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Round table, and the road home?

Praveen Swami

Two families of top Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operatives hope that the second round table on Kashmir will help their loved ones return home.

"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. I mean, its not political." 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 Hizb-ul-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, but the Jammu and Kashmir Police discount the claim, believing it to be part of a deception operation.

Ahmad does not want to believe his brother is dead either. Although Hizb-ul-Mujahideen functionaries and the organisation's political patron, the Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, visited Nuss to offer their commiseration, the family members never travelled north to Kupwara, to visit what they were told was Ghulam Qadir's grave. Nor have they 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 one day return home."

Like Ahmad, families of terrorists across Jammu and Kashmir are hoping that the second round table conference on Jammu and Kashmir, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will preside over in Srinagar on May 24, 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 Hizb-ul-Mujahideen cadre believed to be holed out in camps in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir are desperately seeking a way home.

Journeys into darkness

Sixteen years ago, when the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir escalated from being a low-grade conflagration into a full-blown war, Ganai was an eighth-grade student at a madrasa 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 succeed him as a religious studies teacher. Instead, fired by ideological passion, Ganai chose to join the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and made his way to a training camp in Pakistan.

Ever since the night Ganai chose to become a soldier of the jihad, his parents lived under constant fear: fear of his death, and fear of the inevitable military and police raids that would follow 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 just a few months later.

Faced with these tragedies, Ganai responded by renewing his commitment to the jihad. Power Minister Bhat's assassination was just one of dozens of operations he commanded after 1998. However, rivals within the Hizb-ul-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 that he could build a new life for himself in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. "He knew he could not come back home, because the army would arrest him," says Ahmad, "and that if he surrendered, the Hizb-ul-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 is 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 now 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 Hizb-ul-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 that has, Deva's rivals insist, been designed to benefit the terrorist's family and its business.

Not surprisingly, the truth is opaque. Riyaz Ahmad had an unexceptional life until 2001, running a family-financed bus which operated between Qazigund and the towns of Kulgam and Verinag. "I really do not know why he decided to join the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen," says Deva, "because he never discussed politics with us. Perhaps he saw passengers being harassed by army patrols or was disgusted at having to pay bribes to the police just to run his business. Who knows?"

On the morning he left to join the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Riyaz Ahmad met his father and brothers at Qazigund. He 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 as at the doctor's office," recalls his younger brother, Shamim Ahmad, "and we later learned that he had stopped to purchase newspapers in Anantnag, as his bus passed through the city. I saw him once, three months later, but he wouldn't talk to me."

Riyaz Ahmad's decision to break contact with his family members 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 Hizb-ul-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 Koka, was jailed, forcing the termination of 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."

Politicians in agreement

More than a few of the politicians who will be speaking to the Prime Minister agree — the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader. M.Y. Tarigami, the People's Democratic Party's Mehbooba Mufti, and the National Conference's Omar Abdullah, to name just three.

But turning these wishes into action presents more than a few problems. Even as the parents of its cadre are hoping for an end to the violence, the Hizb leadership has been working to bring about an escalation, knowing that the dialogue process could strip it of what little legitimacy it has. Much of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen's mid-level command, too, profits from the extortion economy that has flourished in the course of jihad — and understands that war pays far larger cash dividends than peace.

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 hope that a bend in the road may one day appear.

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