Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Impressed by Papa’s gains, other Ikhwanis had begun to follow his example.

That morning a group of them had stopped an old Kashmiri couple at a security barrier in downtown Srinagar. When the man refused to hand over his wallet they abducted him and drove away. People gathered and chased them all the way to the camp the Ikhwanis shared with the Border Security Force. The old man was thrown out of the Gypsy just outside the camp. Once they were inside they — how should I put it — they completely lost their marbles. They lobbed a grenade over the walls and then fired into the crowd with a machine gun. A boy was killed and a dozen or so people injured, half of them seriously. The Ikhwanis then went to the police station, threatened the police and prevented them from lodging a report. In the afternoon they ambushed the boy’s funeral procession and made off with the coffin. Which meant there was no body, and therefore there could be no murder charge. By evening public protests had turned violent. Three police stations were burned down. The security forces fired at the crowds and killed fourteen more people. Curfew was declared in all the larger towns — Sopore, Baramulla and Srinagar of course.

When I heard the phone ring and His Excellency’s aide-de-camp answer it, I assumed the trouble had got out of hand and they were calling to ask for fresh orders. That did not turn out to be the case.

The caller said he was speaking from the Joint Interrogation Center, the JIC, which functioned out of the Shiraz Cinema.

It isn’t what it sounds like. We hadn’t shut down a functioning cinema hall and turned it into an interrogation center. The Shiraz had been shut down years ago by an outfit called the Allah Tigers. It ordered the closing of all cinema halls, liquor shops and bars as being un-Islamic and “vehicles of India’s cultural aggression.” The proclamation was signed by an Air Marshal Noor Khan. The Tigers plastered the city with threatening posters and put bombs in bars. When the Air Marshal was finally captured he turned out to be a barely literate peasant from a remote mountain village who had probably never set eyes on an airplane. I was a junior member of a team of interrogators (it was before my Srinagar posting) who visited him and several other senior militants in prison in the hope of turning them around. He answered our questions with slogans, which he shouted out as though he was addressing a mass rally: Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, woh Kashmir hamara hai! The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood, that Kashmir is ours! Or the war cry of the Allah Tigers: La Sharakeya wa La Garabeya, Islamia, Islamia! — roughly: Neither East nor West, Islam is best!

The Air Marshal was a brave man and I almost envied him his clear-hearted, simple-minded fervor. He remained impenitent, even after a stint in Cargo. He’s out now, after serving a long sentence. We still keep an eye on him and others like him. He seems to have stayed out of trouble. He earns a meager living selling stamps outside a district court in Srinagar. I’m told he is not in his right mind, although I cannot confirm that. Cargo could be a pretty rough place.

The ADC who answered the phone told me that the caller had given his name as Major Amrik Singh and had asked for me not just by designation but, unusually, also by name — Biplab Dasgupta, Deputy Station Head, India Bravo (radio code in Kashmir for the Intelligence Bureau).

I knew the fellow, not personally — I’d never set eyes on him — but by reputation. He was known as Amrik Singh “Spotter”—for his uncanny ability to spot the snake in the grass, the militant hidden among a crowd of civilians. (He’s famous now, by the way. Posthumously. He killed himself recently — shot his wife, his three young sons and put a bullet through his own head. I can’t say I’m sorry. Shame about the wife and children though.) Major Amrik Singh was a bad apple. No, let me rephrase that — he was a putrid apple, and was, at the time of that midnight phone call, at the center of a pretty putrid storm. A couple of months after I arrived in Srinagar, which was in January of 1995, Amrik Singh had, on orders quite likely, apprehended a well-known lawyer and human rights activist, Jalib Qadri, at a checkpoint. Qadri was a nuisance, a brash, abrasive man who did not know the meaning of nuance. The night he was arrested, he was due to leave for Delhi from where he was going to Oslo to depose at an international human rights conference. His arrest was only meant to prevent that silly circus from taking place. Amrik Singh apprehended Qadri publicly, in the presence of Qadri’s wife, but the arrest was not formally registered, which was not unusual. There was an outcry about Qadri’s “abduction,” a much bigger one than we expected, so after a few days we thought it prudent to release the man. But he was nowhere to be found. A great hue and cry arose. We set up a search committee and tried to calm nerves. A few days later Jalib Qadri’s body showed up in a sack floating down the Jhelum. It was in a terrible condition — skull smashed in, eyes gouged out, and so on. Even by Kashmir’s standards, this was somewhat excessive. The level of public anger went off the charts — naturally — so the local police were permitted to file a case. A high-level committee was set up to look into the whole thing. Witnesses to the abduction, people who saw Qadri in Amrik Singh’s custody in an army camp, people who witnessed the altercation between the two that sent Amrik Singh into a rage, actually came forward to give written statements, which was rare. Even Amrik Singh’s accomplices, Ikhwanis most of them, were willing to turn approvers and testify against him in court. But then one by one their bodies began to turn up. In fields, in forests, by the side of the road…he killed them all. The army and the administration had to at least pretend to do something, although they couldn’t really act against him. He knew too much and he made it clear that if he went down he would take as many people as he could down with him. He was cornered, and dangerous. It was decided the best thing to do would be to get him out of the country and find him asylum somewhere. Which is eventually what happened. But it couldn’t be done at once. Not while the spotlight was on him. There had to be a cooling-off period. As a first step he was taken off field operations and given a desk job. In the Shiraz JIC, out of trouble’s way. Or so we thought.

So this was the man who was calling me. I can’t say I was longing to speak to him. A pestilence like that is best kept quarantined.

When I answered the phone he sounded excited. He spoke so fast it took me a while to realize he was speaking English and not Punjabi. He said they had captured an A-Category Terrorist, a Commander Gulrez, a dreaded Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander, in a massive cordon-and-search operation on a houseboat.

This was Kashmir; the Separatists spoke in slogans and our men spoke in press releases; their cordon-and-search operations were always “massive,” everybody they picked up was always “dreaded,” seldom less than “A-category,” and the recoveries they made from those they captured were always “war-like.” It wasn’t surprising, because each of those adjectives had a corresponding incentive — a cash reward, an honorable mention in their service dossier, a medal for bravery or a promotion. So, as you can imagine, that piece of information didn’t exactly get my pulse going.

He said that the terrorist had been killed while trying to escape. That didn’t do much for me either. It happened several times a day on a good day — or a bad day, depending on your perspective. So why was I being called in the middle of the night about something so routine? And what did his zealousness have to do with my department or with me?