The Meadow (22 page)

Since 1989, being a journalist in the valley had become a deadly business. Apart from working in Kashmir’s brimming hospital emergency wards, where corpses collected like pencils in a jar, there was no other profession that brought a person so close to death on a daily basis. Reporters like Yusuf, working from their lair in the Srinagar Press Enclave, a warren of small, smoke-filled offices set back from Residency Road in the heart of the city, steered a delicate path around the demands of the militants, with their guns and cudgels. Simple
revolutionaries, Pakistan secessionists, Kashmiri nationalists and puritanical
mullahs
of every flavour and colour, from the hennaed to the greying, every one of them wanted to be depicted by the BBC as a leading man. It was the same with the Indian security forces, who similarly jostled for airtime and prominence, from the portly police officers bulging out of their khakis to the sallow-skinned Intelligence Bureau agents.

But even this old hand was disturbed by the night-time conversation that took place on 4 July, many hours before anyone else had heard about al Faran, and Jane, Julie and Cath had scrambled down to Pahalgam.

‘
Jameel-sahib? Vaaray?
’ the caller had started politely, asking after Yusuf’s health. The journalist thought he recognised the voice, its Kashmiri diction with a southern burr, but the man did not volunteer a name. ‘
Vaaray
,’ Yusuf replied cautiously. Yes, thanks, he was well.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked, hoping that here was a good story, but worried too that he knew the voice, and that it was one that always presaged grim news.

‘
Aghwa karne wala
,’ said the caller, using the Urdu word for kidnapper. Yusuf’s news antennae pricked up at the thought that he was being tipped off to a live abduction of some kind. ‘Details,’ he replied respectfully, realising that this caller sounded like Sikander, the Movement’s Anantnag commander. A key player in the insurgency rocking south Kashmir, he was one of the most wanted men in the valley. Unwilling to come to town unless it was a dire emergency, Sikander needed his mouthpieces in the media, and for a time he had called up Yusuf.

However, the BBC man was surprised, and a little frightened, to hear from him now. Their last conversation had been more than a year back, in June 1994, and it had not ended well, with Sikander physically threatening Yusuf for failing to report some story or other. ‘So why is he renewing contact with me now?’ Yusuf wondered.

‘
Ghayr mulki
,’ said the anonymous caller. The phrase meant ‘foreign’. Yusuf bit his tongue and wondered: ‘This could be a very significant story. Do I have it to myself?’

The caller spilled some more details, saying that the abduction of the foreigners was the work of ‘al Faran’. Like everyone else who heard this name, Yusuf frowned, as he jotted it down on his pad. He suspected that this group must be either a blind or an offshoot of a better-known faction. In an insurgency that had disintegrated into many hundreds of outfits, prompted by spies from Pakistan and India who encouraged dogfights and jealousies by sponsoring sectarian hits and fomenting betrayals, this was by no means unusual. ‘Anyhow,’ Yusuf thought, ‘whoever’s behind the kidnapping doesn’t really matter just yet. It was enough that there had been a crime.’ He knew the news would trigger a feeding frenzy: foreigners (for which he read tourists) abducted at gunpoint, no doubt while trekking in the mountains of Kashmir, the only place to which a trickle of backpackers still came. He spared a momentary thought for the unsuspecting holidaymakers, whoever they were, unfamiliar with the local terrain and language, uninitiated in the pervasive terror of the valley, hauled from their tents by masked men speaking a Babel of languages.

The caller recapped. Four foreigners trekking above Pahalgam had been seized at gunpoint by a militant outfit calling itself al Faran. There would be dire consequences for the hostages unless the Indian government agreed to free twenty-one Muslim prisoners incarcerated in Indian jails. The man rattled off a long list of names, and stressed that the clock was ticking.

After he had hung up, Yusuf wondered how he should proceed. Reporting these kinds of incidents in Kashmir carried considerable personal risks. Twice, over the years, masked men had lobbed grenades at his office and his home, unhappy about one of his bulletins. Another aggrieved group had demanded he appear before its
qayadat
(leadership council), or face execution. A third had denounced him as a collaborator just for reporting the outspoken views of a junior Congress minister, Rajesh Pilot.

Threats came from all sides. Back in the summer of 1990, soldiers from the 11th Gurkha Rifles had abducted him from Srinagar and transported him several hours away to remote Uri, far from friends and contacts, for interrogation. There was no point in his blaming
whoever had made whatever unsubstantiated allegations the Indian Army was now acting upon. In those early days of the militancy, becoming a suspect was as unavoidable as catching a cold. All it required was for a needy contact to haemorrhage the names of everyone he could think of while being dangled by his ankles, with a funnel shoved up his rectum. And then his whole neighbourhood was incriminated. This was a favoured method of the security forces – petrol, preferably laced with chilli powder, decanted into a naked, upended prisoner. After thirty gruelling hours in the hands of Lt. Col. Bhanwar Singh, Yusuf somehow talked his way free, having to make his own way back to distant Srinagar. But in a dirty war you learned not to take things too personally.

Nine months ago the Indian security forces had got him again, beating him viciously as he covered a protest by the Daughters of the Nation, a fringe women’s group lobbying for strict adherence to Koranic law, demanding that women completely cover up. For centuries, Muslim women of all ages had walked with their faces uncovered in Kashmir, having little truck with Islamists or their garb. But after the attack on Yusuf some people came to the conclusion that maybe the Daughters were right, and only by concealing their entire persons within an Afghan
burqa
would they be protected from a state so pathological that it was happy to see a BBC man thrashed in broad daylight.

Yusuf had been hospitalised for four days. Afterwards, friends in the Press Enclave had warned him to get out of the valley and let things simmer down. But he had stayed. Not long afterwards Ghulam Mohammed, a well-liked freelancer, had received a night visit from the Indian Army’s Punjab regiment and been asked to write up a heroic tale about the recent slaying of two militants. Ghulam had told colleagues that his research revealed that the dead men were in fact blameless locals who had been killed in cold blood. The soldiers were furious, warning Ghulam that there would be repercussions, and days later the journalist lay dead, shot in his own parlour, along with his eight-year-old son. The front pages of the next morning’s papers were printed black all over in protest at the killings.

Still, there was no shortage of Kashmiris wanting to do what Yusuf did. The reason lay flapping in the wind on the walk up to Amira Kadal, the arched bridge that linked Residency Road to Srinagar’s central market. On any morning, come rain or snow, newspaper vendors laid out titles in a fan on their handcarts. A literate state of loquacious inhabitants, gripped by an emergency in which every form of communication was often withdrawn as a form of collective punishment, had become fixated by news. Yusuf kept the voice of Sikander in his head as he prepared a late-night dispatch.

Yusuf Jameel and Sikander had spoken many times, and had met at least twice. The first time had been early in 1994, when Sikander had telephoned the Press Enclave to rant about the arrest of Nasrullah Langrial, the notorious Pakistani militant who for more than a year had been careering around the valley causing mayhem. Six weeks previously the Indians had finally caught up with Langrial, and Yusuf had reported the incident, telling colleagues afterwards that the arrest of such a high-profile Pakistan-backed
mujahid
would ‘result in bloodshed’.

The Movement would do whatever it could to spring their man, Sikander had warned then. He had also asked Yusuf to come to a mountain hideout, promising him a scoop. Heart in mouth, the BBC stringer had eventually agreed to meet him at an isolated rendezvous. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he had said to himself. Which is all well and good somewhere like London or New York, where at worst you might lose a handful of banknotes on a wasted lunch. But here in Kashmir, if things went wrong someone was likely to find his body thrown into a gutter behind the cemetery in Anantnag. For security, and in case there were any picture opportunities, Yusuf had taken along his great friend Mushtaq Ali, an Agence France-Press photographer.

Following detailed instructions, the two had climbed up through the steep woods rising to the east of Anantnag, eventually arriving at a remote col somewhere near Chhatargul village, where a tall, bearded young Kashmiri introduced himself as Sikander. Alongside him were
other fighters: one called the Turk, another called the Afghani, and a Yemeni who was referred to as ‘Supahi’. At the time, Yusuf and Mushtaq had had no idea of the significance of these men, or of the aspirations of the newly launched Movement. But just as Sikander was beginning to explain what all this was about, chaos had broken out. ‘Run!’ Sikander had screamed, pointing to a glint high up on a mountain ledge that Yusuf had assumed was just sunlight bouncing off some long-abandoned shrine. ‘Telescopic sights!’ Sikander had bellowed as he headed for cover.

Yusuf and Mushtaq had run for their lives, following the gunmen into the pine trees. Here, to their shock, they found several miserable-looking Indian soldiers tied to each other. ‘Sikander told us that these men had just been captured at the water gardens of Verinag.’ He was referring to the former holiday retreat for Mughal Emperors, south of Anantnag town. One of the prisoners was identified as Major Bhupinder Singh, whom Sikander intended to trade for Langrial. Following Sikander’s instructions, Mushtaq had taken some photographs, and he and Yusuf returned to Srinagar to break the kidnapping story. After New Delhi had refused to budge, Major Singh had been photographed once more, this time dead and face-down in an open sewer.

Barely a month later, Yusuf had been called to a press conference in Badami Bagh, Srinagar’s army nerve centre south of Dal Lake, a vast encampment of razor wire, whitewashed lookout towers and sandbags that ran alongside Maulana Azad Road and extended into the forests of Shankarashariya, the pointed hill that sat beside Dal Lake. Badami Bagh was named after an almond orchard that had once grown there, but these days all Kashmiris knew it as BB Cantt: headquarters of the Indian Army 15th Corps, the force responsible for maintaining law and order throughout the whole of Jammu and Kashmir. Now it was the security forces’ turn to gloat. A gleeful Corps Commander, Brigadier Arjun Ray, had a surprise. His troops had just captured Masood Azhar and Sajjad Khan, aka the Afghani, two key players in the Movement, a relatively new ISI-backed militant group that the Indian Army described as being ‘intent on spreading chaos
through the valley’. Yusuf says: ‘The army was understandably in a back-slapping mood over the arrests.’ That evening he received an anonymous phone call with another angle on the story. His voice shaking and incoherent, the caller had warned that the Movement would respond. Yusuf knew at once. This was Sikander, and his message presaged a fifteen-day bombing spree.

When Yusuf next heard from Sikander it was June 1994, and this time the young militant was calmer, and sounded pleased with himself. He revealed that the Movement had just kidnapped two British tourists from the hills above Pahalgam. One was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, Kim Housego. The other was a video director from London called David Mackie. ‘Now,’ Sikander warned Yusuf, ‘their lives are hanging by a thread unless Langrial, Masood and the Afghani are freed.’

The Movement had crossed a line. Up to now, most home-grown Kashmiri militants had agreed that targeting foreigners would destroy any hopes Kashmir had of returning to its former incarnation as a haven for backpackers and trekkers once this war was over and done with. Until the kidnapping of Housego and Mackie, this understanding had largely been adhered to, barring two deviations very early on in the conflict. A couple of Swedish engineers had been captured back in March 1991 by the Muslim Janbaz Force, a Kashmiri outfit, but had been released unharmed after ninety-seven days. Three months later, eight Israeli tourists were seized from a houseboat on Dal Lake. This incident had quickly degenerated into farce, with the tourists snatching the kidnappers’ weapons and all escaping, except one who was fatally wounded.

As Yusuf wrote up his story on the kidnapping of Housego and Mackie, wondering why Sikander had broken the unspoken rule, he had an unexpected visitor in the Press Enclave. It was David Housego, whom Yusuf had known from his days as the New Delhi bureau chief for the
Financial Times
. Now retired, David had remained in the city to run his own business. David and Yusuf were men of the same mould, the Englishman having been a much-admired reporter with influential contacts across the subcontinent and a wide circle of loyal
Indian friends. Now David explained that he wanted Yusuf to help kick up a stink in order to try to free his son Kim, who had just been seized with David Mackie while the family was trekking to celebrate David’s wife Jenny’s fiftieth birthday and Kim’s impending departure for Britain, where he was about to start boarding school.

Yusuf grabbed his notebook, and David described how he, Jenny and Kim had been held up on their return from a day trip to the Kolahoi Glacier. Having camped in the Meadow for a night, just as Jane and Don, Keith and Julie, Paul and Cath and John Childs would do a year later, they had packed up and were walking down to Aru when three men carrying Kalashnikovs stepped out from the trees to block their path. David’s initial assumption was that they were Kashmiris from one of the groups he had interviewed during his many trips to the state for the
Financial Times
. But without saying a word, one of the men had put his hand in David’s pocket and taken his money. ‘The leader then said, “We are looking for Israeli spies. No harm will come to you,”’ David told Yusuf. ‘He told us we would be escorted down to Aru to have our passports checked. We would wait for his return that evening.’