[Attacks in Kashmir have
plunged in recent years, with the top leaders of India and Pakistan again
promising better relations in the contested region. While many Kashmiris still
resent India’s dominance, far fewer are willing to fight it anymore — although
sporadic assaults, including a recent attack that killed eight soldiers,
continue.]
 |
Kuni Takahashi for
The New York Times
A road in
Indian-controlled Kashmir, where bloody clashes had quieted down.
A police
officer in Thathri has been accused of being the mastermind of
bombing and
assassination attempts.
|
THATHRI, Kashmir — This tiny mountain town in Kashmir, once the site of
bloody battles between militants, has returned to a quieter life, surviving on
apples, walnuts and government handouts. Terraced fields are carved out of
mountainsides, and locals use donkeys to help carry their loads.
So when an unexploded
grenade was found on April 28 in a pile of broken bricks outside the fortified
police station here, a shudder ran through the ranks of Kashmir’s top
officials.
Two years had passed
since the last militant attack in the surrounding area, and officials had begun
to hope that the cycle of massacres, assassinations and revenge killings that
had made this corner of Indian-controlled Kashmir one of the most dangerous in
the region’s long, dirty war had finally burned itself out.
Some even hoped tourists
might soon be willing to brave the hair-raising switchbacks to travel here to
experience its breathtaking valleys.
In the end, the police
arrested one of their own, a decorated officer. And while that allayed concerns
about militant-led attacks, it exacerbated fears that some people would be unable
to move past the region’s violence. In this case, the officer was charged with
attempted murder, accused of staging the unsuccessful grenade attack in what
several officials called an effort to raise enough worries about continuing
violence to win him a promotion to inspector.
Attacks in Kashmir have
plunged in recent years, with the top leaders of India and Pakistan again
promising better relations in the contested region. While many Kashmiris still
resent India’s dominance, far fewer are willing to fight it anymore — although
sporadic assaults, including a recent attack that killed eight soldiers,
continue.
India has responded to
the relative quiet by withdrawing the army from Srinagar — the summer capital
of the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir — and some larger towns, but a vast
police and paramilitary presence remains. Paramilitary killings of civilians last week during
protests over a reported desecration of the Koran led to demonstrations across
Kashmir. Nearly 100,000 police officers, meanwhile, were assigned to preventing
insurgent attacks.
“Unfortunately, there is
a vested interest in certain quarters to keep the conflict alive,” Omar
Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister, said in an interview at his
official residence in Srinagar. “One of the challenges we face as the level of
violence goes down is figuring out how to deal with those people who have
benefited from violence, whose career prospects have been determined by
violence and who used to make money from violence.”
Shiv Kumar Sharma, the
arrested officer, would seem to fit that description. He rapidly moved through
the ranks and earned thousands of dollars in bonuses because his bosses
considered him unusually good at finding and killing militants. Former
colleagues say he loved gold chains, dark sunglasses, fine clothing and the
fame that his many operations brought him.
But Rashish Gupta,
Officer Sharma’s lawyer, said that his client’s successes had made him
vulnerable to jealous rivals on the police force and that they were framing
him, a charge the police denied. “He got a name for himself and so much fame
because of his good work in such a short time that many officers were jealous
of him,” Mr. Gupta said.
The break in the grenade
case came when an officer reported that he had seen a former militant wandering
suspiciously around the police station on the morning of the attack, according
to Mohammad Arif Rishu, the area’s police superintendent.
The former militant,
Abdul Rashid, known as Abdullah, is one of hundreds of men who trained at
militant camps in Pakistan and sneaked back into India, but instead of
attacking, they surrendered themselves and their weapons. Mr. Rishu ordered the
former militant’s arrest.
When the police found
Mr. Rashid, he admitted that he had helped plan the grenade attack and had
recruited another man to carry it out, according to Mr. Rishu and Rauf Ahmed
Khan, the chief of the Thathri police. The authorities soon arrested three
other members of the group who they believe were involved and said they had
recovered an assault rifle, a pistol, ammunition and high-powered
walkie-talkies.
The group’s efforts to
create mayhem, the police said, were almost comically unsuccessful. Their
initial plan was for Rafi, a 19-year-old who goes by one name, to assassinate
several prominent officials, the police said. Rafi stalked his prey but was
unable to pull the trigger.
“He told me, ‘I went to
the places I was told to go, and I was near the people I was told to kill, but
I couldn’t do it,’ ” Mr. Rishu said. “He became chicken-hearted.”
Mr. Rishu and Chief Khan
said that led Mr. Rashid to recruit a second 19-year-old, who also uses one
name, Altaf, to toss a grenade into the Thathri police station, a sagging
two-story adobe building ringed by corrugated metal sheets and barbed wire.
Altaf could not bring himself to approach the station, so he climbed to the
roof of a nearby hotel and tossed the grenade from afar, but it failed to
explode, the police said.
Mr. Rashid, Rafi and
Altaf were charged with attempted murder, possession of illegal arms and other
offenses, and they remained in custody.
But the group’s most
surprising claim — according to Mr. Rishu, Chief Khan and a third top police
official — was that their leader had been Officer Sharma. The two 19-year-olds
said they had participated because they were each promised 50,000 rupees, or
more than $800, a princely sum here.
To Mr. Rishu, the
confessions appeared to be part of a larger story. He said Officer Sharma had
been desperate for a promotion to inspector, which had been under consideration
for some time. “He used to come to my office and ask about it,” Mr. Rishu said.
At the same time,
Officer Sharma was issuing increasingly urgent warnings of militant movements
in the area. Mr. Rishu said believes that Officer Sharma intended to
manufacture his own militancy so his promotion would go through.
During their
investigation, the police also retrieved cellphone records that Chief Khan said
showed a web of connections between Officer Sharma and Mr. Rashid, the former
militant.
“Sometimes they spoke
for 47 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes and sometimes 5, but there were a lot of
calls,” Chief Khan said.
Still, Officer Sharma’s
lawyer said that proved nothing. His client, he said, was expected to keep in
touch with such men because they might provide leads about active militants.
When arrested, Officer
Sharma said he was being targeted by the very militant elements he had spent
his career fighting, the police said.
Chief Khan quoted him as
saying, “I have done a lot of things, and they’re trying to get me.”
Local representatives of
the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group, have defended Officer
Sharma, saying he was the victim of a conspiracy that included the ruling
Indian National Congress Party.
“On the directions of
their political masters, local police officers have hatched a conspiracy to
implicate Shiv Kumar Sharma,” a party official, Nirmal Singh, said, according to
local news media. The police said they had acted independently, and
Mr. Abdullah, the region’s chief minister and part of a coalition with the
Congress Party, said the arrest had been appropriate.
“There has been an
industrialization of violence here,” Chief Khan said. “Those who have made
their careers out of violence are worried now that it is gone.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Kashmir.
