Free The Meadow by Adrian Levy Page B

mourners at his funeral.
    By October 1990 Jagmohan Malhotra was gone, replaced as governor by Girish Saxena, a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the equivalent of the ISI. Five years earlier, Saxena had orchestrated a plan designed to smash an insurgency and pro-freedom movement in the Indian Punjab, the brutally effective ‘Operation Blue Star’ that left an estimated 1,500 civilians dead. Under his rule the bloodletting in Kashmir increased. After the army was sent in to quell a riot in the market town of Handwara, fifty miles north-west of Srinagar, 350 ancient houses and shops were burned down. Fifteen charred bodies were pulled from the ruins.
    By now there was a multitude of Indian security forces operating in the Kashmir Valley, ranging from regular army to newly created reserve forces, paramilitary police as well as regular police, Special Branch, CID and a range of armed units attached to the intelligence agencies RAW and the Intelligence Branch (IB). The Handwara incident was blamed on the Border Security Force (BSF), a paramilitary outfit raised after the war between India and Pakistan in 1965. By 1990 more than a third of its 240,000 strength was deployed in Kashmir on counter-insurgency operations.
    It was not just the paramilitaries who were excessive. ‘Are they animals?’ Masood demanded in February 1991, after reporting on events in Kunan Poshpora, a village close to the LoC where at least twenty-three women were raped, an attack blamed on the 4thRajputana Rifles, an army unit that had the distinction of winning two Victoria Crosses during the Second World War. It wasn’t as if these incidents were few and far between, Masood reported. Two months after Kunan Poshpora he wrote up ‘a Kashmir family story’ from Malangam. It told how seven members of one Kashmiri family were shot dead, before their corpses were tied to military vehicles and towed down from the mountains by the BSF (116th Battalion). When their remains were later handed to police, the deaths were recorded as due to their having been ‘caught in the crossfire’, although the only shots fired had been Indian. Masood wrote about the ‘crossfire’ excuse again in June 1991, after Indian security forces killed seventeen unarmed civilians, all of whom supposedly died inadvertently, during a gun battle in Srinagar’s Chotta Bazaar.
    Blood and more blood. With Maulana Khalil’s recruits striking indiscriminately across the valley, the indigenous militants fighting too, and a reeling India responding chaotically, Masood revelled in the region’s descent into savage war, with his focus firmly fixed on atrocities committed by the Indian side. In January 1993, soldiers gunned down more than fifty unarmed civilians in Sopore, a rebellious town surrounded by apple orchards in north Kashmir, where insurgents had killed two Indian paramilitaries. Afterwards Sopore was set on fire, with most of its wooden buildings being destroyed and an unknown number of residents burned to death. Amnesty International sent a delegation to Kashmir. In Pakistan, Masood drew his readers’ attention to a subsequent report that documented ‘706 cases of custodial killings’ by Indian forces. ‘Disappearances, routine torture of detainees so brutal that it frequently results in death, rape of women during search operations, and extrajudicial executions of unarmed civilians, often falsely labelled as having been the result of “encounters” or as having occurred in “cross-fire”’ was how Amnesty expressed it. A few days after the delegation departed, Hriday Wanchoo, a vocal Kashmiri human rights campaigner, was abducted and shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Srinagar.
    As far as Brigadier Badam and the ISI were concerned, their proxy war in Kashmir was going better than expected. India was on the back foot, and unrest was spreading daily through the valley. But according to Masood’s account, seized by Pakistan federal investigators,