Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 2

'Yeah, we're getting them off our back,' General Puri said. 'They're still occupying some of our areas but we're making progress. But it will take me time. Maybe a month.'

Ironically, my visit was on 4 July 1999, the American independence daythe day that Nawaz Sharif was summoned to the White House by President Clinton. It was the day that Sharif announced that the intruders would vacate Kargil; India retook Tiger Hill the next day; and the war officially ended a week later. Of course, when I met General Puri, neither of us knew that Bill Clinton had read Mian Saheb the riot act, and when we later heard what had happened in Washington, DC we were both amused that we had expected the fighting to continue for another month.

After the war was over, the chairman of the four-member Kargil Review Committee, K. Subrahmanyam, came and met me, for by that time I had taken over as secretary at R&AW.

'Why do you think Kargil happened?' he asked, with particular reference to the build-up over the preceding winter. 'There was no intelligence.'

'First, let me clarify that I was not in R&AW in the period you're talking about,' I said. 'I was in IB and there were some bits of intelligence that I thought were quite significant. These were pa.s.sed on.'

Maybe by itself the intelligence didn't amount to much, but we had information that there was unusual activity taking place on the other side of the LoC. We were keeping a watch in the aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests in Pakistan, and what we saw had to do with troop movement, building of bunkers, movement of weaponry. And in fact it came to my deskI was the number two man in the IBand I took it to the DIB.

'There's something unusual about this,' I told Shyamal.

'Why don't you send a note to the government?'

'I'll draw up a note, but I think this should go under your signature,' I said, 'because it's not just an ordinary thing.'

So in June 1998 the IB sent a note to the government. The Kargil Review Committee report, in its chapter on 'Findings', under the section 'Intelligence', said: 'The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is meant to collect intelligence within the country and is the premier agency for counter- intelligence. This agency got certain inputs on activities in the FCNA region which were considered important enough by the Director, IB, to be communicated over his signature on June 2, 1998, to the Prime Minister, Home Minister, Cabinet Secretary, Home Secretary and Director General Military Operations. This communication was not addressed to the three officials most concerned with this information, namely, Secretary (R&AW), who is responsible for external intelligence and has the resources to follow up the leads in the IB report; Chairman JIC, who would have taken such information into account in JIC a.s.sessments; and Director General Military Intelligence. Director, IB stated that he expected the information to filter down to these officials through the official hierarchy. This did not happen in respect of Secretary (R&AW) who at that time was holding additional charge as Chairman JIC. The Committee feels that a communication of this nature should have been directly addressed to all the officials concerned.'

Obviously, neither the home ministry nor the army took much notice of the IB report, but there was something funny happening in that area. We report whatever unusual activity that we find, and this information had come to us from Leh a year before. Whatever the Kargil committee may have said, the fact is that various governments from time to time have ignored intelligence inputs, in this case provided almost a year before the intrusions in Kargil were discovered by shepherds.

The other reality is that with our focus on counter-terrorism we are so wrapped up in actionable intelligence that we overlook tell-tale signs. This controversy was to haunt us again when 26/ 11 happened. It is so easy to make intelligence agencies the scapegoat, 'intelligence failure' is the general response.

And what was the army doing? It is supposed to send out regular patrols, which it had obviously stopped doing because it had become so routine. It's as simple as that.

In Kashmir, all we've done since 1989 is talk of infiltration, and it's the army which is the first to talk of it. But infiltration continues. Every summer as the snow begins to melt, you get a plethora of intelligence reports saying that Pakistan is sending in new batches of militants. Yet for all these dire warnings, people come and people go. The army has not been able to stop it.

Yet the army won the Kargil war in July, and in August I took over as chief of R&AW. Just before I took over, Dave one day said to me: 'These R&AW guys run a trade union here. I don't allow them into my room.'

The atmosphere at R&AW was less collegial than it was in the IB and that was because while the IB was h.o.m.ogenous in its composition of officers from the Indian Police Service, R&AW comprised several servicesincluding its own service, the R&AW Administrative Service (RAS). The founder of R&AW, Ram Nath Kaoa man so mysterious that there was apparently no photograph of himhad envisioned R&AW would have its own service. Initially the recruitment was from the open market, much in the way the CIA or the MI6 does; Kao took from various streams, such as the postal service, the revenue service, the army, etc. His idea was that people would leave their parent services and join the RAS.

However, Kao and his deputy, K. Sankaran Nair, did not lay down clear rules of seniority for people joining from different services and this has plagued the service from day one. As a result, many people did not opt for the RAS, fearing they would lose out on the seniority their parent service offered them and defeating the very purpose the RAS was set up for. This has resulted in groupism in the RAS, unnecessary because in my experience the R&AW had officers who were as top-notch, man for man, as those in the IB despite the heterogeneity of backgrounds: for example, my successor, Vikram Sood, who had a very good tenure as chief, was originally from the postal service. Similarly, one of our bright officers who was posted in Pakistan, Vipin Handa, and who later died tragically early in a malfunctioning lift at R&AW headquarters, was from the revenue service.

One consequence of the groupism was trade unionism, as Dave put it, and I was mindful of that. As it was, the buzz going around R&AW was that Dulat was taking over and bringing in his own gang from the IB; furthermore, the rumour was that my staff officer would be someone from IB. I made it a point not to bring officers over from the IB, and I asked someone, 'Who's the most difficult fellow here? Who's the ringleader of the RAS?' 'Jayadeva Ranade,' I was told. I appointed him as my staff officer. He was very good at his work, and we're still good friends.

In fact, the irony of the matter was that as a fallout of this running rivalry between the RAS and non-RAS personnel, Ranade did not get his promotion or was made additional secretary till a few days before he retired; something that would have affected his pension had it not come through. The same government that had second thoughts about making him an additional secretary then made him a member of the National Security Advisory Board, where he was the China expert. This is the craziness of government functioning.

Appointing Ranade wasn't the only surprise my colleagues got. At the R&AW headquarters there are eleven floors, and the chief's office is on the eleventh; to access it he has a private lift at the back of the building. The building has been structured in such a way that the chief can enter the grounds, drive around and come up the private lift which goes straight to the eleventh floor, without anyone knowing. It's called 'the chief's lift'. Everyone else comes in through the main entrance, which has a whole row of lifts on the far end of the s.p.a.cious lobby.

When I heard of this, I thought I can't come in sneaking around the back. In any case, I'm a guy who comes to office late, and if I come late then everybody should be able to see that I come a bit late. I wanted to make a point so I began using the main entrance. I said I would use the private lift only when I was going out during the day, or for my guests, or when I was going home at night. A colleague pointed out to me how much of a departure this was. According to him, I was the first to do so, the others used to come by the private lift and leave by it. 'Saab, aapse pehle iss taraf se koi nahin aayaa. Peechhe se aatein hain, peechhe se hi chale gaye.' It was another example of the way things were at R&AW.

Days after I joined, I decided to pay a visit to R.N. Kao, who was nearing ninety and living in Vasant Vihar, a posh colony for retired senior bureaucrats. I called him up and asked if I could visit. 'This is a good decision you have made, to call me up,' he said rather modestly, and invited me over.

He was a tall, thin man with a hawk-like nose, and we chatted about the organisation that he built. Apparently, when Indira Gandhi gave him the go-ahead to set up an external intelligence agency he went to London and met the second-in- command at the MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, who later took over as 'C' (and who was rumoured to be one of the models for 'C' in John le Carre's spy novels), for advice on setting up R&AW. The one thing that stood out from our conversation was his advice to me that now that I was in charge, I need not worry about anyone else; I should run it as I thought best, without looking over my shoulder. 'You've got the best job in the government,' Kao said. 'Now don't worry about anyone else, and just do your job.'

That was good advice because there weren't too many dull moments in the months after I took over. For one thing, on 12 October 1999, General Musharraf took over in Pakistan in a military coup d'etat. I had been in the job for two months or so, and everyone in R&AW was caught unawares. I can claim credit for a lot of things (actually I can't, due to the Official Secrets Act) but the fact was that as far as the coup was concerned we were caught unawares.

In a nutsh.e.l.l, Musharraf had gone to Sri Lanka for the weekend to attend their army's 50th anniversary celebrations. On the way back, he was sacked by Nawaz Sharif, who appointed the ISI chief, Khwaja Ziauddin, in his place. The army quickly surrounded the prime minister's residence and arrested him, but not before Mian Saheb sent a message to Karachi International Airport not to let Musharraf's flight land, and instead re-direct it to India. ('Over my dead body we're going to India,' Musharraf reportedly shouted at the pilots while waving his pistol in the c.o.c.kpit.) The flight was allowed to land once the army surrounded the airport, and Mian Saheb was thrown in jail; he would later be exiled to Saudi Arabia. Musharraf went to President Rafiq Tarar and declared himself chief executive.

Who would have thought that this guy would get off a flight and lock up his prime minister? Come to think of it, who would have antic.i.p.ated that the prime minister would have sacked him? It all happened so fast.

We knew that this fellow was uncompromising. During Vajpayee's bus trip to Lah.o.r.e, for instance, the story was that Musharraf conveniently came to meet our prime minister without his cap. In the military, you salute with your cap, and if you're not wearing your cap, you don't salute. Musharraf obviously had refused to salute Vajpayee. And then of course was Musharraf's conversation with his number two during the Kargil war that R&AW had intercepted and that the government had played for the world.

It was a turn of events that saddened Vajpayee, for he had gotten along with Mian Saheb. Now not only was the peace process in tatters, but he was genuinely concerned for what would happen to Nawaz Sharif. I saw that there was a real shock to Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra, but to their credit they would eventually get over it and try to do business with Musharraf. It helped that the CIA chief came and shared his opinion with us that Musharraf was someone people could do business with.

But that was still in the future, for just two months after Musharraf took over, India faced another crisis that was inspired in Pakistan and blessed by Musharraf: the hijacking of its Indian Airlines flight IC-814.

3.

TWO HOSTAGE CRISES.

If you were to ask me, Gen. Pervez Musharraf had to have had a hand in the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 on 24 December 1999. The reason one can say so is that such an operation could not have been undertaken without ISI support; a hijacking was no cakewalk, even in those pre-9/11 days. And Musharraf, being the army chief and that too in a country where the military had taken direct control, was all powerful. In fact, the story we heard was that when the hijackers took the plane to Lah.o.r.e they were given a bag of weapons. Thus with three events in quick successionthe Kargil intrusion, the coup d'etat, and the hijacking of IC-814there was every reason to be wary of Musharraf, who one suspected had a hand in all three incidents. The hijacking itself made for a harrowing final week of the final year of the century, what with the pressure upon the government from the families of the 176 pa.s.sengers held hostage, and the international isolation in which India found herself, while the West celebrated Christmas. IC-814 was en route from Kathmandu, Nepal, to New Delhi on Christmas Eve when five armed men, threatening to detonate a bomb onboard, hijacked the plane at around 5 p.m. They told Capt. Devi Sharan to take the aircraft further west than its intended destination, towards Lah.o.r.e, but fuel ran low and the plane had to be landed in Amritsar, where it remained for 45 to 50 minutes. That was the only moment when India could have taken control of the hijacking incident. Once it left Amritsar then the only way it could have ended was with India giving into the terrorists' demands, which is what happened.

When the hijacking became known the government convened a Crisis Management Group (CMG) headed by the cabinet secretary, Prabhat k.u.mar, to monitor the situation and deal with it. While the plane was on the ground in Amritsar, Punjab Police was in charge of the situation. The Punjab Police chief was Sarabjit Singh, a batchmate, who was based in Chandigarh and had taken charge a few weeks earlier. Sarabjit and I had known each other throughout our careers, and he later told me his version of what happened while IC-814 was in Amritsar.

Sarabjit had just come out of a dentist's appointment when he got news of the hijacking. As in the past, Amritsar airport would be the most vulnerable in Punjab, so he immediately spoke to J.P. Virdi, the inspector general (border), posted in Amritsar. The state police had commandos in Amritsar and Virdi had two companies sent immediately to the airport. The deputy inspector general (border), Jasminder Singh, had the presence of mind to reach the air traffic control (ATC) tower even before IC-814 landed. Jasminder kept reporting to Sarabjit on the developments as they unfolded.

Sarabjit decided to monitor the situation from Chandigarh and await instructions from the CMG in Delhi, because he felt he was not in a position to act on his own. This was not a position that former Punjab Police chief Kanwar Pal Singh Gill would have taken.

K.P.S. was the man credited with leading the police from the front in the fight against terrorism in Punjab. In 1993, he had dealt with a similar situation when an Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Srinagar was hijacked and forced to land in Amritsar. The hijackers wanted the plane taken to either Lah.o.r.e or Kabul, but a quick operation by the paramilitary National Security Guard (NSG) ended the episodein a span of 12 seconds, all four terrorists were immobilised and the main hijacker, Mohammed Yousuf Shah, killed. You needed a man like Gill in 1999 to make a quick a.s.sessment and disable the aircraft without wasting time waiting for clear instructions from Delhi.

Sarabjit did consider that he had at his disposal in Punjab commandos who were trained in anti-terrorism, and that they could storm the aircraft, but there would be casualties. He told Delhi, which responded that the government's top priority was that there be no casualties. Sarabjit was also in touch with his chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal, who was at the time visiting his village. Badal's instruction was: be careful. The chief minister did not want a mess in Punjab and did not want to be blamed for anything. He too said that no harm should come to the pa.s.sengers.

On the other hand, DIB Shyamal Datta asked Sarabjit why he did not puncture the tyres of the aircraft and immobilise it. 'They were talking to me as if there was a bicycle there,' Sarabjit mused years later. (Since I knew Sarabjit and I knew what pressure he would be under with everyone breathing down his neck, I avoided talking to him during the crisis.) Sarabjit said that Delhi never told him that IC-814 was not to be allowed to take off. After the event he came in for a lot of flak for allowing the aircraft to leave, and even K.P.S. joined the chorus to say that the Punjab Police should not have allowed the plane to fly away. 'I wasn't Gill,' Sarabjit said in all modesty. 'I wasn't of his stature to stake leadership because of the bad luck by which the plane landed in Amritsar.'

Sarabjit decided to sit tight and do just what Delhi instructed him. The fault, thus, would lie with the CMG, which could not come to a clear decision on what to do.

Captain Sharan also came in for criticism, but his role was exemplary. He kept telling the ATC to help with fuel; that the hijackers had already killed a pa.s.senger, maybe two; and that even flying on reserve fuel to Lah.o.r.ewhich was a short distance away, on the other side of the borderwas a risk. Worse, the plane was parked midway on the runway, instead of at the end from where it could begin its takeoff.

The hijackers insisted that the plane keep taxiing and told Captain Sharan to take off however he could. The body language of the hijackers showed them to be quite panic-stricken, and so the captain took off with only half a runway. At Lah.o.r.e he was refused permission to land and Lah.o.r.e ATC even turned off the airport lights; it was only when Captain Sharan threatened to land on a road that they permitted IC-814 to land. The hijackers had been so filled with panic that they didn't think they would get out of Amritsar and killed Rupin Katyal, ultimately throwing his body out in Dubai.

Readers may remember that IC-814 was the last hijacking that took place in India. Long before that there were lots of hijackings taking place all over the world and whenever anyone heard of a hijack they would cross their fingers and hope that the hijacked aircraft would not land in their territory. A hijacking was a no-win situation that no one wanted on their head. By the time IC-814 happened, most had gotten over the hijacking phobia, but India's most vulnerable airports remained Srinagar, Jammu and Amritsar. Soon after the hijacking of IC-814 the government decided to station NSG commandoes at these airports.

On 24 December 1999, however, the CMG debated how to deal with the hijacking, and while the CMG was debating, IC-814 flew away. It debated matters such as how to deploy the NSG commandoes to Amritsar fast enough. In all that debate the opportunity to gain the upper hand slipped away. To give credit to the home minister, L.K. Advani, he landed up at the CMG and took charge after the plane left Amritsar.

I was a part of the CMG since I headed R&AW, and several people have asked me about what happened inside the CMG during those 50 minutes; most of the publicly available literature blames 'mismanagement' for the missed opportunity to get a handle on the hijacking. Even filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj, who was working on a film script (and later made the excellent film Haider, based on Basharat Peer's script), asked me to reveal to him what happened in the CMG, but it is not my place to disclose the contents of a secret meeting.

What I can say, however, is that the CMG degenerated into a blame game, with various senior officials trying to lay the blame for allowing the aircraft to leave Indian soil on one another; the cabinet secretary, being the head of the CMG, was one target, and the NSG chief, Nikhil k.u.mar, became another. It was a fraught time and nerves were unfortunately constantly on edge.

In either case, the plane landed in Lah.o.r.e, was refuelled and as the story went, the hijackers received a bag of weapons. Then the plane went to Dubai, where twenty-seven pa.s.sengers were allowed to leave; and then the aircraft went to Kandahar, Afghanistan, at that time ruled by the Taliban. While IC-814 was in Dubai, India had contemplated a commando raid at the Dubai airport, but the local authorities refused to cooperate. We tried to prevail on the Americans to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates to allow us a raid, but as I mentioned earlier, India found itself isolated internationally. Nothing seemed to be going our way.

After the plane reached Kandahar, which incidentally was the base of the one-eyed head of the Taliban government, Mullah Mohammed Omar, we heard of the hijackers' demands: the release of thirty-five terrorists from Indian prisons, the main one being Maulana Masood Azhar, a dreaded veteran terrorist leader; and $200 million in cash. We sent a team of negotiators, the best professionals in the business, including future IB directors Ajit Doval and Nehchal Sandhu, as well as my senior colleague C.D. Sahay (who would take over as R&AW chief after Vikram Sood); there was an external affairs ministry representative, Vivek Katju, and representatives of other departments like the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security. A truly high-powered team without much power to do anything on the soil of a country governed by people sympathetic to the hijackers.

This was evident in the fact that the Taliban surrounded the aircraft with tanks and soldiers, which they said was to dissuade the hijackers from any further violence, but which we understood was a signal to us not to try a raid by commandos to immobilise the hijackersan option that we discussed in detail. It became clear that the airport was essentially under the ISI's control, and that the Taliban were being guided throughout the episode by the ISI. Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain, who was in Kandahar during the hijacking, later wrote in his book, Frontline Pakistan: 'Afghan sources . . . revealed that the hijackers were taking instructions from Pakistani intelligence officers present at the airport.' For Hussain, 'the extent of Taliban/ISI/jihadi cooperation was revealed during the Indian hostage crisis of 1999'.

It was frustrating to be outmanoeuvred by Pakistan's spy agency. On top of that, Doval, with whom I had worked closely in the IB and who would later become PM Narendra Modi's national security advisor, was pressing me from Kandahar to get the government to find an early resolution to the hijacking. Who could blame him, for the team out there was badly stuck in a hostile environment, surrounded by Taliban. 'Take a decision quickly, sir,' he said, 'because these fellows are getting impatient and I don't know what will happen.' Eventually, after five days of negotiations the hijackers' demands were whittled down to the release of three terrorists: Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar.

We had arrested Masood Azhar back in 1994, when he had come to India to settle some disputes between different factions of his outfit, the Harkat-ul-Ansar. He was of such high value that to get his release, his group floated a front group, al-Faran, which in 1995 kidnapped six foreign trekkers in south Kashmir and held them hostage in the mountains, demanding the release of Masood Azhar and twenty other terrorists. The six were Britons Keith Mangan and Paul Wells; Americans John Childs and Donald Hutchings; German Dirk Hasert; and Norwegian Hans Christian Ostro. Childs managed to escape. Ostro was beheaded (and the name 'al-Faran' was carved on his chest). The other four were never heard from again; a few months later al-Faran claimed they no longer held them, and their bodies were never found. Much later there were reports that in late 1995, the al-Faran leader, Abdul Hamid Turki, was killed in an exchange with our army, and that nine days after Turki's death, the hostages were shot dead. Masood Azhar was not released.

We spent a year trying to spot the al-Faran/Harkat-ul-Ansar kidnappers and their hostages. It proved very tough in the mountains of south Kashmir. At the time, as I've mentioned earlier, I was heading the Kashmir group in the IB, and we got a whole lot of information every daythere had been a sighting here, there had been a sighting there, another sighting somewhere completely different. The Bakerwalsa pastoral community inhabiting the hills and mountains of Kashmirand some Gujjars would bring us these stories, and in one sense, the avalanche of information was farcical. The truth is that the kidnappers had taken the Westerners deep into the forests, and no technical intelligence, satellite imagery, or Gujjar ears and eyes on the ground could nail them.

In fact, one day the minister of state for home affairs, Rajesh Pilot, who used to take a keen interest in Kashmir affairs and who was encouraged in doing so by his prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, summoned both the vice-chief of the army staff, Lt. Gen. Surinder Nath, and me to his room in North Block. General Nath had earlier been commander of the Srinagar-based XV corps so he had a working knowledge of the Valley. Pilot shot off a bunch of questions.

'What the h.e.l.l is going on?' the minister said. 'Why can't the army get to know where the hostages are? And when we give the army information, why aren't they able to do anything?'

Pilot was himself from the Gujjar community and was well aware of the intelligence that was coming in from them. He spread out on the table a large map of the Kashmir Valley.

'General,' he said. 'Tell me, suppose I tell you that these guys are here,' he pointed to a mountainous spot in south Kashmir, 'how long will it take for your people to get there?'

And in typical army parlance, General Nath began his long- winded answer: 'It will have to be a brigade-level operation.'

So Pilot folded the map he had spread out before him and the general left. We were back to square one.

We were keen to get the hostages back; by that time, we were sick of kidnappings. It was a phenomenon that began in December 1989 with the kidnapping of the home minister's daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed; the success of that hostage trade-off made kidnapping an everyday occurrence in Kashmir. It became a lucrative business. A militant would pick someone up and extort good money. It became so that a target could be kidnapped in the morning and released in the evening; people had no choice but to pay up and smile.

In fact, just before the al-Faran incident there was a high- profile kidnapping of Financial Times correspondent David Housego's son Kim; the journalist made use of his network of contacts to get his boy released. The picking up of the six Western trekkers marked the peak of the kidnappings; and in the way IC-814 was the last hijacking, the al-Faran abductions became the last kidnapping. After this, it faded and stopped, because it had become counterproductive for everyone.

Some people allege that India strung out the al-Faran kidnapping, or that India half-heartedly searched for the kidnapped trekkers, because it was proving to be a public relations disaster for Pakistan and that it was one of the factors that helped India get over the international hostility it faced over Kashmir and thereby subsequently manage the political problem. This is nonsense.

What was an unexpected consequence of the kidnapping was that the Western governments used it to their great advantage in building up their networks in Kashmir. The Americans, for instance, made a lot of trips to Srinagar on the pretext of monitoring the kidnapping, for one of their nationals was still involved. They sent their diplomats and they sent their intelligence professionals; we knew each and every visitor to the Valley. In a sense, then, the al-Faran kidnapping was the first opening up of Kashmir, for until this incident, very few foreigners used to go to Srinagar once violence broke out in 1990; perhaps there would be the occasional visit by the first secretary (political) or the political counsellor of a Western mission. The al-Faran kidnapping became a good excuse and some professionals did build up a good network. The British also showed a lot of interestthey worked closely with the Americansand they developed a well-informed political section.

You could say that everyone got something out of the al-Faran kidnapping except the kidnappers themselves, for Masood Azhar remained jailed, and so Harkat-ul-Ansar tried again the next year when it kidnapped four Western tourists and kept them as hostages in a village in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. The person who lured the tourists into a trap was a former London School of Economics student, Omar Sheikh, who Musharraf in his memoir In the Line of Fire alleged was recruited by the British MI6 while he was at LSE (Musharraf also claimed MI6 sent Omar Sheikh to the Balkans). Again Omar Sheikh and company demanded the release of Masood Azhar, as well as ten other terrorists, but the police were able to foil the kidnappers, release the hostages unharmed and capture the kidnappers including Omar Sheikh, who spent the next five years as a guest at Delhi's Tihar Jail.

The third terrorist whose release the IC-814 hijackers sought was Mushtaq Zargar, a particularly brutish, ruthless, low-life Kashmiri terrorist, quite unlike the militant chiefs who were committed to their separatist cause, who had intellectual curiosity and who were not ideologically dogmatic. From a neighbourhood near Srinagar's Jamia Masjid, he joined the movement and took up the gun early on, launching his own tanzeem, al-Umar Mujahideen. He is responsible for forty murders, including a string of killings of Kashmiri Pandits which contributed in no small measure to the exodus of Hindus from the Valley once violence took centre stage in 198990. He is somebody I have always found highly distasteful.

Once Ajit Doval and the other negotiators had whittled the IC-814 hijackers' demands to these three terroristsMasood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargarthe government had to take a call. There was great pressure exerted by the media, which kept showing visuals of the protesting families of the hostages gathered at the entry to Race Course Road, where the official residence of the prime minister is located. With very few cards to play, Vajpayee's team had little choice but to agree to release the three terrorists.

Suddenly it occurred to everyone that the J&K chief minister, Dr Farooq Abdullah, would have to be informed; it also dawned on everyone that he might object and pose a hurdle. The national security advisor asked me to go. Jaswant Singh made an official call to Farooq on behalf of the CCS, and advised the chief minister that the R&AW chief was being sent to him.

I was picked to do the dirty job as I was reckoned to be close to Doctor Saheb since my days as the IB head in Srinagar in the late 1980s. Since it was winter, the J&K government had shifted to Jammu, and I called Farooq and told him that I was coming to Jammu. He immediately guessed why the government was sending me. He responded by saying, 'You might as well come and stay with me.' I had not expected it to be a pleasant encounter and had taken a colleague along as moral support. He did not take the full bombardment that I was to get for three hours plus. He tactfully excused himself saying he had to go for dinner.

As my R&AW aircraft landed in Jammu, the sun was setting on 30 December. It was the month of Ramzan. I went straight to Farooq's residence, where I found him sitting at his dining table by himself. 'I know why you've come,' he said. 'Just let me go and say my prayers.'

After his prayers he came out and had his juice. And then he angrily said: 'You again? Tumne Mufti ki beti ke liye kiya tha, phir wohi kar rahe ho.'

What he was angry about and what the small irony of our situation was, was the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed on 8 December 1989, an eventful episode like the hijacking of IC-814 a decade later, and one where both of us were involved. In both episodes, he was chief minister; during the earlier incident, I was the head of the IB in Srinagar. In both episodes I had asked him to release jailed terrorists, and in both episodes he had initially refused, saying presciently that doing so would have dire consequences for militancy in his state. In both episodes I persuaded him to ultimately give in, on orders from the top in Delhi.

As mentioned earlier, Rubaiya Sayeed was the daughter of the newly appointed Union home minister, Mufti Sayeed, who had taken charge following the election defeat of Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government and the installation of a National Front government led by Vishwanath Pratap Singh. She was kidnapped as she came out of the hospital where she interned, the Lal Ded Memorial Hospital, by boys of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, and kept in captivity somewhere in Sopore, as some JKLF boys later told me.

The JKLF was founded in 1977 by Pakistan-based Amanullah Khan and Maqbool b.u.t.t, who was hanged in 1984 following the kidnapping and murder of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in England, and whose execution was mourned annually by Kashmiris to defiantly show their anger with India. The tanzeem was the dominant 'nationalist' separatist group in the early days in Kashmir, espousing independence. Later it was overtaken in power and influence by other groups which wanted Kashmir's merger with Pakistan.

Most of the boys who first crossed over into Pakistan for terrorism-training under the ISI, following the fraudulent a.s.sembly elections in 1987 in which many of them were involved as poll agents for the new opposition party, the Muslim United Front (most of whose leaders would six years later form the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference), did so under the aegis of the JKLF. (Mushtaq Zargar was originally a member of the JKLF till he fell out with the group in 1989 and formed his own tanzeem.) The JKLF's leaders were known by the acronym HAJY, standing for Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Mir, and Yasin Malik; they committed the first acts of terror in Kashmir between 1988 and 1990, though their unwavering commitment to independence made them suspect in Pakistani eyes.

The JKLF had been hatching a kidnapping plan for some time; their first target was actually the chief minister's eldest daughter, Safia Abdullah. The boys, however, found it difficult to get to Safia because Gupkar Road, where the chief minister stayed, had enough security and protection to make a kidnapping difficult. Also, she did not go out too much in those days. After a while, the JKLF gave up on the plan to kidnap Safia and their next target was the daughter of the senior superintendent of police (SSP), Allah Baksh. Though he was a straightforward policeman, who only spoke the language of the 'danda' and followed strictly whatever orders he got, he was one of the officials blamed for the rigged 1987 elections, as his policemen allegedly picked up many MUF workers and threw them in jail for the night.

While they were planning this kidnapping, on 5 December 1989, Mufti was sworn in as the Union home minister, and one of the JKLF fellows had a brainwave: why not pick up Rubaiya. With Mufti becoming minister, Farooq had in any case receded into the background, and in those days, he had left Kashmir feeling down and had gone to England, as he occasionally did (he had studied there and he met his wife there, so it was a natural getaway for him). And Rubaiya, Mufti's middle daughter, was a 23-year-old medical intern at the Lal Ded hospital; she went in every second day; someone said she went in at such-and-such time and left at such-and-such time; so it would be an easy pick-up.

Thus on 8 December, at about a quarter to four in the afternoon, when she was half a kilometre from home, Rubaiya was pulled out of the mini-bus she was in and put into a Maruti car and driven to Sopore. She had been kidnapped.

All h.e.l.l broke loose. Where was Mufti's daughter, everyone kept asking me. The kidnappers called up the office of the Kashmir Times and claimed responsibility. They demanded the release of several militants including JKLF leader Hamid Sheikh, who was in custody. Since it was winter and the government was in Jammu, I took the next morning's flight to Srinagar, and immediately people who had any link or connection to Mufti got into the act.

Chief Secretary Moosa Raza, a Gujarat cadre officer from Tamil Nadu, was the main negotiator, but all the back-up was provided by IB, and I worked in close tandem with him. Moosa rarely left the IB office from where operations were conducted, but for obvious reasons the IB was kept in the background. The first two guys on the scene were journalists, Zafar Mehraj of the Kashmir Times and Mohammed Sayeed Malik, both of whom had deep connections with Mufti. Sayeed came to do a recce, basically to report to Mufti what was going on, and whether the men in Srinagar were showing seriousness in tracking down Rubaiya.

But Zafar Mehraj hung around and was helpful. He arranged a meeting with the father of Ashfaq Majid Wani, one of the JKLF top guns and one of those involved in the actual kidnapping. Ashfaq was already a legend in Kashmir for his bravado, and the legend grew after he died while trying to lob a grenade at some CRPF personnel in March 1990. His father, on the other hand, was a humble government clerk.

We met in a government flat and sat on the ground, and Ashfaq's father was very emotional, not least because there was some anger in the Valley that the boys had kidnapped an unmarried girl, which they considered a highly un-Islamic act. Ashfaq's father kept saying Delhi had always let down Kashmir and Kashmiris, and then he would launch into an emotional speech about how the boys were actually nice boys, that they wouldn't harm anyone, that he could vouch for them, and that Rubaiya was like a sister to them.

Ashfaq's father told us that the kidnapping was basically to get Hamid Sheikh freed. He had been injured and so was being kept in the hospital, and the JKLF wanted him released so the whole kidnapping was for that, plus whatever publicity they could get.

'Okay,' I said. 'But if he's to be released, where do you want him released? In Lal Chowk?'

Ashfaq's father was not very clear. 'Why don't you hand him over to the Iranians?' he said.

'There are no Iranians here,' I said. 'Which Iranians do you want him handed over to?'

'No, you could hand him over to the Iranian emba.s.sy.'

'How will you take him and hand him over to the Iranian emba.s.sy?' I asked. 'Suppose the Iranians refuse, then what will we do with him?'

He kept saying vague things like that, perhaps bits of conversation that he had himself heard. The JKLF had apparently seriously considered options like this.

'Why don't you leave him at the border?' Ashfaq's father suggested.

'If the government agrees we could,' I said. 'So many are going, he could also go.'

In the end, in half-disgust, half-bravado, and half-theatre, he grabbed my wrist and said: 'Let me tell you one thing. These boys are very good boys, and even if Delhi does nothing, no harm will come to Rubaiya. She is like their sister, she will be released.'

That was the conversation. And it gave us confidence that the whole episode would have a good ending, and that we need not jump the gun. We felt that Rubaiya might be released for no one, or at the least, in exchange for just Hamid Sheikh.

A lot of other fellows got into the act. There was the judge, Moti Lal Kaul, who reported faithfully back to Mufti; there was an MLA, Mir Mustafa of Lasjan, who was later killed. Moulvi Abbas Ansari, a decent man who was instrumental in setting up the MUF and later joined and headed the Hurriyat, and I met him through a colleague in the J&K police during that time. Moulvi Abbas was close to the JKLF boys, who had a lot of faith in him, and after I met him he volunteered to help by going and talking to the boys holding Rubaiya. Unfortunately, by the time he got into action, things were moving at a fast clip and n.o.body needed too much help.

The home minister's daughter was a hostage and there was intense pressure on us, so I was meeting a lot of Kashmiris. Indeed, this was the beginning of my career as a person talking to as many Kashmiris, of as many hues as possible, as I could, not a start in the best of circ.u.mstances. In fact, one of the first people I approached was Dr Abdul Ahad Guru, the cardiothoracic surgeon who was an ideologue of the JKLF and who basically told me to get lost.

I went and met Dr Guru at his residence-c.u.m-clinic in Barzalla at eight in the morning on a bitterly cold December morning. I had been told that if I wanted to go and meet him, I should go there at eight o'clock. There was a long queue of waiting patients outside his house. He came out of his room and asked me, 'What can I do for you?'

'You know our problem,' I said. 'This Hamid Sheikh is in the hospital and he has a lot of regard and respect for you. You could help us resolve this whole matter.'