COVER STORY

Another summer of killings

Militants have renewed their killings in the Kashmir Valley, taking advantage of the reduction in security levels in view of the Kargil conflict.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Anantnag

SEVERAL months ago, some families migrated from Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh and Etawah in Uttar Pradesh to Sandu, 9 km from Anantnag, in search of work in brick kilns. On June 29, when the workers were asleep after a hard day's work, terrorists arrived at their huts a little after midnight. It took several minutes before two men working through the night stoking the kilns, whom the terrorists had forced to act as guides, could wake any of them up. Five men workers came out of one set of huts, and seven from a second cluster of huts some 200 metres up the road. Several others slept through the sharp commands to come out. Fatigue ensured that they survived the massacre that followed.

Women workers, who came out hearing the commotion, turned out to be the only witnesses to the killings. They were ordered to stand to one side as the terrorists began a desultory conversation. One of the three terrorists who were at the cluster of huts nearer to the road asked to share a bidi, an act that was intended to ensure coordinated fire with the second group of terrorists. Then shots rang out. The leader of the smaller group fired from his assault rifle on single-shot mode, picking his targets one by one. The larger group fired automatic weapons, ripping apart the workers' bodies. Then, having completed the first communal massacre in Jammu and Kashmir this summer, they left the brick kilns as quietly as they came.

The carnage at Sandu and the massacre of nine villagers at Mendhar in Poonch district two days later have proved that India's military successes in Kargil are just a counter-point to an otherwise depressing summer in Jammu and Kashmir. With the Kargil conflict having thinned out troops meant for counter-terrorist operations, security forces in the Valley have found themselves short of at least 25,000 personnel. The pressure on the troops has created space for terrorist acts designed to deepen the fissures between the Hindu and Muslim communities throughout the State and also the country. The offensive also comes at a time when a spectrum of powerful figures have demanded a new partition of Jammu and Kashmir, one that would forever tear the State asunder on communal lines.

Several observers have attributed the new round of communal killings to the June 28 murder of 17 Muslim residents of Mohra Bachchai hamlet near Surankote. The victims, who included three women and three minor girls, were the relatives of Khalil Khan, Imtiyaz Ahmad and Mushtaq Ahmad, three top Hizbul Mujahideen activists belonging to the village. Many local residents promptly, but unfairly, blamed the Army for these killings. On August 3 last year, 19 family members of top Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami terrorist Imtiaz Sheikh were shot dead at Salian village by unidentified gunmen. A State Human Rights Commission inquiry had held the Army responsible for the murders. No individuals or units were indicted, but the killings followed the murder of Zakir Hussain, a key source of the 9 Para Commando Regiment, a formidable Army unit based in northeastern India.

AIJAZ RAHI/ AP
A 10-year-old lighting the pyre at the cremation of his father who was killed by militants in Sandu village near Anantnag on June 29.

Investigations into the June 28 massacre have largely been built around the testimony of its sole survivor, Zubaida Bi. From her hospital bed in Jammu, Zubaida Bi confirmed reports of a bitter power struggle between the Sameer Mohammad faction of the Hizbul Mujahideen, to which her relatives belonged, and the Kauner Mehmood group. The power struggle exploded when a female relative of key figures in the Kauner Mehmood faction was kidnapped by Sameer Mohammad's unit on suspicion of being a police informer. The woman was raped, tortured and then shot. Zubaida Bi believes that the massacre of her family members was a reprisal action. Although she saw men in uniform near the village on the eve of the killings, Zubaida Bi insists that many of the 13 persons who carried out the attack were terrorists from the region, and not soldiers in disguise. Her account is plausible for more than one reason. Had the Hizbul Mujahideen believed the killings were carried out by the Army, its response would most likely have been a communal massacre in the Poonch area itself.

Further, the Zakir Khan group, believed to be responsible for the Anantnag massacres, has no history of involvement in communal enterprises. The once-powerful Zakir faction of the Hizbul Mujahideen has been under intense pressure from the Anantnag police and the Rashtriya Rifles and is unlikely to have volunteered for an enterprise that was certain to invite targeting by the security forces. The Zakir group's top bomb-maker, code-named Shaheen, had been eliminated a week before the Sandu killings. Another member of the group was shot dead in February at Dharna.

WHY then were the Anantnag killings carried out? Cynics believe that the Zakir faction was just reminding brick kiln owners of their "obligation" to pay protection money. They say that brick kilns have been a major source of revenue for the terrorists in the area and the return of peace in Anantnag curtailed this lucrative source. Whatever the truth, the killings have sparked an exodus of migrant labour from the State, a crippling experience businessmen are certain to avoid in the future.

Other interesting explanations have also been offered. Khundra, near Acchabal, is home to one of the Army's largest field ordnance depots. The movement of ammunition from the depots depends largely on a heavily secured road, just one kilometre ahead of Sandu. The massacre may have been designed to draw security pickets away from the road as a prelude to attacks on ammunition convoys.

The killings at Mendhar appear to have had little connection with the Anantapur massacre. Apparently, they have had their origins in an affair between Shankar Lal, a local resident, and Arifa, the daughter of Sher Mohammad. The two eloped in mid-May, following which Muslim communalists insisted that the girl had been abducted. Their Hindu counterparts gave the issue a political colour, claiming that the local police harassed Shankar Lal's family. Some terrorists joined in the fracas and warned the local Hindu population that failure to return Arifa would invite their wrath. Ironically, Shankar Lal's father Mohan Lal and mother Kaushalya Devi escaped the terrorist attack. Those who were killed included 95-year-old Jeevan Das, his 87-year-old wife Ishro Devi and two children.

That the Surankote killings may not have been the trigger for the Mendhar massacre is illustrated by the fact that terrorists have for several years intervened in communal disputes. In August 1997, Manzoor Hussain, a Gujjar schoolteacher posted at Sewari Buddal village in the Reasi area, married Rita Kumari, a Hindu girl who came from an impoverished home. The two evidently married with the blessings of Rita Kumari's mother. After the local police refused to intervene, three dominant feudal Rajput families stepped in to punish the couple for the temerity. Rita Kumari was abducted, while Hussain and his mother-in-law were severely beaten. Hussain subsequently approached the Farid Khan group of the Hizbul Mujahideen for revenge. Eight members of the three families, who had organised Rita Kumari's abduction, were slaughtered.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Ali Bhutto, head of the terrorist cell in Turtok, who has been arrested.

Read in the context of last summer's massacres, the renewal of the killings requires little interpretation. The broad objective, then as now, is to apply a communal cleaver between the predominantly Muslim areas north of the Chenab and the predominantly Hindu areas to its south. Pakistan's fundamental post-Pokhran objective in Jammu and Kashmir, as its Kargil assault confirms, is to force a conventional engagement that would raise the prospect of a nuclear conflagration and then deploy these developments to force a Western-mediated settlement. In such an event, widespread hostilities between Hindus and Muslims within Jammu and Kashmir would serve an obvious purpose. Local politicians seem determined to aid Pakistan in this objective. As with past massacres, the Surankote and Mendhar killings saw communal mobilisation by local units of the Bharatiya Janata Party, on the one hand, and the National Conference in tacit alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami, on the other.

KARGIL'S impact on security in the rest of the State might then be mildly described as a calamity. Figures obtained by Frontline show that 58 battalions of the Army engaged in counter-insurgency operations have been withdrawn for deployment on the border; 36 of these have been withdrawn from Kashmir and 22 from the Jammu province. Just 14 Central Reserve Police Force and six Border Security Force battalions have been moved in to take their place. No one has any clear idea of just how the shortfall will be met, particularly with the Lok Sabha elections round the corner. During the 1998 Lok Sabha elections, 354 additional companies, each consisting of 125 men, were deployed throughout the State. Given that each battalion has between four and six companies, at least 500 companies would have to be brought in even to meet the 1998 security levels.

The reduction in security levels comes at a time when the demand for security cover is certain to increase in the months to come. Last month's arrest of a 25-member terrorist cell, led by Ali Bhutto, a local resident from the Turtok area of Leh, has indicated that conflict can be expected in this quiet region. Bhutto's arrest has been treated with little concern. But terrorist activities had similar low-key origins elsewhere too. In Poonch, the first sign of an offensive was the arrest of Ayyub Shabnam in May 1990. Shabnam, who went on to spend five years in jail, was believed to be responsible for the training of and distribution of weapons to several local operatives. He, like Bhutto, had little knowledge of Pakistan's broader objectives. Few took the incident seriously until Poonch went up in flames after 1993.

Even as Jammu and Kashmir finds itself lacking security cover, there is evidence that cross-border infiltration has been unusually high this summer. Field intelligence officials in Kupwara and Baramulla estimate that nearly 600 terrorists have moved in since March and occupied positions at heights above 4,000 metres. Anantnag too has witnessed a sharp rise in the arrival of Pakistani and Afghan terrorists, with more than 200 of them reported to be active in the district. While most terrorist groups have avoided frontal engagement with the security forces, there is little doubt that since the Kargil war broke out there has been a marked escalation in violence.

Since last summer, the mountain heights, which were considered areas of little political significance, have seen large concentrations of Pakistani and Afghan terrorists. Received military wisdom on this development was that these groups lacked the motivation or resources to fight a losing battle in the Valley. But a more intriguing possibility also existed. By building up numbers in Doda, Banihal, Kupwara and the Rajouri-Poonch belt, terrorist groups could dominate the heights over the four principal lines of access to the Valley. In the context of increasing recovery in the recent months of heavy weapons, ranging from mortar and anti-aircraft guns to a Grail anti-tank missile launcher, some people argue that the current deployment patterns suggest that the terrorist groups are preparing to support Pakistani troops in a conventional engagement.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Noor Bakshiya, a terrorist from Turtok.

"We've made a terrible mistake by sundering the conflict in Kargil from that in Jammu and Kashmir as a whole," a senior security official said. "After all, very little has happened in Kargil that is fundamentally different in character from what has been going on in Jammu and Kashmir over the last 10 years. Pakistan has pushed in arms and personnel and engineered sustained violence against both the Indian state and its citizens."

In Sandu, there is little interest in the larger theatre for which the village briefly became a stage. The Muslim residents reached out to the poor migrant workers; they organised materials for the cremation of the dead and arranged food, clothes and shelter for the survivors. When a labour contractor complained that the death of the workers meant that the advance payments he had made to their families would now have to be written off, he almost faced a lynching. This display of sympathy illustrated the real ties between communities that have survived 10 years of terrorism. But it is not clear if such a solidarity can be sustained as some forces are arrayed against the people.