Ladakh Festival

Luring the tourist 

Zubair A Dar

Leh: Two round metallic plates of Baikul, an ethnic musical instrument, join by a clap and create a vibration that flows to every corner of Spituk Monastery’s Chamra (square courtyard) on a barren hill top in Leh. The bell has already announced the beginning of a performance, calling for the attention of the audience – mostly foreign tourists – who sit on the ladders descending to the Chamra, line the edges and even occupy the small canopy that covers part of the courtyard and fences the descending slope of the hill. A Nalchak (stick) strikes the Nal (Ladakhi drum) and the beat soon synchronizes with the vibrating rhythm of the Dungches . Tungchen, a five feet long pipe now comes alive. 
Four dancers appear from the gallery on top of the stairs. All eyes fix at the performers as they descend into the square. Their colourful Chamgos dress and a mask covering the face and head sets them out in the distinct landscape of this cold desert. A cluster of photographers encircle them for close-ups. The orchestrated descend leads the dancers to the Chamra, where they perform Chams – a spiritual dance based on the theme of the destruction of the evil. 
“The performance of the dance will develop courage and dignity besides keeping the performers away from evil,” a background announcement by a woman about the dance informs. It also warns against clapping for the performance as the dance is spiritual and not just entertaining. “It helps the performers kill three inner evils,” the announcer adds. 
Chams is the main attraction of the two week long festival sponsored by the Jammu and Kashmir Tourism Department to showcase the culture of the Himalayan region. But the spiritual dance is not the only activity to look out for during the festival days. There are pageantry cultural troops in colourful costumes that march through the markets in the evenings. There are music concerts, a polo tournament, camel safaris, archery competitions, river rafting and cultural song and dance performances at different places in and around the town- each forming an important part of the extravaganza called the Ladakh Festival.  
“The main aim of the festival is to lengthen the tourist season by two more months. The season earlier lasted only till august,” says Chief Executive Councilor and Chairman of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (Leh), Chering Dorjay. And the addition to the Ladakh’s rich tourist potential has yielded good results. “Only this year, more than 60,000 tourists have visited Leh and we expect the figure to cross 70,000. It is a record,” says Nisar Hussain, an officer in Tourism Department in Leh. “Last year, we received 51,000 tourists,” he adds. 
The festival is not just another cultural show. It is journey through Ladakh’s Buddhist past and its culture that is scattered on several thousand square kilometers across a barren land dotted by small villages and a few towns. Knowing well what touches the weakest nerve of an ancient culture seeking tourist, the festival travels to monasteries, auditoriums, river valleys and villages. 
“Having the dances at monasteries makes it historically rich. It is better than watching the dances at auditoriums,” says Nicole Miller, who is travelling India along with her husband, Luke Miller. “The festival was mentioned in the guide book. We watched a lot of it even in rain,” she adds. 
The two sit glued to the square compound where the Chams is performed. As each group of dancers appears from the balcony, Luke keenly awaits with his camera for a click to save the moment for posterity. 
Chams begins with a dance by Hashank (teacher) and Hutuk (disciples). Hashank, in Buddhist philosophy is the sponsor for 16 Arahads that spread Buddhism. Following a particular theme, it ends with the Shawa (deer) dance in celebration of the animal which is very harmless in nature and thus connects the philosophy of life with the nature of the animal. In one of the sequences, the dancers wear masks with tongues protruding out. From the mouth, parts of body like legs and head appear. “There is no visible form of the inner evil. The parts depict the killing of that evil,” the announcer told us. 
In the evening, the festival moves to Leh’s main market. Groups of dancers appear from behind the crowd and enter the small space left for them by the jostling onlookers. They dance to the tune of the drums as hundreds of cameras click for photos – the performance resembling a fashion parade in some metropolis. Among the performers is Dadul Skarhe, an archer whose photo appears on the brochure of the Ladakh Festival. Dressed in printed yellow robes and armed with a sword, a bow and arrows, he sings with others as he marches through the market with co-performers in two rows along with hundreds of spectators. 
“I learned archery from my elders when I was a kid,” says Skarhe, a contractor by profession and now awarded by the Archery Association of Ladakh. He performs a story of the legendry king Kesar and his queen.
There are Ghazal dancers, a form of song and music that came to Ladakh from Baltistan. The drums and pipes in the background bring the audience alive. As each group finishes, a new one with a different cultural dress makes its entry. One that is most sought after by the tourists is the group of Brokpas from Aryan. The four women include Yangchen Lamo from Garkhon village of Aryans. She can not speak, but her expressions and beauty attracts most of the flash lights. 
Amid this nostalgia, however, the charm of the polo in Leh is not lost. At the finals of the polo tournament, thousands of spectators gather. “In a town with a population of 25,000 only, the gathering is unprecedented,” a tourism official says. Such is the interest shown by the population that the Chief Executive Councilor of Leh joined the concluding dance at the closing ceremony along with tourists and locals, much to the amusement of the audience.

June 2008 Uprising

Fuelling Gen-X fire in Kashmir 

Zubair A. Dar

If the nine days of uprising in June 2008 by Kashmir's Generation X represented anything, it is the unpredictability of peace in the valley. And now it is crystal clear that it takes little provocation, or just one small mistake, to push Kashmir back to the familiar revolt of 1990. The reasons too are not unfamiliar: first the separatist sentiment is well and alive; and then, New Delhi has literally wasted the window of opportunity provided to it by the changed international circumstances after 9/11, the successful Assembly elections of 2002 and Pakistan's u-turn on its traditional Kashmir policy. In fact, New Delhi even failed to understand that the decline in violence and a boom in tourism have made it compulsory to address the larger issues of justice to heal the festering wounds of the last 18 years. Instead, it essentially followed a policy of forget and move ahead, and thus, failure was destined. 
When a several thousand-strong protesting mob of young men marched towards the clock tower in Srinagar's central Lal Chowk area on Friday, June 27, it was not only the climax of this nine-day uprising: it was the moment that defined Kashmir's return to revolt. The only difference this time, however, is that this post-1990 generation is pelting stones and not firing bullets. Kalashnikovs though are not far away – Kashmir has enough of weapons in 2008. 
Unlike other protests, generally limited to a particular area, the uprising that began on June 23 ended only when the state government revoked the land transfer order to the Amarnath Shrine Board on July 1. For the first time since 1947, such a major government decision had been rolled back under public pressure. Understandably so, because the protests spanned the length and breadth of Kashmir valley and witnessed participation by a cross section of youth – from students to labourers, private sector employees to public servants and daily wagers to successful young entrepreneurs. 
While the coalition government bowed – and even fell following the withdrawal of support by the main ally Peoples Democratic Party – the protests also made it amply clear that return of secessionist sentiments in Kashmir just needs a provocation, an alibi to vent. The idea that development was an antidote to the separatist sentiment has once again been proven incorrect. The return of peace and normalcy to Kashmir recently has been a truth, but without serious efforts for a resolution to the actual problem and a government strategy to turn the status quo into a permanent solution to Kashmir makes this calm dangerously reversible.
To understand this nine-day uprising, its complexion and shocking intensity, it is essential to look at the frontlines of these stone pelting mobs that marched the streets. Here are few examples. 
Imtiyaz, a medical sciences graduate, was one among those thousands that chanted slogans while jostling with other protesters to hoist a green flag on the Clock Tower that Friday, despite heavy police and CRPF paramilitary presence, who looked on helplessly. 
The medic gives two main reasons for the spontaneous protests that drove him to the city centre. "There is perpetual anger against India that had remained inside our hearts over the past 18 years. This was a chance to vent it. We always felt subjugated by the occupation but our protests were divided. This time, we united to protest for a cause," says the wold be doctor. 
Drilling a hole in New Delhi's policies towards Kashmir, Imtiyaz says, "We trusted India when the peace process started. But what did it give us? Only disappointment! Those of us who argued in favour of India's peace initiative were proved wrong." He says that New Delhi had neglected the fact that 80,000 people had died in Kashmir. "They laid their lives while trying to secure a right. We can not forget their sacrifices," Imtiyaz asserts. 
To this central Kashmir youth, the Amarnath land transfer issue was just a trigger that prompted the youth to demonstrate their pent up anger. "The yatra has been there for many decades. No one ever objected. But the (union) home ministry, through the governor, tried to strengthen the occupation, and Amarnath was used as a tool. The plan was to create places inaccessible for a common Kashmiri and thus dilute our identity." Among those protesting was Feroze Ahmad Rah, a bus conductor from downtown Srinagar, shot dead by CRPF personnel at Nowhatta, near Srinagar's Jamia Masjid. A day later, Sameer Ahmad Batloo, a 23-year-old driver from Srinagar too was shot. But their families do not regret their deaths. 
"It (Amarnath land transfer) was a major issue," says Sameer's father, Ghulam Mohammad Batloo. "Today, they had occupied a piece of land in Pahalgam. Tomorrow they could reach our neighbourhoods and the next day drive us out of our houses." Adds his uncle, "Whoever died was destined to die. In the end, we won." 
Shakeel Ahmad Dar, a Bandipora youth, was among the 50,000 protesters who marched past army camps, chanting pro-freedom and anti-India slogans, besides voicing the demand for revocation of land transfer order. "I could not bear the sale of my country's land to a body that does not represent us. Who are the members of the Shrine Board? How many members are Kashmiri?" the 24-year-old questions. "I earn enough to feed my family and have employed three people. But the protest was not about employment. It was the question of our Kashmiri identity. When I heard that people across the state were protesting, I also decided to join them," he adds. 
Shakeel, who led the protests from his north Kashmir village to the nearby Bandipora town, had come to know about the developments in different parts of the valley from his friends. "Friends from different places contacted me on mobile phone and we exchanged SMSes about the situation. I would inform other people about what I knew from friends," says Shakeel. "The cable television and newspapers discussed the protests in great detail." 
Analysts say that this horizontal communication at individual levels about developments in particular areas played a major role in turning the protests that started from Kashmir University, into a mass uprising. 
While those who protested and survived consider it a moral victory, for the rest, who could not pelt stones, role playing happened a different way. Farooq Ahmad Rather, a history student at the post graduate department of Kashmir University could not protest. Due to the violence and police action, he and his friends had got stuck inside the campus. But the ferocity of stone pelting and the pitched battles fought with the police and security forces across the valley inspired Farooq to contribute 'in whatever way' he could. The youth, along with his colleagues at the university, donated blood for the treatment of injured. "There were many who were physically weaker than me. They were protesting out on the streets. I could not, because I was trapped here and any protest could have put the hostel's security at stake," he says, while sitting in the boys' hostel in Kashmir University. "I donated blood for the treatment of the injured." 
This south Kashmir boy has his own reasons for justifying the protest. "The Amarnath land transfer just became the immediate cause. There are other important factors like the occupation by Indian army and the sentiment of people for achieving freedom," says the history student. 
Adds Farooq's friend, Syed Adil Andrabi, a student at the department of Law at Kashmir University, "We had been receiving messages on cell phones that hospitals were short of blood as the number of injured was increasing. So we sat with the president of the student's union and decided to organise a blood donation camp." Adil says that the response to their initiative was higher than they had ever expected. "Whosoever we met or called on phone, consented to donate blood. Even girl boarders and the physically challenged students came forward." 
Adil believes that protesting against the land transfer was his 'right and duty as a Kashmiri.' "I would have pelted stones the way others did. But I was caught in this hostel and there was no way I could do that. So we came forward to donate blood." 
Separatists see the development as the beginning of a new era that would mark the end of the one that began in 1989, and saw hundreds of thousands alienated youth take to the streets to express their anguish. Sajad Gani Lone of People's Conference looks at the uprising as a takeover by the new generation from the previous one. "It is much more intense than 1989, and totally indigenous. It is a mass movement. The sentiments of secession seems to have percolated right down to the ground level," says Sajad, while adding that nine-day uprising had shifted the clout back to Kashmir. "The clout earlier was either in India or Pakistan. Keys to the resolution of the dispute have now come to Kashmir. What we saw in the nine days, I believe is not the end, and we will see this again, with higher frequency. May be the issues will be different." 
Sajad says that the biggest lesson is for the Indian State to learn. "Kashmiris came forward in the peace process, which failed to bear any fruit. But India apparently was unaware of the intensity of this sentiment. The Indian State has now learnt that the peace process has to be focused on the people of Kashmir." 
Separatist hawk Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who has lately been very critical of Pakistan's changed policy over Kashmir, views the developments as a message to the world that 'Kashmir's struggle is both indigenous and peaceful'. "The way people protested on the streets of Kashmir has proved two things. First is that our struggle is not dependent on Pakistan. The mass protests were completely blacked out by the Pakistan's media, but we still succeeded in achieving our goal. Second is that our struggle is not dependent on gun," says Geelani.
JKLF's Yaseen Malik has a different take on the situation. "I had been saying in Delhi as well as Islamabad that both the countries are under an illusion. They thought that Kashmiris are worn out, while the fact was that the two countries were pushing the Kashmiri nation to a new revolution. People have serious doubts regarding the institution of the peace process and it's necessary to speed up the peace process and resolve the Kashmir issue on a priority basis." 
While the ground situation is reflective of a strong resentment against New Delhi as well as Islamabad, whether the two countries listen to the streets in Kashmir will determine which way Kashmir will go in the coming days. 

Unearthing grave crimes

Who lie burried in there?

Zubair A Dar

Kitchama/Tchahal: Villagers at Kitchama hamlet in Baramulla were preparing to bury Javed’s body in the Martyrs’ Graveyard, some 35 kilometers from his home. Over the years, burying unidentified bodies had become a routine. His maternal aunt, who lives nearby, decided not to venture out. She knew little who the deceased was. However, the seemingly calm family descended into chaos a few days later when her sister from Shalkut village in Rafiabad area of the district came searching for her son’s body in the village graveyard. 
The body was exhumed and taken home. “His head and eye brows had been shaved off. Body bore torture marks. No bullet had hit him,” says Mushtaq Ahmad Parray, 21, from Kitchama who has taken it upon himself to bury the “unidentified” for years now. His is one among the 18 villages on the banks of river Jhelum in Uri area of this North Kashmir district where earth has been concealing bodies in its chest. Along with are buried evidences of grave crimes in a raging conflict. 
A report, published by Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), details 942 burials where security forces handed over bodies to local villagers - in the dead of the night or at first light - terming the dead as “unidentified militants” or “foreign terrorists” operating in Kashmir. The report - A fact-finding mission on nameless graves and mass graves in Uri area - by APDP, a body that represents relatives of the disappeared, claims that many a graves could contain civilians picked up by security forces and never heard of since their disappearance. 
At Kitchama, the villagers remember each of the burials. Parray takes us to a local shrine whose courtyard was designated as the first martyrs’ graveyard in this village. “The first time I buried a body was in 2000. Four men, all hit by bullets, were brought here and the village headman was asked to arrange for the last rites. We dug graves for them and gave them the burial bath,” recalls Parray. “That night I had nightmares. I had never laid a body to rest before, not even gone near to one.”
Soon the villagers objected to burials near the shrine and a piece of public land in the village was designated for the purpose. “Since then, close to 135 men have been buried in our village. I have myself buried several bodies – some charred beyond recognition, some mutilated by bursts of gunfire while others simply tortured to death. Generally, the age ranged between 20 and 35. They (police) would tell us that they were foreign militants,” Parray adds. 
Among those buried were two friends – Ghulam Mohammad Matoo and Javed Ahmad Shah – whose bodies JK Police handed over the villagers for burial. “They appeared to be locals. They wore white Pathan suits. We buried them but kept their photos for record. Then the villagers decided to go public about the burial through newspapers,” says Parray. “Some two weeks later, their parents came with the exhumation order and we dug the bodies out.”  
The duo had been killed along with another friend - Nazir Ahmad Gilkar - after being picked up outside the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Soura in Srinagar by a State Task Force officer. The trio was returning from a marriage ceremony on 23rd June in 1999. Gilkar’s body was fished out of Nigeen Lake in Srinagar. The accused officer – Rashid Billa – is still absconding, allegedly under official patronage. Court has described Billa a proclaimed offender. 
Similar stories are heard from every village along the banks of the Jhelum as it flows further down in this bordering area towards Pakistan Administered Kashmir. We drive ahead along this road that runs parallel to left bank of the Jhelum and connects Srinagar with Muzaffarabad. A bridge, seven kilometers ahead, connects to a right bank village - Tchahal. The fact-finding mission claims that 203 bodies have been buried here. 
We meet Manzoor Ahmad Khan, son of the village grave digger, Ata Mohammad Khan. Manzoor seconds the APDP’s claim. “More than 200 people are buried in the Shaheed Mazar (Martyrs’ Graveyard) here,” he says. “Several of them are Kashmiris. Many a times families have exhumed the bodies of their children and taken them back home. Some decided to leave them here but they often visit the Mazar and come to speak to us as well. One question that every parent asks is – did they get a proper burial?” he adds. 
At the Mazar, not more than seven graves have tomb stones, rest of them remain unidentified. One of the tomb stones reads: Basher Ahmad Dar, Son of Ghulam Mohi-u-Din Dar, resident of Jalshri Baramulla, Date of Martydom: 25 July 2004. However, the stone does not mention the emotional breakdown that Ghulam Mohi-u-Din Dar undergoes every time he visits the grave. When Bashir’s body, along with five others, was being laid to rest by Atta Mohammad routinely as an unidentified militant, the Ghulam Mohi-u-din Dar had been watching from the edge of the graveyard. 
“When my father was digging the graves, Dar had no idea that among the dead is his son,” Manzoor tells us. “Dar later came to know that his son had been killed. He returned two weeks later and my father again dug the grave to show him the body. He and his family members recognized it and decided to let it rest there on my father’s advice,” Manzoor adds. 
It had taken Mohi-u-Din two weeks to find out that his son was killed. "Bashir had left home to bring his wife back from her parents place, but never returned," says Dar's mother, Jana. The family, living in village Jalshiri, just ten kilometers from Tchehal, acquired an exhumation order from the district authorities to identify Dar's body. 
It is incidents like this that makes every parent who has lost a son anxious to know who rest in these graves. ADPD claims that eight thousand Kashmiri men have disappeared since the outbreak of militancy in this Himalayan valley, allegedly at the hands of security forces. While the association documents each case and has been protesting the rights violations, nothing substantial has come out so far. The association wants a thorough probe into such incidents and suspects that many among these 942 graves could possibly be of those 8000 men who have disappeared in security forces’ custody. 
“The details in the fact finding mission is just the tip of the iceberg. There is every likelihood that other 8000 men who have gone missing must have met a similar fate,” says Parvaiz Imroz, APDP’s Legal Advisor and President of the Coalition of Civil Society – the parent body of APDP. 
The state government has from time to time acknowledged such Human Rights violations but the figures stated have differed with each statement. On February 25, 2003, the then Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, informed the state assembly that 3744 persons had disappeared between 2000 and 2003. Earlier, the then Home Minister on July 18 in 2002, he had admitted that 3184 disappearances occurred between 1989 and 2002. Ghulam Nabi Azad reduced the number to 693 in 2006. But verification of the facts is yet to come, though Peoples Democratic Party, now in power in J&K coalition with Congress, made establishment of an enquiry commission a part of the election manifesto in 2002. 
APDP now wants the facts to be dug out by some international Human Rights organizations. “Considering that Argentine Forensic Anthropology (EAAF) and International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) have the necessary skills and the expertise to carry out scientific excavations and establish the truth or otherwise the claim being made by us, we therefore request EAAF and ICMP to consider our request to take up this investigation,” reads the APDP report, while the parents keep their fingers crossed in anguish. 
---Ends---

War over water

Ecological implications be damned. India and Pakistan use rivers as strategic weapons against each other.

Zubair A Dar 

 
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf may not have been right about a lot of things, but he was, when he predicted that the Indo-Pakistan Indus Water Treaty – brokered by the World Bank in 1960 – contained the “germs of a future conflict”. Interestingly, four of the six rivers of the Indus water basin flow through Kashmir’s mountains and valleys from Tibet and water the plains in India and Pakistan. And Kashmir, whose water resources have been divided between India and Pakistan under the Treaty, is the ground zero of this dispute between the two neighbours. 

The latest in the series is Kishanganga hydel power project that National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited plans to build near the Line of Control in north Kashmir. The project draws water out of river Kishanganga (more popular as Neelam in Kashmir) near Habba Khatoon pass and stores the water in a 37 m high concrete face rock-fill dam at Gurez before further supplying it to the 330 MW underground powerhouse at village Kralpora. The water is then released into Wular Lake. 

Pakistan says this transfer of water has legal as well as ecological consequences. It maintains that India, under the Treaty, can store water but cannot divert it, because India must release as much water downstream as it stores. Union Water Resources Minister, Saif-u-Din Soz, told TSI that the objection has already been addressed and the design has been changed to a run of the river project. 

But that is not the only objection Pakistan has. In its normal course, Neelam meets Jhelum near Dumail after meandering into PoK near Gurez, where it acts as the de facto line of control for a few kilometres. Pakistan maintains that the inter-tributary transfer, as envisaged in Kishanganga project design, shall force a crop change in a vast belt in PoK. Pakistan also says that India should stop constructing the powerhouse as substantial investment has already gone into the construction of its 969 MW Neelam-Jhelum power project in PoK, being constructed with the help of a Chinese consortium. Here, Pakistan’s position is again favoured by the Indus Water Treaty, which lays down that if the two countries plan two projects on the same river, the country that has made a substantial investment will be favoured. 

Besides these, NHPC’s 2005 design displaced a major portion of Dard Shin tribe by submerging seven of its villages in Gurez valley. To top it all, the NHPC design was not economically viable. Following objections by Pakistan and criticism by environmental groups, India reduced the height of the dam and the quantum of water stored in it, thus minimising the displacement of the community. 

But, Pakistan sees a bigger game in India's plans to construct the powerhouse. On November 24 last year, Pakistan's Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah stated that India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years. Shah was pointing to the blocking of water by another controversial power project, Baghlihar, whose dam height had made Pakistan approach the World Bank for arbitration. 
 
India, however, is not deterred by any such objections. "We have satisfied ourselves that we are not violating the Treaty. We got a survey done by our experts who went to Pakistan, and through remote sensing. There is no question of loss to agriculture," says Soz. 

Both countries now eye the meandering Chenab River. Although, most of the river lies in Pakistan, its headwaters lie in India's portion of Kashmir. The Baghlihar dam has been constructed on the same river and Pakistan is apprehensive that India could use it for strategic purposes besides others. NHPC has identified eight other sites on the river for hydroelectric projects. In constructing Kishanganga, India again has an opportunity to take strategic advantage. Union Minister of State for Power, Jairam Ramesh, during his visit to Kashmir last year said that NHPC will have to work faster on the Kishanganga power project in the wake of Islamabad's efforts to complete Neelam-Jhelum project on the other side of the LoC by 2015. It is not just the urgency in power generation that made the cabinet committee on economic affairs hurriedly approve the upward revised cost of the Kishanganga project at Rs 3,642 crore. Diversion of water towards Wular Lake will mean that the long proposed navigation lock on Wular can be built and water levels raised by several feet. It will also feed the Uri II power project during winter when water levels recede. 

Pakistan has long been objecting to the navigation lock terming it as the de facto storage of water from Jhelum and its tributaries. At a time when Pakistan's water availability has decreased to 1,200 cubic metres per person from 5,000 cubic metres in 1947 and is forecast to plunge to 800 cubic metres by 2020, Pakistan may soon approach the International Court of Justice in Hague for resolving the issue. 

But India intends to go ahead despite the threat. "Wular is a lake and there is no question of holding water. We want a lock of five feet for winter navigation," Soz told TSI, adding that Pakistan's objections are an "unnecessary exaggeration". "They (Pakistan) are welcome to move the International Court." 

Meanwhile, with the Treaty itself becoming a major conflict, Kashmir is emerging as the biggest loser. The result is that in J&K, only 40 per cent of the cultivable land can be irrigated and just 10 per cent of the hydroelectric potential harnessed as ability to store, divert and regulate water have been put out of bounds. To top it all, Kashmir remains a power-starved state despite the fact that NHPC, which earned Rs 2,300 crore in the last fiscal, has half of its assets in J&K where it has three major projects, including Salal that fetches it the cheapest energy. 

With the festering Kashmir conflict far from being resolved, water appears to be the next big reason for punch-ups between the nuclear neighbours. And, no wonder that the two countries may one day go to war over water and not territory. 

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Laying them to rest

‘I Treat All Of Them Like My Children’

Zubair A Dar

Chahal (Uri), Apr 2: His is a name that few heard for 67 years of his life. Not many remember it now as well. In his chest, however, lie buried stories of the last rites of hundreds of men, none of whom knew him either.

Ata Muhammad Khan remembers each detail about their burial – faces, injuries, graves and exhumations. The unlettered villager from this hillside hamlet on the right bank of Jhelum even remembers each paper he marked with his thumb before police handed over the bodies to him. All these years, his only companion in pain has been his village graveyard, some 15 kilometers from Varmul on Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Road.

Like the graveyard, Khan too has never complained though the pot of patience is about to overflow. But for the search of a loved one, Khan might have given up the job years back.
“Faces I buried here can never fade from my memory,” says Khan, who took it unto himself to lay the ‘unidentified militants and foreign terrorists,’ as officially labeled, to rest. Away from media glare, when dozens of bodies were transported by troops to his village from across Kashmir - early morning or late night - Khan dug graves, locals joined in for funeral prayers, and the family shared the emotional trauma.

Many rights groups have urged Amnesty International and other bodies to help identify human remains in nearly a thousand unmarked graves discovered by a local human rights group over the past year. The graves were found in 18 villages of north Kashmir.

“Initially, when I accompanied my father to the graveyard and helped him in burying the martyrs, the figures would haunt me in bed,” says his son, Manzoor. “But the most painful part is retrieving the bodies when parents come to know and arrive with orders. Some stories are so painful that we fear recalling them,” adds the senior Khan.

Khan clearly remembers the first time he buried a body. He was busy in his fields that a police man from the village in civvies approached him. “There is a body of a Muslim youth that needs to be buried,” Khan recalls the police constable telling him. By then the Martyrs’ graveyard in nearby Kichama village had been filled with bodies leaving no space for any further burials.

“When I asked why he (Constable) had approached me, he said that no one else in the village had agreed. That was the first time and the succession has not ended till date.”

Since then, Khan says that he buried 235 bodies and exhumed seven of them when parents came back with orders from the district magistrate. Pain of witnessing the mutilations and marks of torture on the bodies has turned him frail. “My eyesight has faded. I have not slept for years. I have grown hard at hearing as well,” says the skeletal villager whose grey hair and wrinkled face tells the story of anguish he has gone through. But he remembers the face of the first body. And all the bodies that arrived successively – some times in numbers as high as nine.

“He was young. A bullet had hit on the right side of his back and then opened its way through the chest,” Khan recalls. “There were marks all over the body. Probably, it had been thrown down some slope to avoid the grind of carrying it on back,” he adds. While Khan has dug hundreds of graves, he calls some of the burials unforgettable. “How can I forget the two bodies that arrived at 11 pm. No one except a neighbour came for my help. He held a gas in hand till I dug two graves. A dozen policemen were watching us,” Khan recalls, leaning forward. “There was no one to offer funeral prayers. So the two were buried without any prayers,” he continues, masking his face by his hands. “One was an aged man who I was told had fought forces for long. Other was a 20 year old. Tears rolled down my eyes when I put his body in the grave. I had cleaned their faces. It appeared as if they were alive, smiling.”

Khan might have given up the volunteering soon afterwards. Several times he fought with police and army over the ill treatment given to the bodies. “I would ask them why they brought bodies in sacks. Why they pushed them down the slopes,” Khan fumes. But for a personal quest.

Khan’s sister had died leaving behind a one and a half year old nephew. “I brought him up till 16. Then his father took him back to his house,” says Khan. “Then one day he came to my house. That was the last time I saw him. Those days many youth would go for arms training. He promised me he would be back by the evening but he never came back since,” Khan reveals. “Even today, I search for him in the bodies that arrive for burial. One day I missed the burial of eight bodies. Then someone told me that my nephew was among them.”

“Allah knows what the truth is. I treat all of them like my children.”

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Lost childhood

Rebel with a cause

Zubair A. Dar  

When this most dreaded boy of central Kashmir was carried home, the shroud enveloping his body was stained red. Nine hours is a long gun battle but he was not killed inside the shrine where he was hiding – anxious troops fired at him indiscriminately even as he lay unconscious, outside the shrine. Mustafa Khan was dead at 19 – five years after he had first picked up a Kalashnikov rifle. 

The troops wanted to kill him at all costs. So when the men in olive cordoned off Goigam village, 23 kilometers from Srinagar on July 30 in 2001, they didn’t stop when they found him hiding in a shrine along with two other militants. Ordinarily, the troops avoid an encounter with militants in shrines. They asked him to surrender. He didn’t. And soon, Khan was encircled by hundreds of guns – all of them targeting him.

The village mourned him – not because he was a brave fighter but for the painful tales of his lost childhood. Mustafa Khan’s journey from an innocent child to a deadly militant is a legend in the villages across central Kashmir. It’s a perfect script for a Bollywood blockbuster. 

“Mustafa’s uncle was a militant, who had a confrontation with a political worker in the village. Mustafa was caught in that controversy. He was only 13 then,” says Tariq Lone, Mustafa Khan’s childhood friend and classmate. “But Ikhwanis (Counter Insurgents) used to harass him. They came regularly to his house.” (In Kashmir of 1996, several surrendered militants had joined forces with army to fight militants, and came to be known as Ikhwanis.) 

Then one day that year, a grenade was hurled on the Ikhwanis – Ama Kana and Muma Kana – in the village. Both survived the attack. Rumours went around that Mustafa was behind the attack. But the Kanas retaliated with might. “They came to our house looking for my son. They found him and I began to plead for mercy. They misbehaved with me, even beat me and pushed me to the ground,” recalls Shameema Begum, Khan’s mother. It was this incident that changed Mustafa’s life entirely. “He hit one of the Ikhwanis with a radio and dared him to touch his mother again,” adds Lone, who believes that the incident had tested the threshold of Mustafa’s tolerance. 

Mustafa Khan was arrested in early 1996. He spent the next few months in security forces’ camps. The 13-year-old boy would play his games no more. He was a detainee, ‘dangerous for peace and security of the general public’. “I remember him feeding kittens. He had three of them as pets. He even stitched a dress for a puppy. He said that he felt a chill when he saw the poor puppy getting drenched in the rain,” describes Lone. “In the fields, he would play-act Tipu Khan’s last attempt to flee.” (Tipu, a militant, had been shot dead while trying to escape on horse-back some years ago.) At the camp, however, playing fields were out of bounds. Besides his own torture, Mustafa had to witness cruelties that would always haunt him. “He was made to sponge down the blood-soaked vehicle in which Shakeel was tortured to death,” Shakeel’s brother, Ghulam Ahmad Bhat, remembers Mustafa telling him. Shakeel, Mustafa’s childhood friend, had joined militant ranks and was eventually arrested from Badran village while Mustafa was in the Barzulla army camp near his village. “Three days after his arrest, we recovered Shakeel’s body from the fields. It was April 4 in 1996. Whenever I met Khan, he would talk about the incident,” says Bhat. 

Mustafa Khan was finally released from the 34 Rashtriya Rifles camp in Beerwah town of central Kashmir, some 17 kilometers from his village. He had been transferred there from Barzulla camp. “But the Ikhwanis asked him to report to them at the camp every month and bring his mother along when he came on August 1 that year,” says Khan’s father, Abdul Razak Khan, a shawl trader in those days. “At home, I advised my son not to indulge in any suspicious activity. He would not speak a word, except asking ‘why should my mother go to the army camp?’” 

Three days before the August 1 meeting, Khan left his house in the morning and did not return. He was, instead, trekking the high altitude along the LoC to reach the other side for weapons training. He had joined the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. He returned some months later, planned attack after attack on army camps across central Kashmir with Ikhwanis as his prime target. People believe that a suicide bombing on the 34 RR camp at Beerwah – Ikhwanis camped there – had been planned by the teenager. 

As a silent appreciation of Mustafa’s fight against the counter insurgents, thousands attended his funeral after he was killed in the gun-battle. He didn’t kill Ama Kana – the counter insurgent was killed days before Khan returned from Pakistan. But his resolve to fight other counter insurgents remained alive. “Mustafa Khan told me that he’d made it a point to give the counter insurgents a tough time,” says Bhat. 

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