A way back home

Families of Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists hope the round-table conference will help them return home.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Kulgam

"I LOVE MY INDIA," reads the English-language chalk graffiti above the front door of Ghulam Ahmad's home in the small village of Nuss. "The kids wrote that," he says, flustered, "its from some film song or the other." Then, pausing, Ahmad adds: "Well, it is our country too. Isn't it?"

Four years ago, Ahmad's brother Ghulam Qadir Ganai became one of the most wanted men in Jammu and Kashmir. The Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, who operated under the code-name `Danish', organised the assassination of State Power Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bhat near the town of Dooru in May 2000. Ghulam Qadir was reported to have been killed in a September 2003 shootout near the Line of Control (LoC), but the Jammu and Kashmir Police discount the claim, believing it to be part of a deception operation.

Ahmad does not want to be believe his brother is dead either. Although Hizbul Mujahideen functionaries and the organisation's political patron, the Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, visited Nuss to offer their commiseration, the family never travelled north to Kupwara to visit what it was told was Ghulam Qadir's grave. Nor has it ever sought to examine the personal effects recovered from the body. "I cannot help but hope that my only brother is alive," says Ganai, "and that he will return home one day."

Like Ahmad, families of terrorists across Jammu and Kashmir are hoping that the second round-table conference on Jammu and Kashmir will help open the way for their loved ones to return. While terrorist groups have rejected the dialogue process, many of the 2,000 to 3,500 Hizbul Mujahideen cadre believed to be holed up in camps in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) are desperately seeking a way home. Some have made their own way across the LoC, but most others do not dare take the risks involved.

Sixteen years ago, when the jehad in Jammu and Kashmir escalated from being a low-grade conflagration into full-blown war, Ganai was an eighth-grade student at a madrassa in the frontier town of Bandipora. His father, a Jamaat-e-Islami cleric who had studied at the great Dar ul-Uloom seminary in Deoband, had hoped Ganai's studies would enable him to succeed as a religious studies teacher. Instead, fired by ideological passion, Ganai chose to join the Hizbul Mujahideen and made his way to a training camp in Pakistan.

Ever since the night Ganai chose to become a soldier of the jehad, his parents lived under constant fear: fear of his death, and fear of the inevitable military and police raids after their son's occasional visits home. In 1996, one such raid almost succeeded in trapping Ganai. The intense firefight that followed ended in the destruction of the family home. Soon afterwards, Ganai's father, Ghulam Mohammad, passed away. Zainab Ganai, his mother, passed away a few months later.

Ganai responded to these tragedies by renewing his commitment to the jehad. Power Minister Bhat's assassination was just one of dozens of operations he commanded after 1998.

However, rivals within the Hizbul Mujahideen began to turn on Ganai's family. His uncle, Abdul Rashid Thokar, was shot dead on charges of helping a police recruitment effort in the town of Verinag; another relative, Sanger resident Mohammad Akram, was killed on suspicion of being an informer.

Disgusted, Ganai decided to cross the LoC hoping to build a new life for himself in Muzaffarabad, the capital of PoK. "He knew he could not come back home because the Army would arrest him," says Ahmad, "and that if he surrendered, the Hizbul Mujahideen would not allow him to live in peace." Ahmad chooses to believe that his brother did succeed in making the crossing - that the body found in Kupwara was part of an enterprise designed to evade the ghosts of his past.

Ever since 2003, Ahmad set about rebuilding what could be salvaged of his own life. He sold two of the five kanals of land his family owned - 2.5 kanals make an acre - and used the cash to rebuild his family home. Ahmad has two children, a daughter named Khushboo and a son, Danish, named for his brother's nom de guerre. Still, the past refuses to go away. "Just two months ago," he says, "someone I had a dispute with over land complained to the Army that I helped terrorists. I was questioned for two days."

Farooq Ahmad Deva, a road-works contractor who lives in the southern Kashmir village of Panzath, is familiar with the sentiment. His brother, Riyaz Ahmad, who operates under the alias `Tufail', is the head of the Hizbul Mujahideen's operations in the Qazigund area. Riyaz Ahmad's unit is at the core of a well-oiled extortion racket targeting construction contractors in the region - a racket, Deva's rivals insist, that has designed to benefit the terrorist's family and its business.

Deva's relatives say they are unsure just why he became a terrorist. On the morning he left to join the Hizbul Mujahideen, Deva had purchased two sacks of coal, which were to be shipped home on another bus, and handed over Rs.200 for the treatment of his ailing sister. "He told us that he would see us at the doctor's office," recalls his younger brother Shamim Ahmad, "and we later learned he had stopped to purchase newspapers from a shop in Anantnag. I only saw him once three months later, and he wouldn't talk to me."

Riyaz Ahmad's decision to break contact with his family was prompted by the desire to protect them from military and police raids: unlike the Ganai home, their house is intact. Still, the family has paid a huge price for his decision. Both of the Hizbul Mujahideen commander's brothers have repeatedly been detained for questioning by the Army, which on one occasion in 2003 led to street protests by their fellow villagers. A cousin, Mohammad Shafi Kukka, was jailed, and this ended his undergraduate education.

"Our life is in ruins," says Deva. The family's fruit orchard, he says, has been ruined because no one wishes to lease it, fearing raids or shootouts that might destroy the harvest. And, contrary to the allegation of other contractors, Deva insists his brother's power and influence has done nothing for his construction business. "You have to pay bribes to get contracts," he says wryly, "but no official will take one from me because they are afraid of my brother - and as a result, I have almost no business."

"Ever since my son left home," says Riyaz Ahmad's mother Jana Bano, "I have spent each evening fearing that his corpse will be returned to us. I do not care about India and Pakistan; all I want is that a way is found for my child to be able to return."

Even as the parents of the cadre are hoping for an end to the violence, the Hizbul Mujahideen leadership has been working to bring about an escalation, knowing that the dialogue process could strip it of what little legitimacy it has. As things stand, the paths travelled by Ganai and Riyaz Ahmad appear to be one-way streets. What the dialogue process does offer, though, is the hope that a crossroads may one day appear.