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Lining up to return home

Praveen Swami

“My name is Nasir Ahmad Pathan,” shouted the bedraggled figure from across the rolls of barbed wire that mark the Line of Control, “and I want to come home.” For over an hour, troops at the Nanak Post had peered out at the four specks winding their way towards the LoC. At first, the soldiers thought the group was a terrorist outfit. It soon became clear, though, that something unusual was under way. One of the group was a woman with two infants in her arms; the man was urging two exhausted children to take the last steps up the mountains that rise up along the Jhelum Valley.

Like the Pathan family, at least 138 Jammu and Kashmir residents have returned from across the LoC since the Kashmir earthquake of October 2005 — five of them with the families they built during their time in Pakistan. Most had left to train at camps run by Islamist terror groups; others were among the estimated 35,000 refugees who fled the State, fearing war and ethnic cleansing, when the jihad broke out in 1989.

Ever since 2002, however, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence started squeezing funding to terror groups, and the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir began to disintegrate. Now, hundreds of men are thought to be waiting in jihad camps for a chance to come in from the cold. Thousands of refugees, too, believe the time has come to resume their war-interrupted lives.

Pathan was a school student when he began his journey from the impoverished mountain hamlet of Sultan Dhakki to Pakistan. His brothers, Javed and Mubassir, would join the Indian Army; Pathan turned to the jihad in search of adventure, self-esteem — and a living.

One summer evening in 1989, Pathan traversed the minefields along the LoC with the help of a Hizb-ul-Mujahideen recruiter. By that evening, he was on a truck to a training camp near Muzaffarabad. Unlike thousands of other terror recruits, though, Pathan’s stay in the training camp was brief. His father, Saifuddin Pathan, contacted relatives in Pakistan for help. Within six days, Pathan’s relatives pulled him out of the camp.

With no way to return to his family, Pathan began living with his Lahore-based uncle, Mohammad Mamoon Khan. He trained as a driver, and later purchased a mini-bus. Soon, Pathan had saved enough to buy a small plot of land in Rasoolpura. In 1994, he married a Pakistani national, Naseema Akhtar. The couple had four children — Uzma, who is now 12, Umar, who is 10, six-year-old Ishrat, and four-year-old Aqib.

No one is certain just what provoked Pathan to leave this life. “My father had visited us just before the earthquake,” Pathan says, “and begged me to come home. My wife and I felt obliged to respect his wishes.” Police records dispute this account, that Pathan was being forced to undertake fresh cross-LoC operations for the Jammu Kashmir Islamic Front. In this version of events, he chose to surrender to Indian forces instead.

Like Pathan, Sopore resident Abdul Hamid Rather was among the hundreds of young people who crossed the LoC in the first months of the Jammu and Kashmir jihad. He makes no secret of his motives for returning home. In 1990, Rather walked across the LoC as part of a group of 135 young men from Sopore. After three months of combat training, he returned to serve with a Hizb-ul-Mujahideen combat unit in the Sopore area. Rather claims to have been disgusted by what he saw. “Most of our leaders were from the Jamaat-e-Islami,” he says, “and their main interest was in killing leaders of the National Conference and Congress. They didn’t want freedom; they wanted power and wealth.”

Rather returned to Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 1994, and began the precarious life of a refugee. His wife, Reshma, soon joined him, along with their sons Khalid Hamid and Irfan Hamid. The family survived on a dole of some Indian Rs.3,500 a month, made up of assistance both from the provincial government of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.

Life, however, was hard — and Rather began searching for a way out. In 2000, he joined supporters of the pro-peace Hizb-ul-Mujahideen dissident Abdul Majid Dar. “We were sending men to death each day,” he said, “for a cause we knew was lost. We wanted peace.” When Dar’s peace effort was opposed by the Hizb command, Rather was among those who rebelled. Supporters of the dissident commanders exchanged fire with their one-time comrades on at least two occasions. Peace returned after the dissidents were given a camp of their own. But without official patronage and funding, their future was tenuous.

In 2004, Rather’s father, Ghulam Ahmad Rather, travelled on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus, bearing an offer that held out new hope. If Rather would return home, his father said, the police were willing to facilitate his rehabilitation. Using contacts in Muzaffarabad, Rather succeeded in obtaining Pakistani passports for himself and his family. A travel agent arranged for tickets on the Lahore-New Delhi bus service, along with Indian visas to visit non-existent relatives in Kolkata and New Delhi. “It cost me some Rs.25,000 in bribes to get the travel documents,” Rather recalls, “but I wasn’t willing to risk the lives of my family crossing the LoC.” Released on June 21 after six weeks in jail, Rather hopes to begin a new life as a businessman.

Many of those who have returned home have similar hopes. Manzoor Ahmad Awan left the mountain hamlet of Kundi Barzala for Muzaffarabad in 1989, when he was just 10 years old. His father, Zafar Khan, had decided to leave India, fearing that the outbreak in Jammu and Kashmir would lead to war, or a pogrom against residents of the hamlets along the LoC. Soon after, though, Khan died. Awan continued to live with relatives in Muzaffarabad. He married a Muzaffarabad resident, Asfat Mir, in 1999, and the couple had three children. Interestingly, Mir’s family had been residents of Kundi Barzala until 1947, when her father, Amiruddin, fled the region in the midst of the first India-Pakistan war.

Although Awan was entitled to a refugee’s dole, he could only make ends meet by doing odd-jobs on construction projects and roads. It was, he felt, a humiliation. “We have a few acres of land,” he says, “and I knew my family would have a much better life there. It was, however, just too dangerous to risk the journey home.” After the earthquake, however, what little work Awan could find in Muzaffarabad dried up. Facing starvation, Awan and his family decided to risk the mountains.

Munir Ahmad was born to the Awan family in March: an event it is tempting to read as a metaphor for hope and healing. Reality, though, is rarely poetic. Since Pakistan-controlled Jammu and Kashmir is in law part of the Republic of India, Asfat Mir is not a foreigner. However, her crossing of the LoC, like that of her husband, is an offence under the Egress and Movement Control Act. She, like all of those who have returned, face prosecution and possible prison sentences.

While a wide spectrum of politicians in Jammu and Kashmir has been calling for the law to be waived, and an amnesty to be put in place, officials note that that the returned terrorists pose genuine security concerns. Last month, police arrested Hajan resident Riyaz Ahmad Rather, who surrendered on the LoC in March, for his alleged role in a plot to assassinate Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. Riyaz Ahmad, the police claim, had hoped to use his credentials as a Hizb-ul-Mujahideen dissident to penetrate a Congress rally in Bandipora, and plant an explosive device.

Still, there is little doubt that the ranks of the returned are set to swell. Increasingly, relatives of terrorists still in camps are using the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service to persuade their loved ones to come home; hundreds of families have contacted Military Intelligence Directorate officials to secure safe passage across the LoC. Jammu and Kashmir’s Government needs to find ways to make the passage as safe — not just for those who seek to return, but also for those who live in the State.

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