The ghosts of Machil

NADIHAL, India — At 3 o’clock in the morning of April 30, 2010, a unit of the Indian army’s 4th Rajput Regiment was patrolling an area of the Line of Control, the de facto border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The soldiers were in a sector called Machil, near the Sonapindi Pass, where the foothills give way to mountains — a notorious route for armed groups infiltrating India. The soldiers “observed three persons moving suspiciously in own territory,” according to a report they filed the next day. “Sensing situation, the party commander alerted his troops, allowed terrorists to close in. At a closed quarter, 50-70 m, terrorists noticed our party and opened fire on them. Unmindful of the volley of bullets, our ambush party returned fire resulting killing of three terrorists.”

The army asked villagers in Sonapindi to bury the three men and added them to the tally of 40 “unidentified foreign militants” — fighters from Pakistan — killed in 468 infiltration attempts that year. The deaths were also added to another grim statistic: the thousands of anonymous graves found all over the hills along the LOC. The International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice has documented 2,943 such graves in three border districts of Kashmir. The area is the front line in the long-running conflict over territory between India and Pakistan and ground zero of an armed Kashmiri separatist insurgency.

But the bodies buried at Machil did not remain anonymous. Three Kashmiri families claimed the men as their sons, laborers, they said, who had nothing to do with Pakistan.

Their deaths have reverberated far beyond the mountains. Police and local activists say they were killed not in the heat of battle but by soldiers motivated by greed and a draconian law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, that they knew would protect them from civil prosecution. Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch, who has written extensively on the region, says, “This particular case became an example of everything that had gone wrong in Kashmir.”

But the story of Machil — told through interviews with the families of the men who were killed and extensive access to the police records documenting the incident — has also become a sign of what’s possible. It set in motion a rare prosecution by the Indian army of its own soldiers, with the last verdict being announced just last week, and a chance to finally end Kashmir’s decadeslong cycle of violence. Ganguly says, “Machil is the beginning.”

After a 2003 cease-fire between India and Pakistan, Baramulla, the traditional trading center of Indian Kashmir, was briefly a symbol of everything that has gone right in the region. Though the main road there had become impassable during the height of the separatist insurgency in the early 1990s, India later rebuilt it in an effort to encourage cross-border trade.

In this fragile peace, the people of Baramulla district patch together a living. They eat rice from the paddy fields that haven’t yet been sold to developers, sell fruit in the markets whenever the roads are open and, failing all that, send their sons out to work as day laborers on construction sites all over the Kashmir Valley. It is a tenuous existence, but better than the open conflict of the previous decade, when young men could choose only between two kinds of exile: the life of a migrant laborer or a militant.

These difficult choices about how to earn a living are made every day inside the brick houses of Nadihal, a village about seven kilometers (roughly four miles) west of Baramulla town where sheep, chickens and pony carts make up the only traffic. In a brightly painted room — green walls, yellow door, pink flowered curtains — Shahzad Ahmed Khan’s mother, Ayesha, talks about her eldest son. At 25, he was married with a 6-year-old child, and his only steady work was packing apples in the orchards of a neighbor. He would sometimes hitch rides to Srinagar or Baramulla for jobs, Ayesha says. “He would go with whoever paid him more.”

No matter where he went, Shahzad always carried two things in the pocket of his black checkered woolen tunic, or pheran: his mobile phone and a small diary in which he kept careful accounts of how much money he owed other people and what they owed him. One day in April 2010 Shahzad met a neighbor, Bashir Ahmed Lone, who promised him 500 rupees (about $8) for a day’s work as a porter for the army. Bashir arranged for an SUV and driver to take him to the army base at Kalaroos. Shahzad came back that day humiliated; his mother says he hadn’t been paid.

Riyaz Ahmed Lone, a handsome 20-year-old motorcycle mechanic, had a similar offer, according to his father, Yusuf. (Lone is a common surname in Kashmir, and they are not related to Bashir.) The second of eight children, Riyaz liked to wear track suits and left his brown hair long enough to tumble into his eyes. He worked with Yusuf at a motorcycle workshop and earned about 3,000 rupees a month, but constantly complained, “My pay is too little.” Riyaz went to Kalaroos without telling his parents, anticipating that they would be angry. When he got back, they warned him that he would lose his job. He told his parents he had a chance to double his pay from the first day. His mother, Naseema, says, “We never saw it, but he said he got 500 rupees.”

The missing-person case fell under the jurisdiction of Altaf Khan, the superintendent of police or SP of Sopore, a district that is considered the ideological home of the pro-Pakistan separatist movement. At the time, this was one of the few places in Kashmir where armed groups seemed to be gaining strength: About 50 fighters were believed to operate in Sopore with logistical support from a population of 300,000. Khan was assigned the career-making task of flushing out terrorists and their sympathizers from the area. “Should I be honest about it?” he asks. “To me, out of every six, one is working for a terrorist or is a terrorist.”

Tall, broad-chested and voluble, Khan, who has since been promoted to another district, lives in a spacious two-story house in one of Srinagar’s new housing developments with his wife, a banker, and their children. He entered law enforcement more than 14 years ago after abandoning a career as a scientist, and he approaches his work with academic detachment, writing action plans and papers about emerging trends in terrorism. Without guidance, he says, young people in Sopore fall prey to terror networks that offer them money to buy SIM cards, procure supplies or act as “mules” for weapons. He has tried community policing, drug de-addiction camps and “moral education” to win them over, he says, but “People are very reluctant.”

The disappearance of three laborers normally would not merit the attention of the SP, but this case intrigued him because of the alarming possibility that these young Kashmiris might have crossed the LOC to be trained in Pakistan, as thousands did in 1989. That earlier generation of indigenous separatists has been killed or co-opted or has just grown old, but there is a growing fear among security experts of a new uprising of Kashmiris joining the armed groups operating in Pakistan. “From the case-study point of view it’s very interesting, whether the locals are lured toward terrorism or not,” Khan says. “So that is actually what captivated me toward it.”

The police began with Bashir. Under interrogation, Khan said, Bashir implicated two other men, Abbas Husain Shah and Abdul Hameed Bhat, who both worked as paid informers for the army. There are few other good sources of intelligence about terrorist activity in Kashmir, according to Maj. Gen. Dipankar Banerjee, a retired Indian army officer who served in Kashmir, including in Machil. Telephone intercepts rarely reveal detailed plans, and Indian intelligence services are believed to have few, if any, human agents on the other side of the LOC. They rely on paid informers, Banerjee says. “Without them, an operation cannot succeed.”

Before he was taken into judicial custody, Abbas described his work in an interview with The Indian Express newspaper. He said his handler was Maj. Upendra Singh, an Indian army officer stationed in Baramulla, and Abbas’ job was to feed him intelligence about suspicious people in town and the surrounding villages. In April 2010, Singh had a bigger job for him: “Major sahib [Singh] asked to arrange few young men and told me that we have to send them across to Pakistan.” The men would be asked to help fighters trying to enter Indian Kashmir, carrying weapons for them and serving as their guides through the mountains. It was a clever ruse. Local Kashmiris frequently act as paid guides to groups of foreign fighters. “The infiltrators depend upon them,” Banerjee says.

Abbas asked Hameed for help and Hameed roped in Bashir. They recruited Shahzad, Riyaz and Shafi from Nadihal, brought them to the army base at Kalaroos on April 29 and got their reward: 150,000 rupees, two bottles of whiskey and two bottles of beer. Police later found 50,000 rupees in cash in a raid of Bashir’s house. Phone records submitted as evidence show numerous calls between Singh, Abbas and Hameed in the weeks leading up to April 29. Under interrogation, Abbas said the laborers had been brought to Machil and were killed on April 30 in a staged encounter made to look like a firefight. It was the same incident described so vividly as an ambush at close quarters in which the army men described shooting three “terrorists” crossing the LOC, “unmindful of a volley of bullets.”

While the army would like to look at Machil as an aberration, the case has become an emblem of the larger struggles in Kashmir, between the Indian army and civilian authority, between transparency and the fog of war, between Kashmir’s past and its future.

The civilian charges filed against serving army officers represent, in one sense, a clear break from the past, when extrajudicial killings were common but prosecution was rare. “The Machil verdict should mark a turning point for human rights in Jammu and Kashmir,” wrote Shailesh Rai, programmes director at Amnesty International India, when the first convictions were announced in November.

The relative calm prevailing in Indian Kashmir has helped to make this possible. There is also an elected government in Srinagar and a police force that is trying to assert its authority over the army and show that it can maintain law and order on its own. “The police are much more empowered now,” Ganguly says. “A civilian government is much more accountable.” In addition, Indian officials and independent security experts say that popular support for militants has largely dried up, with the remaining terrorist activity rooted in Pakistan.

And yet these peacetime deaths shocked Kashmir even after a decadeslong conflict, in which an estimated 60,000 civilians have died. The three men from Nadihal were not caught in crossfire or in a case of mistaken identity; they were not accidentally killed during interrogation or by soldiers in the heat of battle. Nor were they hardened terrorists subject to frontier justice, a common perception in India of fake encounters. Ajai Sahni, an expert on counterterrorism and director of the Institute for Conflict Management, explains the rationale: Soldiers think, “So the guy is going to get out and again do what he was doing, so shoot him,” Sahni says. “So there is a kind of institutional sanction … This is not that kind of a case.”

The motives in Machil, according to the charges filed by police, were more banal: greed and ambition. The 4th Rajput battalion was due to leave the LOC in early May 2010, and until the encounter on April 30, the unit at Machil had reported no successful kills or captures of militants, nor seized any weapons, hurting the officers’ chances for advancement. Khan says that the unit received a 600,000-rupee reward for its report of killing three militants and that it fabricated the seizure memo listing arms and ammunition recovered to bolster its case for promotions.

A 2005 diplomatic cable revealed by Wikileaks raised a warning about the perverse incentives for human-rights abuses in Kashmir, even during peacetime. Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross told the then-U.S. ambassador to India, David Mulford, that after the 2003 cease-fire and extensive human-rights training, abuses still continue because “security forces need promotions.”

A spokesman for the army’s northern command declined to comment on the Machil case or its significance and referred all questions to army spokesmen in Kashmir, who did not respond to multiple calls and messages seeking comment.

Undisciplined soldiers may commit excesses in any situation, says Sahni, but at the height of the insurgency, “maybe the opportunities for legitimate rewards were higher.” Today maybe some of the commanding officers find themselves kicking their heels in Kashmir and think, “‘It’s an insurgency-affected area,’” he says, ““but I am not getting any opportunity to go out and do anything.’”

The 50,000 rupees paid to each of the three informers seemed to confirm these fears. “They were literally sold,” says Sajjad Lone, a former separatist who is now a state legislator in Kashmir. “Even in the context of a lot of human rights violations in Kashmir, this will attract more outrage.”