Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 7

Majid Dar came across as a confident, positive person, enthusiastic above all else for peace. He got the separatists to think without and beyond Pakistan. Had he been around when the government began talking to the separatist All Party Hurriyat Conferencethe then deputy prime minister, L.K. Advani, did so in January 2004he would have very much been a part of it (in fact, his interlocutor, Fazl Haq Qureshi, did join the Hurriyat talks).

It was clear that in his mind, the Pakistan story was over. He told everyone that what got him started thinking about a dialogue was the Kargil war.

Pakistan's misadventure in Kargil was an eye-opener for Kashmiris operating out of Pakistan, Majid Dar said. It was a big disappointment particularly because US president Bill Clinton had called up Nawaz Sharif and told him to pull his troops back. That's when Kashmiris realised that Pakistan could do nothing for them even if it wanted to; and that veneer had already come off with the indication, over the past few years, that Pakistan's anti-India agenda did not necessarily translate into a pro-Kashmir agenda.

Majid Dar was disillusioned with Pakistan and categorically said that Pakistan's tap of terror could be turned off immediately, at any time, by the Americans. 'Pakistan has no interest in freeing Kashmir,' he said. 'Pakistan just wants to bleed Kashmir.'

And so, the Kargil war had got him and many others thinking about dialogue with India.

The other thing that bothered Majid Dar was the corruption of the movement. For much of the 1990s, the tanzeem that had sustained the movement was the Hizb. And he made the point to other Kashmiris that though the Hizb was different from the JKLF, it was actually pro-liberation. But then in 2000 it began to look as if the Hizb would not survive for long; it had been diminished operationally and others had been given more importance, particularly the mercenaries. Control was being taken over by the Lashkar-e-Toiba. Now his Hizb was playing second fiddle to the Lashkar.

This resonated with other Kashmiris such as Abdul Ghani Lone, an important Hurriyat leader who often argued with Geelani that the Lashkar and the Taliban and other jihadis were not welcome in Kashmir. 'Yeh hamare mehmaan nahin hain,' Lone said. 'These guests are coming here and killing Kashmiris.'

The ISI did not like any of this at all and it even tried reaching out to Majid Dar. But in 2001 Majid Dar stopped taking calls from the ISI chief, General Mahmud. That undoubtedly firmed the ISI's resolve to finish Majid Dar.

Salahuddin's rift with Majid Dar also widened. Majid Dar had always been loyal to the Hizb supreme leader, despite Salahuddin's close proximity to the ISI, but he began to find Salahuddin's duplicity intolerable. Their estrangement now was reflected in the increasing internecine battles in the Hizbul Mujahideen in Pakistan: many fights erupted between Majid Dar's boysmany of whom had their roots like their leader in the TJIand Salahuddin's boys. The Salahuddin people began b.u.mping off Majid Dar's people, starting with those who partic.i.p.ated in the 3 August talks with the government of India, Hamid Tantray and Farooq Mircha. And, of course, it included the murder of Majid Dar himself. Fazl Haq Qureshi was also later targeted and shot and critically wounded while coming out of a mosque in Srinagar on 4 December 2009. He was lucky to survive and continue in the moderate Hurriyat, still very much a votary of dialogue, even though he was one of the first Kashmiri separatists to indulge in violence in Srinagar, being part of the infamous al-Fatah.

Majid Dar, in the meantime, was beginning to realise that the job of getting people together, persuading them that talking was a positive and beneficial step for them, for Kashmiris, was a little more difficult than it might have looked from across the border. The Hurriyat in particular was so much under the control of Pakistan that he could not progress. Then he must have understood that what he needed to do was go back to Pakistan and talk to the ISI to loosen its reins on the separatists.

When word filtered down, we saw no logic in going back to Pakistan because he was no doubt a persona non grata there. One reason was that Majid Dar's ceasefire had started a chain of events, including Prime Minister Vajpayee's announcement of a unilateral ceasefire during Ramzan, which was during September 2000.

How that happened is that Yousuf Tarigami, the lone flag- bearer for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kashmir and a.s.semblyman from Kulgam, came and met me at my official residence one morning. 'Eid is coming,' he said. 'Kucch karwa dijiye.'

'Ceasefire toh hua tha,' I told him. 'Hizb has backed out. What should we do?'

'Why don't you have a unilateral ceasefire declared,' Tarigami suggested.

I took it to Vajpayee, and the idea appealed to him. A Ramzan ceasefire was announced, and this really caught the fancy of Kashmiris. It was one of a series of p.r.o.nouncements that endeared Vajpayee to Kashmiris long after he left office. Above all, it was a critical factor that improved the atmosphere for the 2002 a.s.sembly election in J&K, which was a success.

In the ISI's panicked eyes, it was further d.a.m.nation of Majid Dar, if more was needed. In December 2001, Salahuddin threw him out of the Hizbul Mujahideen. And when he let it be known, after the 2002 a.s.sembly election, that he would go back to Pakistanhe was supremely confident that he could go and deal with the ISI any time he wanted tothey had him killed.

In fact, the idea of his going to Pakistan was a dangerous one, and one worried that he would be killed there, in Pakistan; but he was killed right here. Of course, it was delayed a bit, till March 2003, due to the ISI's a.s.sa.s.sination of Abdul Ghani Lone in May 2002 (which we will come to in the next chapter), and the ISI's need to wait for things to cool down after Lone was murdered, but in the end Majid Dar was killed here so that the blame would not fall directly on the ISI. And also, to send everyone in Kashmir a message: never to cross the ISI.

When we began receiving his decision to go back to Pakistan, to us in R&AW it was incomprehensible.

A common friend told Dar, 'Don't go back. As far as Pakistan is concerned, you're finished. You will get into trouble there. You might never be able to come back out, or worse, they might just kill you.'

That probably steeled his resolve to return.

There was precious little anybody could do to save him, because Majid Dar was on his own, underground, and we in the government only occasionally heard that he had been in such-and-such place, or that he had met so-and-so. Though we had successfully managed his return, once he was back he was a free person. Plus he was underground.

His wife Shamima Badroo later said that it was Brigadier Riaz, the ISI officer who had helped make the case within the ISI to let Majid Dar cross over, who whipped up an atmosphere against Majid Dar in Pakistan. Shamima said, and there's no way of verifying this, that the ISI plan B, if his a.s.sa.s.sins could not get to him, was to kidnap her and the son that he doted on.

The threat to him grew so serious that one of Majid Dar's men warned him, during the last few days, against visiting Sopore. On Friday, 21 March, one of his friends in Srinagar told him so: 'Aap Sopore mat jaye.'

On 22 March, he spent the day with his Hizb colleagues.

One 23 March, he went to Sopore, despite all the warnings, because he said he had to go and say goodbye to his mother whom he loved immensely. It is said that while he was in hiding his mother would send him his favourite Wullar fish personally cooked. A mother's love and his own over-confidence contributed to his tragic end. And around 11 a.m., he was shot dead.

We a.s.sumed the Hizb killed him, the boys with allegiance to Salahuddin, on orders from the ISI. When the ISI felt the time was right, Majid Dar was put down. It was unfortunate, to say the least, because if he had been around when talks with the Hurriyat came out into the open in 2004, Majid Dar would have been a huge a.s.set to everyone; he had leadership qualities.

Worse, though, was what happened to his wife. For on 28 November 2006, she was shot at her house in Chhanpora, Srinagar, and though she survived, she was left paralysed. Again, I suspected the Hizb, and what I was told was that many militants were still settling scores with her for Majid Dar's return to Kashmir. I heard that Majid Dar's own divisional commander was involved in the shooting; yet why should his own men kill Majid Dar's wife?

The Hizb boys knew that she was the reason he came back, and they were convinced by the ISI that Shamima was an Indian intelligence agent who, during the seven or eight years of their married life in Pakistan, worked on him to return, thereby cleaving into two what used to be the premier militant group, Hizbul Mujahideen.

The shooting left her wheelchair-bound for life and in a bad state, both emotionally and financially, yet still this gutsy woman went to Pakistan in January 2014 and confronted the ISI. She said that she tried to meet the ISI chief, but he didn't meet her; instead, she met Brigadier Riaz, who apologised and said that Majid Dar's death was a great loss. A former lieutenant of Majid Dar's, Zafar Bhat, later revealed that Majid Dar had some land in Pakistan and that she probably went back to dispose of it. Perhaps this was the unfinished business that Majid Dar sometimes spoke of. Basically he wanted to go back to apprise the ISI of the ground situation in Kashmir: to tell them there was no other way but dialogue. It's doubtful that we will ever know the complete story, but such is the messy business of espionage.

There were other Kashmiris that we would have liked to have brought back home, but when my tenure ended on 31 December 2000, there were guys who were left out in the cold.

One of the guys whom I had very much in mind was Irshad Malik. If you remember, Irshad Malik was the secretary general of the United Jehad Council in Muzaffarabad and a colleague of our friend Firdous Syed, who caught up with Irshad when he visited PoK and Pakistan in 1994.

Irshad had been a practising lawyer in Baramulla, was the organiser of the district bar a.s.sociation, and actually worked for the government, representing the local cooperative bank. He had been sympathetic to Shabir Shah's People's League for many years and was arrested in 1982 for some minor disturbance on 14 August, which is Pakistan's independence day. In 1987 Irshad was asked by the MUF to contest the 1987 elections, though he was not confident enough. The MUF had wanted him to contest independently and split the NC vote so that the MUF candidate would win; Baramulla const.i.tuency had a 55:45 rural-urban ratio, and the countryside was where the NC was strong. The MUF was confident of taking the urban vote, but Irshad, not confident he could achieve anything, declined their offer.

One of Irshad's friends at university was a commerce student named Aijaz Dar; Dar was one of the founding members of the JKLF who would later gain notoriety as the first militant killed when he was shot dead during an attack on the residence of the deputy inspector general, A.M. Watali, in September 1988. Aijaz hung around two other students who would later become prominent militants, Shakeel Ahmed Bakshi and Hilal Beg. That was how Irshad started meeting militants and became familiar with many of them.

I met Irshad more than two decades later, in London, where he had sought asylum in 2004 after fleeing Pakistan out of disillusionment. Irshad told me that when he lived at home, in Baramulla, his best friend was a fellow named Shahid Ali Shah, who came from an important NC family and was the nephew of Khwaja Mubarak Shah, a former state minister and MP from Baramulla, and known as one of Sheikh Abdullah's trusted lieutenants. In 1989 and 1990, as mentioned earlier, militants who burst upon the scene were targeting various groups of people, one of which were members of mainstream parties. In January 1990, some militants came to Irshad's house in Baramulla, looking for his friend Shahid Ali.

The militants told Irshad to guide them to Shahid Ali's place. The ringleader was Prince Khan, who was Nayeem's brother; Irshad knew Nayeem of course as a close lieutenant of Shabir Shah, and since Nayeem was a distant relative of his. He also realised that these militants, led by Prince Khan, were going to kill Shahid Ali and had surrounded his house. Thus, to save his friend, Irshad said he would join the militants. Fortunately, as Shahid Ali was unavailable, the militants went away.

One thing led to another, and in June 1990, at the age of twenty-four and having fathered a daughter who was now fifteen months, he crossed the LoC. As soon as he did so he wept, the weight of the moment coming down on him. He realised he might never go home (he still hasn't been able to return to Kashmir); that he had lost his ident.i.ty, his daughter, his roots. His companion during the crossing, another advocate named Abdul Salam Rather, told him to cheer up.

In December 1990January 1991, the Jehad Council was formed, and about ten of the militant representatives gathered in Islamabad to discuss its formation and who would sit on the council. Irshad was selected as the secretary general, and when the time came to choose a chairman, a veteran militant named Azam Inquilabi spoke up and told the gathering that they had to decide who it would be; and then he walked out of the room. Obviously his message was that they should pick him. So they did.

The ISI, when it learnt of this, was not amused. The ISI's Kashmir group officers summoned a couple of the militant representatives and asked them what was going on. Basically, according to Irshad, the ISI wanted total control of the jehadis and anything happening without their knowledge was unthinkable. The consequence was that there was a Kashmiri Jehad Council and a Pakistani Jehad Council for some time, until the ISI realised how bad two councils looked and got them to unify. The whole episode was telling of Pakistan's true intentions; after all, this was a Kashmiri movement. It was the beginning of Irshad's disillusionment with Pakistan.

When I was in R&AW, Firdous reminded me of his friend Irshad. 'Irshad Malik se baat kariye,' Firdous said. 'Irshad Malik ko laaye, he's keen to come back.'

This was early 2000. 'Tell me a connection,' I said. 'Tell me a way.'

'I have told you,' Firdous said. 'Ab aap dekhe.'

Then I heard that Irshad was going off to London in 2004, where he would seek asylum. But by that time, I had left the government; I was in the PMO, and had left when Vajpayee lost power. For whatever it's worth, if I had been in a position to bring him back, I would have. When I met him a decade later in London, we chatted for an hour and a half, and in that time he said so many things. He is a wealth of information. But I also realised when I met him that he was better off in London than he could ever be in Kashmir.

The other thing, which really ought to have happened but has not, is the return of Salahuddin himself. After Majid Dar's a.s.sa.s.sination Salahuddin showed an inclination to return to Kashmir: contact was even established which only confirmed his serious intent.

Over the years after Dar's return, Salahuddin showed great keenness to return, though some people in the Valley were not willing to trust him. In fact, he had shown an interest long before, sometime in 1995, in a conversation to, of all people, Syed Mir Qasim, the Congress chief minister of J&K from 1971 till 1975 (when Sheikh Abdullah took over).

I was interacting quite a lot with Mir Qasim from 1994 to '96, because Qasim was a great supporter of Farooq Abdullah and I was working on getting the political process revived in the militancy-hit state. Qasim would tell me, we must keep talking. 'Sab se baat kariye,' he said. 'Doctor Saheb ko khush rakhiye.'

And Qasim told me one day that he got a call from Salahuddin.

I was taken aback. What did he say?

'Qasim Saheb, hame mat bhooliye,' Salahuddin apparently said. 'I have heard that you are getting everyone into the dialogue. If you are initiating dialogue please don't forget me.'

Then there is the story of Salahuddin's son.

One of Salahuddin's big concerns was his son, who had qualified for medical college admission, but in Jammu, not in Srinagar; possibly the grades required for admission for Srinagar were higher. But the boy and his father were desperate that he somehow get into Srinagar. So Salahuddin reached out to everyone, and he spoke to my IB colleague, K.M. Singh, who was in charge of the IB's Srinagar unit (a post I held from 1988 to 1990).

K.M. also had a good equation with Farooq Abdullah: they reached out to one another often, they understood each other, and they trusted one another. K.M. went to the chief minister with the proposal, and said: 'Sir, yeh ek kaam kar dijiye.'

Farooq agreedwhich in itself is a story that repeatedly takes place, that of Farooq's ultimate nationalism, particularly when issues of national security are involved. Many people doubt Farooq, even prime ministers such as Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee, but those of us who saw Farooq up close and over a period of time, knew that of all the Kashmiris, Farooq was the one Kashmiri who was always there for India. He said time and time again that Kashmir's accession to India was final and irrevocable, the only Kashmiri to do so.

Salahuddin's son got the admission, and Salahuddin called K.M. up and said: 'I'm eternally grateful to you.'

Words like that should be capitalised on, but unfortunately we never did. We could have brought Salahuddin back, he was willing, but it was just a matter of when to bring him in. One of those things where timing was on a razor's edge. Perhaps we wasted too much time. By the time this matter of his son's admission happened, I was no longer in R&AW but in the PMO, where the focus was the 2002 elections rather than bringing individuals back, even someone as big a deal as Salahuddin. Just imagine what a big thing it would have been in Kashmir if Salahuddin had returned and begun a dialogue for, after all, he was a political person.

After I left, however, R&AW did not show the same interest in Kashmir. Whatever excitement there was in R&AW over Kashmir was because of me, and the baggage I had acc.u.mulated and carried over from the IB. I was able to do a lot because I had a good equation with my batchmate who was the IB chief, Shyamal Datta.

By 2001, Salahuddin was ready to come back, and I advocated it hundreds of times. Possibly the chief after me, Vikram Sood, had other interests; and his people might have thought that since I was handling Kashmir generally from the PMO, there was no need for them to get involved. C.D. Sahay, who was chief after Sood, should have had every reason to be interested but somehow it was one of those things that never happened. I never intervened beyond a point. That's one of the things about the spy agenciesonce you're out, you're out, and for good reason, considering the sensitivity of the work we do.

One of the things Irshad Malik harped on was that there are still 2,400 Kashmiris in Pakistan, most of whom are married and settled. Out of those, about 2,000 are unhappy with their meagre existence and the hostile environment. The rest have done well for themselves and are happy. All of them were kids when they went, but that was twenty-five years ago. We could do very well by bringing that disgruntled 2,000 back. They want to come home.

Omar Abdullah as chief minister had spoken of a rehabilitation programme, but we in India haven't been able to work it out. It shows our lack of confidence. So go ahead, tell those Kashmiris: we're not interested in you, it's no big deal to us if you rot there. Yet you can't do that either.

I was on a TV news show after I left the PMO, possibly in 2005 or 2006. Some fellows came to my house and said: 'Hum Kashmir pe aapka interview lena chahate hain.'

'Kya interview lena chahate ho?' I asked.

'Kucch baatein hain,' they said.

'There's nothing to talk about.' I was ready to put down the phone.

'Salahuddin bhi hain iss interview mein,' they said. So I said: 'Okay, I'm ready.'

There was Salahuddin from Pakistan, there was a young and articulate journalist from Srinagar, and there was me. We talked, and the interesting part of that conversation was about dialogue, so I said: 'Salahuddin Saheb should also think about dialogue.'

In response, he said: 'Hamare liye toh table pe jagah hi nahin hain.'

I a.s.sured him there was s.p.a.ce at the negotiating table for him. 'Table pe toh bahut jagah hain, Salahuddin Saheb,' I said. 'Table pe hamesha jagah hoti hain.'

'Lekin hamare se toh koi baat bhi nahin karta,' Salahuddin replied.

So I said: 'Salahuddin Saheb jaante hain baat kaise hoti hai, that's not a big issue.'

And he laughed.

But Salahuddin keeps sending messages. Even now I get messages. There are guys who come to me and say that the fellow wants to come back. And I pa.s.s this thing on to the government. I presume someone follows it up, but I have no idea. The thing is really, more than anything, how much clarity, time and effort you are willing to put into an operation like this. Only then will they come to you.

Yet twenty years later, our friend is still there, stranded in Pakistan.

8.

'THIS MOVEMENT IS AN EXPERIMENT

AND IT WILL Pa.s.s': A.G. LONE

Pakistan's failed gamble in Kargil also had an impact on the separatists in Kashmir, as it did with Majid Dar. One such man was Abdul Ghani Lone, the lone veteran politician among the separatists. In the late autumn of 1999, a few months after Kargil, Lone returned from a trip to America, via Dubai, a changed man. In Dubai, he had a meeting with the ISI's number two man, Maj. Gen. Jamshed Gulzar Kayani. Lone told Major General Kayani: 'It is time for a dignified exit for Kashmiris', from their movement. The ISI official was dismissive, as ISI officials always were they never wanted to hear what the Kashmiris thought, they only wanted their plans executedand so when Lone returned to India, I sought him out.

It might surprise a lot of people but when I spent two years in Srinagar on an IB posting from 1988 to 1990 I never got to meet Lone. It was a grave omission because those days we were obsessed with the FarooqRajiv relationship and Lone had sidelined himself from the mainstream. When I thought about it later on I asked myself what the h.e.l.l I was doing in Srinagar. In all honesty, at that point I was spending most of my time with Farooq Abdullah, the National Conference and the Congress, and one didn't move very much beyond that. It was also my brief from my then boss, M.K. Narayanan, to keep Farooq on the right side of Delhi so a lot of focus went there.

It took me maybe five years to understand that the business of Kashmir is much bigger, that it is not just the Abdullahs though they are key to the whole thingand that there is more to it.

There had been opportunities to meet Lone Saheb. In Srinagar there was a business community of Punjabisnot just Sikhs, but Hindus as wellwho left along with the Kashmiri Pandits in the exodus of 1990. Being a Punjabi I had friends in this group. Some would say, 'Do you know Lone Saheb?'

'No, I don't.'

'Aap hamare saath taash khelo, Lone Saheb taash ke bahut shaukeen hain.'

'What does he play?' I asked.

'He plays rummy with us.'

Obviously, Lone was fond of gambling.

The fact of the matter was that Lone Saheb was a proud Kashmiri of humble origins, and at heart he was a liberalas were many Kashmiris of that era. He liked his drink, he used to go to Srinagar Club, and he played cards with his Punjabi friends. There was an inspector-general of police in J&K, Amar Kapoor, who died in service of a heart attack and he was a buddy of Lone's.

In fact, someone suggested that at one time Lone might have been an atheist and a communist. While researching this book, I met an expatriate Kashmiri in London, an educationist named Abdullah Raina, about whom there is more in the next chapter. Raina said that there used to be something in Kashmir called the 'No G.o.d Federation', and that Lone Saheb was a member.

I checked with Lone's son Sajad about this, and he claimed that this was just a lot of Jamaati propaganda. 'Was there such a thing?' I asked.

'Yeah,' Sajad said. 'It was talked about, but Dad was not a part of it. He was not an unbeliever.'

'All right,' I said. 'Was he a leftist or a rightist?'

'Yeah,' Sajjad said. 'He was a leftist, he was a socialist.'

As Raina put it, Lone was a different type of person from what he became and what many think he was. He started his innings long ago; born in a village in Kupwara in May 1932, Lone obtained a law degree from Aligarh Muslim University, and it was during his early days as a lawyer that he was drawn into politics. As he told Pakistan's Newsline magazine in an interview in 2001 (published after his death in 2002), there was a judge in whose court in Handwara he argued many cases; that judge drew him aside one day and said: 'If MLAs are trying to intervene in cases, it is due partly to the fact that there is no one to oppose them. You are the first person from your area to have educated himself. You are an advocate now. You must come to the rescue of your people.'

Lone thus joined G.M. Sadiq's Democratic National Council. Sadiq was to become the last prime minister of Kashmir, and the first chief minister, heading a Congress party government from 1965 till his death in December 1971. He was a Marxist with a reputation for honesty, which was a rare quality in public life. Lone was impressed with Sadiq's honesty and his argument that it was futile to fight the mighty government of India. 'Instead, he argued that we should become part of the system and persuade India to recognise that people in Kashmir cannot be ruled by force,' Lone later said.

Lone joined the Indian National Congress, and entered the J&K a.s.sembly in 1967, when Sadiq was the Congress chief minister, and two years later was made a junior minister. Many Kashmiris blame Sadiq for the erosion in Kashmir's autonomy; and even Lone (much later) blamed his former mentor: 'In 1964 the biggest blow to our autonomy occurred during Sadiq's government.' The big blow was the change in nomenclature, from prime minister to chief minister, and from Sadr-e-Riyasat to governor. Sadiq also enacted laws that circ.u.mvented the Article 370, which served as a bridge between J&K's autonomy and the Indian Const.i.tution.