How Satyapal Malik’s “revelation” on Pulwama is meaningless

A fresh controversy over the 2019 Pulwama suicide attack has erupted after the recent comments of former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satyapal Malik’s interview to the journalist Karan Thapar. In the interview, among other things, Malik said that the casualties happened because the Centre refused to provide aircraft to CRPF personnel stranded in Jammu as the national highway connecting it to Srinagar was closed due to snowfall.

Malik said many other things, but this article is only about putting facts around the attack and to argue how the availability of aircraft would have made no [major] difference to the final outcome of what the Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed had set out to do around that time.

Let us begin with that fateful day on February 14, 2019. The CRPF convoy that was attacked in Pulwama began that morning at about 3.30 am from Jammu. It consisted of 78 vehicles, mostly buses, carrying 2,547 personnel. The large number of personnel in a single convoy was a result of the closure of the Jammu-Srinagar highway for more than a week due to snowfall. The CRPF personnel, returning to Kashmir Valley from all over India had been able to reach till Jammu but got stranded in the transit camp there. As the highway opened, there was a big rush of soldiers returning to their duty.

Almost 12 hours later, at about 3.15 pm, when the convoy reached the highway near Pulwama, one of the buses carrying 39 personnel was hit by a suicide bomber travelling in a Maruti Eeco car. The bus was blown to pieces, killing all personnel, and one more solider, who was on the road as part of the CRPF’s ROP (road opening party). The ROP is essentially an exercise whereby soldiers are deployed on a particular stretch of road to prevent direct attacks on convoys or the possibility of terrorists planting explosives on the route. At any given point, a company of the CRPF [on ground about 60 personnel] are meant to man a stretch of a minimum of three kilometres. The ROP is meant for convoys of all forces that could pass through that area – on that day, for example, before the CRPF convoy was attacked, several army convoys had passed without any incident [In fact a Military Intelligence officer, supervising the passage of army convoys that day had just opened his lunchbox in a vehicle nearby when the blast took place]. Since the deployment of personnel on ROP is thin, it is at no point possible to man every entry point to the highway. Even if it were, the procedure till that day in Kashmir was to allow civilian vehicles to move as well – a practice that has been stopped from that day [Now civilian vehicles are only allowed on a stretch once the convoy has moved. If it is a double road, no one can even cross from the other side].

Let us leave the matter of aircraft for a moment. Let us now see, based on information made available to us after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) cracked the case, how the attack was carried out by a former Kashmiri stone-pelter, Adil Dar. His activities were known to the police and other security agencies, but a few months before the attack he disappeared from their radar. They did not know it then, but Dar had by this time met Umar Farooq, the nephew of the Jaish founder, Masood Azhar.

In his early twenties, Farooq had been trained in the best facilities of al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan. He crossed over from the international border in Jammu’s Hiranagar sector on the night of 13-14 April 2018. With him, four other Jaish terrorists infiltrated as well. Apart from sophisticated weapons, they carried about ten kilos each of RDX in their rucksacks. A day later, he had reached South Kashmir. In October that year, his younger brother, Usman Haider, who had reached Kashmir three months before him was killed in an encounter with security forces.

It is after Usman’s death that Farooq, guided by his other uncle, Rouf Asghar, the operational head of Jaish, decided to carry out a big attack.

During his stay, Farooq managed to radicalise and “prepare” a number of Kashmiri youngsters for the way of Jihad, including blowing themselves up. This included Shakir Bashir, who alerted Farooq about the opening of highway on February 14 and then drove the suicide bomber Adil Dar till the link road leading to the highway where he rammed his car into one of the buses. The car was locally procured. In all, about 200 kilos of explosives was used, roughly one-fifth of it RDX. Farooq assembled the bomb himself, putting these together in two drums joined by wires to a switch beneath the car’s steering wheel.

For days before the attack, Farooq kept Adil isolated, not allowing him to mingle with anyone. This is done by “experts” to rule out any last-minute tendency to develop cold feet that could be triggered by an emotion [in turn triggered by a conversation with a friend or a family member or a lover].

As investigation and transcripts of conversation between Asghar and Farooq would reveal, the attack was planned to damage Prime Minister Modi’s credibility right before the Lok Sabha elections to be held a few weeks later. But since it create a big furore in India and led to the Balakot strike, Asghar told Farooq that “the thing” (attack) had ended up helping Modi instead of damaging him. Asghar also instructed him to call off another planned attack. He told him: “Nuksaan utna hi hona chahiye jitna dushman ko bardasht karne ki taaqat ho.” The loss should only be as much as the enemy can absorb.

Now, suppose, the CRPF personnel would have been sent back in aircraft than through the road. They would have in any case landed in Srinagar from where they would have to go in convoys to their duty stations across Kashmir, including Pulwama. In the convoy, personnel in only one bus died. Had it not been for this convoy, Jaish would have targeted some other convoy, resulting in similar loss. In the past also, several such attacks [though not suicide attacks] have resulted in casualties. On June 24, 2013, an attack on an army convoy near Srinagar killed eight army personnel. Ten soldiers were killed in an IED blast on a bus outside Srinagar on July 19, 2008. On June 24, 2005, nine army soldiers died due to a blast caused by RDX kept in a car. It is simply not possible to stop the movement by land of security personnel.

There is only one thing that could have prevented this attack. It is if intelligence agencies had prior information about Farooq and his band of men. Had Adil Dar not slipped from the watch, perhaps Pulwama could have been avoided.

But it is also to remember that there were others willing to take his place. In Kashmir, unfortunately, there is no incentive to prevent men like Dar from reaching point of no return. Once men like Dar officially become terrorists, there are incentives in “neutralising” them.

CRPFKaran ThaparKashmirPulwamaSatya Pal Malik