[The conflict today is probably driven less by geopolitics than by internal Indian politics, which have increasingly taken an anti-Muslim direction. Most of the fighters are young men like Sameer Tiger from quiet brick-walled villages like Qasbayar, who draw support from a population deeply resentful of India’s governing party and years of occupation.]
By Jeffrey Gettleman
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Officer
Ashiq Tak, the commander of a tactical police unit in southern Kashmir.
His
uncle was killed by the militant Sameer Tiger. Credit Atul Loke for
The
New York Times
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QASBAYAR,
Kashmir — It was 9:30 p.m.
when Sameer Tiger came to the door, a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Most of the village of Qasbayar, a
tucked-away hamlet surrounded by apple orchards and framed by Kashmir’s
mountain peaks, was getting ready for sleep. A few yellowish lights burned in
windows, but otherwise the village was dark.
“Is Bashir home?” Sameer Tiger asked. “Can we
talk to him?”
Bashir Ahmad’s family didn’t know what to do.
Mr. Ahmad wasn’t a fighter; he was a 55-year-old pharmacist. And Sameer Tiger
was a bit of mystery. He had grown up a skinny kid just down the road and used
to lift weights with Mr. Ahmad’s sons at the neighborhood gym; they’d spot each
other with the barbells, all friends.
But Sameer Tiger had disappeared for a while
and then resurfaced as a bushy-haired militant, a member of an outlawed
Kashmiri separatist group that had killed many people, the vast majority of
them fellow Kashmiris.
Kashmir’s war, a territorial dispute between
India and neighboring Pakistan, has smoldered for decades. Now it is collapsing
into itself. The violence is becoming smaller, more intimate and harder to
escape.
Years ago, Pakistan pushed thousands of
militants across the border as a proxy army to wreak havoc in the Indian-controlled
parts of Kashmir. Now, the resistance inside the Indian areas is overwhelmingly
homegrown.
The conflict today is probably driven less by
geopolitics than by internal Indian politics, which have increasingly taken an
anti-Muslim direction. Most of the fighters are young men like Sameer Tiger
from quiet brick-walled villages like Qasbayar, who draw support from a
population deeply resentful of India’s governing party and years of occupation.
Anyone even remotely associated with politics
is in danger. That included Mr. Ahmad, who, when he wasn’t sitting behind the
counter of the village pharmacy, was known to host events for a local Kashmiri
political party.
“Don’t worry,” Sameer Tiger said, standing at
Mr. Ahmad’s door, seeming to sense the family’s anxiety.
He looked Mr. Ahmad’s son right in the eye.
“We don’t mean any harm,” he said. “Your
father is like our father.”
Mr. Ahmad rushed home from work and invited
Sameer Tiger in for tea. They sat on the living room carpet talking quietly,
then Mr. Ahmad nodded goodbye to his wife and son and left with the visitor.
He didn’t have much choice. Sameer Tiger was
armed, and insistent, and had arrived with three others who were waiting in the
road. The group moved slowly down the unlit lane.
At a bend in the road, in front of a
shuttered shop, Sameer Tiger and Mr. Ahmad started arguing, a witness said.
Four gun blasts rang out. Mr. Ahmad screamed. The few remaining lights in the
neighborhood were suddenly extinguished.
JUST THE NAME KASHMIR conjures a set of very
opposing images: snowy mountain peaks and chaotic protests, fields of
wildflowers and endless deaths. It is a staggeringly beautiful place that lives
up to all its fabled charm, yet even the quietest moments here feel ominous.
Kashmir sits on the frontier of India and
Pakistan, and both countries have spilled rivers of blood over it. Three times,
they have gone to war, and tens of thousands of people have been killed in the
conflict. It is one of Asia’s most dangerous flash points, where a million
troops have squared off along the disputed border. Both sides now wield nuclear
arms. And the two sides are divided by religion, with Kashmir stuck in the
middle.
India, which has controlled most of the
Kashmir Valley for the past 70 years, is predominantly Hindu. The valley itself
is predominantly Muslim, as is Pakistan. But as the days pass, the conflict has
become less of a religiously driven proxy war.
The rebellion, says Imran Khan, Pakistan’s
presumed new leader, is now “indigenous.” Mr. Khan, who clearly has a Pakistani
perspective on the conflict, says he is determined to negotiate an end to it.
His persuasive election victory last month — and the fact that India’s prime minister,
Narendra Modi, made a friendly phone call to congratulate him — suggests a
breakthrough is possible.
But India still loves to blame Pakistan for
all its Kashmir problems, and Pakistan, according to Western intelligence
agents, continues to send some money and weapons to militants in Kashmir. Many
Indian politicians seem in denial that their own politics and policies might be
a factor.
India’s swerve to the right in recent years,
with the rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has deeply
alienated its Muslim minority. Many top members of the ruling party have a very
questionable record when it comes to treating Muslims fairly. This has
emboldened Hindu supremacists across India, and in recent years, Hindu lynch
mobs have targeted and killed Muslims, often based on false rumors. Many of the
culprits are lightly punished, if at all, leaving India’s Muslims feeling
exposed.
In the Indian-administered parts of Kashmir,
where there was already a history of bitter conflict, the new politics have
spurred more people to turn against the government. Some pick up guns, others
rocks, but the root emotion is the same: Many Kashmiris now hate India.
“This is what’s different,’’ said Siddiq
Wahid, a Kashmiri historian who earned his Ph.D from Harvard. “Before, in the
1990s, many Kashmiris felt we can negotiate this, we can talk.’’
“But nobody wants to be part of India now,”
he said. “Every Kashmiri is resisting today, in different ways.’’
The latest are children and grandmothers. At
almost every recent security operation, as Indian officers closed in on houses
where militants were believed to be hiding, they have had to reckon with
seething crowds of residents of all ages acting as human shields.
Walk through Kashmiri villages, where little
apples are ripening on the trees and the air tastes clean and crisp, and ask
people what they want. The most common response is independence. Some say they
want to join Pakistan. None say anything good about India, at least not in
public.
India’s steely response has pushed away even
moderates. Soldiers manhandle residents, cut off roads and barge into homes,
saying they are looking for militants, who often hide among ordinary residents.
When violent protests erupt, the Indian security services blast live ammunition
and buckshot into the crowds, killing or blinding many people, including
schoolchildren who are simply bystanders, despite cries from human rights
groups to stop.
But while protests against Indian rule have
grown in number and size, the armed militancy has become surprisingly small,
partly because Pakistan is not providing as much support as it used to.
Security officials say there are only around 250 armed militants operating in
the Kashmir Valley, down from thousands two decades ago. Most of them are
poorly trained and militarily lost. But still, the Indians can’t stomp them
out.
“I’ll be honest,” said Mohammad Aslam, a
seemingly forthright police commander in southern Kashmir. “For every militant
we kill, more are joining.”
THE HUNT FOR SAMEER TIGER began the night he
killed Mr. Ahmad, on April 15, 2017.
Back then, he wasn’t widely known as Sameer
Tiger. To most, he was still Sameer Bhat, a 17-year-old high school dropout who
had worked in a local bakery. The Indian security forces give all the known
militants a grade: A through C, with A being the most wanted. Sameer Tiger was
a C.
The first place the police searched was
Drabgam, his village. The shops are small, tucked into old brick buildings. The
jobs are few. Like much of southern Kashmir, Drabgam hangs on the apple
business. After the last of the apples have been picked in October and until
the new crop is tended in the spring, there is little to do.
Sameer Tiger’s house is one of the more
modest: one and a half stories of crudely finished brick, a couple of naked
electrical bulbs dangling in the living room, some wet shawls flapping on a
line outside. His father is a laborer and farmer who tends just a few acres of
orchards. His mother, Gulshan, is chatty and welcoming. They live on a dirt
road.
“Sameer loves these,” she said, pressing a
handful of coconut candies into my palm and tugging me into their bare living
room. The candies were exceptionally sweet and left a milky taste on the
tongue.
Sameer Tiger’s parents said their son was a
reluctant militant. One afternoon in early 2016, he was accused of throwing
rocks at police officers. Sameer Tiger was working in the bakery at the time,
his parents said, and they insisted he was innocent.
But the police didn’t listen and dragged him
into a truck by his hair, they said. He spent a few days in jail. After he was
let out, he disappeared.
Soon his face popped up on separatist
websites, his piercing eyes staring at the camera, his bushy hair now down to
his shoulders, a Kalashnikov in his hands.
“When we saw that,” said Maqbool, his father,
“we said goodbye.”
More than 250,000 Indian Army soldiers,
border guards, police officers and police reservists are stationed in the
valley, outnumbering the militants 1,000 to one. Most militants don’t last two
years. One fighter, a former college sociology professor, was killed in May
just two days after he joined.
Their attacks tend to be quixotic and they
usually die in a hail of automatic weapon fire. Their assassinations and
killings are not militarily significant, more acts of protest against Indian
rule. Of the approximately 250 known militants, police officials said, only 50
or so came from Pakistan, and most of the rest, the locals, have never left the
valley.
Sameer Tiger’s parents said he changed his
last name from Bhat to Tiger in honor of a brawny uncle with that nickname who
was known for his immense strength.
When I asked about the killing of Bashir
Ahmad, his father looked down at the carpet. For the first time, he seemed
embarrassed about his son.
“Bashir was a good man,” he mumbled. “Sameer
wasn’t there to kill him. It was an accident.”
It might have been. On this point, Sameer
Tiger’s family and a survivor of the shooting seem to agree.
The night Mr. Ahmad was killed, the militants
had also pulled another village elder from his home, Mohamad Altaf, a first
cousin of Mr. Ahmad. Both were among Qasbayar’s elite, landowners who supported
the Peoples Democratic Party, Kashmir’s dominant political organization.
The party used to sympathize with separatism,
but to win control of the state parliament, it joined hands with the
Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party three years ago. Many Kashmiris
accused it of selling out to Indian rule.
In June, the alliance suddenly broke apart,
leaving a vacuum in the State Assembly. India’s central government took over
running the state. Kashmiris are now terrified that the government will
escalate military operations; the sense of hopelessness is rising.
According to Mr. Altaf, as they walked
through the unlit lanes of Qasbayar with the militants, Sameer Tiger urged him
and Mr. Ahmad to renounce their party affiliation. When Mr. Ahmad started
arguing, Sameer Tiger ordered both men to lie facedown and close their eyes.
Mr. Altaf was shot once in the back of his
right knee and not critically hurt. He thinks the intent was to send a message.
But Mr. Ahmad was shot three times in his
legs, the bullets moving upward toward his waist, Mr. Altaf said. His cousin, a
lifelong friend, bled to death on the spot. Maybe the Kalashnikov jumped in
Sameer Tiger’s hands. Maybe he squeezed a split second too long.
Mr. Altaf can’t stop thinking about it. The
betrayal haunts him.
“Bashir invited Sameer Tiger in for tea,
tea,” he said.
His cousin’s death seems so pointless. He
wonders if Sameer Tiger didn’t set out that night to kill. Maybe, Mr. Altaf
thinks, he just didn’t know how to use his gun.
These days, the Kashmiri militants don’t have
many opportunities to practice shooting, police officials said. It is not like
the 1990s, when thousands of young Kashmiri men slipped across the border to
training camps on the Pakistani side. The Indians have sealed much of the
contested frontier, which runs about 450 miles.
The Israelis have been surreptitiously
helping them, providing security cameras, night vision gear, drones and other
surveillance equipment along the border to stop big infiltrations. All this,
coupled with the fact that Pakistan has closed most of its militant camps under
pressure from the United States, has pushed the fighting away from the border,
and deeper into the villages.
Kashmiris speak of a psychological tension
that divides communities, individual families and sometimes even the same
person. On one hand, people want to support a functioning society — to have
their children go to school, get jobs, see some economic development — and
Indian control represents that. On the other, they feel real sympathy for a
cause, Kashmiri independence, that they consider just.
“Let’s be realistic: India’s never going to
give up this land,” said one young Kashmiri who asked that his identity not be
revealed because he could be labeled a collaborator.
“I can say such things in my house. But as
soon as I step outside, even into my own street, I can’t say that. It has to be
‘Azadi! Azadi! Azadi!’ ” he said, using the word for freedom. “It’s like you
have to be two different people, all the time.”
He sighed.
“It’s exhausting.”
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN KILLING MILITANTS,
Officer Ashiq Tak explained, isn’t finding them.
“Information is coming in all the time,” he
said. “We know their friends, their girlfriends, which houses they’re using.
“The trick,” he said, “is laying the cordon.”
Officer Tak is another example of how this
war is shrinking. He grew up in Qasbayar, a couple of miles from Sameer Tiger.
Mr. Ahmad was his mother’s brother. This winter he found himself, as the
commanding officer of a tactical police unit in southern Kashmir, hunting the
man who killed his uncle.
Sameer Tiger was emerging as a militant’s
militant. He was increasingly active — and not just on social media.
He attacked police stations, he recruited new
fighters and he supplied pistols to young men to carry out assassinations,
Officer Tak said. The police often discovered where he was hiding, and set up
their security cordons, but he was slippery.
“We almost had him,” Officer Tak said in
February. “But he escaped, dressed like a girl.”
Officer Tak seemed dispirited by all the
support for Sameer Tiger, and the fact that many Kashmiris consider police
officers like himself to be traitors. Unlike soldiers in the Indian Army, which
is recruited from across the country, police officers in the region come from
within the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and dozens have been killed.
Many Kashmiris see them as collaborators and
call them “Modi’s dogs,” a reference to India’s prime minister, who rose to
power as part of the Hindu right-wing movement.
Officer Tak said that Kashmiris had so little
faith in the security services that when a police officer or soldier killed a
civilian, people didn’t even bother demanding justice.
“Anywhere else, they’d ask for an
investigation,” he said. “Here, they just take the body and go away.”
“That’s a bad sign,” he said. “That’s total
alienation.”
SAMEER TIGER RESURFACED in late April, a year
after Mr. Ahmad’s death. A few miles from his house, witnesses said, he stopped
a car carrying a local politician and shot him dead. The attack, conducted in
the daytime and on a busy road, was unusually audacious. India’s national news
media seized upon it, and for the first time Sameer Tiger was front-page news.
The hunt for him intensified but more
civilians were rallying to the defense of militants, often barricading the
roads as the police closed in and pelting officers with rocks.
“It’s getting very hard to do operations,”
Officer Tak grumbled.
Around this time a mysterious video appeared
on Facebook in which Sameer Tiger issued a threat to Maj. Rohit Shukla, one of
the area’s commanding army officers: “Tell Shukla to come and face me.”
A few days later, on April 30, the army got a
tip that Sameer Tiger was hiding in a house in the center of Drabgam. Though he
was now a highly wanted militant, upgraded to an A rating, it seemed he had
never strayed far from home.
This time, the Indian Army didn’t arrive en
masse. They used mud-smeared dump trucks packed with soldiers wearing
traditional pheran cloaks, guns hidden. The villagers thought they were
laborers. The soldiers quietly surrounded the house and called for backup.
The soldiers sent in two rounds of
emissaries, including village elders, to persuade Sameer Tiger to surrender. He
replied with a burst of bullets, hitting Major Shukla in the shoulder.
The sound of gunfire served as an alarm,
setting off an eruption. The village mobilized. Boys, girls, men and women
scampered out of their houses and rushed into the road with stones in their
hands. Mosque loudspeakers blared: “Sameer Tiger is trapped! Go help him!” The
whole town, quite openly, was rallying to an outlaw’s side.
As additional army trucks rumbled in, packed
with troops, more civilians rushed forward, trying to insert themselves between
the troops and Sameer Tiger. One young man was shot dead; the crowd kept
coming.
But the cordon had been well laid, growing to
nearly 300 soldiers and police officers. The civilians, however determined,
couldn’t break it.
Several police commanders said security
officers then moved in, firing a rocket at the house. Flames burst out. Sameer
Tiger scampered onto a rooftop. The soldiers opened up with automatic weapons
from four directions. He was hit several times.
A CULTURE OF DEATH IS SPREADING across
Kashmir. The militants have become the biggest heroes. People paint their names
on walls. They wear T-shirts showing their bearded faces. They speak of them
affectionately, as if they are close friends. The militants are especially
revered after they are dead.
On a Tuesday morning, May 1, Sameer Tiger’s
lifeless body, riddled with holes and soaked in blood, was hoisted onto a
makeshift wooden platform in the yard of one of Drabgam’s mosques. Thousands
poured in from across the valley. For hours they chanted his name: “Tiger!
Tiger! Sameer Tiger!”
Boys scrambled up trees and scurried across
tin roofs, the light metal popping beneath their gym shoes, to find any vantage
point. Others fought through the nearly impenetrable crowd to the funeral pyre,
just to gently stroke Sameer Tiger’s beard or to kiss his pale face goodbye.
Many vowed to join the militants.
One woman who identified herself as a
separatist leader looked out at the sea of mourners and gravely smiled.
“We are winning,” she said. “These bodies are
our assets.”
A few hundred yards away, on the rooftop
where Sameer Tiger had been cornered, a team of boys wearing religious
skullcaps scrubbed a rust-colored splotch. A crowd pressed in to watch.
“Young ones, tell me: What does the spilling
of this blood mean?” one man shouted.
“Azadi!” the crowd roared back.
The boys worked fast, heads down, sweat
trickling off their temples. They used wet rags to mop up the splotch. They
squeezed the blood-water mixture into a copper urn, to be saved. An imam
watching closely told them to capture every last drop of blood.