The Long Road to Justice

Thirty years after the killing of four Indian Air Force personnel in Kashmir in 1990, the main accused in the case, Yasin Malik, appeared through video conferencing in a TADA court in Jammu. It was his first appearance in the case. Malik is currently lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail in another case involving channelling of terrorist funds through the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi. The way for the resumption of his trial after so long was paved earlier this year when the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) High Court lifted the stay on his trial ordered in 1995.

As the judge read out the section of the penal code under which the trial would commence, Malik showed no emotion. As the next hearing was set for November 5th, the court ordered that one of the other accused, Showkat Bakshi, currently in a Srinagar jail, be also produced before it.

“By that time Jammu and Kashmir would have become a Union Territory, which means that no delaying tactics of Malik’s lawyers will work any longer,” said Pavitar Singh Bharadwaj, the CBI’s public prosecutor in the case.

On January 25th, 1990, a group of terrorists, allegedly led by Malik, fired at Air Force personnel at five places close to each other in Srinagar’s Rawalpora area, near the Air Force station. Four personnel, including a squadron leader, Ravi Khanna, died in the attack, while 22 other personnel were injured. The CBI had filed a chargesheet in the case in 1990 itself. But, soon afterwards, Malik, who was injured while escaping from the security forces, was groomed by the Intelligence Bureau for a prospective future in politics. As New Delhi cosied up to him, the case lay dormant.

In 2008, Malik approached a special court saying that the trial in the case should be shifted to Srinagar as he was facing security problems in Jammu in the light of the Amarnath agitation which led to communal polarisation between Muslim-dominated Kashmir and Hindu-dominated Jammu. In March this year, a bench of Chief Justice Gita Mittal held that the Srinagar wing of the J&K High Court had no jurisdiction to hear a case being tried in a Jammu special court.

Open has got access to the CBI investigation in the case which lays out in full detail how the conspiracy to launch attacks on Indian security forces was hatched in Pakistan by Amanullah Khan, the then chief of the terrorist organisation, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Between 1988 and 1989, Yasin Malik and several others crossed over to Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir to get arms training. In October 1989, as insurgency took root in Kashmir, one of Malik’s close friends, Showkat Bakshi, met Amanullah Khan whereby he was given direction to plan attacks on security forces in Kashmir.

In January 1990, Malik and his men decided to attack Air Force personnel in Srinagar’s Rawalpora area where many of them lived in rented accommodations. The CBI investigation reveals how a JKLF worker, Dr Ghulam Qadir Soofi, offered up his residence where Malik and his friends met and hid their weapons. For several days, they conducted a recce of the area to record the movements of the Air Force personnel. Towards the middle of January, they procured a blue Maruti car bearing the number JKE-3575, and a black-coloured motorcycle numbered JKD-3705, which belonged to another worker, Abdul Rehman Dar.

On the morning of January 25th, a JKLF terrorist, Javed Zargar, took out the car as four others, Saliam alias Nanaji, Manzoor Ahmed Sofi, Mohammed Rafiq Dar and Showkat Bakshi, sat in it. The motorcycle was driven by Mushtaq Lone as Yasin Malik and Javed Mir alias Nalka sat behind him.

As they reached the main roundabout in Rawalpora, two from the car took position behind a few oil tankers stationed on the road. Three others stopped a little ahead on the road outside the Rawalpora housing colony.

Of these, Nanaji and Soofi took up position behind the oil tankers. Showkat and Dar and Zargar took up their positions in front of the Rawalpora housing colony street with the car’s engine on.

The motorcycle stopped outside Tantray General Stores. Malik and Nalka got down and walked to a spot where a group of seven airmen was waiting to be picked up by office bus. They opened fire with their AK-47 rifles. Three airmen, DB Singh, Uday Shankar and Ajad Ahmed, were killed here.

Soon afterwards, Nanaji and Soofi opened fire from behind the tankers on another group of Air Force personnel, causing grievous injuries to two officers and a wife of an officer who was proceeding on leave. Meanwhile, Bakshi and Zargar opened fire on a lone corporal, NK Rath. But he was miraculously saved as bullets fired at him hit a pillar nearby. As other Air Force personnel ran towards them, the terrorists opened fire again, injuring another corporal, Mohammed Salim.

In the meantime, Malik fired upon another officer, AK Pandey. Then they drove a little further, stopping at the final spot (marked ‘E’ in the accompanying sketch), where Flt Lt BR Sharma and Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna waited for their bus. According to Sharma’s testimony, Lone walked up to them, asking for directions to Natipora, a colony nearby. As Khanna earnestly began to give him directions, Lone took out his pistol and fired upon him. One bullet hit his Aristocrat briefcase while another got lodged in his abdomen. As the two men scuffled, Khanna shouted at Sharma to save his life. With Khanna’s back towards Malik, the latter took out his AK-47 rifle and emptied his magazine on his back. A total of 27 bullets hit him (later, it was found that the same rifle of 7.62 mm bore was also used in three other terrorist attacks in Kashmir between October 1988 and February 1990).

FROM HER HOUSE, Nirmal Khanna heard some sound. It felt as if someone had burst a basketful of crackers. She looked out from the upper storey of her house. Her husband, Ravi Khanna, had left for office just minutes ago. It was very cold; Khanna had put on his cap and walked out.

“I saw many personnel standing. But I could not see my husband who would stand out because of his height,” recalls Nirmal Khanna. She thought he must have left in a jeep. But still, something did not feel right. She came out and started walking towards the spot.

Her eyes, she says, fell first on her husband’s briefcase.  She began walking towards the road. Nirmal’s mother came from Lolab in Kashmir Valley; she knows Kashmiri very well. Her head was covered with a cloth the way Kashmiri Muslim women cover theirs; she also wore a grey traditional pheran (loose coat). As she spotted her husband’s body, a cry escaped her lips. “Parwardigaar (Almighty),” she cried. She says her husband’s nameplate reading ‘R Khanna’ was partially hidden which made it read as ‘R Khan’. At a little distance, she saw two men on a motorcycle shouting religious slogans and pumping their fists in the air. One of the onlookers thought a fellow Muslim had died. She shouted in Kashmiri that may Yasin Malik be struck by lightning (a common Kashmiri curse).

Two chargesheets were filed by the CBI in 1990 itself. But as New Delhi was not interested in pursuing the case, it went cold. In the ensuing years, Malik fashioned himself as a ‘Gandhian,’ and shared stage with intellectuals in Delhi. He would be called to media conclaves to talk about his ‘struggle’. In 2006, he was seen shaking hands with then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as he called upon him. In 2009, Malik married a Pakistani woman, Mushaal Hussein Malik, whose mother happened to be the chief of the Muslim League.

“I look at their daughter sometimes,” says Nirmal Khanna. “She is seven-plus now. Mine was almost her age when my husband passed away.”

As the young widow struggled to put pieces of her life together, she faced extreme difficulty. Her husband’s pension was stopped, and she had to fight a long battle to earn it back. “I did not sleep on the bed for 12 years,” she says. For days, she says, she would pack roasted grams and a little water and wait outside government offices to get her due. In a matter of a few months, both of Ravi Khanna’s parents died of grief. “His father went mad with grief and would imagine that a young Ravi was sitting on his knees whom he sang lullabies, as he had done when Ravi was actually a child,” she says.

The Khannas got married in 1978 and right afterwards Khanna was posted in Srinagar. Nirmal joined him and finished her BEd from there. She recalls how in 1980 a professor once urged them to donate their jewellery for the ‘Kashmir cause’. “I had no idea what he meant, so I also took out a bangle of mine. But they hesitated as they knew my husband was in the forces,” she says. It was years later that she realised what the professor was up to. “It was only after my husband’s death that I realised for how long the anti-India sentiment was festering in Kashmir,” she says.

She says that till her children grew up she did not tell them about who had killed their father. “I did not want them to be overwhelmed with hatred for a man and get derailed from their studies,” she says.

After Open carried her story last month, the Prime Minister’s Office swung into action and ordered that Ravi Khanna’s name be included in Delhi’s National War Memorial.

“See, the case has not been expedited because of me; it has been expedited because the Government of the day wants it,” she says. She has waited 30 years, she says. She points at the ceiling of her house. “This ceiling is not level at all because it took me 20 years to build this house, one room at a time,” she says.

Recovering from a recent brain stroke, she recites an Urdu couplet about the ephemeral nature of life and says that all she wants is justice for her husband. “He is waiting and so am I,” she says.

IAF caseJaved MirKashmirNirmal KhannaRavi KhannaterrorismYasin MalikYasin Malik trial