Made up of soldiers seconded from other parts of the Indian Army and paid extra, the original six battalions of the RR – motto Dridhta aur Virta, meaning ‘Strength and Bravery’ – had been created as a counter to Brigadier Badam’s ISI operation. But soon the RR, which would have forty thousand men in Kashmir, the largest dedicated counter-insurgency force in the world, was as renowned for its reckless lack of precision as for its ingenuity and valour. In Dabran and other villages across the valley, the bodies of those it had killed, who it described as ‘foreign militants’, were dumped at the local police post, without justification or documents. Most were Kashmiri civilians who had been abducted by the RR and summarily executed, but no one was brave enough to take it to task. Instead, Dabran’s cemetery became a place to bury the evidence, and for collective mourning. Everyone in the village had someone ‘over there’, so the Dabranis clubbed together to pay for the last rites and the burial shrouds of these unclaimed corpses, hoping the same civility would be accorded their kin, should their bodies be found on Pakistani soil.
One day early in 1995, six years into the insurgency, while snow settled on the single track through Dabran, a stranger banged at Mr and Mrs Bhat’s front door. His face was obscured by an unkempt beard and a pakul, the flat woolly cap favoured by the Afghan mujahideen, and the couple were terrified until he spoke. Then Mrs Bhat fell to her knees. It was Javid, the son who in her mind’s eye she had buried. After the hugging and kissing, and the pouring of namkeen (salt tea) from the thermos, Javid cleared his throat. ‘I am not Javid any more,’ he told them, adding that he did not have long to explain. He was with some men with guns, on their way to carry out an important mission. Right now they were stationed outside as lookouts.
‘Where have you been?’ asked his father, wanting a souvenir of his son, a fragment to fill the void of waiting. In Pakistan, Javid told him. And Afghanistan. Sipping his tea, he explained that while serving in the Muslim Brotherhood he had come across a mujahid who had mesmerised him, an implacable, smooth-skinned man nicknamed Supahi al-Yemeni, or ‘the Warrior from Yemen’, who rarely broke into a sweat. Supahi had said that he bottled up his fear. The proof was that in an engagement with the enemy he always remained standing even under heavy fire, trading bullets until his Kalashnikov glowed in the dark. Everyone had been a little afraid of Supahi’s self-control and recklessness, which were daunting qualities for young Kashmiri recruits so raw they still dropped their weapons and tripped over guide ropes at night. But Javid had been drawn in as Supahi told him of his experiences as a veteran of many wars. Believing that in Javid he had found a like-minded soul, Supahi convinced him to undergo specialist training. In the summer of 1990 they had taken a bus to Uri, a town in western Kashmir, then climbed high up to the LoC and crossed over with a few dozen other boys, following a toe-tingling midnight scramble so close to Indian Army camps they could hear the soldiers guffaw. When they finally reached the other side they were exhilarated, calling out ‘Naraay takbir, Allahu akbar!’ (Cry out loud, God is great) before sliding down the snowy slopes on their trouser bottoms, like boys in the park. Eventually, as the temperature dropped further, Javid had arrived in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, his face tinged with blue.
Small tent villages run by religious organisations encircled Muzaffarabad, the capital of what all Kashmiris dreamily eulogised as ‘Azad’, or Free Kashmir, the region over the LoC that was administered by Pakistan. Now it had the appearance of a refugee camp and the smell of a rubbish dump. Uniformed instructors, who everyone murmured with respect were members of the ISI or from the Pakistan military, taught Javid how to strip down a Kalashnikov and assemble a rocket launcher. Once a week he ate slivers of fatty mutton; the rest of the time it was cold bread, rice and daal scoffed down while squatting on the ground. They dug latrines day and night, but raw sewage flowed everywhere, and wild dogs converged to pick at the garbage left rotting in the open. However, for the first time in his life, surrounded by pious and like-minded youths, Javid felt alive, and over the weeks he spent there the camp was deluged with new recruits from his side of the Line of Control.
‘Somehow, between prayers, and from one week to the next, thousands of boys came over,’ Javid told his father as he sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the living room of his childhood home in Dabran, a flock cushion wedged behind his back and a Chinese rug thrown over his legs. ‘Within a month there were barely enough weapons to go around, only one Kalashnikov for every seven volunteers.’ They counted out bullets, sharing the few they had equally between them all. Soon there were no live-fire exercises at all. Although Pakistan had planned this secret Kashmiri revolution, it had been taken aback by the speed with which it had spread, and the demand for arms and training. What had started as a dribble of fighters had become a torrent, with one group of 1,800 young men rumoured to have crossed over the LoC in a single day. Wedding caterers from Rawalpindi had to be brought in to cook for the ISI’s massing Kashmir militia. ‘No one teaches you how to prepare for a revolution,’ Javid told his father. ‘Which books should we read? It was chaos.’
While Pakistan tried to come to grips with the forces it had set in motion, Javid moved up the ranks. Many boys were sent back over into Indian Kashmir after just a few weeks of basic guerrilla-warfare training, but Javid, with his BSc in engineering, was picked out. Supahi suggested he accompany him over another mountainous border, this time the ranges that divided Pakistan and Afghanistan. Working their way between boulders on ponies bowed by the weight of bursting saddlebags carrying munitions and banknotes, they eventually reached Camp Yawar, the jihad factory of the Holy Warriors where Saifullah, the warrior former student from the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, had trained thousands, the place where Masood Azhar had endured his night-time humiliation. By the time Javid arrived it was capable of housing up to 1,800 recruits, and with strictly assessed diploma courses and a postgraduate programme, Yawar had evolved into a college of war. Here, Javid told his father, were serious-minded revolutionaries. His first lesson had been to accept that he was no longer a Kashmiri, but an Islamic fighter who would respond to any call to perform holy jihad, the world over. ‘First Kashmir, then Palestine,’ he recounted. Mr Bhat stared back at his son, fearing that he understood all too well what this meant.
Yawar’s core curriculum was based around three pillars: Haj Habi Tablighi (religious indoctrination), Tarbiyat (training) and Jihad (the holy fight). Two kinds of courses were offered: the basic one-month guerrilla-warfare starter (the one Masood had failed in 1988), and a three-month specialist course that included modules in explosives, encrypted communications and counter-intelligence. From this second course, students graduated as fully-fledged jundullahs, or soldiers of Allah. The best would be picked out for further training as commanders, learning how to manage men as well as weapons, and how to plot and execute operations. Javid completed this final course, becoming an ordnance specialist, handling explosives for the first time and also learning to create highly volatile home-made incendiaries by mixing textile fixatives with petroleum jelly. He was taught how to manufacture mines, IEDs and booby traps, and shown how to transform a battery-powered doorbell into a remote detonator.
In April 1992, Javid was ready. He was appointed district commander for Anantnag, part of the Holy Warriors’ high command structure in south Kashmir, and was launched back across the Line of Control into India, repeating his first treacherous mountain journey in reverse. His base would be a newly-established Holy Warriors camp in the remote forests east of Anantnag, where he and his father had once hunted musk deer.
From now on, Javid Ahmed Bhat of Dabran took on another identity: ‘Sikander’, the Persian name for Alexander the Great. He chose it because he believed it befitted a mujahid with an understanding of justice, capable of compassion as well as bravery. And the Kashmir operation he had been sent to mastermind began