Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 6

Maqbool was hanged in Delhi's Tihar jail on 11 February 1984. He had been sentenced to death for the 1966 murder of a policeman as well as the murder of the manager of a Kupwara bank; he escaped from Srinagar jail in 1968 by digging a tunnel out and then went to Pakistan. He returned to India in 1976 and was arrested; his hanging eight years later was ostensibly as payback for the kidnapping and murder of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham, England, on 3 February 1984. The anniversary of Maqbool b.u.t.t's execution is observed annually in Kashmir as a day of anti-India shutdown and protests, but in recent years this anniversary has been losing steam. Instead, it now seems likely that the anniversary of the 9 February 2013 hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, for his complicity in the December 2001 attack on Parliamenta charge that many Kashmiris found dubious and vindictive will be observed as the major anti-India day instead.

Has.h.i.+m said he met Maqbool b.u.t.t for the first time as a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, when he went to Pakistan with his family in early 1969. Khaleel Qures.h.i.+, Has.h.i.+m's father, was a member of the Political Conference, the party founded by Mohiuddin Karra in 1953 as the first party openly for accession to Pakistan. Has.h.i.+m stayed in Peshawar and was enthused to meet the renegade Maqbool b.u.t.t, who was admired by many youngsters. During Has.h.i.+m's five months in Pakistan he was influenced by Maqbool's argument against accession to Pakistan but for azaadi. According to Maqbool, the international community would not support Kashmir's accession to Pakistan, but it would support azaadion both sides. The insight, that the world would not take sides between India and Pakistan, unless it sided against both, impressed Has.h.i.+m. He joined Maqbool b.u.t.t and the JKNLF.

Maqbool told Has.h.i.+m that the organisation and its cause needed to get some publicity, and he sent Has.h.i.+m back to Kashmir to try and enlarge the JKNLF. Has.h.i.+m did just that, forming cells around urban Srinagar and clandestinely putting up posters that called for an armed struggle. Naturally, the cells he had set up now asked for arms.

At this stage Has.h.i.+m one day walked into the Royal Haircutting Saloon at Regal Chowk and made the acquaintance of a fellow customer, who happened to be a BSF inspector. They became friends.

Has.h.i.+m told the BSF inspector he was thinking of crossing the border into Pakistan, and the inspector promised to help him, provided Has.h.i.+m got information for him on an organisation called al-Mujahid. Has.h.i.+m agreed, because al-Mujahid was nothing more than an organisation on paper, set up by the self-styled first mujahid of Kashmir, Sardar Mohammad Abdul Qayoom Khan, who was occasionally either the president or the prime minister of PoK. 'It was rubbish,' said Has.h.i.+m, who agreed to the inspector's terms. The inspector took Has.h.i.+m to meet his superintendent of police, Ashok Patel. In early April 1970, Has.h.i.+m went across the border.

Has.h.i.+m went to Rawalpindi, where JKNLF (and future JKLF co-founder) Dr Farooq Haider lived and had a clinic where he treated Kashmiri migrants for free. Dr Haider would have a prominent role in militancy for he was very close to the ISI. He was originally from Jammu and went over to Pakistan back in 1947 because of the communal rioting, in which his elder brother, Malik Ajaz Ahmed, was killed. This embittered Dr Haider. It was at Dr Haider's house that Has.h.i.+m caught up with Maqbool b.u.t.t; and now the ISI was watching over them. Has.h.i.+m told Maqbool how he had come across with the help of the BSF, and they all had a good laugh. He then told him that the boys were asking for arms for training and they all sobered up.

One of them recalled the Karachi airport incident from 18 June 1969, when an Ethiopian Airlines plane was attacked by three armed rebels of the Eritrean Liberation Front. Part of the Boeing 707 burned, but fortunately there were no casualties, and the three Eritreans were caught, convicted and sentenced to a year of hard labour. It had been quite sensational. In the JKNLF discussion the idea to do something similar came up, a terror attack, something that would internationalise Kashmir and also their JKNLF. That's how the idea of the hijacking first came up.

Dr Haider's brother-in-law, Javed Minto, was an ex-pilot of the Pakistan Air Force, and he acquainted Has.h.i.+m with aircraft training. He took Has.h.i.+m to the Chaklala airbase in Rawalpindi (now known as the PAF's Nur Khan base located at the international airport) where there was a Fokker F-27 Friends.h.i.+p. The ISI, told about the JKNLF's intention, was happy to grant them permission to learn the basics of aviation. Javed and the ISI showed Has.h.i.+m how the wireless worked, how the compa.s.s worked, how to take charge of an airplane, and what to do if he needed to take control of it. Has.h.i.+m pa.s.sed with 'flying colours', so to speak.

Has.h.i.+m returned to India in August 1970, via the Sialkot-Shakargarh sector south of Jammu. He carried with him a pistol and a grenade, and a plan to hijack a plane from Jammu. But he was caught by the Border Security Force (BSF).

This was a possibility that Maqbool b.u.t.t had prepared him for. Maqbool had told him that if he got caught, he should immediately own up and avoid getting bashed, which was pointless. He was to tell his captors that he was being trained and that there were two others being trained, by the names of Javed Sagar and Naseem Rana. This would make the BSF want to look for the other guys, rather than just lock Has.h.i.+m up and throw away the key.

The BSF confiscated his pistol and grenade, and Has.h.i.+m asked for his friend, the BSF inspector from the Royal Haircutting Saloon. Has.h.i.+m gave him his story of how three of them were being trained by the ISI for terrorism. Ashok Patel landed up in Jammu for the interrogation; even the director general of police got involved, and the IB sent people from Delhi for the interrogation.

Ultimately the BSF gave him the benefit of the doubt and released him to look for the other two. Not only that, they told him he could function as a BSF sub-inspector and play that cover to keep a watch at the Srinagar airport for the two other fellows. However, to Has.h.i.+m's enduring chagrin, they did not give him an ident.i.ty card, just a plain piece of paper which said he was a sub-inspector. It was a farce, Has.h.i.+m felt, and he was now determined to hijack a plane.

Luckily for Has.h.i.+m, the BSF posted him at Srinagar airport and this made his job easier. Has.h.i.+m began watching the arrival and departure of planes, and he reconnoitred the airport and its aircraft. He also began training his cousin, Ashraf Qures.h.i.+. In the absence of any weapon they made a wooden grenade and obtained a fake .22 pistol. The .22 pistol looked so realistic that it not only fooled the aircraft captain but also the security forces in Lah.o.r.e.

The flight they hijacked was the SrinagarJammuDelhi flight of 30 January 1971. The aircraft was a Fokker F-27, one of the oldest planes Indian Airlines had, that had been decommissioned and then weeks later, in a typical bureaucratic flip-flop, re-inducted. It took off from Srinagar at 11:30 a.m.

As the flight began its descent into Jammu, Has.h.i.+m and Ashraf ran up the aisle towards the c.o.c.kpit. Has.h.i.+m, holding the fake gun, ran inside, while Ashraf held the fake grenade and stood outside the door to the c.o.c.kpit, facing the pa.s.sengers. Ashraf asked the pa.s.sengers to raise their hands in the air and warned them: 'Zyada hos.h.i.+ari dikhane ki zaroorat nahin.'

Inside Has.h.i.+m stuck his gun's muzzle to the back of the pilot's head and took control of the plane. He told them to take the plane to Lah.o.r.e. Captains Kachroo and Oberoi protested and argued, but Has.h.i.+m was menacing enough for them to fall in line. At around 1:30 p.m., the plane landed in Lah.o.r.e, in an airfield dotted with aircraft of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA). Security forces surrounded the Fokker. The plane door was opened, a couple of aluminum boxes were thrown down to use as steps, and Has.h.i.+m stepped off the airplane.

The rest of the people deboarded and were greeted with tea and Lahori bread. Then, to everyone's surprise, the Pakistani external affairs minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, arrived at the airport. He greeted Has.h.i.+m and Ashraf, exchanged a few words, and invited the pa.s.sengers to lunch with him. Following the lunch, Bhutto held a press conference.

The hijackers demanded political asylum in Pakistan and the release in India of about two dozen jailed JKNLF colleagues. India and Pakistan spent a couple of days negotiating all this, which ended with the pa.s.sengers being sent overland to Hussainwalla border, from where they returned to India. This was because on 2 February, at 8:00 p.m., Has.h.i.+m and Ashraf set the Fokker on fireat the behest of the ISI.

K.H. Khurs.h.i.+d, a Kashmiri originally from Srinagar who became personal secretary to Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a witness in the hijack case, which went to trial later, and he told the court that he had arrived at Lah.o.r.e airport at 7:00 p.m. on 2 February, and was told the situation was tense. PIA had stopped serving food to Has.h.i.+m and Ashraf, kept in custody at the airport. Khurs.h.i.+d and Maqbool b.u.t.t, who also arrived at the airport, were taken to a room where they met Has.h.i.+m and Ashraf. The hijackers told them that the ISI was pressuring them to burn down the aircraft.

Maqbool apparently thought this would be unwise, and till now Has.h.i.+m had followed all his instructions implicitly. But after he and Khurs.h.i.+d left, the ISI insisted the hijackers burn the plane as the only way of finis.h.i.+ng the episode. So they did.

Incidentally, while the Ganga's hijacking focused world attention on Kashmir, it also led to India banning all Pakistani flights from its airs.p.a.ce. This ban was serendipitously timed, because East Pakistan was erupting with protest and when the war took place later in the year, Pakistan said it could not transport enough troops to quell the rebellion due to the ban as if that would have stopped the inevitable secession of Bangladesh. Yet it provided enough grist for conspiracy theories for years to come, as to whether Has.h.i.+m's hijacking was merely a ruse to provide a justification for the ban.

Has.h.i.+m and Ashraf remained heroes in Pakistan till 14 April, when Has.h.i.+m was arrested in Murree. Pakistan had appointed a commission to look into the hijacking and what it now felt was an Indian conspiracy. After prolonged interrogation other JKNLF leaders were arrested, including Maqbool b.u.t.t and Dr Haider; these men were in jail for two years until the Lah.o.r.e High Court challenged their detention, exonerated them and released them, calling them 'patriots fighting for the liberation of their motherland'. Even Ashraf was released (he went on to become a renowned academic in Pakistan). Only Has.h.i.+m remained in jail.

Though he was found guilty under a mountain of charges and sentenced to nineteen years in prison, Has.h.i.+m spent nine years in various jails: in Attock, Sahiwal, Faisalabad, in camp jail Lah.o.r.e, and in Multan. The Supreme Court reduced his sentence. 'Only I know how I was ill-treated, how I was tortured,' Has.h.i.+m said of his Pakistani prison experience.

His fellow Kashmiris visited Has.h.i.+m in jail and kept him abreast of what was going on. He learnt that Maqbool, who was released in 1973, met Bhutto on a number of occasions starting in 1974. Bhutto, now the prime minister of Pakistan, told Maqbool that something had to be done in Kashmir.

'Nothing less than independence,' Maqbool responded.

'Pakistan or independence, India must be out of Kashmir,' Bhutto said.

Hence Bhutto was the only Pakistani who agreed with Maqbool that it was all right even if you talked of Kashmiri independence. He struck the Kashmiris as a practical leader. Whereas before 1971 Pakistan pursued Kashmir as the unfinished agenda of Part.i.tion, after 1971 it became revenge for Bangladesh. Bhutto wanted revenge. (In Kashmir people were quite upset when General Zia executed Bhutto in 1979. But typical of Kashmiris, they protested against Bhutto's execution and later against the death of his executioner.) Maqbool, in 1974, not only met Bhutto for the first time, but also Farooq Abdullah. Farooq was working in London and was sent to Pakistan by Sheikh Saheb to gauge reactions while the negotiations for the eventual SheikhIndira Accord of 1975 were on. In PoK, the Plebiscite Front hosted Farooq. During his visit to Mirpur, which is in the Jammu part of PoK, Farooq is said to have made a public speech where he said, in reference to the ongoing negotiations (or the BegParthasarathy consultations, as they were called) that nothing short of independence would be acceptable in Kashmir.

When Farooq met Bhutto, however, the prime minister advised him to tell Sheikh Saheb that as Pakistan, having lost in 1971, could do nothing for him at this juncture, Kashmiris should take whatever they could get from Delhi. This was the signal from Pakistan for Sheikh Saheb to go ahead with the accord, which he did, and following which he became chief minister of J&K till he died in 1982.

Maqbool returned to the Valley in 1976 with the intention of organising the JKNLF, and was soon arrested. Eight years later he was put to death.

Has.h.i.+m was released from jail in 1980, after which he kept agitating for an independent Kashmir in PoK. This did not go down well with the ISI, and he was picked up repeatedly and released, thanks to Dr Haider, who was his link to the ISI.

In 1983, Has.h.i.+m again thought of hijacking an airplane, to seek the release of Maqbool b.u.t.t. Hijacking seemed the only way of getting things done in those days, but no one was willing to help him. The ISI gave Has.h.i.+m a pa.s.sport on which he travelled to London and met with Amanullah Khan, the man who would found the JKLF in London (it was formed in phases: in 1977, the London unit of the PF turned into the JKLF, and then set up a unit in PoK in 1982, and a unit in Kashmir in 1987). Has.h.i.+m claimed that it was Amanullah who gave the go-ahead for the killing of Mhatre, thereby virtually signing Maqbool's death warrant.

This sort of game went on in the early 1980s. After Bhutto it was General Zia-ul-Haq, for whom the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union provided Pakistan with the perfect opportunity to divert men and material to Kashmir. Pakistan was the West's key ally and also the base for the Afghan war, so it was in a position to virtually blackmail the West. Incidentally, this was also the time a young US State Department diplomat and former CIA a.n.a.lyst, Robin Raphel, began referring to Kashmir as disputed.

The key role in Kashmir was that of the ISI chief, Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rehman Khan, who gained fame for running the Afghan war against the Soviets and in the bargain significantly expanding the capabilities of the ISI, turning it into the powerful 'state within a state' that it was known as thereafter. Following Farooq's dismissal by Governor Jagmohan in 1984, there was a serious effort to destabilise Kashmir, and Dr Haider arranged a meeting with the ISI of selected JKLF leaders in a safe house in Islamabad, and four or five meetings after that. Has.h.i.+m came face to face with General Rehman during one of these meetings. That's when Rehman told them to get boys from the Valley for training, and wait for a signal: 'We would like to replicate Bangladesh in Kashmir by creating something like Mukti Bahini, and by cutting off the Valley,' the ISI chief said. 'Pakistan would attack at the appropriate time.'

This did not work out due to the reluctance of the JKLF boys. Indeed, it was only after Amanullah Khan was thrown out of England in 1988 for terrorism and he came to Pakistan that the boys started coming across (Amanullah's arrival happily coincided with the boys' fury over the 1987 rigged a.s.sembly elections in J&K).

The ISI told Has.h.i.+m to start militancy, but he refused. As it was, the ISI was getting irritated with Has.h.i.+m's agitation against accession and for independence. So its officers told him to return the pa.s.sport and ident.i.ty card and other papers the ISI had given him; it had been a big mistake, they told him. Has.h.i.+m, instead, filed a writ pet.i.tion in Rawalpindi in the court of Justice Yusuf Saraf. The judge took Has.h.i.+m aside and told him that he had been approached by the ISI with regard to his case. 'Flee,' Justice Saraf told Has.h.i.+m. 'It is better you leave the country.'

What took me by surprise while listening to Has.h.i.+m's story was the following part: that the CIA advised him to s.h.i.+ft to the Netherlands. It is an interesting anecdote, but Has.h.i.+m did not elaborate.

Despite being on the ISI's blacklist, Has.h.i.+m bribed his way through the airportno doubt the CIA might have given a slight nudge to his effortsand in August 1986 left for Amsterdam, where he sought political asylum. India's first reaction was that Has.h.i.+m was probably setting up a base for the JKLF in the Netherlands at the behest of the ISI. Has.h.i.+m told me that the Dutch gave him more than asylum; they gave him work helping with a.n.a.lysis by their intelligence service; and in 1992, they gave him citizens.h.i.+p. Has.h.i.+m's background attracted intelligence services. In the Netherlands he was their 'South Asia' expert.

Has.h.i.+m did return to Pakistan once, in 1993, on a visa, which he admitted he got with the help of the Americans. The ISI chief at the time was Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir, an extremely pro- Islam, anti-India chief, and he wanted to meet Has.h.i.+m. But Has.h.i.+m refused to meet him. Has.h.i.+m went to Rawalpindi and stayed with Dr Haider and met with leaders of the Jamaat-e- Islami, who were by now at the forefront of Kashmir militancy through their armed group, the Hizbul Mujahideen. Has.h.i.+m also went to Muzaffarabad, the capital of PoK, and dropped into the office of engineer Tariq Shura, who introduced him to a major in the ISI. Has.h.i.+m rebuffed the major as well. He went to Pakistan, he claimed, to check out the fate of Kashmir and Kashmiris.

Has.h.i.+m was repeatedly approached by the ISI, but he wanted nothing to do with them. He had enough experience of Pakistannot just its jails, but also its insistence that Kashmir should join Pakistan, not fight for independencethat he was disillusioned with the country. In fact, in 2010, his old friend Shabir Shah approached him and asked him to meet the ISI. 'They're very keen to meet you,' Shabir told Has.h.i.+m.

'Pakistanis are zero per cent for Kashmir,' Has.h.i.+m replied. 'Even if India is only 30 per cent for Kashmir, we can still deal with India. It is impossible dealing with Pakistanis. I have enough knowledge of Pakistanis, thank you very much. I would rather not have anything more to do with Pakistan.'

Has.h.i.+m then asked his old separatist friend how it was that Shabir had never visited Pakistan. Every single separatist, be it a militant or a politician, had been to Pakistanexcept Shabir. 'It's because you're scared of Pakistan,' Has.h.i.+m said. 'Yet you are recruiting on behalf of the ISI.'

In the course of time, Has.h.i.+m met me and said: please bring me home.

It was six months before he could make it back, during my final days at R&AW. It took him that long because first, he wanted to make sure he had our approval and that he wouldn't land in a legal soup after reaching India; and second, because he had to make arrangements for his family. He had married his cousin Zaib-un-Nisa Baig, a Pakistani citizen, in 1982, a couple of years after he was freed from prison; and they had four children.

Finally, on 29 December 2000, he flew into Delhi and was arrested at the airport as soon as he landed because of a 'lookout warrant' issued against him by the J&K government. He spent a fortnight in Delhi's Tihar jail, where among his visitors was Muzaffar Baig, who would later join Mufti Sayeed's PDP and become deputy chief minister of J&K. In the new year, Has.h.i.+m was transferred to Srinagar, where he spent almost a year in the joint interrogation centre. He was released on bail for Eid in November 2001.

Yet the two things that he wanted did not materialise. First, the hijacking-related case against him still hangs, despite his plea of double jeopardy. The case, as of this writing, has been carrying on for thirteen years, since 2001, but the wheels in justice move slowly and also lower-tier judges are wary of ruling against the State. The case is so absurd that the State's witnesses don't recognise Has.h.i.+m any more. And that's not because he is a threat, or a menacing fellow. 'This case is total rubbish,' Has.h.i.+m said, pointing out that Satnam Singh, one of the five men who hijacked an Indian plane on its way to Srinagar to Pakistan in September 1981, was let off. Satnam was thrown in jail in Lah.o.r.e where he spent thirteen years, and then he migrated to Canada. In February 2000 he also returned to India; he was arrested and produced before a magistrate to whom he showed his papers and said, 'I've already been punished for the hijacking.' The magistrate said, double jeopardy: no one can serve twice for the same crime. She had him released.

Has.h.i.+m got in touch with the chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, and said: 'Mine is also a case of double jeopardy. How can you charge me?'

'Yes, I know,' Farooq said. 'But you have to get through this somehow.'

Of course, what Has.h.i.+m did not know was that Farooq had his plate full at the time, in 2001, to which we will come a couple of chapters from now.

'These IB, R&AW guys don't realise that if I get a sentence here then the Indian judiciary will face questions in front of the whole world,' Has.h.i.+m said. 'I'm a Dutch citizen. When I was arrested, they raised it in their parliament, and it will get raised again. And then they will ask, what is India doing in Kashmir?'

This brings us to his other grouse: that even fourteen years after he returned, he's still a Dutch national. I had promised him Indian nationality, but it turned out to be too difficult, particularly since my tenure as R&AW chief ended two days after he arrived. Left to me, I would have made him a citizen, because then he could have been used politically in Kashmir. Yet there are people in the government who don't trust him because n.o.body is certain whether he's an Indian agent or a Pakistani agent or a Dutch agent or an American agent. Even Farooq, who, if you recall, introduced me to Has.h.i.+m, pretended as if he did not know him at all and did not want to deal with him. And the home ministry seems gloriously uninterested.

He came out on bail and spent his years fighting his cases, setting up a non-governmental organisation to help widows, and even set up an office right opposite the Hurriyat party's office. Nothing came of it. Many years later, I reminded him: 'Has.h.i.+m Saheb, what did I tell you, what will you do here?'

Has.h.i.+m replied to that with an Urdu couplet, which roughly translated says: I live in a city of such jealousy where even during namaaz people think ill of others. 'The Kashmiri has a huge problem,' Has.h.i.+m said. 'He doesn't want to speak the truth, he doesn't want to hear the truth.'

'I speak the truth, so they call me an Indian agent,' said Has.h.i.+m. 'My group has an office in front of the Hurriyat office. I say that the Hurriyat people should give up the accession to Pakistan, as should our people. Sixty-five years have pa.s.sed, another 500 years will pa.s.s, Kashmir will never become Pakistan. You can write it down. All these groups, Mirwaiz (Umar Farooq), (Syed Ali Shah) Geelani, even Shabir who once roamed around with the needle and thread and now roams around with scissors, all three of these are for Pakistan; why don't they become one party? And people, don't sacrifice your children, you're not going to get anything from their struggle. If you're sincere, then say both India and Pakistan should get out of our land.'

Has.h.i.+m said he made a great mistake in 2000. 'My son said, everyone thinks you're a Delhi man, and Delhi doesn't think you're their man,' he said. 'You should have come to Delhi and said, fellow Kashmiris, Pakistan is the best. India would have raised you on a pedestal, made you Wazir-e-Alam, you would have got Arab money. He was right.'

Instead, Has.h.i.+m has had a stressful time. He has two daughters and two sons. One boy was studying in Amsterdam and stayed back; by now he has a job in a bank. The other son was a small boy when they returned, and as of the writing of this book, had grown up and gone off to Holland to study. Of the two daughters, one got married in 2007 and lives in Dubai. I attended her wedding, as also that of his son, Junaid, though I asked Has.h.i.+m if he was sure I should attend because I was a former R&AW chief; it would mark him out in Kashmir. He laughed and said, let them say I'm your agent. As it turned out, at Junaid's wedding, many of the separatists who attended came over for a chatbecause I knew them all.

Has.h.i.+m's other daughter ran away from home. It has depressed him. She ran first to her sister in Dubai and then went to London, where she now lives and plans to marry (incidentally, her love interest is a Kashmiri boy; yet Has.h.i.+m is still disapproving). Has.h.i.+m's wife also left. An attractive Pakistani woman, coming from Holland to Kashmir was quite a letdown for her, and she chastised him for the 'third-cla.s.s' world he had brought her to. There was a lot of disruption in Has.h.i.+m's family.

When his daughter ran away, he rang me up for help in locating her. His wife was not there, he was all alone, lonely and stressed out. 'Please, aap logon ke har jagah contacts hote hain,' he begged me. 'Please isse dhoondhwaye.' Finally she was traced in Dubai.

All of this took its toll: in 2013, Has.h.i.+m had to have a heart bypa.s.s. Fortunately, his wife is now back with him.

You wonder why, after all this, Has.h.i.+m stays in India. 'There's no country freer than India and people don't realise it,' Has.h.i.+m said. 'You can pee anywhere you like and nothing will happen to you. America is a great democracy but has not even spared our ministers from physical searches. I know one minister from Tamil Nadu who went there; he had long hair coming out of his ears, and they searched that even. What's so great about the US?'

'India has let down a lot of people, no one more than me,' Has.h.i.+m said. 'They have no morality. But at least they are humane.'

As I mentioned at the beginning, it helped that militants who were once anti-India were rapidly disappointed with Pakistan. Our success with Has.h.i.+m at the beginning of the summer helped the next man come over, a far more dreaded militant named Abdul Majid Dar, who came over in what was a storybook operation.

7.

THE DEFECTOR WHO SHOOK.

PAKISTAN.

The story of Abdul Majid Dar is a love story. He was the most important Kashmiri terrorist in Pakistan, and he returned to India in what was an operation that turned on a matter of the heart. The ISI, which got burned, had Majid Dar a.s.sa.s.sinated. And then they went and shot his wife. As with many stories, the episode began while I was in the IB. A Kashmiri boy had been caught and was interrogated. An officer of the force interrogating the boy came to me and said the boy was an interesting fellow. 'You should talk to him,' he said. We did so.

As you might have guessed, some of the details of this account will have to remain sketchy due to reasons of operational secrecy. Besides the confidentiality that I'm sworn to, lives could be at riskbeyond the ones already lost.

The boy being interrogated said: 'Do you know Abdul Majid Dar?'

Who didn't? He was the operational chief of the Hizbul Mujahideen, the lethal pro-Pakistan Kashmiri militant group. It was considered the armed wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, but it was pretty much a power unto itself. The Hizb was led by Syed Salahuddin, whose real name was Mohammed Yusuf Shah, a Jamaat-e-Islami preacher who contested the 1987 J&K a.s.sembly election on an MUF ticket, from the Amirakadal const.i.tuency. He lost. The winner was the National Conference's Ghulam Mohiuddin Shah, the focal point of allegations of rigging in those flawed elections. Yusuf Shah was thrown in jail, and though his Jamaat was reluctant to join the armed militancy that was brewing (prescient Jamaatis argued that terrorism would only lead to Kashmiris killing Kashmiris), when violence finally took centre stage in 1990, the Jamaat-e-Islami gave the go-ahead to the formation of the Hizb in April 1990. The first chief was a killer named Ahsan Dar, who convinced Yusuf Shah to join; the latter adopted his nom de guerre after Saladdin the crusader.

Salahuddin took over as chief in November 1991, but he was just the chief for name's sake. The brainstrust was the operational chief, Abdul Majid Dar: a man of guts.

Majid Dar was not an original Hizb recruit, though he had a strong Jamaati influence as he grew up in Sopore, in Baramulla district, one of the Kashmiri towns that have historically been hostile to India. Born in 1954, he was enrolled in the degree college at Sopore but had to leave before he could finish his bachelor's. He married in 1978, and for a while it is said that he ran a dry-cleaning shop in Sopore. In the early 1980s he joined Shabir Shah's People's League and began visiting Pakistan. When People's League members began joining militant groups in the late 1980srecall that Shabir Shah's lieutenants such as Firdous Syed formed his own group, and Nayeem Khan joined the Islamic Students Leaguethen Majid Dar followed a fellow named Sheikh Aziz and formed the Tehreek-e-Jehad-e-Islami (TJI).

In the early 1990s, Majid Dar's group dominated north Kashmir, from Sopore to Kupwara. It was also a time when groups were splitting into smaller and smaller factions, and hence there was a move by group leaders to unify their followers/ soldiers so as to be more effective against the government. By the end of the year, Majid Dar's TJI merged into the Hizbul Mujahideen, and Ahsan Dar made him deputy chief.

As I said, however, he was the one who really ran things. He was a guy with brains, and had a much better understanding of the militancy and the situation in Kashmir. As a result, he had better contacts and links with the ISI. Also, he grasped quickly when things were going bad; he grasped how Pakistan was waging its own war and had made Kashmir its battlefield; he grasped that the ISI was s.h.i.+fting its focus away from the Hizb after 1995, and towards trans-national jihadi groups, particularly the Lashkar-e-Toiba; and he grasped that his people were tired. 'Compared to Majid Dar, Salahuddin was a pygmy,' his wife later said.

Hence the boy being interrogated said that Majid Dar might be interested in coming back to Kashmir, because his wife was very keen to return. And Majid Dar was very much in love with his wife, Dr Shamima Badroo.

It was the second marriage for both of them. Shamima was also from Sopore, an attractive divorcee with a forceful personality; it is said that Majid Dar had fallen in love with her and forced her to get a divorce. Majid Dar, who had married early, as happens in traditional families, particularly those in semi-urban or rural areas, left his first wife behind in Sopore. And then he went across to Pakistan in 1991.

Shamima followed him there, so they had apparently fallen in love and were already having an affair. She got a visa and went to do a postgraduate degree; she stayed with a friend, met up with Majid Dar, and they got married. Because she was working at the cantonment hospital in Muzaffarabad, Majid Dar was spending a lot of time in the PoK office of the Hizb, rather than in Islamabad where Salahuddin wanted him. That Majid Dar was besotted with his wife earned him much scorn from the Hizb cadres, particularly those closer to Salahuddin.

That's why, the boy under interrogation said, 'You can target Majid Dar.'

Our ears perked up. 'How can you say that?'

'He's very much in love,' the militant said. 'His wife is very keen to come back.'

Our files told us that Majid Dar had left his wife back in Sopore, so it took some explaining before we realised he had married again. Once we realised that this was his second wife he was in love with, it struck me that she must feel uncomfortable living over in PoK, which by all accounts was a drab and backward place. She must have judged that this was no life, that it was better to go back.

At the time, however, there wasn't much I could do because I was in the IB, and Majid Dar was based in Pakistan. This was out of the IB's domain. All Pakistan matters were handled by R&AW, and though our agencies cooperate, they are also compet.i.tive. The IB and R&AW are no different from other intelligence agencies in the world, each of which is naturally possessive about its turf.

When I became the R&AW chief, Majid Dar's possible vulnerability was one of the matters I remembered, and I told myself that now was the time to get something going. We got a group of colleagues to engage with him. Obviously there was a limit to how much we could check him out, given that he was inside Pakistan, our arch enemy and a place where even normal Indian diplomats were subject to relentless surveillance and suspicion. Hence, in this business, some of these matters are based on trust, and you have to take a leap of faith.

We could take that leap with him because he was a good guy, a confident fellow who was completely for ending the militancy. Our a.s.sessment in R&AW was that this was an intelligent guy, perceptive and sensitive, attested to by his love affair. When we dug into his past, we found that he had never actually killed anyone, and some of our guys doubted that he had ever fired a gun at all. We knew that at that point of time, there was great disillusionment with Pakistan, in Pakistan, among Kashmiris. Majid Dar was likely among those who realised that the only people suffering in the militancy were the Kashmiris themselves.

Plus, it was obvious he wanted to get his family back here. He had a young boy whom he was extremely fond of. We worked out a plan. We crossed our fingers, and we began to pray that he would find a way and come over.

Majid Dar found a way, and it was pretty straightforward: he went to the ISI and told them he wanted to go back to Kashmiras their agent. He needed the approval, if not just the support, of the ISI to return. He convinced his ISI handler, a fellow named Brigadier Riaz, that he would go as their man, and seeing that Delhi was prepared to talk to militants, he would go and engage India in dialogue, while secretly carrying out the ISI agenda. Brigadier Riaz checked with Salahuddin, who was okay with it despite his growing differences with Majid Dar. He came armed with a resolution from the Hizb Supreme Council authorising him to engage in dialogue. Brigadier Riaz then went to the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, who approved Majid Dar's return to Kashmir.

(General Mahmud was the same ISI chief sitting in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC when the 9/11 attacks took place. He was removed just before the US attacked the Taliban regime in Afghanistan a month later.) Majid Dar slipped into Kashmir, and later it was rumoured that he came to India via Dubai (which is pretty much ISI turf). He remained underground for a while, so no one knew he was here.

And then one fine day, on 24 July 2000, Majid Dar surfaced in Srinagar and announced a unilateral ceasefire. He said it was to facilitate talks for a settlement. Of course, this caused great excitement because no group had done this before; while individual militants like Firdous Syed had given up the gun and entered talks with the government in 1996, never before had a group, and that too one that had dominated militancy in the way the Hizb had throughout the 1990s before the pan-Islamists began taking over. Ordinary Kashmiris who had long tired of the violence but had been let down before, notably by Shabir Shah, were intrigued.

In Pakistan, Salahuddin acknowledged his support to the ceasefire. The government of India reciprocated with a three- month ceasefire of its own.

The Union home secretary, Kamal Pandey, responded and on 3 August he and other home ministry officials flew in from Delhi and met four of Majid Dar's commanders, including his nominated interlocutor, Fazl Haq Qures.h.i.+, at the Nehru Guest House in Srinagar. It was a start. It looked as if a major breakthrough had taken place. Majid Dar himself became rather enthusiastic about the dialogue, and immediately began planning to broad-base it with the partic.i.p.ation of other Kashmiri separatists and militants.

Then on 8 August, just five days later, Salahuddin, in an announcement from Pakistan, withdrew the ceasefire. But for the first time, as a Kashmiri friend put it, Kashmiris realised that there could be life in Kashmir without violence.

The ISI had chickened out. In its view, Majid Dar had been turned by Indian intelligence; the ISI had lost control of him and he had been won over and become an Indian agent. Shamima later said that it was a big shock for the ISI because while Majid Dar was in Pakistan, he was the last word in the Hizbul Mujahideen as far as the ISI was concerned. The ISI respected him a lot. His turnaround after his arrival in Kashmir was thus a shock to the ISIparticularly since he had come with Pakistani permission, Pakistani approval, on a Pakistani mission. It broke the back of indigenous militancy and was to have far-reaching consequences, not least of which was the success of the 2002 elections. The Hizb remains decapitated to this day with the Dar loyalists in Pakistan refusing to accept Salahuddin's leaders.h.i.+p.

The ISI began planning Majid Dar's a.s.sa.s.sination.

Despite Salahuddin's withdrawal of ceasefire, Majid Dar was spending his time productively; he had his agenda for dialogue and so he went around meeting people. He met the Jamaat-e-Islami supremo and senior Hurriyat leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a few times. He met Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. He met Yasin Malik. He must have met Shabir Shah as well. Initially he was checking them out but then he began to suggest to them that they should begin talking. He was trying to build a lobby and form a consensus in favour of dialogue.