India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 06 :: Mar. 13 - 26, 1999

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COVER STORY

Another season of massacres

Three massacres on the night of February 19 in the Jammu region could signify a renewed round of macabre killings similar to the ones that punctuated the summer of 1998.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Rajouri and Udhampur

THE wedding feast at Bal Jaralan had ended. Some young men stood inside the wedding marquee, enjoying a last drink of country liquor. Sant Ram, a migrant worker from Madhya Pradesh who worked at a nearby brick kiln, was washing dishes to earn a few extra rupees. No one noticed that a corner of the marquee had been lifted, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists had moved in. In just seconds, seven people were dead, including Sant Ram.

The massacre at Bal Jaralan was the first of three communal massacres on the night of February 19 timed to coincide with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's drive across the Wagah border. The massacres could also signify a renewed round of macabre killings similar to the ones that punctuated the summer of 1998. One family of four was killed at Mohra Fata hamlet of Khorbani, which like Bal Jaralan is a remote village in Rajouri district. Nine members of a family, three of them children, were killed the same night at Barhyana in neighbouring Udhampur district. All the killings were carried out by the far-right Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was also responsible for the killings last year.

Police officials in Jammu and Kashmir had anticipated trouble on the eve of Vajpayee's Pakistan visit. Far-right Islamic groups in Pakistan, many of which sponsor militant groups and secessionist political groups in Jammu and Kashmir, oppose Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's efforts for detente with India. In Rajouri, alarm bells went off four days before the Wagah border crossing. Army intelligence personnel, who intercepted radio signals on the frequencies used by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, overheard controllers commanding their field units to "give Nawaz Sharif a present" by "turning the snow red".

S. SUBRAMANIUM
At Bal Jaralan village in Rajouri district, where seven persons were killed at the venue of a wedding on February 19, policemen talk to Vikas Sharma and Rajeev Sharma, armed service personnel who had come home for their sister's wedding. There are bullet marks on the pump house in the background.

On the night of February 19, personnel of the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Army lay in ambush around Sewari, the village where the first communal massacre in Rajouri district had taken place in September 1997. Police intelligence inputs proved correct. A group of five Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists appeared in Sewari. Two were shot dead, while three escaped using hostages from a nearby hamlet as shields against rocket fire. Over a five-hour walk, sniffer dogs tracked the group up to a point near Bal Jaralan, after which the trail disappeared.

"Our investigation suggests", said Rajouri Senior Superintendent of Police Hemant Lohia, "that this group of three waited in a house near Bal Jaralan, watching the wedding in progress." The village has some 30 Village Defence Committee (VDC) members, recruits who are given a small honorarium and a .303 rifle to protect their communities. Many VDC members were still awake and armed, and the terrorists clearly did not want to risk their lives. By midnight, most of the wedding procession had dispersed, and the young revellers inside the marquee, by now unarmed, were too inebriated to react.

One reason the casualties were not higher at Bal Jaralan was the presence of Vikas Sharma, a soldier in the 13 Jammu Kashmir Rifles, and his brother Rajeev Sharma, a Central Reserve Police Force jawan. Both had come home on leave for their sister's wedding. As soon as Vikas Sharma heard the fire at the wedding venue, he grabbed one of the two .303 rifles from his home nearby, and opened fire into the dark. His brother soon joined him, loosing some 30 rounds of ammunition. "We couldn't see a thing, and weren't hoping to hit the terrorists", said Rajeev Sharma, "but the fire stopped them from staying long enough to pick off the boys who were hiding in the grass, or those who had run into the nearby stream." Rajouri's top Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, Pakistani national Sher Khan, was shot dead on February 5 by a VDC member, Raghubir Singh, at Sonchal village. Even the VDC's rudimentary equipment, terrorists had since understood, could be lethal.

S. SUBRAMANIUM
Two children, whose family members were killed by militants at Baryana village on February 19, with other refugees at the Reasi camp.

There was no similar prospect of escape for Diwan Chand's family at their one-room home in Bharyana. A nine-hour walk from the nearest roadhead, Bharyana is typical of hamlets in the Jammu region. It is not so much a village as a cluster of homes scattered across several hundred metres on the mountainside. Families in this desperately poor region rely on earnings from a single maize crop a year. With the nearest security picket a four-hour walk away, Diwan Chand's family had little choice but to shelter terrorists, and meet their demands for food.

On the night of February 19, the family had finished dinner when seven terrorists, all speaking Urdu and not the local Poonchi dialect, knocked on their door and demanded milk. The family obliged. They then moved towards the house of Sheeba Devi, a few hundred metres away. She recalled: "My dogs started barking and the terrorists told me to shut them up. I was very scared because in July last year, some other armed men had come to my house and taken away our chickens. When I had tried to argue with them, they had beaten me. So this time I hid the four children who were in the house, and fled."

That decision probably saved Sheeba Devi, but sealed Diwan Chand's fate. Past 2 a.m., the terrorists returned, possibly after reconnoitring the area for the largest available target. They again asked the family to warm up milk. As Diwan Chand and his family huddled together, the terrorists suddenly opened fire. Diwan Chand's son-in-law, Dilip Singh, was the only adult survivor. "They stood around the bodies for a while", he said. "My father-in-law's youngest child, two-year-old Shankar Singh was in his mother's arms when the bullets hit her, and had fallen to the ground. He was crying. One of the men said that they should kill him too, but another said: 'Why bother, he'll die soon anyway'."

Shankar Singh was not the only child to survive. His brothers, Jeet Singh, Billu and Ankar Singh, were sleeping on a bed in a corner of the room. The darkness prevented the terrorists from spotting them, huddled as they were under blankets. "I heard the bullets and woke up", said 10-year-old Jeet Singh, Diwan Chand's eldest son. "There were blood and bodies on the floor, but I stayed still. I lay on the bed all night, not knowing what to do. After dawn I left for my uncle's hamlet, which is an hour's walk away." Diwan Chand's four-year- old daughter Vaishno Devi and 14-year-old Kanta Devi, as well as Dilip Singh's one-and-a-half-year-old Bimlo Devi, were killed.

The third massacre of the night at Mohra Fata was no less brutal. What is known of the incident has come from Bagga Gujjar, who visited Munshi Ram's home to buy fodder for his herds. He arrived at Mohra Fata late in the evening, and was invited to spend the night in Munshi Ram's outhouse. At 1 a.m., terrorists arrived at the house, asking for tea for 15 men. Saying that he had no way of meeting their demand, Bagga Gujjar offered to take them to Munshi Ram's home. On the way he ducked into the woods and walked for hours to the Border Security Force (BSF) post at Mathiani Gali. Meanwhile, Munshi Ram, his 65-year-old wife Shannu and sons Krishan Ram and Teja Ram were tortured and shot.

THE consequences of the killings have been depressingly predictable. Rajouri nearly witnessed a communal riot when the residents of Bal Jaralan, instigated by local Hindu chauvinist politicians, sought to bring the bodies into the town. Policemen blocked their way at Dhangri village but the mob dispersed only after warning shots were fired. Nasir Gujjar, 20, was shot dead during the fracas. Drawn into the crowd by curiosity, Nasir Gujjar's arrival led some people in the mob to scream, in a display of mindless communal hatred, that he was a terrorist. The terrified young shepherd fled, and in his panic ignored calls to halt by BSF jawans, which led them to open fire.

Nasir Gujjar's killing illustrates the tragic cycle of killings and counter-killings which could shatter the fragile peace between communities in the Jammu region. The killings of four innocent Muslims by Hindu fanatics at Karara (Frontline, April 11, 1998) gave popular legitimacy, however perverse, to subsequent massacres at Chapnari and Kishtwar (Frontline, July 4, 1998). The killings at Sewari was sparked by Hindu right-wing violence against the marriage of a local Muslim schoolteacher, Manzoor Ahamad, and a local girl, Rita Kumari. Humiliated and forcibly separated from his wife, Sharif contacted the Hizbul Mujahideen, and members of two families, who had been leading protests against the inter-community wedding, were shot dead.

With more and more Hindus leaving their remote homes to become refugees in towns, and in the absence of any genuine political intervention, such polarisation seems inevitable. Bharyana's Sheeba Devi, now living in a temporary home in Reasi, asked: "Why should we go back to be slaughtered?" Others are even less restrained. "I have been a soldier", says Dilip Singh's brother, Inder Singh. He added: "I know how to take revenge, and the Muslims in our village will pay for what has happened." Refugees from last year's massacre at Prankote still stay in Reasi. Rumours, invariably fictitious, of local Muslim connivance in the killings, have been allowed to circulate, encouraged by local Hindu fundamentalists.

Weapons recovered from Sher Khan.

The communalisation serves no one but the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other militant organisations. Muslims in Rajouri, for example, have been the principal targets of terrorists. Largely hostile to both Kashmir-based secessionist organisations and to Islamic fundamentalism, Gujjar and Bakarwal herdsmen as well as Muslim farmers have been killed on the basis of allegations of collaborating with the security forces, or in the course of disputes with individuals with terrorist connections (see table). In 1998, Rajouri saw a dramatic increase in terrorist casualties, a certain sign of declining local support. Only if any Hindu fundamentalist response to the massacres leads to reprisals against Muslims will the terrorist groups be able to regain legitimacy.

That prospect has, for the moment, been averted by firm police action. The prolonged curfew in Rajouri made clear that communal violence would not be tolerated. "People might say the curfew was excessive", says Rajouri-Poonch Deputy Inspector-General of Police K. Rajendra, "but it sent a clear signal to trouble-makers that we will not allow anyone to exploit these tragic killings for political ends." Then, the fact that the Lashkar-e-Taiba unit responsible for the Bharyana massacre was eliminated on March 1, and two more members of its Bal Jaralan faction were killed in an encounter the day after the killings has provided some sense of justice to the victims. "My son is gone", says Bal Jaralan victim Raj Singh's ageing father, Nain Chand. "All I want is that his killers meet the same fate."

With the Lashkar-e-Taiba clearly determined to pursue its agenda of hate, it will take more than police action to ensure communal peace. The massacres of February 19 have been followed by the killing of two Hindu residents at Chana village in Udhampur, and were preceded by the hacking to death of four members of a family at Morah Sukhal on February 13. The Indian intelligence believes that two Lashkar-e-Taiba groups, the Adnan and Haidari factions, have been especially primed for similar actions. As spring thaws the ice in the mountain passes of Jammu and Kashmir, terrorists will be able to operate more freely and remain elusive to the security forces. How the State's politicians respond to the political repercussions of the killings this season could decide whether or not the Jammu region has any hope of a lasting peace.