The recent incident of custodial torture and death of three Gujjar men, in the aftermath of the recent round of militant ambush on military in the higher reaches of Bufliaz in Poonch killing three soldiers, has sent Pir-Panjal into deep distress. The three tribals killed in custody are Safeer Hussain, 37, Showkat Hussain, 26, and Shabir Ahmed, 32. The rise in militancy related activities and operations have seen a spike in the past few years, where the ongoing disturbances are looked upon as taking Pir-Panjal back to militancy prone decades.
The following account, an excerpt from a longer historical fiction, while throwing light on the social-cultural life as it existed under those troublesome years in late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the years of heightened tensions and violence, also provides a lens for us to see that human right excesses at the hand of the armed forces under impunity can push Pir-Panjal back to stages from which it has yet to fully recover. The insurgency and counter-insurgency operations in the past choked the already vulnerable diversity in the region, as the twin borderland districts of Poonch-Rajouri went on to deal with both internal-operations as well as the volatile pounding of them under severe cross-border shelling, creating a severe disbalance in inter-ethnic and inter-religious ties. With the current incident, the only way forward for the state and the forces is not just to enter the damage control mode that they appear to be doing at the moment, but to ensure that a fair trial follows and the killers are punished, besides been mindful of the fragility that these regions espouse.
§
On a freezing January day in 2002, 11-year-old Subbu was travelling in one of the newly introduced ‘video-coaches’ en route to Poonch, the deluxe buses run by the Jammu and Kashmir State Road Transport (JKSRTC) on the Jammu-Poonch highway. Earlier, the only means of public transport between Jammu and Poonch were the local iron-steel buses, with a multi-coloured body much like the old-school bridal lorries, with wooden bench like seats and plain glass windows that opened vertically, lifting and placing one flap in front of the other, up and down, both ways. Private shared taxis were yet a thing of the future in 2002. People in this part of Pir-Panjals, Poonch-Rajouri, heavily relied on these buses for commute, privately owned cars were not as widespread at the time. Mobile phones had not made an entry either and Poonch was still a land of landlines, one for four-six houses in a mohalla (neighborhood) and sometimes two connections for a village if it is a chosen one where the precious cables could reach. This was also a time when the guns on the line-of-control in Pir-Panjal had not yet completely fallen silent after the brutal siege of 1999-2000, the Kargil war. The shelling in these belts was one of the heaviest that people had ever witnessed. The shells falling around the town area, especially the ‘darya-mohallas’ – the neighbourhoods towards the river basin – still are fresh memory for the inhabitants.
On a ‘barely double lane’ that Jammu-Poonch highway was back then in 2000s, it sometimes took around nine to ten hours to reach Poonch from Jammu and vice-versa. These had always been one of the least developed, isolated, marginalised border belts in Jammu and Kashmir. It was ten minutes past one in the afternoon, and the bus had just reached Rajouri. As soon as the bus touched the entrance of the bridge that connects the Poonch highway to the main town of Rajouri, the conductor of the bus, Shadaab Hussain, kept calling out: “Chaar Seataan ann, Surankote Surankote Surankote, Uncle Chalna ne…Poonch Poonch Poonch (in Poonchi-Pahari), four seats left, any passenger for Surankote?” Pointing at a man standing with a bag and two kids near the bridge, he added, “Uncle, four seats, want to come onboard for Poonch?”
The man replied in negative by shaking his head, as the bus moved on towards Poonch. The Poonch-Jammu road was the only road connecting Poonch outwards, the last border-district as Mughal road connecting Poonch with Srinagar today had not been constructed yet.
The commotion in the bus signalled the restlessness among the passengers, as it had already been over two hours into the journey since the last refreshment break at Bhamla, in Sunderbani. Some women and a couple of men were talking about the long and arduous journey that Jammu-Poonch is, with the elders expressing that undertaking the journey is akin to a pilgrimage of some sort, preparations for which usually started at four or sometime earlier in the morning.
Subbu, the little girl, was shook from her sleep by her mother Rekha, waking up to see the long-awaited purpose of her journey being fulfilled as she finally got to enjoy the actual videos inside the video coaches. The fine cushiony seats, neat covers, even the window curtains on the windows inside these new video-coaches did not attract her attention much. All she had been waiting for was the cinema. As soon as the journey began, she had just one question to ask, “Mom, when will the film start, and which one will it be?” dreading the possibility of a film finally put would be an old Hindi movie, much to the dislike of any young girl growing up in the early 2000s.
Another reason for her excitement was that the transition from Doordarshan to cable network had not yet sunken smoothly deep on the ground. There was no possibility whatever few channels her limited local cable network provides would play a new fancy cinema of age, in her own television set at home. The video finally was played after a few passengers, looking at the plight of the poor child, pleaded the conductor immediately as the bus started after their last break at Bhamla. Her joy knew no bounds when the conductor indeed had a VHS tape of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, the movie of the time, recently released and brought to Subbu straight from the cinema to the VHS player of the video coach en route Poonch from Jammu that day. But how was she to follow the movie from a middle to rear seat, and the glitchy display that would go worse whenever the bus hit a pothole, which were many on a borderland road network, not to mention the squeaking sound the tires made when the brakes were hit after every minute taking into consideration the sharp curves these mountains are known for. On top of this, most of the passengers, unlike a young Subbu, would have been interested in this box with visuals and sounds if a Manoj Kumar or Madhu Bala were to appear there. They had no interest in KKKG, and hence continued with the chatter, making it all the way more difficult for Subbu, to follow from within these. She tried only to finally give up, and enjoy the almost muted version of the fancy faces on screen.
Rekha opened a big lunch box packed with several puris and began sharing it with others, specifically those who were interested. She cannot not have, everyone knew everyone on a Poonch-bound bus back in those days, and if someone did appear a little strange, familiarities were quickly established with a few initial rounds of questioning pertaining to family details among others. Prakash Sudan, sitting next to Rekha and Subbu, was the first to pick some up.
The bus slowly pulled up into the quiescent little town of Manjakote, a few kilometers before Bhimber Gali top – the natural mountain pass border between Rajouri and Poonch, the twin districts. Manjakote, otherwise unfrequented by visitors, had usually acted as a refreshment stop, the last one before Surankote, especially in the militancy laden years of the 1990s and early 2000s. The conductor made a quick call to all the passengers,
“Whosoever wants to take a short and quick loo break, or wants to purchase something to eat, can do so now, the bus will halt only after entering Surankote before finally reaching Poonch after that.”
Everyone knew why they need to take this announcement seriously. The drive between Manjakote-Bhimber Gali-Surankote-Poonch in the 1990s and 2000s was like a dreaded leap that everyone wanted to quickly take, just to reach the other side, their homes, safely.
The driver honked, whosoever was out quickly boarded, and the bus started one of the last legs of its journey towards Haveli, the administrative centre of Poonch. Now it carried only the passengers for Poonch district, others who had boarded it for various stops in district Rajouri had by then been safely dropped off. A few minutes into it, Bhishan Raina, a school teacher and a married man with two young girls on board, started discussing the life they as a borderland community faced during the past two years of the Kargil war.
Speaking in Poonchi-Pahari, he loudly expressed, “My father-in-law tried his best to convince us to temporarily shift to Jammu as the mortar shelling became a gory reality full of uncertainty back in early 2000 when the war in Kargil was in full swing. We contemplated, but you see, I could not have just left…my brothers, their families and my father were all staying back in Poonch. I told him you can take your daughter and our kids for the time being if it frightens you that much, I will stay back and look after the house. Eventually we stayed, as my wife decided otherwise, and then, my father-in-law suggested that we should at least hand over our little savings, gold jewellery among other things. His rationale was that in case the war grew gorier and if the entire town had to be temporarily evacuated, at least we will have savings, in money and kind, safe with him, that we can always be assured of. The man finally took our gold for safe-keeping, and has not returned it yet, two years after the war began. Perhaps, he was worried about the gold more than he was worried about his daughter, his grand kids and let alone, me.” The whole bus filled with laughter at this.
Aslam Sheikh, a contractor by profession, added, “I remember the time well, but luckily we never had the shelling problem in Surankote town due to it being tucked away into the mountains safely unlike the exposed town of Poonch that is right up there at the front.”
Sheikh was travelling with his octogenarian father, Ahmad, who had some of the best tales to narrate, courtesy experiences from his long life lived among these disturbed mountains. One that he shared went like this:
“There lives a Bakerwal, Muhamad-ud-din, or simply Muhamadin, in one of the dhoks (meadows to and from where Bakerwals make their seasonal transhumance) up in those mountains above Bufliaz (the place that connects Mughal Road to Poonch). We were having tea at a stall in the bazaar in Surankote a few months ago, where he shared how, while living up there in his dhara (stone and wood makeshift shelter) in the summer when the war had already been on, he noticed his chicken kept swindling in numbers with each new day. One day as he was feeding them danah grains…he noticed something is not up to the mark. The brood of hens not only looked terribly reduced in numbers, but some of the chicks were missing too. That day he was certain that somebody had been either stealing his birds or eating them up alive: it could be a bear, a leopard or a human, he wondered.
“One day a group of policemen and a few havaldars were roaming around in the lower reaches of the meadow, looking for informers who they can assign for the task of collecting information on infiltration and militants highly active in the area at the time. Muhamadin offered his services and vowed to pass on any information he will have thereon only if the policemen will help him solve his chicken-riddle. The policemen, quite amused by the case, were driven to take it up. They walked with him to his dhara, inspected his chicken shelter, kept separately from his other sheep flock and goat herd. The entire situation became too tempting for the policemen and the havaldars, that the sight of chicken, sheep and goat, put together one after the other, could only appear to them as the various types of curries and yakhnies for dinner. Two senior policemen: the inspector and another of his colleague took two chicken, a goat and a sheep each, while the havaldars decided on splitting the meat from a goat and a sheep after zeba (sacrificial butchering) in equal halves.
“That day, in Surankote town, when I met him, at the tea stall, he had come to request the army to intervene while complaining about the situation with the police. Ultimately, the army visited, took away four goats and two sheep, but they unlike the police, offered some money in return, with no possible answers for his dwindling chicken flock. It was one of his friends, another Bakerwal who had also come up to the meadow for flock rearing, informed him that some people had been stealing birds and cattle in the group, as they have been pressured by the militants who have camped in the nearby forests to do so. That explained his loss.”
“I,” Sheikh continued, “then advised him to go to district commissioner with his situation, and tell him about how his birds have been feeding, the police, the army and the militants. He said tauba, God forbid, as the thoughts of corrupt greedy gatekeeping clerical staff at the commissioner’s office eating up rest of his flock shook him. He eventually shifted to a different dhok for the season with whatever was left of his cattle and birds.”
Laughter filled the bus once again, that had by then reached the Bhimber Gali Top. It halted there for the regular inspection. The VHS player was finally shut down, much to the frustration of Subbu, whose eyes just a minute before had marvelled at the dancing Poo in ‘You are My Sonia’.
The driver, along with all the male passengers, were called out to identify themselves besides registering the vehicle in a thick book that keeps the record for perhaps all humans, animals and objects that enter and leave this unfortunate district at the extreme periphery of a state.
As the bus plied down towards Surankote crossing Tota Gali, an uncanny silence had engulfed it which was broken by Bhishan Raina, who asked everyone to looked out from the left windows in the bus. With certain melancholy and excitement, both enshrouding his face at the same time, he pointed towards a small white building with faint green rooftop inside the tress far below. “That is my school, this is where I am posted as a master-grade (senior grade) teacher, look there, that one, behind the tree line.” The bus had now reached Sanjote.
“Do you come every day this far up from Poonch main town?” asked Yousaf Choudhary, a Gujjar milk seller, from village Nangali, close to the town.
“No, I have been attached to the Chief Education Officer’s office in the town, for the past one year,” replied Raina. “Two militants had been making specific inquiries around the school premises last year, about masters (teachers) who come to teach from the city. Our headmaster took this seriously and wrote a letter to the CEO, requesting him to attach me, and another of my colleagues Sunil, to some place in the city until the threat settles down. I have thus been asked to keep away from my school and I do not see when can I return back, or if ever I could,” he continued.
“Many of the school teachers have increasingly been attached to town-based offices in the last many years,” added Netar Singh, a retired school teacher and another Pahari Sikh travelling in the bus that day.
“One of my younger brothers was posted in a middle school in village Lathung (Lathung comes after you cross Surankote towards Poonch City). One day three years ago, before the war hit, he was frequented by armed militants in his village, as he stood out from the crowd being a turbaned Sikh. They then asked him to get attached at some place in the town and not to enter village next day onwards. He still is unsure why they left him alive with a warning, and did not kill him. Don’t you all remember the death of two Sikh men around the same village area?” he asked. Everyone confirmed in silence and with a sigh.
The story goes that two men belonging to Poonch city reached Surankote late in the evening on a similar public bus service. They reached Surankote at around four in the evening. Throughout the 1990s and especially in the late-1990s and early 2000s, the route would be captured by multiple-orders: the militants in the region would take over in some sort of parallel order after 3 o’clock in the afternoon. There was no official regime change; the Indian state forces would simply give up and disappear from the roads in the evening, as if handing the game over to other players. If the main highway to Poonch, beyond Surankote had this scene, then one can only vouch for what may have been the scenario in connecting roads that led to several villages and smaller townships. Most of the time, back in those days, the administration wouldn’t let the vehicles coming from the Jammu side pass after 2 o’clock in the afternoon from Rajouri, because by the time they would have entered Surankote, it would be evening already. The military would reappear the next morning, and would simply not be responsible for anything that had transpired on these roads after three or four every evening.
One of the elders from Surankote cities, reminiscing about the dreadful times, talked about how he shifted his extended family in the Poonch city. They stayed there for long, and hardly visited home in Surankote for many years at a stretch. This game of hide and seek between military and militants became difficult to handle for almost everyone who cared for their lives and their families.
The two Sikh men reached Surankote by bus at 3 pm and decided to walk towards the city, attempting to cover a distance of around 28 km on foot. Talk has it that as they kept crossing villages on the way. Many on the road who were winding up the business for the day closing the shutter of their shops, or people in homes that lay on the roadside, pleaded with them to not proceed further on foot, with some even offering their homes where the men were welcome to stay for the night. One of the two Sikh men was a retired armed-forces subedar, most likely, and he was accompanied by his brother-in-law who was a civilian from the city of Poonch. Many witnesses later reported how when confronted and asked to not walk further, the subedar replied, “There’s nothing to fear, you guys are baselessly worried, we will walk up to Nangali Sahab (a pilgrimage of great religious significance for the Sikhs near the city) and shall rest there for the night.”
Their fearlessness cost them their lives, or rather the fearlessness of subedar-sahab cost the other one his life. They were taken across the river by the militants, beheaded, their bodies only to be later recovered by the villagers and the police the next day. The hide and seek between military and militants was not a game played between these two after all. It had engulfed Pir-Panjal like never before. The road from Surankote to Poonch runs parallel to the river that acts as a boundary between areas that were absolutely under the control of militants. Areas like Lathung, Marhote were the places that saw some of the highest displacement and violence, the victims, mostly Muslims: Gujjars, Paharis, Bakerwals, all at the same time.
The bus reached Surankote at 3 pm, which almost felt like a night on a dark grey January afternoon. Aslam got down, bidding everyone farewell.
“Acha ji, Allah Hafiz, aao chalaan, aao chaa pi jao…may you all be in God’s protection, but why don’t you all come have tea at my place, freshen up and then proceed…come Madamji, stay with your daughter here with us, you anyways have to come tomorrow to the hospital,” said Aslam as he bade all his fellow passengers farewell, particularly inviting Rekha to stay the night as she had to make the round trip again to Surankote the next morning where she was posted as a staff-nurse in the only small public hospital (almost hospital) in the tehsil.
“It’s already three, and in a short while it will be almost dark, we all need to reach safely before it’s night. Perhaps some other day when days are not as dark for all of us,” responded Netar Singh affectionately.
The bus once again accelerated through the town bazar, making the last leg of its journey towards Poonch.
“Mommy, when will I get to see the rest of the film, we are almost home,” interjected a still hopeful Subbu.
“We will finish it some other time,” Rekha tried to calm her down.
The window curtains were drawn, especially on the right side of the bus. Nobody asked them to; the conductor did not, the driver did not. The conductor just switched off his cabin lights. This made Subbu ever more restless as her scenic views outside were draped all of a sudden.
The bus crossed the Pir-Baba mazaar, shrine, near Lathung, but did not stop for prayers as it usually does in the morning hours. It accelerated swiftly, like it was escaping something, someone, unseen, yet there, maybe not.
“Where is that temple, Dhundhak, where the two Sadhus were beheaded last year,” asked a young adult, Rashid to Bhishan Singh, trying to look outside through a small hole that the folds in the curtains had created.
“It is further ahead, there is still time, but the Sikh men were picked up from somewhere here,” replied Bhishan, also trying to look for a peephole.
“Wasn’t the Judge killed with his bodyguards, somewhere here too,” asked Yaqoob, a fruit-seller from Poonch.
“No, no, that was up there in DKG, Dhera ki Gali, in Bufliaz, not here,” replied Prakash.
“Many members of a family were killed too in the midst of a night near the town in Surankote. My brother’s cousin, a Bakerwal, living in the upper reaches of Bufliaz had to be displaced from his meadow and shelter, as the land had to be used for military purposes, they now live in shabby shelter here near the town. A neighbourhood has been created only for such displaced Gujjar, Bakerwal, Pahari refugees,” Yaqoob added.
“Who killed the family?” asked the conductor, who by then had been drawn to the conversation.
“Some say they were collateral, as people who had personal rivalries, settled the scores by using militants and police and whosoever else was a player in the game.”
“What is a collateral?” asked a perplexed Rekha.
“Jisko kisi ne nahin maara, aur who phir bhi mara gaya…someone who nobody killed, and yet he was murdered,” replied Prakash.
“Yes, a lot many cattle and flock died too, as in these untimely sudden displacements, people could hardly attend to their animals the way they do normally…many of my known people were harassed on both sides, many killed to for purported mukhbiri, espionage.”
“If you become army informers, militants kill you, if you become militant’s informer, you invite the wrath of the military. If a group of militants were to come and knock at your door in the middle of the night, in these areas where military is nowhere to be found after 4 pm, what will you do? Do you risk harming your entire family, or do you save them by providing them with the food and funds they have come to your door for…because if you don’t you are an enemy, a pro-state, pro-everything, in the eyes of militants, and if you do, you’re anti-everything in the eyes of the state,” Choudhary Ashraf, another septuagenarian who had been sitting quiet and listening to other’s stories all this while, spoke for the first and the final time on this journey.
He went on, “You see those stretches across the river, there, they, the militants simply chop off your ears and nose, there, uss paar…seddha kann kappne.”
An eerie silence befell the bus, as all of them tried to get a peak of the hills across.
Subbu, the youngest in the bus, who before been quite disinterested in whatever had been discussed throughout the journey, suddenly had been paying attention as her film was forcibly shut down.
She had also been looking out through her side of the curtain, and soon as she heard, they chop of ears, on that side, the till then beautiful view suddenly filled her body with a strange fear. She drew the curtains, holding them tight in her tiny hands, lest anything or anyone should see her inside the bus.
“Mommy, when will we reach Poonch?” she asked one final time.
“Soon enough, soon enough,” a terrified Rekha replied.
The bus kept accelerating, nobody spoke a word until the glimpse of the town came into view and another military check post near village Madana was now in sight.
“We have reached, Waheguru tera shukur…all thanks to God, we are almost home now!” exclaimed Bhishan Singh.
All men once again got down for the routine check with their identity cards, as Rekha wrapped little Subbu in her arms, and hid her under her shawl.
Malvika Sharma belongs to Poonch, and has been writing on borderlands for a while now. The essay above is an excerpt from her upcoming book, Echoes in the Panjals: Writing and Reflexivity in Conflict Zones.
