray in 1996 he could have had it all and a chance to forge his people's destiny.

I had a long chat with Shabir during the 2002 elections, when I tried to persuade him to contest, but he said, 'What can I do single-handedly? I can at most win one seat. If I had more people I could win probably three seats. And anyway it's decided that Farooq Abdullah or his son Omar will become the chief minister.' I told him he was wrong, but he did not listen.

After the 2002 elections, Mufti Sayeed became the chief minister without having won the largest number of seats, and I told Shabir he had been wrong. I told Nayeem and him that they could have been ministers if they had become MLAs. Naeem agreed and said, 'Yes, we made a mistake.' But Shabir was bitter. 'Big deal,' he said. 'Mufti is the other side of the same coin as Farooq.'

Things were never the same for Shabir after that: his career drifted aimlessly and now he's in his sixties he has a Hurriyat Conference of his own after once joining it and splitting it. He has of late tilted more towards Pakistan, which funds him, and gets money and hangs around in Srinagar. He is cynical, like most Kashmiris, and will tell anyone who listens about how insincere Delhi is.

It reminded me of what Firdous once said to me in 1995, when his frustration was reaching a zenith. He asked me whether the IB had psychiatrists.

'No,' I said. 'Why do you ask?'

'How do you a.n.a.lyse personalities?' Firdous persisted.

'By talking to them,' I said.

'No,' he said. 'Shabir is not so easy to a.n.a.lyse.'

Shabir was a h.e.l.l of a letdown. They all thought that, even Yasin. It was a disappointment for me, having spent so many years talking to him, trying to get the ISI out of his head, trying to get him to get up and stand up for his people. But in retrospect it wasn't such a big disappointment because one, the thread of dialogue with Shabir can be picked up again, at any time. And two, the experience was a step in the successes we had in bringing militants in from the cold, be they Shabir's commander-in-chief Firdous, Has.h.i.+m Qures.h.i.+, or Abdul Majid Dar.

5.

PROXY WARRIOR.

If terrorism suspects voluntarily returned from abroad during my time as the R&AW chief, the main reason for doing so was their disappointment with Pakistan. Perhaps they had matured, grown older and wiser, and had developed familial responsibilities; perhaps it was exhaustion and a desire to come home and breathe easily; but what was undeniable in all cases was a sense of betrayal and the shattering of their dream that Pakistan would help liberate Kashmir from India. I had seen this repeatedly after 1994 and up close in great detail with Shabir's commander-in-chief, Babar Badr, whose real name was Firdous Syed. He and his group, the Muslim Jaanbaz Force (named after the people's militia that Pakistani military dictator Zia-ul-Haq had propounded), had in April 1991 kidnapped Swedish engineers Johan Jansson and Jan Ole Loman, working on the Uri hydel project just 18 km from the LoC in north-western Kashmir. It was the first time foreigners were kidnapped in Kashmir. Even the United Nations secretary general, Javier Perez de Cuellar, appealed for the Swedes' release. The Swedish government paid off the MJF in Pakistan and in three months the engineers were allowed to walk to freedom. Not long after they were kidnapped, though, the army caught Firdous and a couple of his boys, and after the usual detention and interrogation, we at the IB got word from the army that here was a militant who was unlike the others: he was reasonable, he was good, he spoke sense, he talked peace.

Firdous was not at all the run-of-the-mill militant. He was a middle-cla.s.s boy from an 'NC family', one that traditionally supported the National Conference. He was from Bhaderwah in Doda district, which lay on the Jammu bank of the Jhelum riverthe metaphoric cusp of both the Kashmir and Jammu regionsso Doda's Muslims comprised Kashmiris and non- Kashmiris who strongly identified with Kashmiri culture. Firdous's father was in the timber trade, and since politics in J&K was based on patronagetimber contracts were doled out by the government in exchange for political support theirs was a hardcore NC family. One of Firdous's childhood memories, in fact, was at the Jammu railway station with his folks to receive Sheikh Abdullah following the Sher-e-Kashmir's release, after two decades of imprisonment, and return to J&K in 1975.

Firdous was a teenager during Sheikh Saheb's twilight and the abbreviated first tenure of Farooq Abdullah. That was a time when there was much turmoil in the Muslim world, first with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, and then with the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan leading to a resistance manned by Islamists, funded by Saudi petro-dollars, and armed by the CIA. It still surprises me that a cultured and sensitive fellow like Firdous could have gotten involved in aggression and militancy but that was the trend in the 1980s, particularly after the 1987 a.s.sembly election that the Muslim United Front (MUF) felt was stolen from them. Though he was close to Shabir Shahthe headmaster of those boys that comprised the first wave of militancyhe did not join the Islamic Students League (ISL), which later became the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), and instead formed his own group, the MJF.

In 1988, soon after the a.s.sembly election, groups of boys crossed LoC for arms training by the ISI. Firdous was among those youngsters and he went across with Shabir's other lieutenant, Nayeem. After their return, the MJF was involved in several incidents of terrorism, and then came the 1991 kidnapping of the Swedes and Firdous's subsequent capture. After a month of futile interrogation by paramilitary forces like the CRPF and the Border Security Force (BSF) he was handed over to the army for solitary confinement.

This was a key period, for Firdous as well as for us, because during the eleven months that he was with the army's 10 Garhwal Rifles a lot changed for him. For one thing, he had time to introspect about the movement, the violence, and whether or not it was worth it. A free run of the regiment's well-stocked library contributed to this process, and though Firdous's involvement in rebel activity and militancy meant that his formal education had been curtailed, he read voraciously during that time, going through about fifty books ranging from Gen. Douglas MacArthur's memoirs to Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry. It probably helped that he was in solitary and not among other prisoners, who were more likely to be spending time in planning jailbreaks (as he would later in Jammu jail).

The man who allowed him a free run of the library was the commanding officer, Brig. Naseeb Singh Katoch. This professional soldier talked to Firdous; and that was the second thing about the change Firdous underwent. The two of them debated Kashmir, the movementa separatist militant and a man totally committed to India. The man in uniform impressed Firdous with his knowledge, his patience. Brigadier Katoch generally dispelled a stereotype that Firdous and other militants (not to speak of their ISI handlers) had of Indian soldiers in particular and Indians in general. Firdous found that Indians were reasonable.

The army also realised that Firdous was nothing like the crude, uncouth, illiterate and sometimes barbaric militants they ordinarily came across. The unit sent word to us at the IB that here was a reasonable fellow whom we might want to talk to at length.

In the IB, the whole idea of talking directly to boys who had taken up the gun was two-fold: one was that we needed to detach any militantand in this case, Firdous was an important militantfrom militancy and violence and bring him overground. This would be to our tactical advantage. The second was that we could try and get him involved in talks, because that would be the best way to end militancy. The army and the paramilitary could eventually manage the violence, but we wanted to end it completely, and that would only come through the movement changing tack from violence to politics and talking was the way to get that strategic advantage.

In Firdous's case he was close to Shabir as well, and we were trying to break the ice with Shabir. By then Nayeem had also been arrested and he had started talking to us, and so if we had both of Shabir's lieutenants talking to us then Shabir would have no choice but to move forward; otherwise he might get left behind by his own lieutenants.

So my people went and met Firdous and talked to him, in the hope that he might be of some value. I also met him once in 1993, by which time he had been s.h.i.+fted to Jammu jail. But I did not meet him in jail. He came to Delhi, dressed as a Sikh in a turban, and was brought here on a special aircraft to secretly meet Rajesh Pilot, the minister for internal security. Pilot was meeting several such militants. I also got to meet Firdous at this point, and I wondered what the h.e.l.l is this and who is this Kashmiri pretending to be a sardar.

When Shabir got to know that the government was talking to Firdous, he threw a fit. Not because a Kashmiri militant might be compromising with the government, but because Shabir believed that as the leader he should be the only one talking to anyone in the government. Shabir believed that any political negotiation should be done by him and him alone, for he not only saw himself as the next Sheikh Abdullah, he went beyond that: he was not unhappy being known as the Nelson Mandela of Kashmir.

Shabir had a brainwave. Firdous had spent two and a half years in jail and his detention under the Public Safety Act would soon come to an end. Usually when a militant's detention ended, we had them re-arrested just outside the gate of the prison and sent them back in. Shabir suggested we let Firdous go free instead of re-arresting him. He would send his commander-in-chief on a special a.s.signment, and since Shabir was then very important to the government's plans, particularly those of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, we agreed.

The special a.s.signment that he sent Firdous on was across the LoC. With both Shabir and Firdous in jail, their militant groups were running into funding problems with the ISI. Though two very senior colleagues of Shabir's were across the LoC Mehmood Sagar and Irshad MalikShabir asked Firdous to go across and spend some time there sorting out things. He need not hurry back.

Shabir had sent Firdous to get him out of his hair. Unexpectedly, Firdous came to a crossroads in his life. In January 1994, Firdous crossed the LoC and after some time at the training camps near and around Muzaffarabad, he decided to tour Pakistan and see the country and its people. It was an eye-opening experience for him.

One of the people he hung around with was Irshad Malik, who at one point became the secretary general of the United Jehad Council that was established in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan- occupied Kashmir; it was a coordinating body for all the militant groups that were operating out of PoK and other places. Once Irshad helped Firdous with sorting out their various financial difficulties, Firdous in March 1994 embarked on his tour of Pakistan. This included visiting relatives and other Kashmiri migrants, such as the entrepreneur in Sialkot who made footb.a.l.l.s for the international sporting goods company Adidas. This friend was obviously a big shot. Yet when Firdous visited him, the friend gave him advice: 'Yahan aaye ho, yahan baithna nahin.'

Firdous was puzzled and angry; he a.s.sumed the friend had taken Firdous to be a freeloader, and was thus advising him not to stay long in Pakistan. Firdous did not realise then that the friend was only giving words to his own disillusionment with Pakistan.

Firdous went to Karachi and met Mehmood Sagar's uncle, a retired admiral of the Pakistan navy. The uncle told Sagar that whatever he did, he should one day return to their homeland, Kashmir. Then he turned to Firdous and said: 'Promise me that your goal will always be independence and never accession to Pakistan.' Firdous was stunned to hear a former member of the Pakistan armed forces telling a Kashmiri freedom fighter not to join or settle in Pakistan.

Firdous visited a cousin in Muzaffarabad who was director of education in PoK. She told him not to settle in Pakistan; since he was likely to be killed if he returned to Kashmir, she suggested that like many other Kashmiris he migrate to London and settle down there. 'You're still young,' she said.

It was the same refrain everywhere that he went. Each and every Kashmiri that he met in Pakistan felt they were in an alien land.

The real shock came when Firdous visited Lah.o.r.e and made the acquaintance of Majid Nizami, the chief editor of the Nawa-e-Waqt. Nizami also ran a relief fund for Kashmiri militants and was thus considered a big shot in separatist circles. Yet all Nizami would talk about was the two-nation theory and how Kashmir could only become a part of Pakistan. At a seminar at the Avari luxury hotel in Lah.o.r.e on its foundation day, Firdous listened with disbelief as Nizami said that the third option for Kashmir, that of independence, was un-Islamic and unpatriotic, and a disgrace to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

Nizami's argument was this: an independent Kashmir would reduce Pakistan's strategic depth, as the international border would only be 10 km from the arterial Grand Trunk Road that connected Lah.o.r.e to Rawalpindi; and an independent Kashmir would deprive Pakistan of water, since all of the water that irrigated the breadbasket in Punjab came from the Mangla dam in Mirpur. For Nizami, this was what all the Kashmiri sacrifice the lives and livelihood lostwas for: a secure Pakistani border, and water.