The Meadow (15 page)

His Pakistani handlers called him, flippantly, ‘the Kashmiri’. But in his native Kashmir, where their name meant nothing, he had many others. His parents had named him Javid Ahmed Bhat. School friends dubbed him ‘Dabrani’, after his village, Dabran, a few miles outside Kashmir’s unruly southern town of Anantnag, an hour and a half’s drive from Srinagar.

Javid was a stocky boy who lived in a two-storey brick house near the village’s communal wash-house – a stone-lined pond where everyone cleaned their linen – and close to the ramshackle store, with its cardboard boxes of five-paisa chews, so congealed that you had to eat them with the wrappers on.

The Bhats were an educated family, Mr Bhat having been a quality-control officer in the district’s agriculture department. Javid had done well enough to qualify for the government college in Anantnag, where he studied engineering. It always seemed to his neighbours that he would be somebody, one of the few who would escape the village, with its spinach-green houses and stone-and-mud lanes that tracked the saffron field. Dabran sat in a quiet copse of walnut and
chinar
(an oriental plane tree), surrounded by terraces of paddy. In high summer the village was dappled in light, and in winter it was frozen to the bone. In the daylight hours Dabran bustled along, while at night, like
most villages in the valley, it coiled up like a fern, its residents locking shutters and barricading doors against the regular Indian security-force patrols that clattered through conducting cordon-and-search operations. Ostensibly, they were trying to catch militants, but they had become vengeful, with windows being smashed and possessions thrown into the mud, doors stoved in, sons and fathers taken away to an uncertain fate, women and girls hauled into dark places where bored soldiers, a long way from home, assaulted them.

As a child, Javid had lived for the spring, when he could finally prise open his bedroom shutters and oil his cricket bat, hand-carved from cheap Kashmiri poplar by an uncle. A pace bowler and a robust batsman, a thinker and a leader, it was no surprise to anyone in Dabran that this boy who others loved to be with had a loyal following by the time he was sixteen. He was a dependable friend, but also a worry to his family.

At college he joined the J&K Students Liberation Front (SLF), the youth wing of the
azadi
or ‘freedom’ movement that had taken root in campuses across Kashmir as a reaction to India’s clumsy rigging of the state elections in 1987. For Javid, the SLF was also a vent for his fear and anger at all that he had seen his neighbours and family endure. He quickly moved up the ranks of the organisation, acquiring another name, Saifullah, to shade his political activities, while his alter ego pushed forward silently, attaining a BSc in engineering.

As the screws tightened around the valley with the introduction of Governor’s Rule in December 1989, the SLF debated how to respond. Like students the world over, they were at the forefront of street protests, but some among their ranks wanted to take up arms and fight. ‘Is it worth marching any more?’ Javid had asked one day at a meeting convened to arrange a demonstration. He had been reading about radical German students who had taken up arms and formed the Red Army Faction in 1970. His intervention stopped all of them in their tracks. ‘Holding placards won’t stop the bloodshed. We are at war,’ he continued. In April 1990, with calls for Kashmir’s
tahreek
, or armed struggle, gaining momentum and being fuelled from over the border by Brigadier Badam and the ISI, Javid became part of a
breakaway SLF bloc that took the plunge following the arrest of several student activists. India would only withdraw, so the argument went, if Kashmiris were willing to make it too costly for them to stay. Javid’s group abducted the Vice Chancellor of Kashmir University and his elderly assistant while they were on their way to Friday prayers. They also snatched the general manager of Hindustan Machine Tools from downtown Srinagar. Their aim was to use the captured men to bargain the release of the jailed activists. A line had been crossed.

The Indian government refused to negotiate, throwing the SLF into a panic. What were they to do now? For days there was a standoff, until reports emerged that the Vice Chancellor and his assistant were to be freed anyway, at Padshahi Bagh, a beauty spot close to Anantnag town. The news was greeted with widespread joy, but as the two hostages clambered through the short grass, heading for freedom, they were shot in the back by unseen gunmen. The third hostage was cruelly killed too, his body dumped in the Srinagar neighbourhood of Batamaloo.

Many in the valley were shocked by these executions. Ordinary Kashmiris and regular SLF members rose up in disgust, pointing out that Indians were always pleased to see Kashmiris killing each other, as it saved them the trouble. Such actions only benefited the oppressor, said the mainstream SLF leadership, denouncing the breakaway faction that Javid had joined. Although he was unconnected to the abductions and killings, he refused to criticise those who had carried them out. ‘They are not
darshit gar
[terrorists], they are
mujahids
,’ he told his friends. ‘Don’t shy away. We have to meet this terror head-on. Remember the massacres of Gawakadal, Sopore and Handwara.’ The bloody events would mark the beginning of Javid’s withdrawal from mainstream Kashmiri society, and while some in the SLF went underground, he sought out more militant comrades. If India was to be beaten, then all the old ways, of soft-edged politicking and mystical faith, had to be replaced by a razor-sharp Islamic identity. The only way to purge India from the valley was through
tahreek
, Javid declared. He signed up with the Ikhwan Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of religiously conservative Kashmiri
mujahids
who had been sizing up the massing Indian security forces. As he took up arms, he was a long way from the schoolboy Javid Ahmed Bhat, or the jaunty cricket player Dabrani. But in his own mind he was not yet far enough.

In the summer of 1990, on the run from the Indian security forces after the Brotherhood had been bloodied in an encounter in Anantnag, Javid unexpectedly stopped by to see his family in Dabran, shinning in through the kitchen window. ‘No need to worry,’ he said, at which his mother and father froze in fear. For Kashmiri parents, said Mr Bhat, these four words meant just one thing: their child was going ‘over there’.

‘We knew then that he was heading for Pakistan. He kissed us and he was gone. Then we heard absolutely nothing.’ For months, hundreds of young men across the valley had been disappearing over the LoC, heading for training camps. But terrible reports soon seeped home of boys, too young and inexperienced to evade the hardened Indian border forces, being cut down the minute they crossed back over into Kashmir. Those who made it further into the valley were also being culled, as India stepped up to the growing militancy. After a while Javid’s parents started mourning, hoping someone would be kind enough to bring his body home to be buried in the village cemetery, a shady spot near a line of knock-kneed
chinars
. But no news came. ‘To be honest, there were times when I would have claimed any body – just so we could say it’s done,’ said his tearful mother.

In Javid’s absence, the pocket handkerchief of scrub that made up Dabran cemetery rapidly filled with ‘martyrs’. One third were boys of Javid’s age, friends with whom he had played cricket in the summer holidays, killed by the Indian Army while serving one
tahreek
organisation or another, some of them home-grown, some funded from across the LoC. Another third were boys who had had no connection to the militancy whatsoever, but were killed just for coming from Dabran, which for many in the Indian security forces was crime enough, given the village’s links to Javid and other up-and-coming figures in the
azadi
movement. The remaining third were unknowns,
mostly gunned down by the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), a new specialist counter-insurgency force raised by India’s army chief in May 1990, whose ruthlessness would change the face of the conflict beyond recognition.

Made up of soldiers seconded from other parts of the Indian Army and paid extra, the original six battalions of the RR – motto
Dridhta aur Virta
, meaning ‘Strength and Bravery’ – had been created as a counter to Brigadier Badam’s ISI operation. But soon the RR, which would have forty thousand men in Kashmir, the largest dedicated counter-insurgency force in the world, was as renowned for its reckless lack of precision as for its ingenuity and valour. In Dabran and other villages across the valley, the bodies of those it had killed, who it described as ‘foreign militants’, were dumped at the local police post, without justification or documents. Most were Kashmiri civilians who had been abducted by the RR and summarily executed, but no one was brave enough to take it to task. Instead, Dabran’s cemetery became a place to bury the evidence, and for collective mourning. Everyone in the village had someone ‘over there’, so the Dabranis clubbed together to pay for the last rites and the burial shrouds of these unclaimed corpses, hoping the same civility would be accorded their kin, should their bodies be found on Pakistani soil.

One day early in 1995, six years into the insurgency, while snow settled on the single track through Dabran, a stranger banged at Mr and Mrs Bhat’s front door. His face was obscured by an unkempt beard and a
pakul
, the flat woolly cap favoured by the Afghan
mujahideen
, and the couple were terrified until he spoke. Then Mrs Bhat fell to her knees. It was Javid, the son who in her mind’s eye she had buried. After the hugging and kissing, and the pouring of
namkeen
(salt tea) from the thermos, Javid cleared his throat. ‘I am not Javid any more,’ he told them, adding that he did not have long to explain. He was with some men with guns, on their way to carry out an important mission. Right now they were stationed outside as lookouts.

‘Where have you been?’ asked his father, wanting a souvenir of his son, a fragment to fill the void of waiting. In Pakistan, Javid told him.
And Afghanistan. Sipping his tea, he explained that while serving in the Muslim Brotherhood he had come across a
mujahid
who had mesmerised him, an implacable, smooth-skinned man nicknamed Supahi al-Yemeni, or ‘the Warrior from Yemen’, who rarely broke into a sweat. Supahi had said that he bottled up his fear. The proof was that in an engagement with the enemy he always remained standing even under heavy fire, trading bullets until his Kalashnikov glowed in the dark. Everyone had been a little afraid of Supahi’s self-control and recklessness, which were daunting qualities for young Kashmiri recruits so raw they still dropped their weapons and tripped over guide ropes at night. But Javid had been drawn in as Supahi told him of his experiences as a veteran of many wars. Believing that in Javid he had found a like-minded soul, Supahi convinced him to undergo specialist training. In the summer of 1990 they had taken a bus to Uri, a town in western Kashmir, then climbed high up to the LoC and crossed over with a few dozen other boys, following a toe-tingling midnight scramble so close to Indian Army camps they could hear the soldiers guffaw. When they finally reached the other side they were exhilarated, calling out ‘
Naraay takbir, Allahu akbar!
’ (Cry out loud, God is great) before sliding down the snowy slopes on their trouser bottoms, like boys in the park. Eventually, as the temperature dropped further, Javid had arrived in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, his face tinged with blue.

Small tent villages run by religious organisations encircled Muzaffarabad, the capital of what all Kashmiris dreamily eulogised as ‘Azad’, or Free Kashmir, the region over the LoC that was administered by Pakistan. Now it had the appearance of a refugee camp and the smell of a rubbish dump. Uniformed instructors, who everyone murmured with respect were members of the ISI or from the Pakistan military, taught Javid how to strip down a Kalashnikov and assemble a rocket launcher. Once a week he ate slivers of fatty mutton; the rest of the time it was cold bread, rice and
daal
scoffed down while squatting on the ground. They dug latrines day and night, but raw sewage flowed everywhere, and wild dogs converged to pick at the garbage left rotting in the open. However, for the first time in his life,
surrounded by pious and like-minded youths, Javid felt alive, and over the weeks he spent there the camp was deluged with new recruits from his side of the Line of Control.

‘Somehow, between prayers, and from one week to the next, thousands of boys came over,’ Javid told his father as he sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the living room of his childhood home in Dabran, a flock cushion wedged behind his back and a Chinese rug thrown over his legs. ‘Within a month there were barely enough weapons to go around, only one Kalashnikov for every seven volunteers.’ They counted out bullets, sharing the few they had equally between them all. Soon there were no live-fire exercises at all. Although Pakistan had planned this secret Kashmiri revolution, it had been taken aback by the speed with which it had spread, and the demand for arms and training. What had started as a dribble of fighters had become a torrent, with one group of 1,800 young men rumoured to have crossed over the LoC in a single day. Wedding caterers from Rawalpindi had to be brought in to cook for the ISI’s massing Kashmir militia. ‘No one teaches you how to prepare for a revolution,’ Javid told his father. ‘Which books should we read? It was chaos.’

While Pakistan tried to come to grips with the forces it had set in motion, Javid moved up the ranks. Many boys were sent back over into Indian Kashmir after just a few weeks of basic guerrilla-warfare training, but Javid, with his BSc in engineering, was picked out. Supahi suggested he accompany him over another mountainous border, this time the ranges that divided Pakistan and Afghanistan. Working their way between boulders on ponies bowed by the weight of bursting saddlebags carrying munitions and banknotes, they eventually reached Camp Yawar, the
jihad
factory of the Holy Warriors where Saifullah, the warrior former student from the Binori Town
madrassa
in Karachi, had trained thousands, the place where Masood Azhar had endured his night-time humiliation. By the time Javid arrived it was capable of housing up to 1,800 recruits, and with strictly assessed diploma courses and a postgraduate programme, Yawar had evolved into a college of war. Here, Javid told his father, were serious-minded revolutionaries. His first lesson had been to accept that he
was no longer a Kashmiri, but an Islamic fighter who would respond to any call to perform holy
jihad
, the world over. ‘First Kashmir, then Palestine,’ he recounted. Mr Bhat stared back at his son, fearing that he understood all too well what this meant.