Setbacks
From Within in Struggle to End Kashmir’s Violence
By GARDINER
HARRIS
Published: July 21, 2013
THATHRI, Kashmir —
This tiny mountain town in Kashmir, once the site of
bloody battles between militants, has returned to a quieter life, surviving on
apples, walnuts and government handouts. Terraced fields are carved out of
mountainsides, and locals use donkeys to help carry their loads.
The New York Times
So when an unexploded grenade was found on April 28 in a pile of broken
bricks outside the fortified police station here, a shudder ran through the ranks
of Kashmir’s top officials.
Two years had passed since the last militant attack in the surrounding
area, and officials had begun to hope that the cycle of massacres,
assassinations and revenge killings that had made this corner of
Indian-controlled Kashmir one of the most dangerous in the region’s long, dirty
war had finally burned itself out.
Some even hoped tourists might soon be willing to brave the hair-raising
switchbacks to travel here to experience its breathtaking valleys.
In the end, the police arrested one of their own, a decorated officer.
And while that allayed concerns about militant-led attacks, it exacerbated
fears that some people would be unable to move past the region’s violence. In
this case, the officer was charged with attempted murder, accused of staging
the unsuccessful grenade attack in what several officials called an effort to
raise enough worries about continuing violence to win him a promotion to
inspector.
Attacks in Kashmir have plunged in recent years, with the top leaders of India and Pakistan
again promising better relations in the contested region. While many Kashmiris
still resent India’s dominance, far fewer are willing to fight it anymore —
although sporadic assaults, including a recent attack that killed eight
soldiers, continue.
India has responded to the relative quiet by withdrawing the army from
Srinagar — the summer capital of the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir — and
some larger towns, but a vast police and paramilitary presence remains.
Paramilitary killings of civilians last weekduring protests over a reported
desecration of the Koran led to demonstrations across Kashmir. Nearly 100,000
police officers, meanwhile, were assigned to preventing insurgent attacks.
“Unfortunately, there is a vested interest in certain quarters to keep
the conflict alive,” Omar Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister, said in
an interview at his official residence in Srinagar. “One of the challenges we
face as the level of violence goes down is figuring out how to deal with those
people who have benefited from violence, whose career prospects have been
determined by violence and who used to make money from violence.”
Shiv Kumar Sharma, the arrested officer, would seem to fit that
description. He rapidly moved through the ranks and earned thousands of dollars
in bonuses because his bosses considered him unusually good at finding and
killing militants. Former colleagues say he loved gold chains, dark sunglasses,
fine clothing and the fame that his many operations brought him.
But Rashish Gupta, Officer Sharma’s lawyer, said that his client’s
successes had made him vulnerable to jealous rivals on the police force and
that they were framing him, a charge the police denied. “He got a name for
himself and so much fame because of his good work in such a short time that
many officers were jealous of him,” Mr. Gupta said.
The break in the grenade case came when an officer reported that he had
seen a former militant wandering suspiciously around the police station on the
morning of the attack, according to Mohammad Arif Rishu, the area’s police
superintendent.
The former militant, Abdul Rashid, known as Abdullah, is one of hundreds
of men who trained at militant camps in Pakistan and sneaked back into India,
but instead of attacking, they surrendered themselves and their weapons. Mr.
Rishu ordered the former militant’s arrest.
When the police found Mr. Rashid, he admitted that he had helped plan
the grenade attack and had recruited another man to carry it out, according to
Mr. Rishu and Rauf Ahmed Khan, the chief of the Thathri police. The authorities
soon arrested three other members of the group who they believe were involved
and said they had recovered an assault rifle, a pistol, ammunition and
high-powered walkie-talkies.
The group’s efforts to create mayhem, the police said, were almost
comically unsuccessful. Their initial plan was for Rafi, a 19-year-old who goes
by one name, to assassinate several prominent officials, the police said. Rafi
stalked his prey but was unable to pull the trigger.
“He told me, ‘I went to the places I was told to go, and I was near the
people I was told to kill, but I couldn’t do it,’ ” Mr. Rishu said. “He
became chicken-hearted.”
Mr. Rishu and Chief Khan said that led Mr. Rashid to recruit a second
19-year-old, who also uses one name, Altaf, to toss a grenade into the Thathri
police station, a sagging two-story adobe building ringed by corrugated metal
sheets and barbed wire. Altaf could not bring himself to approach the station,
so he climbed to the roof of a nearby hotel and tossed the grenade from afar,
but it failed to explode, the police said.
Mr. Rashid, Rafi and Altaf were charged with attempted murder,
possession of illegal arms and other offenses, and they remained in custody.
But the group’s most surprising claim — according to Mr. Rishu, Chief
Khan and a third top police official — was that their leader had been Officer
Sharma. The two 19-year-olds said they had participated because they were each
promised 50,000 rupees, or more than $800, a princely sum here.
To Mr. Rishu, the confessions appeared to be part of a larger story. He
said Officer Sharma had been desperate for a promotion to inspector, which had
been under consideration for some time. “He used to come to my office and ask
about it,” Mr. Rishu said.
At the same time, Officer Sharma was issuing increasingly urgent
warnings of militant movements in the area. Mr. Rishu said believes that
Officer Sharma intended to manufacture his own militancy so his promotion would
go through.
During their investigation, the police also retrieved cellphone records
that Chief Khan said showed a web of connections between Officer Sharma and Mr.
Rashid, the former militant.
“Sometimes they spoke for 47 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes and sometimes
5, but there were a lot of calls,” Chief Khan said.
Still, Officer Sharma’s lawyer said that proved nothing. His client, he
said, was expected to keep in touch with such men because they might provide
leads about active militants.
When arrested, Officer Sharma said he was being targeted by the very
militant elements he had spent his career fighting, the police said.
Chief Khan quoted him as saying, “I have done a lot of things, and
they’re trying to get me.”
Local representatives of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist
group, have defended Officer Sharma, saying he was the victim of a conspiracy
that included the ruling Indian National Congress Party.
“On the directions of their political masters, local police officers
have hatched a conspiracy to implicate Shiv Kumar Sharma,” a party official,
Nirmal Singh, said, according to local
news media. The police said they had acted independently, and Mr. Abdullah, the
region’s chief minister and part of a coalition with the Congress Party, said
the arrest had been appropriate.
“There has been an
industrialization of violence here,” Chief Khan said. “Those who have made
their careers out of violence are worried now that it is gone.”
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