As the night descended over Srinagar on a breezy September evening in 1988 and traffic on the streets grew thinner, a group of men pulled up outside a house in the upscale Rajbagh neighbourhood. Armed with weapons, they attempted to storm the building. Their target was Ali Muhammad Watali, the senior most police officer in Kashmir.
Tricked by the darkness, however, the would-be assassins botched up the operation. One of them accidentally fired at his own group, killing an accomplice. The others fled the scene, leaving behind a Russian Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifle behind. The existence of that weapon in Kashmir was “unknown at that time,” writes Watali in his book, Guns Under My Chinar: Kashmir’s Covert Wars – a deep exploration of the history of militancy in the erstwhile state. The assassination attempt on Watali would later be counted as the first attack that marked the start of militancy the following year.
Guns Under My Chinar: Kashmir’s Covert Wars, A.M. Watali, Rupa, 2024.
The last two years of the 1980s were a turning point in the history of the region, the time that scholars and officials generally believe that a relatively peaceful movement for a plebiscite to determine the fate of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir morphed into a violent uprising. Roving the streets where their writ ran large, and where the vestiges of government control had all but collapsed, militants began targeting anything that symbolised the Indian presence. That included, primarily – if not exclusively – members of the police and counter-intelligence.
The first shots fired
On December 1, 1989, militants killed and then dismembered the corpse of Maisuma Police Station’s Station House Officer (SHO) in Srinagar. Parts of his body were stuffed in a plastic bag and then placed outside his office.
On January 2, 1990, R.N.P. Singh, an assistant intelligence officer was shot dead in Anantnag. Just six days later, militants killed three more policemen: Gopal Chouhan, a sub-inspector at the Intelligence Bureau in Anantnag, Hamidullah Bhat, an inspector associated with counter-intelligence and Ghulam Mustafa, a head constable in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Srinagar.
“A series of simultaneous attacks on intelligence officials forced the Intelligence Bureau to pull out 26 out of its 32 officers in the Valley in the first week of January,” scholar Navnita Chadha Behera has written. In a matter of days, the militants had managed to significantly erode the government’s grip over the Valley.
Watali’s book offers a detailed account of how the J&K Police battled this grim situation, and was able to reinforce its command. “We won the battle when out of an estimated 100 trained militants who had infiltrated the Valley, 72 were arrested along with their arms,” he writes. “Peaceful conditions prevailed all across the Valley with a fairly large tourist footfall.”
Watali also mentions that the then IB director, M.K. Narayanan, paid a visit to Valley and was “satisfied with the police operations.”
The ‘surmountable’ phase
So how did the situation go out of hand after that? Although Watali’s narration weaves together several elements to give an idea about the kind of chaotic circumstances which allowed militancy to surge back, he pins the lion’s share of the blame at the door of the Rajiv Gandhi government and, with it, the Army.
The author appears to suggest that the Army was lax in stemming the inflow of insurgents from Pakistan so that the authorities could justify the application of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA, which “had been a permanent demand of the army even during peacetime in Valley,” he writes.
One of the bases for his claims is the lack of help from the Union government for the action plan that he had drafted following what he said was the Army’s inaction to plug the infiltration. The plan envisaged establishing border outposts manned by local police in areas next to the Line of Control. The program required mobilising two CRPF companies, a written request for which Watali had dispatched to the Ministry of Home Affairs.
“The GoI did not provide the two requisitioned companies till I prematurely hung up my boots in October 1989,” he writes. “In hindsight, I feel that it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage my proposal, probably to allow militancy to escalate for political gains.”
‘Our own mistakes’
Recalling his conversation with Lieutenant General P.S. Vadhera, then chief of staff of the Indian Army’s Northern Command, Watali writes that he broached the subject of unguarded borders with him in response to which Vadhera said that the Army would not place their men on the ground to check infiltration unless they were empowered with AFSPA.
“With this logic, I told him that AFSPA should have then been enforced all along the Indo-Pak border as well as in the rest of the country,” he recalls. “Why did the army require special powers at the border when guarding it was their basic duty?… Under the guise of this draconian law, they wanted absolute power to govern the state at grassroots level.”
The J&K Police, Watali writes, had an “upper-hand” in the initial phase of militancy when it was yet to explode perilously. This characterisation of militancy as relatively weaker and therefore vulnerable to a strong counter-strike at its start is consistent with journalist Tavleen Singh’s account in her book Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors.
“He (Farooq Abdullah, then Chief Minister) would not have found so hard to contain the violence…It was not yet terrorist violence of the kind that had become routine in Punjab,” Singh, who spent considerable time as a young reporter in Kashmir ahead as well as in the midst of militancy, writes. “There were no major massacres of Hindus, nor were there incidents in which groups of militants arrived, Punjab-style, in bazaars and on buses and sprayed people with automatic weapons.”
Ghulam Qadir ‘Ganderbali’, Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) in J&K Police in 1958. Photo: By arrangement.
Local wars, foreign fighters
In spite of the police being able to (and having brought already) the situation more or less under control, the Ministry of Home Affairs under Buta Singh decided to hand over the operational command of the Valley to the central forces. “Was this a calculated manoeuvre aimed at prolonging the agony…of the people of J&K for political gains?” Watali asks, alluding to the November 1989 Lok Sabha elections in the run up to which the Congress was grappling with wider public disaffection, leading to the party’s electoral drubbing.
In light of history, this argument doesn’t have much force to it as Pakistan was yet to leverage its influence over the armed mercenaries trained at hundreds of militant nurseries close to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The influx of these foreign mercenaries, which later completely changed the dynamics of the militancy, would have anyway necessitated the Army’s full involvement.
That occasion came just two-three years later, when Pakistan-based groups and the Indian establishment appeared to have entered into a “tacit understanding” to marginalise and decimate the indigenous militant factions. Of the estimated 2,213 militants killed between 1990 and 1992, the majority were affiliated with the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which clearly suggests that the counter-insurgency apparatus was pursuing local born recruits.
Also read: Militancy in Kashmir Is Likely To Get Communalised Again
It is only in the mid-1990s, after the local groups capitulated, that foreign outfits with greater access to more sophisticated weaponry and unremitting supplies of battle-hardened recruits from all over the Islamic world, began to assert their dominance. In 1994, out of the 1,545 militants killed in Kashmir, only 119 were thought to be foreigners. But by 1998, that figure spiked to 398 out of 1,111 total killed. The share of foreign participants in the following years continued to swell; 348, 403, 488 and 516 in 2002, J&K Police data reveals.
The heightened foreign participation enabled the violence to billow out in its most gruesome forms – exemplified by the burning of a Sufi shrine at Charar-e-Sharif in Budgam, or the kidnapping and execution of six Western trekkers in Pahalgam, or the Wandhama incident in which 23 Kashmiri Pandit villagers were massacred.
The origins of insurgency
But Watali’s account still offers some vital insights into how such an eventuality became even possible at all.
That begins with the onset of cut-throat political competition between the Congress and National Conference ahead of the 1983 Assembly elections. Farooq Abdullah had rejected an offer of alliance from the Congress and instead, finding himself on a weaker footing, tried to galvanise political support from Kashmiri Sikhs (by courting Sikh separatists in Punjab) and, to broaden his base within the Muslims, also patched up with this former foe, Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq.
These manoeuvres only deepened his rift with the Indira Gandhi-led Congress which, after he won the polls, accused him of having rigged them. She was determined to cut him to size afterwards. Gandhi had many alibis to zero in on, primary among them the J&K Resettlement Bill, which would have – under certain criteria – allowed Kashmiri residents living in Pakistan to return. Another was the 1983 cricket match between India and West Indies in Srinagar where the Kashmiri audience booed the Indian team, and instead cheered for their opponents.
These events were a prelude to the eventual dismissal of Farooq as chief minister in July 1984. Although Gandhi’s son and successor Rajiv did bury the hatchet with him – and GM Shah, who had replaced Farooq as chief minister, was sent packing in March 1986 – the state remained under central rule till November that year. The person who effectively ruled J&K virtually till the 1987 elections was Jagmohan Malhotra, the governor. Allowing him to wield power led to the kind of situation “that Nehru never allowed in August 1953 or Mrs Gandhi in September 198[4],” wrote MJ Akbar in Kashmir: Behind The Vale. “For the first time since the days of Hari Singh, Srinagar was ruled by a non-Kashmiri.”
It was here that the seeds of insurgency began to germinate. Jagmohan, who came to J&K with a tainted record which included the blood of Muslims at Delhi’s Turkman Gate, later presided over similar mass killings in Kashmir, the anger over which re-energised the armed violence. Especially after Central rule was imposed and he was given a free hand in January 1990.
A new subsidiary source material
The other portions of the book deal with the forms of militancy that erupted in J&K through 1960s and 70s involving groups like Red Kashmir, Master Cell, and al-Fatah. But these are the stories that readers must have already encountered in journalist Praveen Swami’s book India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir. Both Swami and – to some extent – Watali appear to have drawn heavily on the ‘secret files’ compiled by Surendra Nath who served as the Inspector General of Police (IGP) in Kashmir during the tumultuous years of the 1960s.
Guns Under My Chinar itself doesn’t form much of a coherent narrative about the history of Kashmir as the book is a potpourri of many different stories taking place at different time periods involving the author. But overall, it will be an important supplementary source for future histories of the J&K, as and when they are written.
Shakir Mir is a freelance journalist based in Srinagar. He was previously a correspondent with The Times of India.
