Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 15

15.

THE HARDLINER AND THE HURRIYAT.

After the 2002 J&K a.s.sembly election was over and as the year was drawing to an end, I went to Brajesh Mishra and said: 'Now what?' 'Now nothing,' he said. 'For the time being.'

'How can you say that?' I asked.

'You tell me.'

'Sir, this is not the end, this is the beginning. We must start talking,' I said. 'Everyone who comes here enquires why we are not talking.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Let me talk it over with the PM.'

That announcement took too long a time in coming: almost a year. In the meantime, though, Prime Minister Vajpayee made a speech at a public rally in Srinagar on 18 April 2003 which changed many, many things. Possibly this speech needed to be made before the talks began; in any case, a lot of valuable time was lost because in May 2004 the ruling alliance did not get re-elected.

Vajpayee had visited Srinagar three times before 2003: in 1999, 2001, and then in May 2002 for a meeting of the unified command. At the time the tension from the military build-up on the border was at its peak so his visit was welcome from the troops' point of view. After his visit was over and as he was leaving Srinagar, a journalist questioned him at the airport. 'Aapne kaha ki sab se baat karenge,' the journalist said. 'Toh kya yeh hogi within the Const.i.tution baat?'

Vajpayee was one step ahead. 'Uski baat kyon karte hein, hum insaniyat ke dairey mein baat karenge,' he said, side-stepping the question of talking within the Const.i.tution by talking of discussions within the framework of humanity.

Kashmiris went jubilant beyond bounds over his 'insaniyat ke dairey'.

And then came his public rally in 2003, the first by a prime minister since Rajiv Gandhi, and which made his prime ministership, especially with his policy of 'insaniyat ke dairey', a benchmark for future administrations in the eyes of Kashmiris.

I was not asked to accompany the prime minister on the earlier visits, but for the April visit I was specifically asked to go with him. What happened on the earlier visits was the PM's speechwriter, Sudheendra Kulkarni, would come to my room and ask me: 'PM is going, what should be said?'

I would say 'let's think', and then we would discuss it.

This time I went to Kulkarni's room and asked him just one question: 'Political?'

'Don't worry,' Kulkarni said. 'This time it's only political.'

I went to Brajesh Mishra and told him I'd like to go a couple of days earlier, just to see the mood. I did and I think by then the prime minister had thought it through.

When he arrived at Srinagar we drove from the airport to Sonawar stadium. As everyone was settling down, I took a moment to ask Kulkarni, 'Let me have a copy of the speech at least now.'

'There is no speech today,' he said. 'Boss ne bola hai, koi speech nahin chahiye, main khud bolunga.'

And then he extended his hand of friendship to Pakistan, which kickstarted the process in which India and Pakistan came closest to an agreement on Kashmir. Once bitten, twice shy, Vajpayee said, but though he'd been bitten twice he did not hesitate to extend his hand in friendship again. The Kashmiris went crazy with happiness. As mentioned before, there is nothing that makes the Kashmiri feel better than good relations between India and Pakistan.

Frankly, I had no idea what the prime minister was going to say. It was something he and Brajesh would have discussed, as with everything else. Whatever happened between Brajesh Mishra and A.B. Vajpayee, only those two knew; there was no third person. Sometimes you would get a feel of it, as I mentioned their disappointment after the Agra summit. Otherwise it was very tight between these two. So who decided all important matters? As I have said Vajpayee spoke very little at formal meetings and Brajesh even less.

We returned from Srinagar and a few weeks later, in May 2003, I had dinner with Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. He had sought the meeting ostensibly to get his pa.s.sport renewed, but that would have got renewed anyway. So we got down to some talking.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq became the chief priest of Kashmir at the age of seventeen when his father, Mirwaiz Moulvi Mohammed Farooq, was a.s.sa.s.sinated in May 1990. The Mirwaizs had their base at the Jamia Masjid in downtown Srinagar, whose surrounding areas have traditionally been a hotbed of pro-Pakistani sentiment (in 1947, Umar Farooq's granduncle migrated to Muzaffarabad). They and other prominent families of downtown Srinagar were known as the Bakras and they were in political opposition to Sheikh Abdullah and his family, which is why Sher-e-Kashmir had the Hazratbal mosque built as a platform to rival the Jamia Masjid (hence their rivalry was known as the Sher vs the Bakras). The Mirwaiz also headed his own separatist organisation, the Awami Action Committee.

You may recall that I used to occasionally meet Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq when I was posted in Srinagar, and he lent his help during the Rubaiya kidnapping by publicly denouncing it as un-Islamic. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated by Hizbul Mujahideen gunman Mohammed Abdullah Bangroo because he was in touch with the National Front railway minister George Fernandes; the militants b.u.mped off several people they suspected to be parleying with Delhi in those days.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was a student of Srinagar's Burn Hall school and was planning on becoming a software engineer and all of a sudden he became the chief priest. Though he did complete his studieshe has a doctorate in Islamic Studieshe had no choice but to get involved in separatist politics and in 1993 was one of the founding executive members of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. Because he was so young, the other Hurriyat foundersSyed Ali Shah Geelani, Abdul Ghani Lone, Abbas Ansari and Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhatfound him to be most acceptable as the chairman (rather than each other, that's how high the intra-Hurriyat trust level was). The other thing with Umar Farooq was that having seen his father a.s.sa.s.sinated, at home, he was always reluctant to speak too forthrightly against the militants.

Over the years, the young Mirwaiz has impressed a lot of people with his good looks, his youth, his articulation in English, his dress sense. He has been rated very high by everybody, the Pakistanis, the Americans, the British, other foreigners, and by us. It has helped that he remained chairman of the Hurriyat for so long which, as Prof. Ghani once put it, is because Umar Farooq is the only one of the Hurriyat leaders with some standing. The Mirwaiz by virtue of being the Mirwaiz is somebody in his own right. He has the advantage of his position and platform, ideology and const.i.tuency. He's been Pakistan's blue-eyed boy. We've also pampered him. He is, among the Hurriyat, a big player.

But the Mirwaiz lacks political courage. Sometimes he gives the impression he's quite happy just being in a mosque or being at home, leading the Friday prayers; but at some point he needs to decide whether he wants to be pope for life, or he also wants to be chief minister. The fact is that he has told people that he would not mind being chief minister. His tragedy, though, is that he doesn't realise how highly he is rated, and that too, by everybody. But staying confined to your mosque has got him nowhere and will get him nowhere. It is just a matter of marking time, which eventually doesn't escape the notice of others. Or, as Prof. Ghani put it: 'Like all rich people the Mirwaiz wears silk pajamas, and the strings open easily.'

The Mirwaiz on one visit to Delhi in 2001 attended a rally of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, India's leading Islamic organisation. He spoke very well.

'You can become a national Kashmiri leader, and you should aspire to that,' I told the Mirwaiz. 'There's a huge shortage of Muslim leaders. There's Farooq, and there's you. You should come out more often.'

The problem, though, is that Muslims in India never speak up for Kashmiris. I once met Maulana Mahmood Madani at the India International Centre. 'You never think about Kashmir,' I said.

'Sochte hain,' he countered.

'Kya sochte hain?'

He thought for a few seconds, but then admitted it was true. 'Yeh hamari kamjori hai.'

'Kamjori ko theek kijiye,' I said. 'Na Kashmiri yahan ke baare mein bolta hain, na aap waha ke baare mein bolte hain.'

One of the telling episodes about the Mirwaiz took place in early 2007. He and the other Hurriyat members met Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, who told them a few fundamental truths: that no one could remove India; that India would not compromise on its sovereignty and that boundaries can't be changed; and that he had found a formula for Kashmiris. Then, it is said, Musharraf told the Hurriyat leaders to go back to Kashmir and prepare for elections. This diktat to the Hurriyat by Pakistan to get out of its comfort zone was a shock to the Hurriyat.

But our dinner in May 2003 was one of those few occasions when the Mirwaiz provided hope. 'Is Delhi sincere about doing anything?' he asked.

'Of course we are,' I said. 'Why shouldn't we be?'

'Can Kashmir get autonomy?' he asked.

'Why not?'

'Can borders be opened, and can coming and going be easier?'

'Of course.'

'Can we have a bus from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad?'

'Of course,' I said. 'If we can have a bus from Delhi to Lah.o.r.e, then we can have that too.' (Incidentally, it was aboard this bus that the Hurriyat went to Pakistan in 2007 and were told by Musharraf to prepare for elections.) I had a counter-question for the Mirwaiz. 'If all this is okay then the Line of Control should be good enough?'

'Yes, it is,' he said.

'Are you willing to say all this publicly?' I asked.

'No,' he said. 'Not publicly.'

The next day I went to Brajesh Mishra and told him about the dinner, and the first question he asked was whether the Mirwaiz was willing to say all this publicly. 'No,' I said. 'In due course we might reach a situation where we may be able to persuade him to say something publicly. But he can't say anything right now.'

It was during this conversation that Brajesh laid out the next stage of the plan. 'Now that you're doing this, carry on,' he said, putting it quite simply. 'We can carry on with Pakistan, and we can merge these two parallel channels at some stage.'

Brajesh had either begun or was in the process of beginning a dialogue with his Pakistani interlocutor, Tariq Aziz, a friend of Musharraf's. Our way of dealing with Pakistan was very straight, in that we'd both put everything on the table and the other side would say what was not acceptable to them and we would say what was not acceptable to us. What was left acceptable to both sides was what we would get into and try to move forward on that. The plan was thus that on one track we would talk to Kashmiri separatists, and on a parallel track we would talk to Pakistan. Once these tracks converged, we would have an understanding on Kashmir.

This was the work I relished undertaking, though there were Kashmiris who told me that it was futile. 'You can try your d.a.m.nedest but these guys are never going to be in a position to do anything with Delhi,' this Kashmiri, whom I'll keep anonymous, said. 'For anyone who's come into proper contact with the ISI, it's like once you get into a wh.o.r.ehouse you cannot get out.'

Pakistan has always had a lobby in Kashmir, and today that lobby was the Hurriyat. But Pakistan, or the ISI to be precise, is forever nervous of losing control of the separatists, because once it loses control of them there is nothing left in Kashmir in terms of political leadership. And as we saw in the case of Lone, anyone even thinking of stepping out of line gets b.u.mped off. As one separatist said to me, 'What's the worst that you guys can do? Lock us up? Those guys shoot.'

That is why the Mirwaiz sits tight; it's not that he's insincere. Hurriyat leaders in private have said that all they need is a go- ahead from Pakistan and they would be willing to do whatever India wants. 'But please get us an okay from Pakistan,' they plead.

My point is always, why do you need an okay from Pakistan?

To maintain this tight control the ISI's main effort, while I was writing this book, was to reunite the three factions of the Hurriyatthe moderates led by the Mirwaiz, the hardliner Geelani's, and one led by Shabir Shah. The Hurriyat initially split after the 2002 a.s.sembly election into a faction led by the Mirwaiz and one led by Geelani, because Geelani pointed out that members of Lone's People's Conference had contested the a.s.sembly election as independents which contravened the Hurriyat const.i.tution. At that time, the Pakistanis publicly alleged that India had split the Hurriyat, whereas it was their ISI which had made the split happen.

The ISI wanted to build Geelani at the time, and these are the games that the ISI keeps playing in Kashmir. Pakistan had loosened control during Musharraf's timehe had even told them to get ready to contest electionsbut Musharraf's departure from power and the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai meant that insecurity crept into the IndiaPakistan relationship, and Pakistan sought to tighten its control again. By 2014 the ISI realised that its effort would be strengthened if the Hurriyat were reunited, which is why there was a constant chorus to the separatists to get back together.

Much water had already flowed down the Jhelum, though. The main players would never join up with Geelani, be it the Mirwaiz or Prof. Ghani or even Moulvi Abbas, or Bilal Lone.

Moulvi Abbas Ansari is one of the seniormost persons in the Hurriyat; he's one of the Valley's prominent Shia clerics who has never advocated accession to Pakistan (he is pro- independence). He's been educated in Kashmir and in Iran, and incidentally he is also the cousin of Iftikhar Hussain Ansari, the politician I mentioned earlier. He's a nice, friendly person. His real rise in politics happened when the Muslim United Front (MUF) was formed in 1986 by government servants dismissed by Jagmohan because he suspected their loyalties. Moulvi Abbas was made chairman of the MUF, and it partic.i.p.ated in the infamous 1987 elections. In 1993, Moulvi Abbas was among the handful of separatists who set up the Hurriyat Conference. In July 2003, after Brajesh Mishra gave me the parallel-track brief, Moulvi Abbas was elected the Hurriyat's chairman.

There's an incident that was reported in a gossip column of the Indian Express that year. I went to Srinagar and on my flight there were only three people in club cla.s.s: the Mirwaiz, Moulvi Abbas, and myself. Of course I had a chat with each of them. The problem was when the flight landed no separatist wanted to be seen hobn.o.bbing with a PMO official, particularly one who had been the R&AW chief. We came off the aircraft and we did so in one line, so there was a procession of the Mirwaiz, Moulvi Abbas, and myself.

Someone saw us coming in a single file, so they asked the Hurriyat leaders if we had been discussing something. The Mirwaiz said that there was a third person who said h.e.l.lo and spent time talking with Moulvi Abbas, but he himself had no idea of the ident.i.ty of that third person. When approached, Moulvi Abbas said, yes he had been talking to Dulat, but only because he was introduced by the Mirwaiz! It was comical, though on a sober note, given the ruthlessness with which Pakistan dealt with anyone who was suspected of dealing with Delhi, their feigning ignorance was not surprising.

The third leader who could never be expected to join Geelani was Prof. Ghani. He hated Geelani, who he claimed had a role in the death of Prof. Ghani's brother, Mohammed Sultan Bhat, in 1995. It embittered him and made him say he was prepared to die at any moment. 'I don't know when I will be shot,' he said. This is why he talks of Geelani's 'narcissism', and that's why Geelani is called Amir-e-Jehad, or even, Bub Jehad (Bub is Kashmiri for father, and Sheikh Saheb was often referred to as Bub).

Prof. Ghani is another 1930s-born Hurriyat leader who worked as a professor of Persian in Sopore before he was dismissed by Jagmohan and joined the MUF in 1986. Prof. Ghani gained prominence as the MUF spokesman and, as mentioned earlier, he was a member of the Muslim Conference which broke away from Sheikh Abdullah in the late 1930s (when he formed his secular National Conference) and went over to Pakistan in 1947, to be led by Sardar Abdul Qayoom Khan, a former prime minister of PoK.

Once the Hurriyat was formed Prof. Ghani was one of its more articulate members, though his frank and direct statements showed him to be less of a politician than the others. He was the most pro-Pakistan of the Hurriyat leaders by virtue of belonging to the Muslim Conference, but when 9/11 took place he turned off Pakistan. 'Who can depend on Pakistan, they can't even look after themselves,' he told me when I met him in 2014, in connection with this book.

The only person who remained pro-Pakistan, and therefore cannot reconcile with the moderate separatists, is Geelani. The irony is that his Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) was reluctant to take up terrorism and was therefore the last major Kashmiri group to get involved in militancy in Kashmir. In fact there is a story that earlier in the mid-1980s, during Zia-ul-Haq's time, the then JEI chief, Maulana Saaduddin Tarabali, went to Pakistan and discussed the plan to bring militancy to Kashmir.

Apparently Maulana Saaduddin backed off, saying, 'No, if the Kashmiri takes to gun, then Kashmiri will be killing Kashmiri.'

As the story goes, Zia said: 'Bhai, yeh Brahmin ke aulaad hain, inko kahwa pilao.' He basically called them cowardly and useless.

The JEI continued to call it dashatgardi; even Salahuddin, who had contested the 1987 election under his real name, Mohammed Yusuf Shah, had argued strongly against the gun, saying he had reservations about terrorism. 'Jehad is not the way to go about it,' he said. And of course Geelani was an MLA till the time the a.s.sembly was dissolved. Yet during the 1990 91 winter he and a few others were summoned to Kathmandu to meet the ISI and Ayub Thakur and Ghulam Nabi Fai, who finally persuaded him that there was no choice now but to get into militancy. This led to the creation of the Hizbul Mujahideen, but the JEI as such wanted to stay away from militancy.

Geelani, in fact, wrote a letter to Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1992 saying he was willing to talk to the government if it was willing to concede that there was a dispute over Kashmir. If the government conceded that much, he would talk without pre-conditions.

That was then. Now, the Mirwaiz faction saw him as an arrogant spoiler who would never agree to anything. Probably Geelani over the years became too big for these guys to handle; after he parted company with the Hurriyat and started to come out openly in support of anything that happened, be it a militant act or a protest, he became bigger than the rest of the separatists. He is Pakistan's man in Kashmir and its most effective tool for countering India. He grows bigger every time the moderates are ignored.

Kashmiris interpreted the killing of Prof. Ghani's brother as a signal to the Professorthat he had better start behaving and fall in line. That's why Lone was killed. That's why Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq was killed. That's why Qazi Nissar Ahmed, the chief cleric of south Kashmir, who was one of the original MUF founders as well as a founder of the Hurriyat, was killed. That's why Majid Dar was killed. That's why Dr Guru was killed. That's why Fazl-haq Qureshi was nearly killed. The list goes on. Some of these killings are attributed to Geelani's brand of politics: it left no room for the moderates and the ISI stepped in to eliminate whoever fell out of line.

Yet, some people, when they think of the Hurriyat, they think of Geelani. For us he has been bad news. This is why the deputy prime minister, L.K. Advani, was against talking to Geelani and restricted himself to the moderates.

A year had pa.s.sed since the J&K a.s.sembly election and I was feeling disappointed that the prime minister was taking so long to decide. With age he had become more cautious and took his time with everything. Yet when it happened, it happened suddenly. It was October 2003 and I was returning to Delhi from Chandigarh because of a meeting on Kashmir called by the prime minister. At the meeting, Vajpayee, who wanted to put an end to the uncertainty, said, 'Haan, hum Hurriyat se baat karenge.'

Everyone was startled. 'Who will talk from the government's side?' Jaswant Singh asked.

'Advaniji, of course,' Vajpayee said. With this masterstroke he nipped in the bud any dissent, by putting the person who was most opposed to talks in the forefront.

The AdvaniVajpayee relationship was a strange one. It was special, and it was not all friction or not seeing eye-to-eye; there were differences because they were different people. The relationship remained special because Vajpayee had sufficient respect for Advani, and Advani had huge respect for Vajpayee. There was so much mutual respect that neither would allow any difference to remain unresolved.

Whenever tension began to build up Vajpayee would say, 'Advani se kehna hamare saath lunch khaye.' And the two men would meet and the tension would disappear. If things had gotten really tense then Vajpayee would say, 'Accha, Advaniji se kehna main unke yahan kal aa raha hoon lunch ke liye.' I don't think they spoke very much at lunch; they simply allowed their chemistry to work things through.

That did not mean there was no tension. People around them created tension, and the greatest source of tension was Brajesh Mishra and his supreme position in the government.

Vajpayee was a politician to his fingertips and he could bluff anybody, Advani included. Everything that he did was political. He had a good mind, as he was a philosopher and a poet; he was also an RSS pracharak; but above all he was a d.a.m.n good politician. He was a Chanakya, and there was n.o.body half as shrewd as him.

In comparison Advani was a straight arrow. This was so because he went by the book, by files, by advice. He would listen; he was a patient listener and never interrupted you. He was articulate. If you went and met Advani you would get a pleasurable conversation.

I first met Advani when I took over at R&AW. I called on the home minister and we had a chat, and we would interact whenever he wanted something or whenever he required me. It was rare, though. My colleague at the IB, Ajit Doval, with whom I interacted often on Kashmir, would say to me, 'Why don't you meet Advaniji, or meet him more often, it would simplify matters on Kashmir.'

'Ajit,' I said. 'I'm always there and whenever I'm called I'll go.' On my own I couldn't just cross the road from South Block to North Block, however, because my boss, the national security advisor, didn't particularly dig Advani.

In any case, now the Hurriyat had to be rounded up to talk to the deputy prime minister, and having gotten a formal invitation, they were willing. What also helped was that in the first week of January 2004, Vajpayee went to Islamabad for the SAARC summit, and on the sidelines he and Musharraf shook hands. They also agreed to commence a composite dialogue between the two countries that would lead to a settlement of all bilateral issues to the satisfaction of both sides. To journalists, Vajpayee said that they would discuss Kashmir; Musharraf said Pakistan could drop the insistence of a plebiscite in Kashmir.

As Brajesh Mishra, who had gone to Islamabad in advance to do the groundwork for the VajpayeeMusharraf meeting, said, the two parallel tracks looked like they were on course to converge at some point.

Advani's first meeting with the Hurriyat was set for 22 January 2004, and it was expectedly a h.e.l.lo, how-do-you- do kind of getting to know one another. The Hurriyat leaders were nervous and came to meet me before their meeting with Advani. The Professor said, 'Humara pajama to nahin utarvaoge!' I a.s.sured them that all would go well. It went well. I wasn't there, but the Hurriyat guys wanted the release of some Kashmiris as a confidence-building measure. 'Give me a list,' Advani said. And they agreed to meet again in March.

The next day the Hurriyat wanted to meet Vajpayee. 'What's the harm?' I told Brajesh. 'Let them have a cup of tea together, they don't have to make it an actual meeting.'

So they were invited for a cup of tea and samosas and jalebis with the prime minister. I took them in, and the five of them stood there and one by one said their pieces. Chairman Moulvi Abbas, the Mirwaiz, Prof. Ghani, Bilal Lone and Fazl-haq Qureshi were there and they each had their say and Vajpayee did not utter a word. Once the five had finished they all looked at each other. Prof. Ghani decided he was going to start on his spiel again, but antic.i.p.ating that the others quickly said, 'PM Sir, you've heard us, what do you say?' One of the five insisted, so the prime minister asked the staff to bring in more samosas.

Vajpayee, as usual, was silent for a long time. Finally: 'Advani is talking to you,' he said. 'Let that go on.'

The tea lasted more than an hour, with Vajpayee doing what he did best, keeping quiet. When the Hurriyat left, I escorted them out and I wondered what the poor fellows would tell the media that was waiting outside. I was feeling sorry for the Mirwaiz, but he acquitted himself well by saying it was a good meeting and that the talks continued.

The Hurriyat went back to Srinagar and in due course pa.s.sed on a list of nearly thirty guys that they wanted released. I tried to persuade the home ministry to release some of them, but they released only eight, which I felt would satisfy neither the Hurriyat nor the government. 'Why don't you release some more?' I asked the home secretary, N. Gopalaswami. In fact, we had a disagreement and I lost my cool, telling Gopalaswami to get someone else to talk to the Hurriyat instead. I was being unfair to the home secretary. Gopalaswami was a decent fellow and agreed to release twelve prisoners. He then suggested to Advani that I be invited to the second meeting, saying that the meeting with the Hurriyat would not have happened but for Dulat.

The second meeting was on 27 March 2004, and the government said we should now get down to the nitty-gritty. 'What is it that you want?' Advani asked.

Not one single Hurriyat leader said anything.