THROUGH THE PIR PANJAL

Of life and realities on the Pir Panjal Range in Jammu and Kashmir. An account by PRAVEEN SWAMI after a four-day trek.

PRAVEEN SWAMIAn Overview

It is impossible in the scope of this report to do justice to the beauty and grandeur of the mountains of Kashmir, or to enumerate the lovely glades and forests visited by so few. Excellent guide books tell of the magnificent scenery of the Sind and Lidder valleys, and of the gentler charms of the Lolab, but none have described the equal beauties of the western side of Kashmir. Few countries can offer anything grander than the deep green mountain tarn of Konsar Nag in the Pir Panjal range, the waters of which make a wild entrance into the Valley over the splendid cataract of Arabal...

- Sir Walter Lawrence, the Settlement Commissioner for Jammu and Kashmir, in The Valley of Kashmir, 1895; 1996 edition, Kashmir Kitab Ghar, Jammu; Page 16.

ANGRELA is the Pir Panjal's own version of Namche Bazaar, the legendary last stop on the tourist trail to Mount Everest. But all the travellers here carry guns, and none of them looks for anything except trouble.

In early June, after the National Democratic Front government's Ramzan ceasefire ended, Angrela resident Jamal Din decided to cash in on the vast numbers of troops and police personnel making their way into the Pir Panjal Range in search of insurgent groups. His shop, perched at the end of the earth road that runs to the village from the tehsil headquarters at Mahore, sells tea, cigarettes and pan masala to troops waiting for supplies and ammunition to be unloaded. A little further up the track into the mountains, Jamal Din's brother stocks toothpaste and soap, for officers who might have forgotten to pack their kit before leaving Brigade Headquarters. "Business is good," says Jamal Din, "I manage to make sales of Rs.400 to Rs.500 a day, and a profit of at least Rs.100." Others in the village have benefited too. Porters, who get paid at least Rs.60 a day, and mules, whose owners charge Rs.100 a day, are impossible to come by. The income helps undo the losses suffered by Angrela in 1992, when floods washed off much of its farmland.

The war-fuelled economic boom in Angrela is not hard to understand. For one, Mahore tehsil is of enormous strategic importance. Any insurgent group seeking to move from the Line of Control (LoC) in Rajouri or Poonch to Doda must cross the area, through the 4,200-metre Nikam Gali (alley, or pass). So too must insurgent units crossing from Doda into the key south Kashmir regions of Shopian and Kulgam. When the Ramzan ceasefire came into force last year, the Army Brigade at Mahore withdrew from the region and redeployed along the LoC in Rajouri. Reports of the Nikam area being used as a training zone for insurgent groups upwards of two platoons began to trickle in, as did news of executions of pro-India figures, ranging from newly elected village sarpanches to alleged informers. The Jammu and Kashmir Police were left carrying out a desperate rearguard action, using its small numbers of Special Operations Group (SOG) personnel.

Another reason for the importance of the Pir Panjal is that whoever controls the mountains dominates access to all of the Kashmir Valley. The range, whose name is derived by combining Pir, the archaic Dogri word for mountain, and its Kashmiri synonym, Pantsal, stretches west to east from Poonch to Doda, separating the Valley from Jammu and Doda. At many places, local residents and acclimatised troops make the crossing through the spectacular passes in less than a day. Should insurgent groups be allowed to gather in numbers along the range, they could, in theory, cut off communications along the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway, the sole road between the two key regions of the State. In addition, insurgents could target walking routes from Poonch to Uri, Kulgam to Doda, and Rajouri to Shopian. Insurgents armed with mortar could bring Army positions in Kulgam under relentless fire, and any counter-offensive would certainly cause heavy casualties, given the terrain.

With the Mahore Brigade having returned to full-blown offensive operations, with one recent ambush by the Rajputana Rifles in the Nikam area claiming the lives of 10 terrorists, the police have also switched its mountain personnel to a more aggressive role. In May, Director-General of Police A.K. Suri ordered his personnel to begin Operation Eagle, a series of independent high-altitude initiatives by the SOG, and covert units to seek and destroy insurgent formations. Although the police personnel often lack even basic mountain warfare equipment - windproof suits, lightweight sleeping bags or boots that stay dry in rain and snow - their results have been impressive. Frontline was granted permission to accompany one such operation, commanded by Reasi Superintendent of Police Satish Khandare. One object of the operation, made up of some 60 men, was to flush out insurgents from villages on the route from Angrela to Kulgam, pushing them up towards waiting Army ambushes. Another objective was to allow Khandare some contact with people in some of the most remote and under-developed areas of the State. The state apparatus has had little presence in Mahore, or other hill areas of the Reasi police district, and high-level police contact with villagers is intended to build confidence.

It is not perhaps surprising that government officials are less than keen on executing their duties in terrain like this, whatever its strategic importance. From Angrela a rocky path leads down to a suspension bridge stretched across a mountain stream, the last sign of the existence of development for the next three days. Beyond, there are no roads, no electricity and no communication facility save the Army's high-frequency wireless sets. Schools and a single public health centre exist more in theory than in fact. The track leads to Nahoch, a mountain hamlet perched at above 2,500 m, and then steadily upwards to Deval, a spectacular high-altitude summer pasture. From there, another half a day's hard climb ends in Gulabgarh, the last significant village before the passes over the Pir Panjal. The village gets its name from a local myth, according to which Maharaja Gulab Singh hid in an underground shelter here after a military defeat. Arital, the last inhabited settlement before the Pir Panjal, is just a few hours from Gulabgarh. A fit SOG trooper or local resident can make the Gulabgarh-Arital-Kulgam stretch, through the Nikam pass, in just eight hours.

It will take me from 4 a.m. to 8-30 p.m. From the end of the Kashrari Gali, with the Barhma Sakli massif behind me, I shall be able to look down on all of south Kashmir, as if from an aircraft.

Structures of Violence

...(the Gujjars) rarely intermix with the Kashmiris, though like them they are Mussalman by religion. They are a fine tall race of men, with rather stupid faces, and large prominent teeth. Their one thought is for the welfare of their buffalo and when they take to cultivation they grow maize for the animals rather than for themselves. They are an ignorant, inoffensive, and simple people, and in their relations with the state are infinitely more honest than the Kashmiris. Their good faith is proverbial and they are a generous people, giving all the milk of Friday away in charity.

- Lawrence, Page 316.

LAWRENCE'S blithely racist account of life in the Pir Panjal seems dated. In parts, though, it also seems alarmingly accurate. "The brigadier at Mahore," says Khandare wryly, "sometimes jokes that we don't have an insurgency up here, just a law and order problem, a caste war, that sort of thing. The thing is, he's right. Or at least, partly right."

Travellers through the Nikam pass stop at a shrine at its end, and tie a ribbon to pay homage. It is, according to the herdsmen on the high pastures, the last place Kashmir's patron saint Sheikh Noor-ul-Alam visited in the valley. The Pir Panjal thus marks not only a division in geographical space, but between histories and peoples.

Noor Husain Gujjar is very certain he does not want his photograph taken. "I'm in enough trouble as it is," he says bitterly, "I don't want any more." In May, terrorists belonging to the Hizbul Mujahideen and the Lashkar-e-Toiba cut off one of his ears, and attempted to sever his right hand with an axe. The blackened, festering hand remains in place, though, bandaged to the arm and held in place with improvised chinar-wood splints. Noor Husain Gujjar's crime, for which he was tried by an impromptu terrorist court, was to have stood for election to the newly formed panchayat in Dubri near Mahore. Noor Husain won against an ethnic Kashmiri rival, but the price has been far too high. He is now spending his summer well away from home, at a relative's dhoke (high-altitude shelter) between Angrela and Nahoch.

Similar terrorist attacks have taken place through Mahore, and through many areas of both Jammu and the Kashmir Valley. Prior to this summer's panchayat elections, terrorist groups repeatedly warned candidates that they would face violent reprisals. The curious thing in Mahore, however, is the number of people who do not seem to have suffered the consequences of defying terrorist edicts. Even more curious is the fact that almost all of the many sarpanches elected unopposed are close relatives of the very terrorist commanders who banned participation in elections.

Take the case of Nahoch, a mainly ethnic-Kashmiri village. Noor-ud-Din was elected panch unopposed. His brother Maqbool Pugli, one of the three Hizbul Mujahideen cadre from the village, along with Rafiq Ahmad and Ali Mohammad, has managed to survive the renewed security force onslaught. Abdul Rahim Chowkidar, who became sarpanch of Nag Deval unopposed, is a close relative of top Hizb leader Mohammad Shafi, and arranged the surrender of his wife two years ago. Gulabgarh's sarpanch Jamal-ud-Din Sheikh, also elected unopposed, is the brother-in- law of Hizb operative Bashir Ahmad, code-named Munim.

At one level, this terrorist effort to grab power in ethnic-Kashmiri neighbourhoods is driven by outright greed. Shortly before the elections, local government officials spread rumours that villages that elected officials unopposed would be given the cash saved on election expenses. At least some terrorist cadre may have been moved by the prospect of instant wealth to defy the stated positions of their leadership on the panchayat elections. An older generation of village officials, like numberdars and chowkidars, have traditionally controlled access to the bureaucracy and official contracts, and the elections provided a way for new village elites to appropriate some of that power. Access to guns has for several years proved to be the easiest way to make money in the hills. In Gulabgarh, local terrorist Jamal-ud-Din's brother Ahmad Din acquired government contracts in Angrela for the simple reason that no one would bid against him. Other Hizb cadres from the area have made a tidy living, settling disputes involving property, grazing rights or marriage.

Consider the case of Samshad Begum of Nahoch, the daughter of the village's former numberdar, Abdul Ghani. Samshad Begum was betrothed to local Hizb operative Bahar Din in early 1999, and the customary mountain-area bride price, in this case Rs.10,000, was paid. Bahar Din was part of the Hizb unit of Abdul Ghaffar. After a rival terrorist group shot Abdul Ghani dead, Samshad Begum decided that she would under no circumstances marry a terrorist. In the meanwhile, Abdul Ghaffar was killed, and Bahar Din turned sides, and began working as an operative for a local Army unit. With their father dead, Samshad Begum's family could not afford to return the bride price. The girl at once remained adamant that she would not marry someone she believed was linked, at least by association, to her father's murderers. Since then Bahar Din has been threatening the family, demanding either his fiancee in marriage or his bride price back. "It's very simple here," says Nahoch resident Mohammad Amin. "There is no terrorism here, just people with guns settling their personal disputes."

But there is also a sharper political edge, with great long-term consequence, to this war between communities. Since at least 1999, plans have been floated for an eventual settlement of the war in Jammu and Kashmir by sundering the State along ethnic-communal lines. In essence, the proposals involve the Muslim majority areas north of the Chenab either becoming independent or joining Pakistan. The Hindu majority areas of the State, mainly south of the Chenab, would remain with India. The Reasi area, cut in two by the Chenab, is a key battleground for these proposals. A 1999 blueprint for partition by the influential United States-based Kashmir Studies Group, called Kashmir: A Way Forward, suggested that "every tehsil in Kashmir proper and in Doda district in Jammu and the Gool Gulabgarh tehsil in Udhampur district in Jammu would seek incorporation in the proposed state." There is no tehsil of Gool Gulabgarh, but both these areas lie in Mahore. Similarly, the State government's proposals for restructuring its regions would place Mahore, Udhampur's single Muslim-majority tehsil, in Doda.

Since these ideas began to circulate, systematic ethnic cleansing has been evident along the Chenab. Twenty-eight Hindus were murdered in the Prankot area of Reasi in April 1998, leading to a massive exodus from the Prankot-Narkot area. The only significant groups of minorities still living in the area are Sikhs around Chasana, home to the first Village Defence Committee. Chasana sees regular exchanges of fire with terrorists, and it is uncertain just how long the community will hold out. Earlier this year, Muslim Bakkarwal shepherds opposed to the mainly ethnic Kashmiri Hizbul Mujahideen were targeted at Kot Charwal. Now the panchayat elections have provided a battleground for conflict between Gujjar and ethnic Kashmiri. Indeed, there has been a systematic effort to eliminate any pro-India elements among Mahore's village communities. Jammu and Kashmir's previous Director-General of Police, Gurbachan Jagat, had launched an initiative in Mahore to recruit young people into the force as part of an expansion programme. One of those hired was Asghar Ali, an 18-year-old Gulabgarh resident. On his first vacation from the Police Academy at Manigam, Ali was dragged out of his home and shot dead, in full public view.

His father did not want to speak about the issue. "I have other sons," he told the villager who went to ask him over to the home where I was going to spend the night.

Poverty and underdevelopment

... it is a matter of surprise that under rapid transition of governments, carrying in race, religion and language, the people of the valley should have retained their peculiar nationality unimpaired. The isolation of Kashmir accounts in a great measure for this, and it is quite possible that the Jhelum valley road will effect a change in the customs and ideas of the Kashmiris which Mughals, Pathans and Dogras could never have accomplished. ...(T)he revolution which will follow the more rapid communication with India is one which will require wise guidance and most careful watching.

- Lawrence, Page 203.

"PAKISTAN is inflicting this misery on a place where many people have never even seen a motor car," reads an Army propaganda poster pasted on the outer walls of houses in the Barhmi Dhar. For once, the propaganda rings true. More than a hundred years on, there is still just one road through the Pir Panjal, and no sign of the revolution Lawrence had anticipated.

Nazir Ahmad studies in the 10th grade. Each morning, he has to set out from Nahoch to Gulabgarh, where the nearest secondary school is situated. Taking a short-cut, it is a four-hour walk each way. Not that it is much better for students in Nahoch. Nawaz Ahmad, an 8th grade student, shows me around his two-room school building. One room has been used to store hay. The other, which has no windows, no roof, and has walls only on three sides, passes for a classroom. Around a hundred students in eight separate grades study here. That is a better situation than what students face at nearby Deval, who no longer have a school. Their school was burned down by terrorists in 1996. Both the boys say they want to join the police when they grow up. "What else can someone from here do?" asks Nazir Ahmad laconically. Unlike in the Kashmir Valley, which has at least some private enterprise and a flourishing network of government employment, residents of the Jammu mountains must struggle to survive. Just seven of Nahoch's 300 homes, for example, have one member in a regular, wage-paying job.

Mahore, like much of the region around it, depends largely on livestock and the single annual maize crop to survive. But landholdings have, inevitably, fragmented over the years. What was enough a generation ago is no longer enough to make ends meet. "My father," says Doga village numberdar Mushtaq Ahmad Gujjar, "had ten buffaloes. I have only four. When I was a child, the adults at most went to Reasi to work as labourers in the winter, and that for a few months at most. Today people from here go as far as Jammu and Delhi, for six months at a time."

To make things even more difficult, many herdsmen are scared to move up to the highest pastures, in the Nikam and Kashrari Gali areas. Many dhokes on the pastures have simply been abandoned because of the fear of terrorist attacks. The process began in 1996, when terrorists burned down dhokes on the grounds that the community was sympathetic to the election process. "It cost me Rs.20,000 to rebuild my dhoke," says Deval Marg resident Abdul Ahad Malik, "so I thought I would build it somewhere safe."

Public amenities are more or less non-existent. Residents must walk to Angrela from as far away as Gulabgarh to stock up on foodgrain, salt and sugar. No organised public distribution system exists beyond the roadhead, and this situation imposes strains on the poorest segments of the population. The only primary health centre for the entire area is in Deval, and it is often short on both medicines and doctors. Local Army units, like the 3 Rajputana Rifles in Barhmi Dhar, do what they can to help. But this is no real substitute for state intervention. No governmental effort has been made to improve yields from the maize fields, which are tended almost entirely by hand and without fertilizer. Although the hills yield valuable produce such as walnut and dried morels, which retail in a place like New Delhi for upwards of Rs.7,000 a kilogram, there is no marketing infrastructure that would benefit the villagers. Worst of all, the region's dairy products must, perforce, be sold to brokers in Reasi. The absence of a milk cooperative structure means that Jammu and Kashmir ends up bringing milk from other States, despite its huge livestock holdings.

In part, the absence of official initiative can be traced to the complete political paralysis of the National Conference (N.C.). In village after village, residents complained that the local Member of the Legislative Assembly, independent-turned-N.C. leader Ghulam Mohammad Malik, had visited their village just once in the last five years, or not at all. The sole official achievement seems to have been pushing the road from Mahore to Angrela, a project that began before the government took power. Projects just do not seem to get off the ground. Construction has not even started on a higher secondary school building that Gulabgarh was supposed to have two years ago. "Look at the situation here," says Deval Marg shopkeeper Feroz Din. "You have a sarpanch who won't open his mouth, and panches who can't tell you what their demands are. You have an MLA who has come here just once, and that too when we made a fuss. And you have a Sub Divisional Magistrate whom I, at least, have never seen. How can things ever improve?"

No surprise then that the Islamic Right is beginning to occupy the ideological and political spaces democratic parties have chosen to vacate. In May, Mahore had its first experience of Kashmir Valley-style protest, after nine-year-old Muzaffar Hussain was accidentally shot dead by a joint patrol of the Army and the police. Local pro-All Parties Hurriyat Conference politicians kept the child's body on public display for eight days, between June 7 and 14, claiming he had been murdered on purpose. The pathetic display, which violated Islamic customs that mandate burial rites must be completed before dusk on the same day, disgusted many people in the area. It at once, however, showed the increasing influence of anti-India political formations in an area where they have traditionally had little hold. The renewed offensive by the Army and the police on the heights of the Pir Panjal has succeeded in breaking the power and influence that terrorist groups acquired during the Ramzan ceasefire. There is an even greater need, though, to address the mosaic of ethnic and communal fissures that have torn apart a region: a task men in uniform are just not equipped to execute.