Book review: 'The Meadow'

Book: The Meadow
Author: Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 510
Price: Rs499

A few years ago, Wajahat Habibullah, a senior IAS officer and the current chairman of the National Commission for Minorities made a chilling disclosure about the assassination of senior cardiologist and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) ideologue Dr Abdul Ahad Guru. Habibullah was the divisional commissioner of the Kashmir Valley in 1993, the year in which Guru was killed, and in his book My Kashmir Conflict And The Prospects Of Enduring Peace, Habibullah has claimed that Guru’s assassination was orchestrated by the Jammu and Kashmir Police, who were in league with a detained Hizbul Mujahideen militant.

“The Police made an arrangement with Zulqarnain, then in custody, who agreed to kill Guru in exchange for his release. But to ensure that this collusion remained a secret, Zulqarnain was killed shortly thereafter,” Habibullah wrote in his book. As peace returns to Kashmir, the locked lips of sleuths, officers and informers are opening up, revealing chilling accounts of cases that have dogged media and diplomats. One such case is the kidnapping of six western tourists by the militant group al Faran from the South Kashmir Mountains.

The award winning British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark have already earned fame by investigating United States’ secret assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear programme, exposing scientist AQ Khan’s nuclear network and routes of proliferation in their earlier book Deception. Their latest book under review, The Meadow, has surpassed the confines of journalistic investigations. It not only explicates the nuances of the al Faran case, but it also reveals how Indian security forces and their agents had scripted a ceasefire with a dreaded Pakistani outfit Harkat-ul-Ansar to jointly wipe out Hizbul Mujahideen from the region.

The al Faran episode is an apt prism that helps one see India’s handling of Kashmir, and the West’s response to the conflict. It is also clear that after the kidnapping, the West took a different view of Kashmir, seeing it no longer as a struggle for self-determination, but as a theatre for terrorism with potential global consequences. The militants are said to have carried out their atrocities to secure the release of some of their more hardcore counterparts, but for the Narasimha Rao government, this incident was an opportunity to maximise an infliction of pain on Pakistan, fulfilling a key plank of the Rao doctrine: to frame Pakistan as a state sponsor of terror. Finally the end of the western backpackers came not in a terrorist hole, but with government forces, claims the book. Though it pays lip service to ‘finding a political solution’, in practice the counter-insurgency doctrine in India has been to “get them by the balls, and the hearts and minds will follow”.

Though voluminous and detailed, the 500-page book is a gripping real-life thriller, unveiling the games sleuths and security agencies played in Kashmir. The authors also disclose rivalries between the Indian army, intelligence and police outfits. They reveal the reluctance of New Delhi to allow either the Jammu and Kashmir Police or Scotland Yard or FBI to pursue investigations that could have ended the hostage crisis. Levy and Scott-Clark write, “Anywhere else in the world, the fraternity of police would have shared intelligence and war stories. Here (in Kashmir) everything was infused by politics, shrouded in secrecy and predicated by control.” The brutal kidnapping of the Western hostages is clearly the tip of an iceberg. The region waits for more storytellers like Levy and Scott-Clark.

It is also in the interest of justice and New Delhi’s democratic credentials that it should institute impartial inquiries into such incidents. The trust of the Kashmiri people needs to be restored and getting them by their balls will never translate into peace. Over the past four centuries, Kashmir has been ruled through a lethal combination of force and fear. The outpouring of resentment in 2008 and 2010 has conveyed that the fear may have dissipated, but force still remains. We need to build a combination of democracy, compassion and understanding to settle the issue of Kashmir. We need to take into account people and not territory.