Whose Hostages?

A brilliant account of the 1995 kidnappings of six foreign nationals in Kashmir reveals shocking details of the involvement of the Indian State

June 1995. An American couple, 42-year-old neuropsychologist Don Hutchings and his wife of four years and partner of ten, Jane Schelly, are packing their bags for a 12-day trek in the upper reaches of the Kashmir Valley. Both are avid mountaineers, and Jane knows well how to restrict individual load, including snack bars and Imodium tablets, to 15 kg. Elsewhere, in the north-east part of England, Julie and Keith Mangan are also working on a similar trip. In Lancashire, 24-year-old photography student Paul Wells is also planning a trip, but to Ladakh, trying to convince his girlfriend Catherine Moseley to travel with him. By some act of fate, they land up in Kashmir. So does another American, John Childs, and a German trekker Dirk Hasert and Norwegian citizen Hans Christian Ostro, a student of Kathakali.

Seven years earlier, in 1988, a 20-year-old man fattened on plates of nihari, who studied at a mosque in the town of Binori in Pakistan, is sent for 40 days of basic jihadi training. Not only does he fail to impress, but in the course of the training, he also gets shot in the leg by guards after he forgets the password to re-enter the camp (after relieving himself). But Masood Azhar is a powerful orator, and in 1994, he is sent to Kashmir, along with a battle-hardened commander Sajjad Afghani, by the ISI. They arrive separately, a nervous Azhar’s new nylon shirt soaking with sweat at the immigration counter of the Indira Gandhi International Airport. He reaches Kashmir after a few days.

In no time, Azhar and Afghani are caught by Indian security forces while on their way to deliver a sermon in a mosque in south Kashmir’s Anantnag. Thrown in the back of separate trucks amid slogans of Jai Hind and Bharat mata ki jai, the two are taken to an Army camp, where Azhar breaks down within 30 minutes and blurts out the truth of the entire operation.

The ISI then decides to ‘kidnap someone important, preferably foreign’. And in a twist of fate, the six Western male trekkers become the plot’s victims.

Now, 17 years later, journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark have written a book that gives a detailed account of the kidnappings that, in the words of the late Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, as the writers say their note of acknowledgement, ‘changed the face of modern terrorism’. While one of the hostages, John Childs, managed to escape, and another, Ostro, was beheaded by Hamid al Turki, the commander of Al-Faran (a militant front of the Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Ansar), the bodies of the remaining four were never found, though it is believed that they died eventually.

Adrian and Cathy’s The Meadow makes some serious allegations against the Indian state, suggesting that the Government deliberately exploited the situation ‘to focus worldwide attention on Pakistan’s responsibility for the kidnappings’. There are other shocking details in the book as well, including how a Western female trekker who had witnessed one of the kidnappings had approached an army camp, only to have an officer sexually assault her. As a police officer, Kifayat Haider, recalls in the book: “We had several crises on our hands, and yet an army officer was acting like an animal with a valuable female witness.”

Above all, what comes across most clearly from a basic reading of The Meadow is the mess that the Indian state has created in Kashmir. Local police officers trying to make headway in the case faced impediments at many levels by various agencies in play in Kashmir: the Army, intelligence agencies, bureaucrats and renegade militants. The Inspector General of J&K Police’s Crime Branch, Rajinder Tikoo, who negotiated with the kidnappers, became so exasperated with selected leaks in the press that undid all his hard work that he decided to go on leave, since he could not resign. Everywhere in Kashmir, every agency jumped ahead of the other to take credit for even small operations. When Ostro’s body is found by the police officer Haider and he tries to make sense of some notes written in Norwegian recovered from his body, the Army rushes in to take the body under its control. As the authors write: ‘Ostro belonged to the army now. Once again, Haider was being sidelined. Growling, he pushed the papers into his pocket.’

Towards the end of the book, remarkably stitching together a string of incidents, the authors paint a very dangerous picture of what transpired towards the end of 1995, when the four hostages are believed to have been killed and then buried in a village. On 9 December, the Army says that Al-Faran commander Hamid al Turki was among three militants killed in a village called Dabran near Anantnag. But there still was no word on the hostages.

Ultimately, The Meadow claims, the hostages were handed over by Al-Faran to a Government-backed renegade militant group Alpha, for Rs 4 lakh. In the second week of December 1995, the book claims, a Crime Branch source drove for hours to reach a village called Mati Garwan and on being ushered into an Alpha camp, he saw ‘a group of weary, white-faced figures, huddled together in a corner under blankets’.

When his colleagues later asked him how they looked, the source was silent for a long time and then replied: “They looked like bears.” Later, an eyewitness tells the Crime Branch squad that the renegade militants backed by a special task force had shot the four hostages.

Tikoo retired in 2010. A few months after he retired, the authors quote him on the hostage crisis. “The people who did this wanted to prove to the world that these fellows (Al-Faran militants) are mercenaries, no respect for anything, no cause, and are basically here to commit terror, and have not even spared the foreign visitors.”

Ruminating over the ‘leaks’ that hampered the case, he is quoted as saying: “Somebody in intelligence did this, and he should be whipped and shot. They got their mileage. But it was so very callous.”

Since 1995, Kashmir has come a long way. And so have jihadi groups and their leaders like Masood Azhar, who was later freed by the Indian Government in 1999 in exchange for passengers of the hijacked IC-814 flight. But have those who represent India in Kashmir learnt any lessons? The answer lies in a photograph carried in the book of a renegade militant leader Jehangir Khan, shot in one of his bases. Behind him is a painted slogan that reads: ‘Get them by their balls, hearts and minds will follow.’ And next to it is another: ‘We are proud to be Indians.’ And this picture was taken in 2008. You get the answer.

Indian statejihadkidnapping