Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 5

Firdous then realised that Pakistan's priorities and Kashmir's priorities were two separate things. And in the bargain, Kashmiris were losing out, quite disastrously.

Firdous's final straw was his meeting with the ISI before he was due to return to India. The man running the Kashmir operations was the ISI's deputy director-general, Lt. Gen. Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah. Under General Iftikhar were two officers, Brigadier Faisal, who looked after the political cell, and Brigadier Fahd, who looked after the military cell. Firdous was given intensive training in bomb making, and once he became an explosives expert, Faisal and Fahd briefed him.

Brigadier Faisal told him that Pakistan wanted violence to be taken to the next level in Kashmir with the use of explosives. Firdous was to take the fight to Jammu and beyond, to the very heart of India. Faisal wanted the militants to give India 'a thousand cuts' and thus bleed her to death. Brigadier Fahd said the main aim was to prevent normalcy from returning: 'Most of all, you are to make sure that a.s.sembly elections do not take place.'

Firdous was surprised at how Pakistan, which in 1990 promised militants like himself that it would invade India and take revenge for Bangladesh once militancy got fully under way, was in 1994 asking the same militants to prevent elections. What a climbdown.

To make sure, Firdous sought and got a meeting with General Iftikhar, where he asked the ISI's number two man for surface-to-air missiles (SAM). The ISI had provided the Afghan Mujahideen with SAMs, and these had turned the tide of the resistance against the Soviet Union. Bringing down a helicopter or two would cause real panic in India.

General Iftikhar turned him down. 'Why do you want to waste your money?' the general asked. 'We have SAMs, we will decide when Kashmir needs SAMs.'

As Firdous tried to argue the point, he realised that the ISI did not want to provoke India beyond a point; it did not want the proxy war to escalate into an open one, which the use of SAMs was sure to do. The ISI was not interested in raising the violence above India's limit of tolerance. The ISI was not interested in the fact that the Kashmiris had gone all out to fight their dirty war for them.

Firdous gave brigadiers Faisal and Fahd a piece of his mind, ranting against the two-nation theory, saying that Kashmiris were being used, and that Pakistan ran the risk of disillusioning the Kashmiri militants. But the brigadiers were not interested in any debate; they were only interested in Firdous going back and using bombs against India. They told him as much.

What a contrast to Brigadier Katoch, Firdous realised. The Indian solider engaged him in intense debate, listened to him, and answered his points with his own. The Pakistani soldiers, on the other hand, looked bored; talking to them was like banging one's head on a brick wall.

On top of this, the rumour among the Kashmiris who were in training was that whenever they got their pay from the ISI, there was always ten per cent missing.

This bitter experience made Firdous's break with Pakistan final and complete. He left.

When he returned to the Valley, Shabir Shah had been released a month earlier and was travelling around Kashmir speaking of mending things with a needle and thread, and drawing large crowds. At first Firdous was excited because he now knew that with Pakistan not committed to the Kashmir movement, the violence was of no use. And if the violence was of no use, then it had to be replaced by a dialogue. Firdous saw the crowds as an endors.e.m.e.nt by ordinary Kashmiris of a new path that the movement should take. Yasin Malik, who was released a few months earlier, in May 1994, had already announced that he would continue the movement through non- violence, which was another indication that disillusionment had set in all round, and the very people who had started the militancy were now looking to end it.

Shabir, however, was carried away by his own importance, and instead of charting out a plan for initiating a dialogue and bringing peace to the Valley, all Shabir was doing was talking about whether or not he stood a chance to win the n.o.bel Peace Prize. He was not taking the movement's next step seriously; he was just marking time. He did not look to be going anywhere. This Firdous found to be equally disillusioning.

Firdous began to get impatient because he was still underground, still a militant, and either he would get arrested or he would get b.u.mped off. Or he would have to go back to Pakistan. Firdous was thus worried about his own safety. On top of that he saw Shabir wandering about India, parading around Kashmir, having a good time. Firdous became restless.

After Firdous returned, our guys in the IB found out and instead of arresting him or anything like that, I sought a meeting with him. We had lots of sessions together, and over time Firdous and I became good friends. We talked a lot, and remember that was my role on behalf of the government: to talk. We talked a lot about Shabir. Once, on a visit to Delhi, when he was staying at a hotel I went and met him and he asked me the question about whether we had psychiatrists in our department.

'How else do you a.s.sess a personality like Shabir Shah?' Firdous said. 'Because this fellow needs a psychiatrist.'

I laughed then and said that we did a.s.sess people but we did not use psychiatrists. His question, though, gave me the first doubt that these fellows were drifting apart.

The next time we met was in Jammu, and he said that he had had enough of Shabir.

'Yeh kya ho raha hain iske saath?' I asked Firdous.

'He will not do anything, I'm convinced,' Firdous said about Shabir. 'I've told him, aap ko jo marzi kariye, hum jo marzi karenge.'

Both Firdous and Nayeem had had a lot of respect for Shabir and somewhere along the way, they lost it. This is also true of Kashmiris in general; after that tumultuous reception he got all over the Valley, the people lost respect for Shabir. Firdous and Nayeem thought that Shabir was cooking a deal with the government of India, and that's what Kashmiris in general, tired of militancy and its violence, had also hoped. When Firdous and Nayeem realised it wasn't going to happen, they were disillusioned with their former leader. Nayeem parted company with Shabir over a dispute about money but is back with him again.

Firdous walked out on Shabir first. The occasion was a meeting of the All Party Hurriyat Conference, a conglomerate of thirty-odd separatist groups headed by the former leaders of the MUF that was tightly controlled by Pakistan. The Hurriyat wanted Shabir to join, but Shabir gave some conditions: that the Hurriyat merge into a single unit, that it elect a single leader, that it give representation to Jammu and Ladakh, among others. The Hurriyat did not want to do so. So Shabir held off joining until May 1995, when a crisis developed at the Chrar-e- Sharief shrine, taken over by a Pakistani militant named Mast Gul. Shabir, without warning his lieutenants, went to the Hurriyat meeting and signed up. In July 1995, Firdous walked out.

Firdous's misfortune was that Shabir flopped. Had Shabir taken charge and forged ahead, he would have been bigger than the Hurriyat. All the militants looked up to him in the beginning, and when the peace process began, he was the most sought after by Delhi. The US amba.s.sador, Frank Wisner, first visited Srinagar in 1996, and he had a special lunch meeting with Shabir in a houseboat. Obviously, Wisner thought Shabir was important enough to talk to one-on-one, and wanted to check Shabir out on whether he was serious about moving forward. The irony is that the Hurriyat, which had hurriedly taken Shabir Shah in just a year earlier, now sacked him after he met Wisner, on the charge of indiscipline.

After Firdous walked out on Shabir, he got in touch with a handful of friends of his in militancy, and they were like- minded in that they agreed to come out and talk peace with the government of India. They included Bilal Lodhi, the chief of al-Barq, which was Abdul Ghani Lone's militant group; Imran Rahi, a divisional commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen; and Ghulam Moinuddin, a divisional commander of the Muslim Mujahideen. In February 1996, the four held a press conference at Ahdoos Hotel in Srinagar, denouncing the Hurriyat and stating that they were ready for a peace initiative with New Delhi.

It had an explosive effect. The Union home minister, S.B. Chavan, welcomed the initiative and invited them to Delhi. The four now-former militants went to a former NC minister named Ghulam Ha.s.san Mir, who defected from Farooq Abdullah's first government in 1984. Mir had been an important player in Kashmir, and he saw the chance to be a peacemaker; so he got involved in Firdous's peace initiative by bringing the four to Delhi. This was how he got to be called 'Manager'.

It was a major breakthrough that paved the way for the democratic process and took the wind out of militancy that year. On its own, however, it did not take off, probably because the limitation that the four ex-militants had was that there was no political leader among them; none of them was big enough to drive their initiative forward. From Delhi's point of view, it was a G.o.dsend in that they got some top militants out of the game. No one was more kicked than the DIB, D.C. Pathak, who felt that Shabir's C-in-C had more than made up for his indecisiveness. But soon after, the government changed, the home minister changed, and the biggest change of all that happened, the biggest setback to militancy, was the holding of a.s.sembly elections in J&K in 1996.

Those elections brought Farooq Abdullah back into power, and once he was in the saddle, Firdous and his friends would only have a secondary role. In fact, I took the four of them to meet Farooq and I said that now that the National Conference had come to power, the two sides had to make a deal. Farooq was willing to accommodate them. But they were not willing to join the mainstream political party. Perhaps it was too soon for them.

Firdous did get accommodated the following year, in February 1997. I was always fond of Firdous as he struck me as more sincere than the other militants, and the years after Farooq became chief minister again (before I went to R&AW) were years when I could have gotten any favour out of Farooq. So I said to the chief minister: 'This boy is an extremely good fellow, why don't you accommodate him somewhere?'

Farooq's reaction was immediate and positive. He told me to bring Firdous over to his place, and the next morning we met the chief minister on his verandah, where Firdous explained how he was from a traditional NC family. But at that time, Farooq didn't even need an explanation.

'Sure,' Farooq said. 'I'll give him an MLC's ticket.'

And just like that, Firdous was on his way to becoming a member of the legislative council.

'You can come and meet me any time you like,' Farooq told Firdous. 'Don't hesitate.'

When it started, it was a great honeymoon, for Firdous was also taken up by Farooq; this was only natural because Farooq's personality is also fairly larger than life. And to begin with, Firdous was allowed direct access to the chief minister a couple of times. But then Farooq must have thought, why does this guy need to see me? So he put him in touch with party general secretary Sheikh n.a.z.ir Ahmed. That's when Firdous's NC experience began to sour.

Though Sheikh n.a.z.ir is Farooq Abdullah's brother, the two are totally different. You could say Sheikh n.a.z.ir was the old school of the old school, the old guard of the old guard in the NCthe kind that never forgave Delhi for anything, least of all the way Sheikh Abdullah was arrested in 1953 and thrown into jail for a series of incarcerations that lasted nearly twenty-two years. This man reacted quite differently to Firdous; he never allowed Firdous to feel comfortable.

'Mere ko bulate hain, phir kucch nahin kehte hain,' Firdous would complain to me. 'Main bolta hoon kya karoon, woh bolte hain kucch nahin.'

Sheikh n.a.z.ir just would not trust Firdous, and simply because Firdous had come to the NC through me, a senior IB official. In Sheikh n.a.z.ir's eyes, once an IB agent, always an IB agent; why should he be in our party? Which was quite unfair to Firdous since he was always his own man, even after we became friends. But he was never let into the inner workings of the party.

Firdous went back to Farooq but I don't think he got much joy out of that. And four years later, when the end of his term was in sight, Firdous was himself 50-50 about continuing; he knew that he might not get another term but he was keen on it. He came to me to ask me to speak with Farooq. 'Meri toh koi sunwai nahin hai NC mein, aap Doctor Saheb se baat karenge?'

'Kyon nahin karenge?' I said. 'I have no reservations.'

It was the winter of 2001 and I was by that time in the Prime Minister's Office. I went to Jammu to deliver a lecture, and met Farooq. He bluntly turned down my request with a straight no.

'Sorry, but he'll have to wait,' Farooq said. 'He's done a term, we'll accommodate him somewhere else, but I have to see about other people.'

'He's a good chap, sir,' I said.

'Yeah-yeah,' Farooq said. 'Isko kahin aur accommodate kar lenge.'

Firdous left the NC. He was extremely demoralised. You might say he lost heart quickly, but then he was a militant who had been across the LoC twice and had taken up arms against India. He was no longer with the anti-India folks and now a pro-India party had left him feeling rejected.

When the 2002 a.s.sembly elections came, I told him that if he was interested in politics, he ought to contest the elections.

'As what?' he said. 'As who?'

'As Firdous Syed,' I said. 'Go home, back to Bhaderwah.'

'Wahan nahin hoga, I'm mostly in Srinagar,' Firdous said.

'If the Hurriyat backed me, I would contest from downtown Srinagar.'

'So go meet the Mirwaiz,' I said.

He met Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, but the Mirwaiz did not show much interest. Firdous threw his hands up. 'Mere se nahin hoga,' he said. 'I can't win an election, I'm not fit for politics.'

He didn't have the gumption to face the voters.

His political career fizzled out, and he has been a bit of a recluse ever since. He started a think tank and did some writing in newspapers, but even his think tank wound up when the UPA government took charge in 2004 and stopped giving it grants. It came to the extent that in 2014 he didn't even have a pa.s.sport; simply because the government did not trust him and did not want to give him such a doc.u.ment. Firdous is a man who wanted peace, but it seemed as if no one wanted him.

Firdous's story is typical of most Kashmiris who became disillusioned with Pakistan, even old hijackers like Has.h.i.+m Qures.h.i.+. Yet it was not easy getting such men back to India. It was finally managed on my watch as R&AW chief, in 2000, making for some interesting stories.

6.

TINKER, TAILOR, HIJACKER, SPY.

I first met Has.h.i.+m Qures.h.i.+ in Paris, in the early summer of 2000. He had driven down from his home in Amsterdam, Holland, in his red Pa.s.sat, and when we came face to face he extended his hand and said: 'I'm Has.h.i.+m Qures.h.i.+.' 'Mujhe Dulat kehte hain.'

Has.h.i.+m smiled. 'Aap apna sahi naam batayenge?' he asked. 'I have met many people, n.o.body tells me his real name.'

'What can I say, this is my name.'

'You're the only one who's ever given me his real name,' Has.h.i.+m said. And so began our relations.h.i.+p.

Has.h.i.+m had obviously met a lot of spooks: from Pakistan, from India, and as he told me, from the Netherlands and the United States. Hence, from the very beginning, he was always suspect. It was always difficult to figure out who he was working for. Perhaps it depended on that very moment.

I had first heard of Has.h.i.+m in September 1989, when an article of his was published in a Kashmiri newspaper and in a national newspaper. Of course, I had heard of the hijacking he had done in 1971; at that time, two years into my career at the IB, I was posted at the headquarters doing counter-intelligence and the hijacking was no small matter. It grew curiouser when the hijacker claimed that he worked for the BSF, and even curiouser when the Pakistanis claimed that the hijacking had been stage-managed so that Indian airs.p.a.ce could be closed to Pakistani aircraft during Bangladesh's liberation war that would come later that year. These were all stories that made the affair head-scratchingly mysterious.

But when I read his article in 1989, I frankly did not connect it with the man who had committed the hijacking eighteen years earlier. The article itself was anti-militancy and anti- Pakistan, and I said to myself, here's a brave Kashmiri to be writing against militancy: for by this time in 1989, targeted killings had begun and fifteen people had been a.s.sa.s.sinated; the JKLF had called for a quit Kashmir movement in the beginning of the summer; and when Shabir Shah was arrested that same September there were riots resulting in three days of civil curfew and four persons dead. The storm had been brewing (and it broke only three months later, in December, following the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping episode), and all Kashmiris looked sullen. On the other hand, here was a guy who sounded like Farooq, the chief minister, in his anti-militancy article. No Kashmiri could have thought well of Has.h.i.+m after what he had written. I then heard that he was living in Holland and so I shrugged, thinking Kashmiris living in Holland have the liberty to say whatever they like. I put him out of my mind.

Four eventful years later, in September 1993, I was in London to attend an intelligence-liaison conference that the British hosted. I had three nights, so I thought I should call up Farooq who was in England those days; ever since he quit in January 1990 and till he was re-elected in October 1996, Jammu and Kashmir was under governor's rule. Mainstream politicians had gone underground while the government was grappling with the security situation and while we were laying the ground for getting the political process up and running again. Farooq was mostly in England, in and out of Delhi and Srinagar, because he was number one on the terrorists' hit list: we had heard that the ISI's largest bounty was offered for Farooq's head.

One day I found myself free and so I called Farooq and said, 'Sir, I'm in London.'

Dr Abdullah was not living in London but in Southend by Sea, Ess.e.x, an hour and a half's drive east from London. 'Will you be coming into London?' I asked.

'I'll come to London whenever you want,' Farooq said. 'But first you must visit us at home.'

Farooq and his wife lived in a modest corner house near the beach, but that is the kind of man he is, adjusting from the good life in India quite easily. Also, there seemed to be no security, considering how we Indians are obsessed with it. 'Do you have no security at all?' I asked.

'Sure,' he said. 'The police know I'm living here. They've given me a number that I can call in any emergency, they'll come immediately. They have their own way of doing this thing, so I'm not worried.'

Farooq and his wife Mollie and I went to a club for lunch. When we returned home I sat in the drawing room while he went into an adjoining room and came back with a whole stack of literature. He handed me something by Has.h.i.+m Qures.h.i.+. 'This may interest you,' he said.

'Okay,' I said, thumbing through Has.h.i.+m's writings.

'He may be useful to you,' Farooq continued. 'Why don't I get him to speak to you?'

Then Farooq called up Has.h.i.+m and we exchanged greetings. It was as simple as that.

Has.h.i.+m later told me that he had first met Farooq just a few months before we spoke on that first phone call from Ess.e.x to Amsterdam, during the summer of 1993. In his telling, Farooq called him on the phone.

It wasn't that extraordinary a thing because Kashmir is in many ways a small place, and a part of Has.h.i.+m's extended family were traditional National Conference supporters. 'Like most Kashmiris, I wors.h.i.+pped Sheikh Saheb,' Has.h.i.+m told me about the Sher-e-Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah. Has.h.i.+m said that Sheikh Saheb used to visit Has.h.i.+m's parents' place in Nowhatta, and later, whenever Farooq travelled to Bandipora, he would stop by and pay his respects to Has.h.i.+m's mother. There were photos of Farooq with Has.h.i.+m's father and at Has.h.i.+m's brother's wedding.

According to Has.h.i.+m, when he hijacked a plane in 1971, the forces came and took his father, Mohammed Khaleel Qures.h.i.+, away. Has.h.i.+m's maternal uncle, Mohammed Sikander, was close to Sheikh Saheb, who was still under arrest at the time, so Has.h.i.+m's mother went to Begum Sahiba and successfully pleaded for her husband's release. Sheikh Saheb later scolded Has.h.i.+m's brother: 'Did your father have to produce this kind of son?'

Farooq and Has.h.i.+m met in 1993 in Hyde Park, of all places. 'Let's eat,' Farooq told him. 'There's a Bengali restaurant with superb food.'

They met several times after that around Europe: in Switzerland, in Belgium, at conferences. And Has.h.i.+m claimed that Farooq had told him: 'Because you ask for azaadi, we Kashmiris get some respect.'

A few months into my tenure as R&AW chief, Has.h.i.+m made contact, and I responded. He was a Dutch national, wanted for the almost-three-decade-old hijacking, so we had to meet in Europe. But he didn't want to meet in Holland. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that he earned an occasional salary being a consultant to their intelligence service. So we decided on a third country whose capital I was pa.s.sing through on other official work.

When we met, he said he wanted to come back.

'When did you first contact the government about coming back?' I asked.

It turned out that Has.h.i.+m had written to the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, possibly in 1985. In the letter, he claimed, he had warned the PM of what was likely to happen in due course, that is, the militancy in Kashmir. Rajiv Gandhi pa.s.sed on the letter to R&AW, but there was too much suspicion of the hijacker who had spent nine years in Pakistani jails. Do we trust him, went the internal debate, which continued for several years.

In due course, R&AW made contact with Has.h.i.+m in Amsterdam. Interestingly, when I met Has.h.i.+m, our man in Holland was Rabindra Singh, the same R&AW officer who defected to the USA in 2004 after it was discovered that he was a CIA mole in India's spy agency. Has.h.i.+m, however, claimed that Singh was a dud: he was a womaniser, used to drink heavily, and talked loosely. Perhaps what he said of Singh was true, but it didn't mitigate the fact that Singh betrayed India. By the time Singh returned to headquarters, I had left R&AW.

Has.h.i.+m talked to me at that meeting of coming back, and I asked: 'What will you do?'

'Now that the political process has begun, I will also find a role in it,' Has.h.i.+m said.

'Where will you fit in?' I persisted.

He had heard that we in the government had been talking to Shabir Shah. He claimed Shabir was his friend. 'Shabir mera dost hai, uske saath hum tie-up kar sakte hain,' he said, optimistically.

I was trying to discourage him because I felt that whatever little he might be in Holland, back in Kashmir he wouldn't fit in. Also, it was my responsibility as a human being to warn him that he might return to a bad mess. Has.h.i.+m, however, was keen to return home and do something for his people, as he told me. And he sounded more Punjabi than Kashmiri: he was proud, talked openly and with a lot of confidence. That was the sort of thing that got Kashmiris b.u.mped off by the ISI. In Delhi, even the IB was impressed with Has.h.i.+m. My friend Ajit Doval spoke to him at length and told me, 'Yeh to kaam ka banda hai.'

'Yeh Shabir tumhara dost hoga,' I said sceptically, but Has.h.i.+m did not let me complete.

'I will set him right if he misbehaves,' Has.h.i.+m said.

I laughed and so Has.h.i.+m immediately called up Shabir and put it on the speaker. 'I'm thinking of coming back to Kashmir,' he said.

'Welcome, welcome,' Shabir said.

I shook my head in resignation. You don't have to be R&AW chief to recognise the smelly stuff being nonchalantly thrown around.

Has.h.i.+m told me that the 1971 hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane 'Ganga' was Maqbool b.u.t.t's idea.

Kashmiris regard Maqbool b.u.t.t as one of the first martyrs of their movement. According to Has.h.i.+m, Maqbool was the chairman of the armed wing of the Plebiscite Frontthe front started by Sheikh Saheb's right-hand man Mirza Mohammed Aslam Beg in 1955, two years after Sheikh Saheb was arrested, that called for a popular plebiscite to determine the finality of Kashmir's accession to India, as promised by the first governor- general, Lord Mountbatten. It was known as the Jammu & Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF).