The Meadow (36 page)

Waved through the security cordon at the top of Church Lane, Tikoo’s Ambassador came to a halt in the gravel outside Saklani’s office-cum-residence, where the Security Advisor was waiting for him on the steps. ‘We only have two hours,’ Saklani said, looking anxious. He immediately turned to walk into the building, beckoning Tikoo to follow. To Tikoo, Saklani seemed to be stringing out the orders
without explaining the context, like Sadashiv Amrapurkar hamming it up as Commissioner What-Not in
Mohra
, the Bollywood smash from the year before. ‘The phone upstairs will ring,’ said Saklani. ‘My security officer will pick up the receiver and pass it to me. He is not to be allowed to talk to the caller. Understand? I will introduce you. And then you take over.’ Tikoo did not understand. As they mounted the wooden stairs to the first floor, Saklani finally spat it out: ‘Al Faran. They have made contact and want to negotiate. You will be our point man with them. Find out what they want. Get to the bottom of this nasty business.’

Tikoo felt trapped, and wondered how to react to the order that would involve him conducting telephone negotiations with the outfit that had kidnapped the Western trekkers. As IG Crime Branch he had followed events closely over the past ten days, and had dispatched his best team up to Pahalgam to have a sniff around, sidestepping the Deputy Superintendent of Bijbehara, Kifayat Haider (an officer he believed was too self-regarding), on whose patch the crimes had been committed.

Now Tikoo was being thrust into the hot seat, just a few hours before the midnight deadline set by al Faran. He feared that he was being set up as the fall guy, given little time to do the job properly, but taking the blame if the whole thing went belly up. ‘For God’s sake,’ he started to say, forgetting where he was, ‘why don’t you get the Int. Chief to do it?’ he said, referring to Gopal Sharma. The twilight world was Sharma’s speciality, and he was better placed to understand the nuances thrown up by any dialogue with al Faran (he was also somebody Tikoo would not mind throwing to the wolves). ‘The Int. Chief is tied up right now,’ responded Saklani, tightly. ‘You are the right man, that is to say the
best
man.’ He paused before delivering the
coup de grâce
. ‘The hostage-taking is a crime, a crime of the tallest order. As Inspector General of Crime Branch it is your duty to take the lead.’ For a minute the two men stared at each other. Then Tikoo backed down. ‘He was my senior. I had no choice.’

One hour to go
. Tikoo, feeling ‘more nervous than I had been in years’, wondered what he would say to the kidnappers. He had been in the force since 1970, and now felt as he did back then when he first graduated into the elite Indian Police Service with three all-important letters following his honorific, rank and name: Shri ASP Rajinder Tikoo, IPS.

Thirty-five minutes to go
. Saklani was still talking on the phone with some other army-
wallah
. Was there actually going to be a briefing, Tikoo wondered. ‘Time was ticking, and I was worried that no one had told me what the government line was. What were we willing to offer? How were we to respond if the kidnappers said they were already killing hostages?’ He was not a trained hostage negotiator, although over the years he had had some experience of dealing with kidnappers. But then, he didn’t believe in over-preparation. He was an instinctive detective who vested much in hunches, and whose contribution to the force had been as a moderniser and galvaniser, qualities he now tried to tell himself had directly led to his being here, waiting for Saklani to get off the phone.

Twenty minutes to go
. Why was he here? To Tikoo this assignment looked like every other job he’d ever been given by New Delhi: ‘a bear trap’. He suspected that Saklani might be distancing himself from the messy front end, with all its potential hazards and pitfalls, letting a Kashmiri take the fall. Although, he thought, it was something that a Kashmiri should even be in on such a high-level operation. When the militancy had taken hold in 1989, the Kashmiri police force had been shattered by it. Ramshackle, underfunded and poorly armed, fighting with Second World War carbines and First World War strategies, it had initially been overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of highly motivated Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters flooding into the region, armed with Pakistani semi-automatics and American RDX explosive. Kashmiri police officers and constables were required to crack down on a local nationalist movement that in many instances was led by neighbours and former schoolfriends. Many policemen with deep roots in the community found their loyalties painfully divided, and some defected to the militants. Without proper training, or
protection, and labouring beneath a weak leadership, those who elected to fight for the state sometimes responded to the insurgency with a terrible malice and ill-discipline.

Tikoo had been in the police control room on 20 January 1990, when the security forces shot up demonstrators near the Gawakadal Bridge in Srinagar, and he remembered watching, with a lump in his throat, as scores of corpses on stretchers were brought inside. Later many officers had cut out a passage from an Indian commentator, Balraj Puri, that was stuck on the office wall. ‘It was no longer a fight between the militants and the security forces,’ Puri had warned, ‘but a total insurgency of the entire population.’

Rather than bolster the flailing Kashmiri police force, New Delhi had shipped in several hundred thousand outsiders from the CRPF, dark-skinned Indian paramilitaries with no affinity for the valley who, Tikoo thought, proved even more indiscriminate in their use of violence. By the last days of January 1990, Tikoo had counted at least 130 unarmed demonstrators shot dead, with the Indian paramilitaries shooting the wounded too. Srinagar’s Bone and Joint Hospital was dubbed the Hospital for Bullet and Bomb Blast Injuries. ‘That was when the law enforcers had begun fighting each other,’ he said, recalling how hundreds of local cops had trained their guns on the CRPF. Senior police chiefs referred to it as ‘the Mutiny’, while others more kindly called it ‘the Strike’. Either way, over a tense few days the Kashmiri police had their guns taken away, and the incoming Governor, Jagmohan Malhotra, publicly derided Kashmir as ‘the valley of Scorpions’.

Ten minutes to go
. How they had all hated that label. How demoralised the Kashmiri-born upper echelons of the force had become. For a clever patriot who was also a Kashmiri, watching New Delhi appointees leapfrog the local officer class had been too much for Tikoo to stomach. Bullying figures, with no local knowledge, they had thundered around the state throwing up dust, spilling blood and talking loudly in Hindi to people who didn’t understand the language. Tikoo and his golf buddies took to calling these New Delhi-planted police and intelligence officers ‘the East India Company’, like the English
merchants who set out to establish a monopoly over trade in the Far East in the early seventeenth century. ‘They knew about as much about the Kashmir imbroglio as I did about my wife’s recipe for
tandoori
fish made from singara netted in the Baghilar Dam,’ said Tikoo. In return, the outsiders despised the Kashmiri police cadre too, suspecting them of collaborating with Kashmir’s uprising. They dubbed Tikoo and his local colleagues ‘the Pakistanis’.

Any misfortunes that beset the East India Company were celebrated by the Pakistanis as proof of New Delhi’s failings. Tikoo cited one much-derided episode concerning a planned celebration for the centenary of India’s elite Intelligence Bureau (IB), which oversaw domestic spying across the subcontinent. In Kashmir, it was decided that the public would be invited to a party and a lecture. IB agents and their helpers were pressed into fly-posting announcements across the valley, inadvertently identifying themselves and their bases along the way. Thankful for this unexpected windfall, the militants were able to pick off a string of IB spies and their proxies in quick succession. ‘When the killing stopped there were thirty-nine dead, including four leading agents,’ Tikoo recalled. The IB’s Kashmir intelligence network would take years to recover.

‘The Pakistanis’ had also found it hard not to celebrate in January 1992, when the police chief of Kashmir, a brusque Indian called Jitendra Saxena, narrowly survived being blown up in his own office by his Kashmiri stenographer.

Five minutes to go
. Finally, in 1993, there had been a sea change as a result of a potentially calamitous event: the army’s ill-advised siege of the lakeside mosque at Hazratbal. It had started disastrously in October that year, when the siege had set in and Indian security forces had slain scores of unarmed demonstrators elsewhere in the valley who were protesting against the operation. The Kashmiri police backed a controversial strategy to offer everyone inside the mosque an amnesty, on condition that they agreed to being interrogated by local officers. This plan, which led to the peaceful defusing of the crisis, and the saving of the mosque, made everyone believe a little more in the judgement of the constabulary. Rajinder Tikoo, who by
then was a senior officer, claimed to have had a personal hand in the matter, and used the momentum it provided to propose something more radical and permanent. Instead of relying on the heavy-handed CRPF, he suggested the police should raise a roving mobile unit of sharpshooters, made up of Kashmiri officers. They could be deployed to crack sieges and counter gunfights, thus placing Kashmiris, for the first time, at the forefront of counter-insurgency operations. He even suggested a name: the Special Task Force (STF).

Although the East India Company had privately scoffed, Security Advisor Saklani and the Governor had liked the idea, since Indian security forces were already overcommitted in the region, and pitting Kashmiri against Kashmiri was always preferable to losing Indian men. Saklani was heard to say that the plan demonstrated Tikoo’s ingenuity, and by the time he was promoted to IG Kashmir Zone in February 1994, the STF was a reality. Selecting as its leader a respected and gruff Kashmiri Muslim police officer, Superintendent Farooq Khan, who had worked his way up through the ranks and was known as a straight dealer, Tikoo pitched the STF to his men: anyone who joined could keep the weapons or communication equipment they seized from the enemy. ‘It was an incentive that worked,’ Tikoo reflected. ‘However, the STF became a
Dirty Dozen
kind of a thing, and we attracted all the encounter specialists, the gang bangers and violent guys.’

By the time Tikoo had become IG Crime Branch in February 1995, the STF was well on the way to becoming a mobile killing force. Two hundred men had now been signed up, and the sight of one of its white Gypsy jeeps thundering into a village was enough to terrify residents. The police’s sledgehammer was also proving difficult to control, with the STF facing mounting allegations that it was settling scores and syphoning off booty wherever it roamed, its officers associated with multiple claims of rape and murder. In remote areas where Indian Army camps and STF bases often sat side by side, it was also forming unofficial allegiances with the army that worried the regular police force. But the conception and execution of the STF idea had brought Tikoo recognition as an innovator, and as a bridge between the Pakistanis and the East India Company. Were these the qualities
that had got him to the negotiating table with al Faran, he wondered. Or was he being punished?

Then the phone rang. It was midnight on 15 July.

Security officer Altaf Ahmed passed the handset to his boss, as had been planned. ‘I have my IG Crime here,’ Saklani told the caller. ‘Why don’t you talk to him? He is one of the most experienced in this field.’ He passed the handset to Tikoo, mouthing: ‘Arrange the next call in your own lodgings, and not in my office.’ Putting the phone to his ear, Tikoo heard the familiar hiss and whine that told him this was a local call. He and the kidnappers’ intermediary were probably sitting in Srinagar within a mile of each other.

The room was empty, barring Tikoo. There was nothing but a yawning silence on the other end of the line. ‘These things were very ticklish, and hostage negotiation is not everyone’s cup of tea,’ says Tikoo. ‘If you fail to engage immediately, you have destroyed the whole thing in the first twenty-four hours. My way of working was a little different. I didn’t have a rulebook. But I was rather shaky at first, thinking, how will I descend to the terrorist level?’

‘Hello, my friend,’ he began tentatively, taking a note of everything said. ‘What can I do for you?’

Earlier, he had had a brief conversation with Saklani. ‘
Sahib
, how should I do it? What do I do?’ Saklani had replied, ‘You’re a good conversationalist. You go your own way, and try to drag it out as long as possible.’ That was all, there would be no script, and no analyst to assist him. ‘No markers, no “This is our considered policy. You stop at such and such. You offer this. You do this thing, yadda yadda yadda.” So I made it up as I went along.’

At last a voice came over the line, spitting Urdu words like cherry pits.

‘You release our people, otherwise we will kill … this thing … you know. Finish them. We will, each of them, kill … murder … them. Do you understand? We will be true to our word.’

Jotting down these words, Tikoo was annoyed. Nobody had spoken to him like this in a long time. He tried to slow things down, mindful
as he did so of the imminent deadline. ‘Look, my friend, these things are not done in such an abrupt manner. We are not selling vegetables. I am not asking you the price of potatoes. You go slow. What do you want?’

He imagined the caller concealed somewhere, perhaps above an embroidery shop in the maze of Khanyar, a pro-militant quarter of the old city, every fibre in his adversary’s body tensing as he spoke to the enemy. ‘This is the first base: we’re talking,’ Tikoo said to himself, before he was brought back to reality.

‘Release our people. It’s simple. Don’t treat us like we are fools. The consequences will be horrible. Don’t make us show you. We are not afraid to die.’

Tikoo had to find a way to extend the deadline. ‘Who are your people?’ he asked. There had been a list of names delivered as long ago as 5 July, but Tikoo decided to make the man spell it out. ‘There are hundreds of
people
in the jails. You tell me. Which “
our people
”? There are hundreds of thousands of
our people
.’