India uses `dirty war' tactics in Kashmir

The border conflict with Pakistan is going badly, so Muslims at home are suffering, says Peter Popham

WE DROVE down a narrow lane alongside a gravel river bed, in a town of high poplars and willows and big, brick-built houses with steep gabled roofs in the north-west of the valley of Kashmir - and came face to face with the London Blitz.

An area of two acres densely packed with just such houses lay in smoking ruins. Some had been flattened. Others were charred shells, the roofs and ceilings and staircases burned or blown away. Everywhere were heaps of bricks and stones and blackened timber and scorched corrugated iron roofing. The newly homeless ex-residents stood about mutely, poking at what was left of their lives. Fifty houses were said to have been destroyed.

This is the face of India's new war in Kashmir that the world has not seen. India will be happy if it stays that way. These houses in the town of Bandipur were mortared, blown up and incinerated on Tuesday, with the loss of three lives, by India's Border Security Force (BSF). The reason: anti-Indian guerrillas, known in Kashmir simply as "militants", were thought to be hiding in them. Having forced everyone out, the paramilitaries made the locals search from house to house; when two suspects were found, they killed them. Then, to punish the community that had sheltered them, they made a bonfire of it.

So far the propaganda war in Kashmir is going all India's way. After some early misunderstandings, most world leaders have come round to the view that the Indian account of the small war that has been raging in the northern Himalayas for the past five weeks is correct. This includes President Bill Clinton, who last week told Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, by telephone that he did not see what progress could be made until Pakistan's troops were withdrawn. In Cologne on 10 June the G8 foreign ministers decided that the fighting started because of "the infiltration of militants across the Line of Control [Kashmir's de facto border]".

And indeed, there is little room for doubt here. The war consists of Indian army and air force units trying desperately and with great loss of life - perhaps 800 Indians dead so far, as against an official figure of more than 200 - to expel heavily armed intruders who are sitting on dozens of high, near-impregnable positions deep inside India. From these positions the infiltrators direct accurate Pakistani artillery fire on to the Srinagar-Leh highway, which is the region's lifeline.

Pakistan's argument is that the troops on these crags are "Kashmiri freedom fighters" battling to overthrow the Indian tyrant. But in this particular battle, the Pakistani line is hard to swallow. Down in the Kashmir Valley, doubt about the true identity of "militants" - Kashmiris? Pakistanis? Afghans? holy warriors loyal to Osama bin Laden? - is inevitable. But up in these high, sparsely populated peaks, whose Buddhist and Shia Muslim communities are hostile to Pakistan, everyone knows they must have come across the border.

They are so well supplied that they must have the Pakistani army behind them. And many of them are in fact regular Pakistani soldiers: regimental identification recovered from the dead by India, and the indiscretions of Pakistani top brass, all point the same way.

So game, set and match to India: get your Stingers off our mountains, Pakistan, India can rightly demand, and only then can we talk about talking. The G8 summit may well send Pakistan a similar message.

But however clear cut the Kargil situation, the larger Kashmir picture of which it is a part is anything but. There is a massive contradiction here. In the far north, India is fighting the good fight. But 125 miles down the road, India is behaving like the most heavy-handed sort of occupying power as it brutalises a population that is more than 95 per cent Muslim and close to 100 per cent disaffected from India.

The story is now very old, possessing that nightmarish subcontinental proclivity for endless repetition, with barely a twinge of development, decade after decade. The actors are out of Kashmiri central casting. On the fringe of the demolished community in Bandipur, the Border Security Force stand guard, paramilitaries recruited from elsewhere in the Indian union, keeping the community penned up inside so they cannot raise a riot.

Inside are the victims: smallish, the men with frizzy hair and small beards, the women in scarves and earrings, all padding about like animals in a nightmare zoo on the roasting hot relics of their homes. A firefighter desultorily hoses the hottest spots. "It happened at 10am," says Mohammed Shaffir, a local teacher who lives here. "All of us men had gone to work. The BSF surrounded the village. At 10.30 other BSF troops marched into the village to search for militants."

In the established ritual of the "crackdown" - the English word is used - they forced the 150 women of the community with their children and the old people out of their houses. "I have five children," says Nasima. "All were at home. Somehow I dragged them all out."

"Then they made us search for the militants," says Sona Allah Wani, 75. "They pulled me by my beard."

During the search, two "militants" were found hiding; it appears that they were summarily executed. Then "gunpowder" (according to one informant) and paraffin were poured inside all the houses while the residents watched, and at 1.30pm mortars were fired to ignite the blaze. The men had by now come running across the fields. "The flames were higher than those trees," says Mohammed Shaffir, pointing to a line of tall poplars. One youth of the community, Imtiyaz Ahmad Mir - locals insist he had no connection with any militants - was somehow trapped in the flames and died.

As we finished our tour of the ruins, two ministers in the state government arrived to offer condolences and announce ex gratia payments of Rs100,000 (pounds 1,500) for each family towards reconstruction of their homes. Standing on the front step of the house where the militants were killed, while 300 villagers sat on their haunches on cinders and ruined walls to listen, Mohammed Sagar, Minister of Public Health and Irrigation, declared, "We will not tolerate this! We are not slaves of India - we are not India's colony! We want to live with India as a crown on the head, not as slippers on the feet." The applause was mechanical. They had heard it all before.

Driving back towards Srinagar afterwards, we stopped for a snack in a flyblown cafe in Sopore, Kashmir Valley's richest town, thanks to its flourishing apple orchards. My interpreter, Masood, pointed out of the window: the market buildings opposite, he said, were gutted by the Border Security Force in January 1993, after a militant shot two BSF officers. In the Indians' fury, I was told, many innocent townspeople were killed by gunfire, and the market destroyed.

Six years on, it is only half rebuilt, in a cheap and ramshackle manner. "The government offered us money," said the cafe owner, named Abdullah, "but we refused to take it."

How did this man feel about the war in Kargil, I wondered, which was being waged so fiercely on his behalf 60 miles away? "India has raped our daughters and burned our houses," he said. "What more can India do with us? I am looking forward to the day when Pakistan conquers India."