Twenty minutes later they stopped beside a newly-built log bridge that marked the start of the Lower Camp. Bashir and Sultan were already busy getting the tents up. Jane went down to the river to relax while Don attempted to wash their socks and T-shirts in the icy water, doing his best to work up a lather. She caught up with her journal. It was 4 July, Independence Day. She realised this was the first time she’d thought about it all day. ‘What would all our friends be doing back in Spokane?’ she wondered. The great thing about leaving home was the warmth of returning, she thought. Don was already talking about what he would tell the Spokane crew. She started to write one last sentence about the day: ‘So we agreed to come back the same way we had come,’ she began, before she was interrupted.
The name chosen for the operation was Ghar, the Urdu word for ‘home’. It reminded everyone of the objective – getting Masood Azhar back to Pakistan. And from the moment of its conception in January 1995, one candidate emerged as the man to handle it.
His Pakistani handlers called him, flippantly, ‘the Kashmiri’. But in his native Kashmir, where their name meant nothing, he had many others. His parents had named him Javid Ahmed Bhat. School friends dubbed him ‘Dabrani’, after his village, Dabran, a few miles outside Kashmir’s unruly southern town of Anantnag, an hour and a half’s drive from Srinagar.
Javid was a stocky boy who lived in a two-storey brick house near the village’s communal wash-house – a stone-lined pond where everyone cleaned their linen – and close to the ramshackle store, with its cardboard boxes of five-paisa chews, so congealed that you had to eat them with the wrappers on.
The Bhats were an educated family, Mr Bhat having been a quality-control officer in the district’s agriculture department. Javid had done well enough to qualify for the government college in Anantnag, where he studied engineering. It always seemed to his neighbours that he would be somebody, one of the few who would escape the village, with its spinach-green houses and stone-and-mud lanes that tracked the saffron field. Dabran sat in a quiet copse of walnut and chinar (an oriental plane tree), surrounded by terraces of paddy. In high summer the village was dappled in light, and in winter it was frozen to the bone. In the daylight hours Dabran bustled along, while at night, like most villages in the valley, it coiled up like a fern, its residents locking shutters and barricading doors against the regular Indian security-force patrols that clattered through conducting cordon-and-search operations. Ostensibly, they were trying to catch militants, but they had become vengeful, with windows being smashed and possessions thrown into the mud, doors stoved in, sons and fathers taken away to an uncertain fate, women and girls hauled into dark places where bored soldiers, a long way from home, assaulted them.
As a child, Javid had lived for the spring, when he could finally prise open his bedroom shutters and oil his cricket bat, hand-carved from cheap Kashmiri poplar by an uncle. A pace bowler and a robust batsman, a thinker and a leader, it was no surprise to anyone in Dabran that this boy who others loved to be with had a loyal following by the time he was sixteen. He was a dependable friend, but also a worry to his family.
At college he joined the J&K Students Liberation Front (SLF), the youth wing of the azadi or ‘freedom’ movement that had taken root in campuses across Kashmir as a reaction to India’s clumsy rigging of the state elections in 1987. For Javid, the SLF was also a vent for his fear and anger at all that he had seen his neighbours and family endure. He quickly moved up the ranks of the organisation, acquiring another name, Saifullah, to shade his political activities, while his alter ego pushed forward silently, attaining a BSc in engineering.
As the screws tightened around the valley with the introduction of Governor’s Rule in December 1989, the SLF debated how to respond. Like students the world over, they were at the forefront of street protests, but some among their ranks wanted to take up arms and fight. ‘Is it worth marching any more?’ Javid had asked one day at a meeting convened to arrange a demonstration. He had been reading about radical German students who had taken up arms and formed the Red Army Faction in 1970. His intervention stopped all of them in their tracks. ‘Holding placards won’t stop the bloodshed. We are at war,’ he continued. In April 1990, with calls for Kashmir’s tahreek, or armed struggle, gaining momentum and being fuelled from over the border by Brigadier Badam and the ISI, Javid became part of a breakaway SLF bloc that took the plunge following the arrest of several student activists. India would only withdraw, so the argument went, if Kashmiris were willing to make it too costly for them to stay. Javid’s group abducted the Vice Chancellor of Kashmir University and his elderly assistant while they were on their way to Friday prayers. They also snatched the general manager of Hindustan Machine Tools from downtown Srinagar. Their aim was to use the captured men to bargain the release of the jailed activists. A line had been crossed.
The Indian government refused to negotiate, throwing the SLF into a panic. What were they to do now? For days there was a standoff, until reports emerged that the Vice Chancellor and his assistant were to be freed anyway, at Padshahi Bagh, a beauty spot close to Anantnag town. The news was greeted with widespread joy, but as the two hostages clambered through the short grass, heading for freedom, they were shot in the back by unseen gunmen. The third hostage was cruelly killed too, his body dumped in the Srinagar neighbourhood of Batamaloo.
Many in the valley were shocked by these executions. Ordinary Kashmiris and regular SLF members rose up in disgust, pointing out that Indians were always pleased to see Kashmiris killing each other, as it saved them the trouble. Such actions only benefited the oppressor, said the mainstream SLF leadership, denouncing the breakaway faction that Javid had joined. Although he was unconnected to the abductions and killings, he refused to criticise those who had carried them out. ‘They are not darshit gar [terrorists], they are mujahids,’ he told his friends. ‘Don’t shy away. We have to meet this terror head-on. Remember the massacres of Gawakadal, Sopore and Handwara.’ The bloody events would mark the beginning of Javid’s withdrawal from mainstream Kashmiri society, and while some in the SLF went underground, he sought out more militant comrades. If India was to be beaten, then all the old ways, of soft-edged politicking and mystical faith, had to be replaced by a razor-sharp Islamic identity. The only way to purge India from the valley was through tahreek, Javid declared. He signed up with the Ikhwan Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of religiously conservative Kashmiri mujahids who had been sizing up the massing Indian security forces. As he took up arms, he was a long way from the schoolboy Javid Ahmed Bhat, or the jaunty cricket player Dabrani. But in his own mind he was not yet far enough.
In the summer of 1990, on the run from the Indian security forces after the Brotherhood had been bloodied in an encounter in Anantnag, Javid unexpectedly stopped by to see his family in Dabran, shinning in through the kitchen window. ‘No need to worry,’ he said, at which his mother and father froze in fear. For Kashmiri parents, said Mr Bhat, these four words meant just one thing: their child was going ‘over there’.
‘We knew then that he was heading for Pakistan. He kissed us and he was gone. Then we heard absolutely nothing.’ For months, hundreds of young men across the valley had been disappearing over the LoC, heading for training camps. But terrible reports soon seeped home of boys, too young and inexperienced to evade the hardened Indian border forces, being cut down the minute they crossed back over into Kashmir. Those who made it further into the valley were also being culled, as India stepped up to the growing militancy. After a while Javid’s parents started mourning, hoping someone would be kind enough to bring his body home to be buried in the village cemetery, a shady spot near a line of knock-kneed chinars. But no news came. ‘To be honest, there were times when I would have claimed any body – just so we could say it’s done,’ said his tearful mother.
In Javid’s absence, the pocket handkerchief of scrub that made up Dabran cemetery rapidly filled with ‘martyrs’. One third were boys of Javid’s