Prem Shankar Jha 
This article is the second in a two-part series on the Union government’s pursuit for the death penalty for Yasin Malik. Read the first here.
In the preceding part of this article I had described why the “new” evidence the government claims to have obtained, that pins Yasin Malik to the killing of four airmen at Rawalpora on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990, will not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny in any self-respecting court of law.
But if Malik and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) did not kill the airmen at Rawalpora twenty-five years ago, then who did?
Despite a decade of digging around for witnesses and sweating the accused in jails, the Central Bureau of Investigation failed to get an answer. But today, the benefit of hindsight allows us to identify one terrorist, little known by the public and the media in Kashmir at the height of the insurgency, as the mastermind, if not the actual killer of the airmen.
This is Mushtaq Ali Zargar, better known in Kashmir as Mushtaq Latram.
Latram is almost completely unknown outside the circle of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The public got an inkling of his importance in Pakistan’s long-term plans for snatching Kashmir away from India only in 2000, more than two decades after the start of the insurgency, when the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) insisted that he had to be one of three terrorists in Indian jails who must be released if Indian Airlines’ flight IC 814 was to be allowed to return to Delhi from Kandahar.
The other two were Masood Azhar, who went on to head the Jaish-e Mohammad, and the British-born extremist, Ahmed Omer Sheikh.
In the decade of peace that had followed the Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting in Rawalpindi in 2004, and the Musharraf-Manmohan joint statement of April 2005, Azhar had created a training centre for terrorists in the Pir Panjal region of South Kashmir. He was also the mastermind behind the Pulwama slaughter of Indian jawans in 2019.
Sheikh was a Britain-born terrorist who became a member of the extreme Islamist jihadist group Harkat-ul-Ansar, also known as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, in the 1990s. He was arrested-in India for the part he played during the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists and jailed in 1994, where he stayed till he was exchanged for IC 814 in 2000.
After his release, he joined the Jaish-e-Mohammed and used his British education and upper-class accent to lure the Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Pearl to his kidnapping and execution in Karachi.
Latram was in the exalted company of the Jaish-e Mohammed’s top killers because, till his arrest in 1992, he had been the single-most important recruiter of killers for the ISI in Kashmir.
Pakistan’s hand in stoking the violence in Kashmir
Pakistan’s complete failure to garner any support from locals in Kashmir in the 1965 war had shown Islamabad that Kashmiris had no desire to become Pakistanis.
But Pakistan never lost its appetite for Kashmir. So when General Zia-ul-Haq, who was an ardent Islamist, came to power via a military coup in 1978, he immediately revived the attempt to seize Kashmir, but this time through “other means”.
Relying upon the religion card, Pakistan’s ISI first approached leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Kashmir, invited them to Muzaffarabad, and even introduced its leaders to Zia.
The Jamaat was willing to work towards the annexation of Kashmir by Pakistan, but the ISI soon realised that its following in Jammu and Kashmir was much too small, as it is even today. So it was left with no option but to approach the leaders of the then-nascent JKLF.
By 1983, only months after Sheikh Abdullah’s death, Kashmir had been thrown into turmoil by New Delhi’s undermining and displacement of Farooq Abdullah, and its imposition of his uncle, Gul Shah, in the chief minister’s seat. When the Gul Shah gambit came unstuck, it declared governor’s rule and sent in Jagmohan as the governor.
So disenchantment with New Delhi was running high when the ISI took some of the senior leaders of the JKLF to Muzaffarabad and Islamabad, to persuade them to revolt. But they soon found that while these were willing to accept Pakistan’s assistance, their goal was to win independence from New Delhi, and not to join Pakistan.
By the late eighties, therefore, Pakistan had been forced back on to the only remaining alternative.
This was to find impressionable young men in Jammu and Kashmir, bring them to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), give them intense indoctrination and military training, supply them with arms (sent separately), get them to launch attacks on Indian soldiers, policemen, Kashmiri Pandits and pro-India leaders of opinion in Kashmir, and allow the inevitable police response, which would involve mass arrests, crackdowns on entire villages and the use of varying degrees of coercion, to create the discontent in spreading ripples that would pave the way to a wider insurgency.
The rigged elections of 1987, and the Gawkadal massacre in 1990 came to it as Manna from Heaven.
Latram was an even earlier convert to separatism than Malik. Belonging to a middle-class family from Srinagar’s old town, he had been arrested on a petty charge and mistreated by the police in 1983 and had never gotten over it. Among the thousands who crossed over into POK to seek revenge for the betrayal of their rights in the 1987 elections, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar was one of the earliest and, as it turned out, most lethal.
In August 1988, after a falling out with Malik over the use of violence, Zargar crossed over to Pakistan through Trehgam in southern Kashmir and received training at a camp that had been organised by the Pakistan army for the JKLF1.
He came back, formed the Al Umar Mujahideen (AUM), went back to PoK for a second round of training in May 1989 and came back to form an even more violent assassins’ group within the AUM. He named it the Al Umar Commando Force and put it under a close confidant and possibly also a relative, named Shabbir Ahmed Zargar.
Together with the much more publicised (and dispensable) Hizbul Mujahideen, the AUM and the Al Umar Commando Force became Pakistan’s most valued weapons for unleashing targeted violence aimed at triggering an Indian over-reaction that would alienate Kashmiris, and to assassinate prominent Kashmiris who were prepared to discuss paths to peace with New Delhi.
Also read: Despite Losing the J&K Elections, BJP Holds the Key to Restoring Peace in the Region
Spate of kidnapping-murders, not yearning for release, made Malik order JKLF to lay down arms
Latram was one of the four men who kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed on December 9, 1989. One of the prisoners whose release the kidnappers demanded in exchange for her release was Javed Ahmad Zargar. Zargar is a common surname in Kashmir, but he too may have been a relative of Latram or of Shabbir Ahmad Zargar. Latram was therefore almost certainly responsible for getting Javed Ahmad Zargar on the list of prisoners to be released.
Six weeks after his release, Javed Ahmad Zargar was accused by the CBI of being one of the planners, if not assassins, of the Rawalpora murders. Given the strained relations between Latram and Malik, there is a strong possibility that it was Latram, not Malik, who planned the Rawalpora killing.
Latram’s presence among the terrorists who kidnapped Sayeed could also be the reason why Malik not only accompanied the kidnappers but was willing to let her see his face. He may have joined the plot to ensure that Sayeed would not be killed even if the government did not accept the kidnappers’ demands, and shown her his face to reassure her that she would be safe. That would explain why he was the only person whom Sayeed was able to identify.
The kidnapping of Sayeed almost certainly completed the split between the JKLF and the AUM. That would explain why Malik played no part in the kidnapping of Mushir-ul-Haq, the vice chancellor of Kashmir University, his secretary Abdul Ghani Zargar, and H.L. Khera, the general manager of the Hindustan Machine Tools plant in Kashmir, all of whom were killed when the kidnappers’ ransom demand was not met.
Those murders set the mould in which violent militancy flourished for the next four years. These years saw a spate of kidnappings of children of politicians and senior civil servants. There were 169 in 1990, 290 in 1991, 281 in 1992 and 349 in 1993. All these occurred while Malik was languishing in jail.
No one has kept count of how much money the militants collected from the parents, but it undoubtedly became the bait that lured more and more disaffected and poor Kashmiri youth into the insurgency.
Malik was in jail when all this was happening. So all Kashmiris know that the JKLF played no part in these kidnappings.
The HAJY [i.e. Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Wani, Javed Ahmad Mir, Jasin Malik] group’s initial outburst of rage had been at the rigging of the 1987 elections, and the reversal of the election victory of their candidate, Mohammad Yusuf Shah (now Salaheddin). But Malik was appalled by the spate of murders and kidnappings that followed. That, more than the yearning to be released from jail, was what made him order the JKLF to lay down its arms in 1994. He had understood within months of taking up arms in 1987 that acts of violence alone would not secure ‘Azadi’.
What is certain is that with Malik in jail and the JKLF in disarray, Latram’s AUM and Commando Force became the main killing instruments of the ISI in Kashmir. Unlike the dozen or so other militant groups that were spawned by the uprising, these did not advertise themselves. In the almost daily news reports carried by the print and television media in the 1990s, there are only occasional references to the AUM, and none to the Al Umar Commando force.
Kashmir’s police and intelligence services credited them with at least 40 murders, but apparently had no idea of Latram’s pivotal role in Pakistan’s game plan. This only became apparent to Delhi and Srinagar when the terrorists who hijacked IC 814 to Kandahar included him in the three terrorists whose release they demanded in exchange for allowing the plane to fly back to Delhi.
What is more, it had become clear even before 1990 that Pakistan was prepared to arm and train only those who espoused the goal of making Kashmir a part of Pakistan.
Hashim Qureshi, the second hijacker with Maqbool Butt of an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan in 1971, had absolutely refused to fight for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan and had to flee to Holland to save his life. In an article in Chattan, a celebrated Urdu magazine published from Srinagar, he had warned Kashmiris to beware of Pakistan’s enticements.
This became glaringly apparent when by mid-1990 itself, the ISI had withdrawn arms and training from around 5,000 JKLF youth who had crossed over into PoK in the wake of the Gawkadal massacre of January 21, 1990, and had created a rival tanzeem, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, out of those who were willing to make this commitment. By October, the Hizb numbered close to 1,5002.
Malik’s first act upon coming out of jail in 1994 therefore, was to order the JKLF to lay down its arms and adopt non-violent methods of agitating for independence. The JKLF paid a heavy price for following his instructions, because it became an easy prey for both the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and security forces personnel hungry for the prize money that the government was offering for the head of every slain militant.
In the next two years it lost somewhere between 100 and 300 of its cadres in the internecine three-sided war that erupted in the valley.
Despite this heavy toll, Malik stuck to his resolve. In the golden period of Vajpayee followed by Manmohan Singh in Delhi, Musharraf in Pakistan and Mufti Sayeed in Kashmir, Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq became intermediaries in ironing out details of the Delhi agreement of 2005. Both made it clear to Musharraf that Kashmir wanted to retain its own identity and not become a part of Pakistan.
At a conference held at the Islamabad campus of the National University of Science and Technology, they both told an audience of Pakistan army officers bluntly that Kashmir did not wish to become a part of their country. This took place in this writer’s presence.
In 2007, Malik launched a Safar-e-Azadi – a ‘journey to freedom’ – in which he covered virtually every village in the valley, urging the people to shun violence and fight for self-determination peacefully. This was two years after Manmohan Singh and Musharraf had agreed to a four-point programme for bringing peace to Kashmir and ending the hostility between Pakistan and India, but were dilly-dallying over its details.
Malik did this to speed up the process. India and Pakistan came within an inch of success then, and again between 2012 and 2014. But Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007 by terrorists widely suspected to have been employed by the ISI, and the UPA’s defeat in the 2014 election, killed both initiatives. The rest is history.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.
Footnotes
1. Manoj Joshi: The Lost Rebellion, 1998.
2. Indian intelligence reports seen by the author in October 1990.