[There have been hiccups
in the program, in part because Pakistan has chosen not to participate.
Returnees must fly to Nepal and cross into India by bus or car. And like all
peace efforts between India and Pakistan, it has been overwhelmed this summer
by some of the deadliest fighting in a decade between the nuclear-armed rivals.
Dozens have died, and life near the Line of Control that separates the Indian
and Pakistani claims has once again become dangerous and uncertain.]
 |
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Liaqat Ali Shah, center, in his house in Lolab Valley, Kashmir, is one of hundreds of fighters
trained in Pakistan-controlled territory who have returned home.
|
LOLAB VALLEY, Kashmir — Many of them left as teenagers, impulsive boys fired by
indignation who sneaked across the border to Pakistan-controlled territory
without telling their mothers.
But even militants get
homesick.
“My first contact with
my mother was three years after I’d left, and my parents had no idea what had
happened to me,” said Abdul Hamid Rather, who left India-controlled Kashmir in
2001 when he was 14. “She was weeping, and I was weeping.”
More than 350 former
militants have returned here to India-controlled Kashmir recently in a quiet
new effort to deal with the growing problem of rehabilitating some of the
thousands who left home in recent decades to fight for Pakistan in its
long-running separatist feud with India over the disputed territory.
“It turns out that it’s
not as dangerous as it might seem,” said Shuja Nawaz, the director of the South
Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington. “It’s
probably better to have them under scrutiny in India than out of reach in Pakistan.”
In addition to the
prospect of seeing aging parents, Kashmiris, in their bowl-shaped valley and
its breathtaking vistas, find an unusually powerful incentive for putting down
arms.
Under the new program,
once a former fighter has decided he wants to return, his family files an
application with the Indian authorities. If there are no accusations that he
attacked India or killed anyone, the application is usually approved. After
that the former jihadi is required to meet with the police regularly for at
least a year.
There have been hiccups
in the program, in part because Pakistan has chosen not to participate.
Returnees must fly to Nepal and cross into India by bus or car. And like all
peace efforts between India and Pakistan, it has been overwhelmed this summer
by some of the deadliest fighting in a decade between the nuclear-armed rivals.
Dozens have died, and life near the Line of Control that separates the Indian
and Pakistani claims has once again become dangerous and uncertain.
But even as fighting
continues, former militants continue to trickle back into India-controlled
territory, where returnees say they have found life both better and worse than
they expected.
Ghulam Mohammad Mir, 27,
was 14 and just finishing the ninth grade in 2000 when a recruiter he had once
played cricket with asked if he wanted to cross the line. The border was fairly
porous at the time, and the recruiter told Mr. Mir and four of his classmates
that they could return after just a few days, Mr. Mir said.
It was the first of what
Mr. Mir and his friends would soon discover were many lies. “We were trapped
there,” he said.
They were sent to camps,
where for eight months they received intensive religious indoctrination. Then
for another eight months they trained in weaponry, including machine guns. At
the end of his training, Mr. Mir made clear that he had no stomach for war, he
said. So he left the camps and began driving an auto-rickshaw. In 2007, he
married a Pakistani woman and soon had three children.
He spent all of his
savings to return to India-controlled territory last year, and has since
started a small tea shop. Of the four boys who ran away with him, he said, two
were killed, one returned and one remains in Pakistan-controlled territory.
Mr. Mir said that his
first year back was challenging. Neighbors were suspicious. His paperwork was
not in order. But he is convinced that his children will have a better life in
India than they would have had in Pakistan, with its myriad economic, social
and political problems.
“My life is better
here,” he said. “I am living with my mother, and that is a pleasure.”
Khazir Mohammad Sheikh,
32, is less cheery. He left the Lolab Valley in 1997 when he was 16. He had
been working in a bakery after leaving school at 13, but fighting led to the
bakery’s closing and his own decision to leave for Pakistan.
He is vague about how he
spent his first years in Pakistan-controlled territory, but he married in 2002
and soon had three children. After his wife died a year ago, he decided to
return.
Now, he said, he is
stuck in a no man’s land. The Indian government has yet to give him the
identity papers he needs to land a job, and he lacks the money needed to start
a bakery. He believes the Indian government owes him a job or a grant so that
he can get his life restarted.
“O.K., we made a little
mistake and crossed over to the Pakistan side,” he said. “Now we’re back, and
all I’m asking for is a little help. I want a job.”
Mr. Sheikh spoke while
sitting in a plastic chair with his 2-year-old son on his lap. Two of his four
brothers and a dozen nieces and nephews stood around as he spoke. None had left
for Pakistan. The prodigal son, Mr. Sheikh was asking for benefits his own
brothers have not gotten.
One of those brothers,
Ghulam Nabi Sheikh, works as a day laborer and eyed his brother skeptically.
“We’re happy that my
brother is back,” he said. “If the government can help him, all well and good.
If it cannot, he will find his own way.”
Omar Abdullah, the chief
minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, acknowledged “teething
problems” in the returnee program. Getting the men and their families
appropriate paperwork and educational placements has been difficult, he said.
“Their citizenship is a gray area we have to sort out,” he said.
That so many of the
returned men expected to be given cash and government jobs has been a surprise,
Mr. Abdullah said. One problem he did anticipate was interference from Indian
security agencies, and they have acted as expected, Mr. Abdullah said.
The case of Liaqat Ali
Shah, who returned in March, is often cited. Mr. Shah was approved to come, but
a relative who was supposed to meet him, his wife and daughter at the border
with identity cards failed to appear.
He was then arrested,
hustled to New Delhi and accused of planning terrorist attacks on India. The
Delhi police even unveiled a cache of weapons and explosives they claimed that
Mr. Shah had stashed in a guesthouse near a famous Delhi mosque.
But the Kashmiri
authorities vouched for Mr. Shah, and the case against him fell apart.
Investigators have since determined that the weapons stashed in the guesthouse
were left by a man living at a Delhi police barracks. Mr. Abdullah called the
case an obvious frame-up.
In his return, Mr. Shah
has done more to embarrass Indian authorities than he ever could have done in
Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Sitting on a carpet in a rustic Kashmiri house a
20-minute hike from the nearest road, Mr. Shah related the story of his arrest
and imprisonment with great delight.
“I am planning to hold a
press conference!” Mr. Shah said as his father-in-law, a wizened old man
wearing something akin to a magician’s hat, sat cross-legged and nodded.
Like many returnees, Mr.
Shah said he expected the Indian government to give him money, nearly $10,000,
he said. “I read it in the papers that they were promising us that kind of
money,” he said.
It is an expectation
that bewilders Mr. Abdullah, but he said the program was working for most
people and would certainly remain in place.
“You’re not a terrorist
for life,” he said. “It’s very possible that you will change your mind.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
