According to a journal written by Masood and later seized by Pakistani federal investigators, the Brigadier approached Maulana Khalil in Karachi with a proposal. The ISI was prepared to offer $25,000 a month to the Holy Warriors to find fighters to wage war in Kashmir, a sum that could rise dramatically if Maulana Khalil achieved anything like his success in Afghanistan. The Brigadier added, Masood recalled, that there was money to spend because for years the ISI had been siphoning off American cash intended for Afghanistan and putting it into a contingency fund to aid rebellion in Kashmir. To date, Pakistan’s activities there had been restricted to reaching out to the leaders of Kashmir’s indigenous freedom struggle, clandestine meetings often being staged in Saudi Arabia, where participants met under the cover of going on Haj.
There had been the odd ISI-sponsored incident in Kashmir, like the time in 1983 when India had played the West Indies in a one-day cricket international at the Sher-i-Kashmir stadium in Srinagar, and spectators were paid to shout abuse and hurl eggs at the Indian players. A series of bomb blasts across the Kashmir Valley, paid for by the ISI, had led to riots and government buildings being put to the torch. Some places, such as the southern town of Anantnag, at times became ungovernable. But the Kashmiri groups, Badam complained, had a habit of going their own way, preferring to mount their own campaigns, calling for freedom and independence from everyone, rather than incorporation into Pakistan. In the eyes of the Holy Warriors, whose ranks were now bloated with war-hungry Pashtuns and dutiful Punjabis, the Kashmiris – infused with their mountain ways and Sufi-inspired traditions – were insufficiently bloodthirsty. ‘The Kashmiris were just too moderate,’ Masood Azhar wrote in the Voice of the Mujahid, ‘to mount the kind of total war that was needed if India was to be unseated.’
What Kashmir needed to tip it over the edge, according to Brigadier Badam, was a fully-fledged infiltration across the LoC. India’s superior military might meant Pakistan was unlikely to win a conventional war. So, rather than sending its own soldiers to die, Pakistan would manage the action from the sidelines, officially distancing itself, claiming that the upwelling of violence over the border was a spontaneous Holy War, a ‘jihad for freedom’. It was a neat plan that Badam had borrowed from his recent experience of working with the Americans in Aghanistan. As Masood later wrote, it would be ‘a steady stream of volunteers crossing over’. The Holy Warriors was just the kind of organisation the ISI needed to see the plan through, a tried and tested group of Islamist fighters loyal to an ISI-friendly emir, or leader (Maulana Khalil), with an established recruitment base (Binori Town, the Pashtun heartlands and the southern Punjab), a well-oiled training infrastructure (Saifullah’s Camp Yawar) and a mouthpiece to rally its followers (the Voice of the Mujahid). The candle on this cake was Masood Azhar, someone capable of getting the youth hot and bothered.
After Maulana Khalil agreed terms, the military operation escalated rapidly, Badam recalled, with young men from places like Bahawalpur and Peshawar, trained by Saifullah and armed by the ISI, infiltrated into Indian Kashmir at high altitude in cells of six to eight, their passage masked by artillery bombardment from regular Pakistan Army units stationed along the LoC. Once they were on Indian soil, Kashmiri guides helped bed them in before they mounted hit-and-run operations across the valley.
India was taken aback by the sudden rise in violence. The tipping point came in December 1989, when militants kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of India’s Home Minister, threatening to kill her unless India released five leading Kashmiri fighters from jail. Within five days the New Delhi government capitulated, and Rubaiya was saved. Believing the security situation in Kashmir was running out of control, India suspended local government, imposing Governor’s Rule and New Delhi’s writ on the citizens of Kashmir. The man they sent in to stamp out the unrest was Jagmohan Malhotra, a confidant of the Gandhi dynasty who had served in Kashmir before.
On his first day, 19 January 1990, Governor Malhotra ordered a curfew across the valley, while the Indian security forces mounted a crackdown, local parlance for mass house-to-house searches. In the lanes and alleys of Srinagar’s old town, usually a whirl of rug merchants, horse-drawn carts and young boys scurrying about with trays of tea and freshly baked bread, everything was brought to a standstill as residents were strip-searched, soldiers battering down ancient wooden shopfronts, toppling wagons of dried fruit, searching for explosives and weapons, arresting residents without warrants or warnings, making the summer capital seethe.
On Malhotra’s second day, Indian security forces opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, defying the curfew to spill out over Gawakadal, a rickety bridge over the Jhelum River in downtown Srinagar. New Delhi eventually conceded that twenty-eight people had been killed, and promised an inquiry that was never convened. However, international human rights groups claimed that the true death tally was almost double that, and survivors gave harrowing accounts of how they had clung to life by hauling corpses over themselves as police officers walked through the scene of the slaughter, finishing off anyone who was still breathing.
The following month, as New Delhi reacted to the mounting violence in the Kashmir Valley by dissolving the state assembly, Brigadier Badam in Pakistan implemented the second part of his plan, a vivid, week-by-week description of India’s heavy-handed response to the Pakistan-backed putsch, written by Masood in his Voice of the Mujahid. He wanted to ensure that people across the Muslim world read about Kashmir’s pain. Masood wrote up a storm, describing how in March 1990 ‘forty unarmed Kashmiris were shot by Indian forces as hundreds of thousands marched for independence’. In May, after militants assassinated Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, a moderate religious leader, Masood recorded vividly how Indian forces shot dead a hundred 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 4th Rajputana 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