Invisible Grief

I was here, too, when the first bomb was exploded in 1988. I remember myfather describing the blast as an opposition party plot to dislodge FarooqAbdullah's government. I was seventeen. Then, that September, the killing inSrinagar of Ajaz Dar, one of the first Kashmiri youths to become a militantleader, changed everything. Bomb blasts and shootouts became frequent. As 1989came, the situation worsened. For days the morning papers splashed photos offive fugitives -- Ishfaq Majeed, Javeed Mir, Yasin Malik, Hameed Sheikh andShabir Shah-who were believed to be behind the rising unrest and violence. Thegovernment offered a huge reward to anybody who gave information about them, butnobody came forward. This was not a simple political game any more. It was war.

I had just completed Class XII then and was enrolled in college -- a perfectpotential recruit. Many of my close friends and classmates had begun to join themilitant movement. One day, half of our class in a Sopore college was missing.They never returned to class again, but nobody even looked for them, because itwas understood. I too wanted to join, not knowing why or what it would lead to.Perhaps the rebel image was subconsciously attracting all of us. I acquired thestandard militant's gear: I bought Duckback rubber shoes, prepared a polythenejacket and trousers to wear over my warm clothes, and found some woollen clothto wrap around my calves as protection from frostbite. I stole five hundredrupees from my mother's purse to pay the guide.

But I failed. Thrice we returned from the border. Each time somethinghappened that forced our guide to take us back. The third time, twenty-three ofus had started our journey on foot from Malangam, north of Bandipore, only to beabandoned inside a dense jungle. It was night and the group scattered afterhearing gunshots nearby, sensing the presence of security forces. In themorning, when we gathered again, the guide was missing. Most of the othersdecided to try their luck and continue on their own, but a few of us turnedback. We had nothing to eat but leaves for three days. We followed the flightsof crows, hoping to reach a human settlement. We were lucky. We reached home andsurvived.

As the days and months passed, and the routes the militants took to cross theborder became known to security forces, the bodies started arriving. Lines ofyoung men would disappear on a ridge as they tried to cross over or return home.The stadiums where we had played cricket and soccer, the beautiful green parkswhere we had gone on school excursions as small kids in white and grey uniforms,were turned into martyrs' graveyards. One after another, those who used to playthere were buried there with huge marble epitaphs detailing their sacrifice.Many had not even fired a single bullet from their Kalashnikovs.

When I started writing about the war in 1992, I felt I was part of thistragic story from the beginning. I knew the mujahids, the makhbirs(informers), those who surrendered and those who did not, those who faced deathbecause they had a dream and those who were sacrificed by mere chance, neitherknowing nor understanding the issues at stake, those who believed they werefighting a holy war and those who joined for unholy reasons.

After eight years of reporting death and suffering, I felt I knew every bitof the trauma of Kashmir. I had seen a thousand widows wailing over their sons'graves, mothers of militants and mothers of policemen alike. I had seen villagesburnt to the ground by security forces, bodies blown to bloody bits by militantbombs, bodies blackened by torture in interrogation centres. I had met familieswith no children left, no food left, no hope left. I thought I had reported thewhole truth about Kashmir.

Then, one day, I travelled to a remote corner of north Kashmir, along theLine of Control. I took my time, and wandered into two small villages, speakingto everyone I met, and asking them to tell me their stories. What I discoveredwas a tiny world of silent tragedy and invisible suffering -- suffering that noheadlines had reported, no government officials had compensated, and thatvirtually no one knew about beyond the village boundaries.

While many other villages in Kashmir had been struck by violence, few hadexperienced such extensive tragedy so early in the uprising, and few had bornetheir grief in such isolation. Officials had visited the two villages, andpromises had been made and forgotten. But with time, as the real suffering sankin and became part of the lore and emotions and fabric of these villages, therewas no one to console them. In both cases, anonymous people had died as cannonfodder, not as heroes to either side of the cause.

As the incidents receded into the past, the villages, isolated 3 andinvisible, grieved alone. The rest of Kashmir, caught up in a whirlpool ofviolence, seemed to have no time or energy to spare for them. To the Indiabeyond, the villages had never existed even before the massacres. Afterward,they existed only as abstract symbols to be politically exploited by India-inone case as evidence of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, and in the other as anunavoidable consequence of militancy. Pakistan, in turn, kept silent on thefirst massacre and capitalised on the second as proof of atrocities by theIndian security forces.

But for the survivors in these remote villages, who knew little about thepolitics being played over their dead, the enormity of what had happened hauntedtheir lives every day. Even now, virtually every house is a portrait of loss andgloom; nearly every family hides a tragedy.

There is a girl who wanders the graveyard where her two brothers are buried,muttering to herself. There is another who was raped by armymen, and the familyand the village kept it a secret. There is a man wracked by guilt because, intrying to be loyal to India, he condemned his neighbours and relatives to death.There is a woman who was forced to marry a boy she had once cradled in her arms,after her own husband was killed. There is a mother who still curses herself forkeeping her son home for an extra day of holiday-it proved to be his last. Therewas a boy who was killed by militants just seven days after his wedding, withhenna still on his palms. There is a widow who used to boil water in an emptypot to give her children false hope of dinner. There is another who has to begto feed her children, who has no one to follow her slain husband's case and nomoney to bribe the clerks.

The stories of these two forgotten villages, both situated in the frontierdistrict of Kupwara, are different from each other. In Warsun, the people hadresisted the tide of militancy and were punished by the militants for garlandinga Union minister. And yet the authorities did not believe that a village soclose to the Line of Control could be entirely innocent, so they too punishedthe people for what they assumed was a self-protective lie .

A man who lost twenty-two of his relatives to militant attacks had his ownson killed in the custody of the security forces. Another man who launched thefirst ever indigenous counter-insurgent group to help the army, and escapeddeath six times, saw his cousin's head chopped off by militants. He still bearsa scar from a militant attack on his shoulder, a badge of his Indianness, andyet even that was not enough to keep a security force officer from plotting totake his life. Today, he lives in fear from both sides.

The other hamlet, Pazipora, a dozen miles from Warsun, was the site of one ofthe first, and biggest, massacres by the army in August 1990. So bloody andmassive was the attack that the armymen ran out of cartridges. Twenty-fourpeople died there that day as bullets rained from all sides. In the evening,there was an announcement on the radio. General Zaki, the then security advisorto the governor, claimed that the army had killed twelve militants. Later, afterthe bodies were identified, the government's story too changed: Now it wastwelve young militants and twelve old villagers dead.

It took this village over three-and-a-half years and thousands of rupees toprove that their dead were innocent civilians, killed by the army in retaliationfor a militant attack on their convoy on the main road outside the village. Allthrough that period, their cries of protest were not heard, their demand forjustice ignored. And till today, the most awful truth of the Pazipora massacrehas never been told: the rape of three unmarried girls after the armymensegregated the men and women of the village. The villagers kept it a secret toavoid problems in finding matches for these girls. But in silence, the familiesstill mourn for their lost honour.

One survivor of the Pazipora massacre has never spoken about it at all. Eachday, in the village graveyard, a young woman walks in circles around two of thegraves, murmuring to herself She had never been mentally well as a child, andthe shock of her brothers' violent deaths drove her deeper into madness, lockingaway the tragedy inside her. In this invisible corner of India, her pain is themost invisible of all.

"If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this."

- From The Country Without a Post Office,
by Agha Shahid All

Warsun lies at the end of a steep, winding road, deep in V V a mountain rangeknown for its hidden treasure of marble and a variety of medicinal herbs. It isa Gujjar village of some four hundred inhabitants, who live in small houses ofmud walls and thatched roofs, scattered across small hillocks.

Only a few miles north lies the Line of Control. The elders dare not ventureinto the jungles because it is too dangerous-either militant territory, or anarea controlled by the army. Beyond the hilltops, the villagers say, nobody canguarantee your life because bullets fly without warning from any direction. In away, death seems to stalk these mountains.

The village has a school, but the majority of children cannot afford tostudy. Their job is to graze small herds of cows and goats. Forty-nine of themwere orphaned in these ten years of mayhem. Smeared with dirt, they walk throughcorn fields on narrow footpaths, but there is no sound of their laughter orgames. In fact, there is almost no sound at all. The village seems completelydeserted.

Before the emergence of militancy, people remember, the hills used to echowith the sound of flutes played by the young shepherds. Now there are hardly anyyoung men left. The few who remain wield guns and belong to a smallcounterinsurgency group, the Muslim Liberation Army of Choudhary Jalaluddin.They are the only wealthy people in the village, and their houses are moresolidly built than the rest.

Many of the villagers died simply because they were related to the Choudharysand stood by them, even though they had no politics of their own. In some casestheir widows were forced to marry their brothers, even those who already hadwives, so that the family fortunes would not be divided. Widows were even forcedto beg in the surrounding villages to feed their children. Today, the village isstill fighting to survive, and its people have little time to think about thepast. But every household in Warsun has a story to offer -- a sordid saga ofpain and loss.

Choudhary Jalaluddin is a tall, bearded man in his early forties-he is alsothe villager with the heaviest cross to bear. For most of his life, he was ashepherd and had nothing to do with politics. But after the emergence ofmilitancy in 1990, his life became a tortuous roller coaster of shiftingpolitical demands and loyalties, physical hardships and betrayals, and survivalamid death-all leading him to the bitter conclusion that no cause was sacred andno friend was permanent.

The first stage in his tumultuous path began when he crossed over to become amilitant. "I never wanted to cross over to Pakistan. I never wanted tobecome a militant," he recalls. "There was a man, Farooq Molvi, whowas very powerful for he was close to both (Indian and Pakistani) intelligenceagencies. As a double agent, he was sending young men across for training. Hehad political scores to settle with my elder brother Choudhary Salamuddin and mycousin Alif Din, and I became his easy prey." Molvi had influence amongmilitant ranks, and had a hit-order issued in his name. "I got to know andliterally went underground to avoid certain death," he recalls. "Thisis when the police also started looking for me, suspecting me to be an activistof the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF)."

On the run, Jalaluddin was caught between the devil and the deep sea. Hiscattle and sheep got scattered because there was nobody to take care of them.The police raided his house and even took away the fodder he had stored for thewinter months. "I had no money to buy food or clothes for my family,"he remembers. "I started selling off the cattle, partly for survival andpartly because I could not afford their fodder." Then Master Afzal, amember of the JKLF from the neighbouring Trehgam village, was released fromjail. Afzal promised to take Jalaluddin across the border and guaranteed hissafety there. "I talked to my elder brother about it, but he was deadagainst my joining militancy. He was a Congressy (activist of the Congressparty) and an Indian to the core of his heart."

Jalaluddin decided to go anyway. He had formed a group of two hundred andfifty men and twelve guides, and they were planning to cross via Aawra village."All the guides were from Aawra and knew the entire border like the lineson their hands," he said. "Even my nephew All Mohammad, who ran ahotel in Kupwara, was there. Those days hundreds of young men would cross fromalmost everywhere in this belt. It was safe and easy. After we crossed over, Isaw Farooq Molvi at Athmuqam. He had been waiting for me and tried to get me offthe bus and kidnap me, but my companions resisted."

The group remained in Muzzafarabad for seven months. At first, no one in thetraining camp trusted them, thinking them to be Indian agents. "Nobodybelieved us. Nobody helped us," he said. "My nephew and I had to eatraw rice with water and molasses. We saw so much suffering that even today wecry when we remember those days. Finally, when the people running the campsdecided we were not Indian agents, they gave us shelter." To earn somemoney, Jalaluddin and his friends guided groups of newly trained militants tothe border posts, to infiltrate into the valley. "We used the money to buyoil and salt and keep ourselves going. As time passed, trust started developingand the next few months went well."

Then Jalaluddin heard that his cousin, Alif Din, had been killed byunidentified gunmen back home. He was a sarpanch and had been killed bymilitants, who were avenging some old slight. Jalaluddin was allowed to returnfor a week.

I reached the village and saw my brother, Choudhary Salamuddin, halfdead from torture-this time by the security forces," he recalled. "Hisson, Abdullah, had also been tortured to death by the Central Reserve PoliceForce. The situation was confusing, and I felt everyone was against me and myfamily. I heard that a group of fifty militants led by Farooq Molvi's brotherhad raided my house. I tried to convince them to stop, arguing that this groupclash would take us nowhere. But they would not listen. I felt bitter. I had myown militant group, the Muslim Liberation Army, and I decided to take them on.

It was 1991. The war between the two groups went on for six months.Jalaluddin had only thirteen gunmen, but they managed to keep a group of threehundred and fifty militants at bay. "At times I was frightened, but I neverallowed it to show," he says. "This was my village, my area, how couldI allow anybody to win here? It was a battlefield of my choice." But thenhis enemies played a trick, and one of his men, Fareed Shah, turned out to be amole. "One day he guided the troops of 7 Assam Rifles to my hideout. Theonly escape was to go up to the jungle, but there were seventy militants of thatrival group up on every ridge, waiting to shoot me," Jalaluddin recounts."Down below was the army. What could I do? I decided my only choice was tosurrender."

It was a big catch. The first time that a commander-in chief of a militantgroup had been nabbed. "They took me to the GOC. I had already decided togo against the militants," he says. "I wanted to teach them a lesson.I gave a plan to the army as to how to deal with the militants. They trusted meand I helped them. I opened the way for others to surrender, and created anopening for politics.I created the road, which nobody knew then, and now evenmuch bigger convoys than mine are travelling on it."

Jalaluddin claims to have been instrumental in creating a counter-militancymovement, the first insider to challenge the might of the pro-Pakistanmilitants. "My fight started bearing fruit when militants like Kuka Parrey,Rasheed Khan and Azad Nabi followed suit to help the authorities control themilitancy," he says. In 1992, he boasts, he and his associates were thefirst to hold a pro-India political rally in the area. 'We garlanded the thenUnion internal security minister Rajesh Pilot in Warsunand organised a hugegathering to listen to his speech right here.