GONIPURA VILLAGE, NORTHERN KASHMIR – At 1:20 in the afternoon on October 21, 2003, a white sport utility vehicle with the license plate number JK 050490 pulled onto the rutted streets of Gonipura village. Two men got out and approached Haider Ahmed Bhat, a 25 year-old Muslim shopkeeper. According to eye-witnesses in the village, one man asked to buy cigarettes. As Bhat was completing the transaction, the second man seized the shopkeeper by the back of his neck and shoved him into the vehicle. The two assailants leaped in after their victim and the vehicle sped away. Bhat’s uncle, Ghulam Rasool Bhat, who witnessed the event, said there were two other men inside the vehicle who wore the uniforms of Indian army troops. Two weeks after the abduction, the shopkeeper’s family was summoned to a police station in a remote area close to the Indian border with Pakistan. The family was asked by police to identify the body of a militant killed during a shootout with the Indian army. The dead man was Haider Ahmed Bhat and he was badly disfigured, with bullet wounds behind his left ear, on his chest and his right shoulder, according to relatives and neighbours. The corpse was brought back to Gonipura for the funeral, and hundreds of mourners were still milling in a central courtyard when I visited the village the following day. The dead man’s father, Mohammed Ahsan Bhat, told me his son had no links with militants; the villagers were certain that Bhat had been murdered in cold blood by the army and that troops had faked an encounter to dispose the body. India’s Ministry of Defence spokesman Mukhtiar Singh said, “there is no truth in this story,” and asserted that the men who picked up Bhat from Gonipura were not army personnel. The uniforms worn by two of the abductors meant nothing, he said, since militants often disguised themselves in army fatigues. Security forces first encountered Bhat during the shootout, Singh said, adding, “one of our boys was injured” in the shootout. Singh called Haider Ahmed Bhat a “terrorist.”
The abduction and killing went largely unnoticed: World media attention was not focused on Kashmir, and the Indian media seem to have imposed something of a blackout on troubles in this northern state, not because of censorship but audience fatigue. Since the late 1980s, a vicious insurgency fuelled by militants entering Kashmir from Pakistan has prompted India to maintain upto 750,000 soldiers, border guards and police to pacify the restive state. The conflict has centred in the beautiful Kashmir valley, a jagged oval about 90 miles in length. Between 40,000 and 100,000 people have been killed – official estimates vary greatly from civilian and separatist groups – and the half a dozen deaths that occur here on any given day are no longer considered newsworthy. Many Indian newspapers, however, regularly focus on how Pakistan has armed militants and embarrassed India by bringing up the Kashmir dispute at international fora; a flood of op-eds regularly analyse who is winning the intricate game of one-upmanship that is the obsession of both countries. Kashmir’s significance in South Asia is unfortunately measured in terms of this zero sum game. Although both India and Pakistan claim to champion the cause of ordinary Kashmiris – and recent peace initiatives between the rivals have been heralded as a harbinger of better times – every single person I interviewed in Kashmir said neither India nor Pakistan represented the aspirations of Kashmiris. Mohammed Ashraf, a neighbour of Haider Ahmed Bhat in Gonipura, said simply, “we have become scapegoats between India and Pakistan.”

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South Asia stepped back from the brink of war in 2002. The following year, India and Pakistan launched a “peace offensive” and opened talks about the future of Kashmir. The effort was praised in Washington and around the world. New Delhi also opened talks with the All Party Hurriyat Conference, a confederation of political parties in Kashmir whose members have aims ranging from increased autonomy to independence. For over a decade, India has accused Pakistan of infiltrating militants into Kashmir, often under cover of fire from Pakistani army positions. After the Sept 11 attacks, the Bush administration pressured Pakistan into ending its support for Kashmiri separatists. Pakistan maintains it offers the groups only diplomatic and “moral” support. It is unclear whether India’s new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an economist with the Congress party, can push forward the peace initiative launched by the previous Hindu nationalist government – indeed, it is not clear what there is to push forward. As I write these words in the summer of 2005, hundreds of people in Kashmir have been killed, wounded and abducted during the last months.
One Indian air force officer who served in Kashmir told me that after militants enter the homes of Kashmiris, Indian security forces cordon off the streets. After trying to get civilians out, the officer said, “we have to blow up the building – and that’s when you get collateral damage.” The officer, whom I met on a train from Delhi, declined to give his name. He held out little optimism for the peace initiative because no political party in India could afford to look weak on Kashmir. Ordinary Indians and Pakistanis want peace, he said, but the politicians would never allow it. This widespread theory is both heartening and disingenuous: There is a real and growing constituency for peace in South Asia. But for a growing number of Indians and Pakistanis, Kashmir has also become a litmus test of patriotism. To see the conflict from the point of view of Kashmiris would undermine each side’s strategy in the zero sum game.
My plane from Delhi stopped in Jammu, the relatively calm winter capital of the state, where Hindus are in a majority. Still, as the plane landed at the airport, I saw army trucks stationed at either side of the runway and soldiers with rifles standing behind shoulder-high sandbags. About 200 people boarded the flight to Kashmir, but nearly everyone deplaned at Jammu. The empty plane flew on to the summer capital of Srinagar, which is in the heart of the valley of Kashmir. Seven soldiers armed with carbines and automatic weapons were waiting on the runway as I climbed off the plane, and dozens more were at the terminal. The road leading out of the airport had a series of fortifications, with soldiers stationed behind bunkers, sandbags and checkpoints. An interlaced structure of barricades forced taxis to weave back and forth across the road; my driver, Abdul Majid, accomplished this at greater speed than I thought possible – his car had the advantage of missing side-view mirrors. Majid told me the economy was in a shambles and unemployment was high. I was his first fare in 20 days. “India wants this land and Pakistan wants this land, too,” he said in Hindi. “No one asks what we want.”

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Kashmir was ruled by King Hari Singh when India was partitioned by the British in August 1947. Both India and Pakistan claimed Kashmir, a Muslim majority state ruled by Singh, a Hindu. Two months later, tribals from Pakistan backed by the incipient Pakistani army invaded Kashmir. Singh appealed to India for help. New Delhi conditioned its support on Singh signing an Instrument of Accession which would give Kashmir to India; as soon as the document was signed, the Indian army fought a brief war with Pakistan and occupied two thirds of the state. Pakistan claimed the northern third. The line of control immediately became the subject of semantics. Pakistan called its territory Azad Kashmir meaning Free Kashmir. India referred to the same area as Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. At the United Nations, India agreed to hold a plebiscite for Kashmiris and Pakistan agreed to create the peaceful conditions necessary for such a poll; both countries have ever since accused the other of reneging on their word. As a schoolboy in India, maps in my geography textbooks always showed the third of Kashmir under Pakistani control as Indian territory – geographically, it was India’s crown. I was outraged by atlases published by international mapmakers because they always showed my country with its crown knocked off. Today, mirroring the positions of their respective governments, Indian newspapers regularly describe atrocities in Pakistan-administered Kashmir while Pakistani newspapers focus on human rights abuses in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Similar narratives drive diplomacy: Pakistan, insecure about its much larger rival, seeks to show the countries are equals. During the early stage of the 2003 peace initiative, the Indian government offered to treat twenty Pakistani children at Indian hospitals. Pakistan responded by offering to treat forty Indian children at Pakistani hospitals. If Pakistan suffers from an inferiority complex, India may have the opposite problem: If the United States could go after terrorists in Afghanistan after the Sept 11 attacks, several Indian strategists reasoned in 2002, why couldn’t Indian troops invade Pakistan and dismantle militant training camps? Such rhetoric quickly causes tempers to flare in nuclear-armed South Asia: Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf sternly warned, “neither are we Afghanistan nor should India think it is the United States.” Ideologues in India and Pakistan regularly use Kashmir to their own ends: Most Indians know about the thousands of Hindus who were driven from their homes in Kashmir by a campaign of terror and now live in refugee camps. The plight of these Hindus is real, but their cause is inexplicably used to turn a blind eye toward the plight of millions of Kashmiri Muslims. Fundamentalists in Pakistan have similarly painted the plight of Kashmiris as part of an international siege against Muslims, although the roots of the conflict here and the culture of Kashmiri Islam are remarkably unique.
Tourism has been devastated. The inaccessibility of the Kashmir Valley, and rumours of its beautiful gardens and lakes have long been a part of its mystique. Kashmir is still remarkably beautiful, but its vistas are now marred by sandbags and barbed wire. Few Indians or Pakistanis have seen the tragedy of Kashmir for themselves.

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Days before I visited Kashmir in 2003, two militants tried to kill the Chief Minister, who at the time was Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. They fired rocket propelled grenades at his residence, killed two Border Security Force soldiers and then raced into the Ali Jan Shopping Complex across the street. Mohammed Altaf, owner of the Al Karam Interior Decoration Collection, whose shop is at the entrance to the complex, saw the armed men run by him – they were 10 feet away. As they raced into the building, he ran out, leaving his shop abandoned and unlocked. The resulting day-long carnage paralysed business and badly damaged the shopping complex: “Pakistan blames India and India blames Pakistan,” Altaf told me. “In the middle, Kashmir gets destroyed.”
The building is a relatively open structure, with a central staircase opening onto shops – but the heavily armed militants kept Indian troops at bay for a whole day and night. One used a landing as a bunker. The structure of the stairs provided a small triangular opening from which to shoot at soldiers climbing the stairs. Another used a room in the rear of the building, which also provided natural cover. The walls and stairs of the shopping complex were riddled with hundreds of bullet holes when I visited; the stairs were chipped and brick walls had been exposed by grenade explosions. Bloodstains were visible on the landing where the first militant was killed; the room in the rear was too badly damaged to retain evidence of human occupation. The outcome of the attack was certain death for the militants, their motivation was apparently to win publicity for the cause of Kashmiri separatism. “They came here for death, to die here,” said one shopkeeper, who identified himself only as Ahmed. “One thing I will say,” he said of the militants in a tone of admiration. “Whatever weapons they had, they used.” Ahmed estimated that it had taken three thousand security troops to kill the militants after the two men had run out of ammunition and grenades. Ahmed said some 80 soldiers had been injured. And the militants were calm throughout the siege: During the overnight barrage of gunfire, Ahmed said, they had brewed themselves tea.
As Ahmed finished his account, nearly two dozen heavily armed Indian soldiers poured out of three jeeps in the parking yard below. They took up positions along the front of the complex, and others fanned out in pairs to the other floors. Two arrived in the area where I was conducting my interview; they watched me carefully but asked no questions. There was the crackle of walkie-talkie conversation. I cautiously climbed down the steps. Two soldiers armed with automatic rifles stood inside the Al Karam Interior Decoration Collection. Two officers with walkie talkies stood beside them, monitoring reports from other floors. A man in civilian clothes was fingering pieces of fabric. His name was Raj Bonsi, and he was shopping for curtains. All the soldiers in the complex were there to protect him. Mohammed Altaf gave Bonsi two swatches of cloth with the prices written on them. Bonsi cordially shook hands with me, told me his name but declined to give his rank. “The only thing we are afraid of is journalists,” he said, laughed and waved goodbye. Holding his swatches, he disappeared into the middle jeep. The heavily armed soldiers backed away from the shopping complex, their fingers on triggers, and the vehicles pulled away.

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“Don’t import ideas for which the society is not ready,” said the top official of the Border Security Force in Kashmir. The Indian paramilitary outfit was responsible at the time for counter-insurgency operations, especially in cities like Srinagar. A group of journalists had asked Vijay Raman, the Inspector General of the BSF, about human rights violations by Indian security forces in Kashmir.
I happened to visit Kashmir during the month of Ramadan, where Muslims break daylong fasts at an evening meal called the iftar. The term has coined a new phrase – iftar diplomacy. Various groups in Kashmir organize meals after sundown, using the occasion to break bread – and break the ice – with friends and adversaries. Raman, a Hindu, had invited local journalists to an iftar dinner. A half dozen reporters were clustered around him on the lawn of the BSF headquarters in Srinagar when I arrived, and one of them had asked him about human rights. Top officials of the force hovered nearby, and cuisines from all across India were being prepared under a series of tents on one side of the lawn. It was approaching sundown.
I asked Raman what he meant when he said that India was not ready for ideas about human rights. The other journalists melted away – I imagined they had heard him talk about this before. Raman invited me back into his office since it was getting chilly. He wore military fatigues and his shirt sleeves were rolled into a smart cuff above his elbows. He sat behind his desk and lit a cigarette.
“You want to change society, but it has to have its own pace,” he said. “The moment you accelerate it, you will upset the equilibrium. Particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, they have felt exploited. Even now they feel exploited. First by the Mughals, then by the Sikhs, then the British and now us. How can we redress this? We have interfered too much with social dynamics.”
I asked him how this related to human rights concerns by groups in Kashmir, which have castigated both militants and security forces for widespread abuses; a group called the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons issued a public statement while I was in Kashmir saying that 104 people like Haider Ahmed Bhat had vanished during the previous year alone.
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Raman replied. “If you see Indian society, an elder’s frown used to be bad enough. Now you are questioning the right of the elder to castigate. Our society is still developing. To impose these restrictions …” He trailed off.
I asked him whether he was concerned that the sweeps and cordoned searches would alienate civilians. Raman said the sweeps were justified because the militants could not elude security forces without support from local Kashmiris. He pulled out his wallet and produced a one thousand rupee note. It looked genuine, but he showed a series of small discrepancies that proved it was counterfeit: “Made in a Pakistan mint,” he said. “We find this among the local population. A person comes to a rural area, spends time. The expenditure may be five hundred rupees, but they give this note. It’s worse than an AK-47.”
I pressed him again on how this related to human rights violations. Raman leaned forward, and pointed to his uniform.
“A lot of innocent people have been killed by this khaki uniform,” he said, a startling admission from a senior Indian security official. But Kashmiris were not inherently opposed to ruthless tactics, Raman said: “You kill a real militant in cold blood in (downtown) Lal Chowk, there will be celebrations in Srinagar. People here have not seen trains, not seen the sea, not seen theatres. It is these people who want a change.” A short while later, Raman’s aides summoned him into the lawn for dinner. Before I left, I was introduced to a young officer called Pramod Kumar who had been injured in the recent shopping complex siege. Kumar had been hit in the left hand by a bullet and received splinters on the right side of his torso.

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Everyone in Kashmir has some direct link to the trauma of the last 15 years. Muzaffar Ahmed, the director of health services for the state, said virtually every home had seen relatives, friends or neighbours killed, maimed or abducted. Psychiatrists in Srinagar used to see 50 cases a day before the troubles began, they now see more than 350. Many of the problems are related to stress – corrosive fear has become omnipresent. The doctors are often as frightened as patients: One of Ahmed’s ambulance drivers was killed a few weeks before my visit in northern Baramullah District by unknown gunmen, another had a leg blown off and now drives with a prosthetic limb. A third ambulance driver was killed in army crossfire in 1996. Many Kashmiris told me that the conflict has spiralled beyond control, with ordinary citizens terrified by militants into offering harbour, and then terrified by the security forces for cooperating with the militants. Each successive round of escalation is met with reprisal, each reprisal with escalation.
“If India says Pakistan is supporting militants, then India is supporting army militants, too,” said Zahoor Shah, a lawyer in Srinagar, whom I interviewed shortly after Friday prayers at the city’s historic Hazratbal Mosque, a shrine said to contain a hair of the prophet Mohammed. Shah said there were stacks of files in Srinagar’s high court describing the cases of missing people.
The carnage is all the more tragic because for decades, Kashmir was one of the few places in South Asia where Hindus and Muslims lived in genuine harmony. When India was partitioned in 1947, Hindus and Muslims slaughtered one another across several states, but Kashmir remained largely peaceful. Family names – potent signals of caste, creed and family origin – are shared between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir; names like Pandit and Bhat are commonly used by both communities. A tradition of Sufism ran through the region, where saints fused different religions into songs of universal divinity. All that has now changed. Hundreds of Kashmiri Hindus were killed in the late 1980s in a systematic campaign of terror; thousands of their relatives fled, abandoning homes and history, to live in refugee camps to the south. Militant groups in Kashmir now threaten women who wear western attire, and force Kashmiri men to adopt rigid Islamic codes. In turn, Indian nationalists have insisted that force be met with force in Kashmir. Security troops in Kashmir, who are drawn from all over India, are predominantly Hindu, adding to the sense that the army is an occupying force, and the conflict is based on a religious divide. Most Indians dismiss the notion that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Kashmir represent an occupation; the air force officer I spoke with asked me, “how can anyone call it an occupation when Kashmir is a part of India? It is merely a domestic disturbance.” But the presence of armed soldiers on virtually every street certainly has the feel of an occupation. Militants in Kashmir are hidden among the population, and fighting them necessarily involves civilian casualties – and resentment. “Whether it is militants or security forces, we are suffering. As citizens we are suffering. The army hurts us more than the militants,” said Hafsa Hafeez, a graduate student I interviewed at the University of Kashmir campus in Srinagar. Her father’s cousin was killed after trouble broke out at a funeral procession and security forces opened fire. Another student, Arshad Khaleel, said he expected the security forces would never leave his homeland. Kashmiris routinely refer to what “Indians and Pakistanis” are doing – whatever New Delhi and Islamabad may say, many Kashmiris already feel they are a distinct people.
The Kashmir conflict regularly threatens the larger security of South Asia: In December 2001, armed militants seeking Kashmiri separatism stormed the entrance to the Indian parliament in Delhi; guards killed them just before they could lob grenades onto hundreds of national lawmakers. An influential section of India’s intelligentsia believes the Kashmir dispute will be conclusively settled only through a fourth and final war with Pakistan. Officials in Islamabad have warned such talk could provoke nuclear war. Some Indians actually discuss how many cities they can afford to lose before Pakistan is obliterated; During a previous reporting assignment, one nationalist politician told me, “before the pride and sovereignty of my country ... nuclear war is a small thing.”
There is a widespread sense in Kashmir that the conflict is endless. Nightlife is nonexistent even in a big city like Srinagar; by sundown the streets are deserted. Health director Ahmed and his wife Shamim Naik, who is also a doctor, said families virtually never eat dinner at restaurants; friends do not meet for social occasions after sundown; there are no movie theatres. We had met for dinner at a restaurant attached to my hotel. It was 8:20 PM and we were the only patrons. The restaurant was dimly lit, and a mirror along one wall reflected the gloomy room. Ahmed told me that on his drive home, his car would be stopped seven times – he recited the precise location of each checkpoint. At every stop, he would have to show identification and be searched. As he drove, he would have to keep the light on inside the car, so that security forces hidden in bunkers would know they were dealing with a civilian. Ahmed grew angry as he described the daily indignities of life in Kashmir. Abruptly, Shamim Naik shushed her husband. Two men had entered the restaurant and were sitting in the far corner of the room. Ahmed froze in mid-sentence and switched the conversation to inconsequential chit-chat. In the mirror, I saw reflections of the men, and thought it odd they never took their eyes off us. After several minutes, a waiter brought the men a take-out order and they left. But the conversation at our table was over. Kashmiris do not know when they are being overheard, or by whom. Ordinary people do not know whom to trust. Many people declined interviews – one professor at the University of Kashmir examined my business card, which identified me as a reporter, shrugged and said, “how do I know who you are?” Militants wear the uniforms of security forces, security forces wear civilian clothes. An alphabet soup of intelligence agencies from India and Pakistan maintain different networks of informers. Someone at the table quoted a proverb about what happens to ordinary people when fear becomes commonplace: “If you tell me it’s day, I’ll say it’s day. If you tell me it’s night, it’s night.”

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When I returned to my room on the third floor after dinner, the room was icy cold. There was no central heat in the hotel although temperatures in Srinagar touch freezing in November, and the space heater in my room was malfunctioning. I donned gloves and an extra pair of socks in preparation for a night patrol with the Border Security Force – one of Vijay Raman’s men had promised to pick me up around 10 to show me how security forces monitored Kashmir at night. The soldiers arrived at 10:15, and I got a panicky call from the reception desk, which thinks of sundown as the end of business. A half dozen armed soldiers were in the lobby. I confirmed I was on my way downstairs. “You’re coming down?” the clerk asked incredulously. The deputy commander of BSF Battalion 118, Sandeep Sinha, sat on a sofa in the lobby. He was about my height, but stockier. We shook hands. I dropped off my room key with the reception desk. “You’re going with them?” the clerk asked, even more incredulous. I stepped outside with the soldiers. The temperature was not far above freezing. Two jeeps were stationed outside. Sinha walked ahead and one of the other soldiers came up suddenly. “One minute,” he said, and ran a gloved hand under my arms, and inside my jacket. He squeezed my camera pouch. The soldiers formed a loose circle around me as I was searched. Then they asked me to get into the passenger seat of one jeep and Sinha took the wheel. The second jeep swung behind us. Half a mile on, we slowed at a roadblock, a metal bar across the road operated by a pulley system. Sinha stopped about 40 feet from the barrier, and doused his headlights. One of the soldiers jumped out of the back of the jeep and identified himself. The gate was raised and we drove through. Half a mile later, we repeated the process at a second checkpoint. The streets were deserted, the houses shuttered. No lights came from any windows. Srinagar could have been a ghost city. As we drove past the third roadblock, I asked Sinha why there were no people on the streets. “The people are there,” he replied. “They are all in bunkers.” The security forces were indeed everywhere, hidden behind sandbag fortifications, in pillboxes whose openings were draped with gunny sacks, a variety of barrels poking through. After a few moments, Sinha realized my question was about civilians, not soldiers. “The civilians go to sleep early,” Sinha said, explaining that it was Ramadan, and the people of Srinagar “have to wake up early” to eat before dawn. We drove on. We passed two more checkpoints, one of which trained a brilliant spotlight on us for several moments. Finally, we pulled up at the battalion headquarters. This time, the soldier who jumped out from the jeep raised his arms as he walked toward the elevated sentry booth. After he identified himself, he and other soldiers removed a series of obstacles – a set of metal poles inserted into holes in the ground, a metal plate with spikes pointing in both directions and a waist-high roll of barbed wire placed on either side of the gate. Sinha drove through and stopped the jeep in a dark courtyard, as the soldiers re-erected the barricades. I stepped out. Heavily armed soldiers watched me carefully. I made sure I didn’t make any sudden movements. Sinha ushered me into a building and we entered a living room ringed with sofas. There was a five foot-long framed picture of the New York City skyline on the wall. Sinha explained that the house belonged to the owner of a flour mill; the soldiers had taken over both the mill and the owner’s house after the business went bankrupt. He referred to the flour mill owner as “the landlord.” The picture belonged to the landlord, Sinha said, and the soldiers had left it hanging in deference to his wishes. Sinha excused himself, and returned wearing a bullet-proof vest. He called for an assistant and asked for cigarettes. He told me he had a degree in economics; the commanding officers had college degrees while the enlisted men had 10th grade educations. As he smoked, Sinha proudly told me that he was from Jharkhand, “the newest state in India.” Jharkhand was carved from the northern state of Bihar after a lengthy campaign for ‘liberation.’ Struggles for statehood and secession are underway elsewhere – numerous conflicts over ethnicity, language and religion have created a volatile stew of separatist struggles in both India and Pakistan – Jharkhand was one of three new Indian states formed in 2000. Sinha seemed unaware of the irony of soldiers like himself suppressing similar, if more radical, aspirations in Kashmir.
We stepped outside the landlord’s house. About two to three dozen soldiers were milling in the dark. I was the only one not wearing any protective gear. Sinha instructed me to stay by his side and we set off, entering the street through a narrow opening. A black dog curled up outside the battalion headquarters jumped up and fell into step beside us – the stray marched with the soldiers on their night patrols. Sinha and the others all carried carbines, rifles and other weapons. We walked along a lane for about half a mile before entering the village of Machua. The moon was nearly full and the soft light on the houses and buildings accentuated the darkness of windows, and the shadows of houses under construction. Sinha drew me against a wall and instructed his men to search a partially constructed building, to make sure militants were not using it as a hideout. He mentioned that soldiers had apprehended a militant here two years ago. The soldiers fanned out, some took defensive positions while others shone flashlights into dark corners of the building. Finally, the men gave a signal and we pressed on. I did not see any villagers, but dogs greeted us with cacophonous barking. Our approach must have obvious to any militant hiding within a mile. Sinha turned sharply into a field, which was divided into plots by narrow ridges. Walking on the eight inch-ridges was difficult in the moonlight, and I stepped into the plots from time to time. The ground was loamy. The barking was left behind. “Dogs spoil our surprise,” Sinha told me. “That’s why we use the fields for special operations.” I looked behind me; dozens of armed soldiers were fanned out in the moonlight. After a quarter mile we reached a clump of woods and Sinha cut through them to reach the bank of the river Doodhganga. The terrain was unpredictably hilly, the ground slushy and Sinha regularly left the edge of the river and took his men through wooded sections. At one point, as we passed a grove to our left, Sinha instructed one soldier to come up beside me, and warned him to keep a sharp eye on the grove because I was not wearing a bullet-proof vest. A chiaroscuro of moonlight and shadows surrounded us. The hike would have been strenuous in broad daylight, but given the darkness, it demanded complete concentration. We followed the river for half a mile, before cutting across to the village of Karalpura, where Sinha led us to a bridge. It was a well-known crossing point for militants, he said. Some of the soldiers crouched at one end and looked across the bridge through night vision goggles, others crossed the span and checked the underside. We had walked two and a half miles from the battalion headquarters; throughout the night, patrols like this fanned out across different routes every three hours or so. Sometimes, Sinha said his men stationed themselves at a location to monitor an area for several hours. The walk back was easier, since Sinha took us through village streets. We talked as we walked; Sinha told me he was 36 and that he didn’t spend time thinking about the political situation in Kashmir. I asked him how many militants there were in the valley. Fewer than 2,000, he said. But that didn’t include tacit support from a large part of the civilian population, he added, and this support made the militancy difficult to stamp out. I asked him if he had gotten used to the danger, and he replied that his family in Jharkhand asked him the same thing all the time. He said he had been in Kashmir and other trouble spots for a decade and no longer thought about the danger. But there was no doubt it was a dangerous, difficult life. Soldiers in Sinha’s unit, often drawn from poor villages across India, visited their families and children for only a few weeks each year. They were in an alien land, unable to speak the local Kashmiri language, fighting shadows hidden among a resentful people. Constantly under threat, it was only natural that they would begin to view the entire populace with suspicion – trust would inevitably be exploited. Sinha was the last of several military officials to tell me there was no military solution to the insurgency.
We returned to the battalion headquarters at 1:15 AM. Sinha and half a dozen soldiers drove me back to my hotel. There were fewer checkpoints; the streets were still deserted. And then, in the distance, we saw a lone man shuffling along the other side of the road. Sinha swerved the jeep across the road, braked and rolled down his window beside the man, who looked like he was in his seventies.
“Who are you?” Sinha asked brusquely in Hindi.
The man wore loose clothes, and he was carrying a bag under a shawl.
“Nothing sir, nothing sir–” The man had his arms raised already.
A soldier leaped out of the back of the jeep. He approached the old man at considerable velocity, one hand on his trigger. The soldier performed a rough search. “What are you doing here?” the soldier barked. The old man, now clearly terrified, kept repeating, “nothing sir, nothing sir.”
Sinha instructed the soldier to let the man go. The soldier climbed back into the jeep, which pulled away. There were no explanations provided for the search, no courtesies exchanged. India had probably lost another Kashmiri heart.

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The two and a half hour drive to Sopore was lined with roadside messages exhorting people to forget about the troubles in the Kashmir valley, to ignore the heavy army presence in the countryside, and to think of the state as a halcyon tourist destination. “It is not the Rally, Enjoy the Valley” one said. “Our job is to make the whole world see the beauty of Kashmir,” read another. I passed security facilities on the way out of Srinagar, pillboxes laced with camouflage netting, tall walls and taller observation posts. Guns pointed in all directions. There was little reduction in military presence as I left the city; soldiers patrolled in front of shops, there were checkpoints at bridges, armed troops stood on village rooftops. I took a photograph of the passing countryside; when I zoomed in on the digital image, I found a camouflaged soldier in the woods. Many soldiers wore masks that covered their noses and mouths; a local journalist I was travelling with said it was to avoid being identified. Convoys of military trucks rumbled past – one took 20 minutes and must have included some 200 vehicles. Gunners stuck out from the tops of vehicles; others had soldiers in the rear, weapons ready.
According to local newspapers, the residents of Sopore had held a march the previous evening to protest the killing of Haider Ahmed Bhat. The protest was led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, one of the more radical Kashmiri separatist leaders. It is not clear how much support various leaders have among Kashmiris since they are self-appointed. State elections conducted in Kashmir in 2002 were supposed to hear the voice of the people, but turnout was very low in troubled areas: threats by militant groups, boycotts by separatist leaders and extraordinary security measures suppressed voting in the places where representative government is most desperately needed. While turnout in the state was fifty five percent overall, it was led by Hindu-majority Jammu. Local journalists told me that voter turnout in the Kashmir valley stood at twenty two percent, and was less than ten percent in places like Srinagar. “The state government has no legitimacy,” said Zahoor Shah, the Srinagar high court lawyer I interviewed. “If I was the Election Commissioner, I would have declared the election invalid.” Low turnout was also reported in national parliamentary elections in 2004 after militants ordered a boycott. Geelani has not participated in the Hurriyat Conference talks with New Delhi.
We arrived at Sopore at noon. It was a dusty, chaotic town with a maze of winding streets, mud paths and open-air markets. Hawkers sold clothes from pavement heaps; people crowded around shacks that brewed endless cups of tea. Soldiers inspected passing vehicles. An old man sat in an empty field, his back to a tree. A few paces away, a soldier stood with a black mask over his nose and mouth. Crowds huddled around open fires. Most people wore the brown ankle-length gowns called pherans, many also carried baskets of live coals called kangadis which are used as portable heaters. It was drizzling. My driver asked for directions and we were directed to the nearby village of Gonipura. We pulled onto a mud path and bounced over uneven terrain. My head hit the roof of the van. A bridge took us over the Pohair River and then we were in Gonipura. We were surrounded by men before we had come to a stop. Their gazes were suspicious. Two led me into a courtyard ringed by several houses. Under a tent on one side, about three dozen women sat on the ground. Many veiled their faces as I approached. News of a journalist’s arrival spread, and soon a crowd of more than a hundred men surrounded me. They drew me inside a nearby house. I sat cross-legged on the bare floor. The room had blue walls and wooden rafters. Men streamed in, all wearing pheran gowns. Some carried kangadis. The room was no more than 10 feet by 12 feet in size, yet 40 or 50 people crowded inside, and others peered in from the door and through the windows. Mohammed Ashraf, a man with sharp angular features and a neighbour of the Bhat family, and Ghulam Rasool Bhat, the dead man’s uncle and an eye-witness to the abduction, narrated what had happened. The village had been searched repeatedly in the days leading up to Oct 21, they said, by soldiers from an Indian paramilitary unit called the 24 Rashtriya Rifles. Security forces searching for militants had stormed houses and interrogated villagers. This was considered routine, which was why the villagers had not thought it unusual when a white sport utility vehicle pulled up at Haider Ahmed Bhat’s shop. The young man had just returned from Sopore with bread, which he had planned to sell. “He was picked up in the presence of the army,” said Ghulam Rasool Bhat, who saw two men inside the vehicle in army uniforms. As Bhat gave cigarettes to one of the men who approached him, another grabbed him. Ashraf seized the dead man’s uncle by the back of his neck to demonstrate how his neighbour had been captured; he pressed down on the uncle’s head to show how the men had shoved Haider Ahmed Bhat into the vehicle. Relatives immediately lodged a complaint with the police. They also approached the army. No information was forthcoming. But army searches of the village abruptly ended, confirming villagers’ suspicions that security forces had found what they were looking for. Three weeks later, word came from the Kangan police station, an outpost 75 miles away. Army officials had handed over Bhat’s body to the Kangan police, who summoned Bhat’s relatives. Where Haider Ahmed Bhat had left his village shoeless, he now wore boots. He had been wearing blue clothes; the corpse wore white. Ashraf touched his head behind his left ear, his chest and right shoulder to indicate where the villagers had found bullet wounds. “We don’t know if it is a custodial killing or an encounter,” Ashraf told me in English. “It could have been a custodial killing and then they took the body and made it a fake encounter.” The villagers said they had no redress: disappearances, abductions and killings were too commonplace. The license plate on the sport utility vehicle that picked up Haider Ahmed Bhat was determined to be fake – no such number was registered with the state. Ghulam Rasool Bhat told me it was the third such abduction in Gonipura. “What can we do against the security forces?” he asked. “We are helpless.” The family brought the corpse back to Gonipura for the funeral. The dead man was survived by his parents, three brothers and four sisters. I could hear a steady wailing from the tent with the mourning women. I asked if I could speak with Haider Ahmed Bhat’s parents. The mother was too distraught, I was told, but the father might be willing to talk to me. I asked the uncle about the political arguments between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. He waved his hand. “We first require our safety,” he replied.
The dead man’s father entered the room. Mohammed Ahsan Bhat was 62, and he began to weep before he sat down on the ground. For several moments, the room was silent. I could ask him no questions, for he simply held his cheeks and rocked and tears flowed along the wrinkles on his face. The others consoled him. “He was a nice boy, very obedient,” he said finally in Kashmiri, and the local journalist I was with translated the words. “He had no links with any militants. We don’t know why he was picked up.” The father lapsed back into tears. “We can only cry,” the uncle said finally. “We pray to Allah for our safety. What else can we do?”
The villagers escorted me back into the courtyard. They had bitter words for the state government, which had promised “a healing touch.” Some called it “a killing touch.” Women beat their chests as I took photographs; the dead man’s sister, Kulsuma Akhtar, sang her grief as she described how her brother had been abducted. Men walked beside my van as we pulled out of the village. Through the windows, they repeated details of the story over and over, like people who are afraid they will never be heard.

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