It is the summer of 1995. The Kashmir valley is roiled by insurgent violence. Eight years ago Delhi had rigged the state polls, leading to an explosion of protests and the outbreak of a full-blown insurgency by home-grown groups and those supported from across the border in Pakistan.
Though tourist traffic drops precipitously in the heavily militarised valley, foreign tourists, encouraged by local assurances that militants don’t usually target them, continue to trickle in. But six trekkers – two Britons, two Americans, a German and a Norwegian – are not so lucky and are abducted in the mountains by a little-known group called Al-Faran.
The kidnappers demand the release of 21 militants incarcerated in Indian jails in exchange for the tourists. On top of their list is Masood Azhar, a chubby radical cleric from Pakistan. Under a harsh international glare, the struggling, minority government of P V Narasimha Rao insists that there will be no prisoner releases and assures the distraught families of the victims that they will get their men back. Eleven months, many such assurances and several rounds of negotiations later, the hostages vanish with their captors. Nothing is ever heard of them again.
This is what the world knew till now. But Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, award-winning journalists with formidable credentials – the duo wrote Deception, a racy investigation into the A Q Khan-run global nuclear bazaar – have come up with a gripping account of the kidnapping and aftermath, one that demolishes the official narrative. The Meadow, named after a famous campsite in the Pahalgam mountains where the kidnappings took place, is a vivid and tautly told story of a kidnapping that was never satisfactorily explained, and which possibly changed the face of modern terrorism.
Talking to detectives who probed the kidnappings, Levy and Scott-Clark pose several uncomfortable questions, pointing to the charge that the hostages were possibly killed by pro-India militia after the government dragged its feet on the crisis to embarrass Pakistan and tell the world how it was stoking militancy in Kashmir.
Why was John Childs, the only trekker to flee his captors and the main witness to the kidnapping, allowed to leave India quickly without briefing investigators? Why was a Rs 1 crore cash-for-hostages deal with the kidnappers negotiated by an intrepid police officer leaked to the media and scuppered? (This when the kidnappers, over time, had whittled down their demand for 21 prisoners to four, with Masood Azhar and London School of Economics-educated Omar Sheikh leading the list.)
The questions get thornier as Levy and Scott-Clark negotiate the treacherous web of fact and fiction in Kashmir. Why did Indian helicopters hover over a house where the hostages were kept high up in the mountains for days without launching a rescue operation? Did the authorities make up several sightings of the kidnappers and their quarry months after the kidnapping to placate the families of the victims? How did the newly elected Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah promise the families more than a year after the kidnapping that in 10 days he would “give them proof that the hostages are alive” and never spoke about it again?
So why did India drag its feet, the authors ask. To extract maximum propaganda value out of the incident at a time when a beleaguered government in Delhi was trying to stay afloat?
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More pertinently, investigators ask the authors, what was so special about these kidnappings that it dragged on when other similar incidents in the past had ended with India releasing prisoners, paying cash or providing some fat concession to the insurgents? Were the hostages, as they tell the authors, finally handed over by the kidnappers to India-backed vigilantes who killed them in cold blood because they were scared that if released the hostages would spill the beans? “There was only one end waiting for them [the hostages] and we all knew it,” an eyewitness to their killings told a detective. “No one could risk the hostages being released and complaining of collusion, having seen uniforms and Special Task Force jeeps, possibly hearing things too that they understood.” The witness said the captors had been led into the snow on December 25, 1995, five months after the kidnapping, and shot dead.
The Indian government has not reacted to these sensational charges, but if Levy and Scott-Clark are correct, the 1995 kidnappings reveal the ugly underbelly of an insurgency at its peak. The all-powerful army, the rash paramilitary, the “slippery and opaque” spooks, and the hapless police are bickering and sniping, caught up in a sticky stew of chaos and distrust. The pro-government militias, fattened on government largesse of alcohol and money, are law unto themselves in their mission to snuff out militant groups. “There were no rules,” say the authors, “only outcomes.” The result: “A permanent rumbling chaos in the valley that both prevented Pakistan or Kashmiris from moulding a resistance that was capable of capturing the state from India, and stopped India from imposing a profound enough peace to be able to incorporate the state into its union.”
THE MEADOW
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
Penguin; 510 pages; Rs 499