The Victimisation of Yasin Malik: The Role of Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, aka Latram

The government is keen to hang Malik over the Rawalpora killings but there is a strong possibility that it was Latram who planned them.

This article is the second in a two-part series on the Union government’s pursuit for the death penalty for Yasin Malik. Read the first here.

In the preceding part of this article, I had described why the “new” evidence the government claims to have obtained, that pins Yasin Malik to the killing of four airmen at Rawalpora on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990, will not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny in any self-respecting court of law.

But if Malik and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) did not kill the airmen at Rawalpora twenty-five years ago, then who did?

Despite a decade of digging around for witnesses and sweating the accused in jails, the Central Bureau of Investigation failed to get an answer. But today, the benefit of hindsight allows us to identify one terrorist, little known by the public and the media in Kashmir at the height of the insurgency, as the mastermind, if not the actual killer of the airmen. 

This is Mushtaq Ali Zargar, better known in Kashmir as Mushtaq Latram.

Latram is almost completely unknown outside the circle of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The public got an inkling of his importance in Pakistan’s long-term plans for snatching Kashmir away from India only in 2000, more than two decades after the start of the insurgency, when the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) insisted that he had to be one of three terrorists in Indian jails who must be released if Indian Airlines’ flight IC 814 was to be allowed to return to Delhi from Kandahar.

The other two were Masood Azhar, who went on to head the Jaish-e Mohammad, and the British-born extremist, Ahmed Omer Sheikh. 

In the decade of peace that had followed the Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting in Rawalpindi in 2004, and the Musharraf-Manmohan joint statement of April 2005, Azhar had created a training centre for terrorists in the Pir Panjal region of South Kashmir. He was also the mastermind behind the Pulwama slaughter of Indian jawans in 2019.

Sheikh was a Britain-born terrorist who became a member of the extreme Islamist jihadist group Harkat-ul-Ansar, also known as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, in the 1990s.  He was arrested-in India for the part he played during the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists and jailed in 1994, where he stayed till he was exchanged for IC 814 in 2000.

After his release, he joined the Jaish-e-Mohammed and used his British education and upper-class accent to lure the Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Pearl to his kidnapping and execution in Karachi.

Latram was in the exalted company of the Jaish-e Mohammed’s top killers because, till his arrest in 1992, he had been the single-most important recruiter of killers for the ISI in Kashmir.

Pakistan’s hand in stoking the violence in Kashmir

Pakistan’s complete failure to garner any support from locals in Kashmir in the 1965 war had shown Islamabad that Kashmiris had no desire to become Pakistanis.

But Pakistan never lost its appetite for Kashmir. So when General Zia-ul-Haq, who was an ardent Islamist, came to power via a military coup in 1978, he immediately revived the attempt to seize Kashmir, but this time through “other means”.

Relying upon the religion card, Pakistan’s ISI first approached leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Kashmir, invited them to Muzaffarabad, and even introduced its leaders to Zia.

The Jamaat was willing to work towards the annexation of Kashmir by Pakistan, but the ISI soon realised that its following in Jammu and Kashmir was much too small, as it is even today. So it was left with no option but to approach the leaders of the then-nascent JKLF.

By 1983, only months after Sheikh Abdullah’s death, Kashmir had been thrown into turmoil by New Delhi’s undermining and displacement of Farooq Abdullah, and its imposition of his uncle, Gul Shah, in the chief minister’s seat. When the Gul Shah gambit came unstuck, it declared governor’s rule and sent in Jagmohan as the governor.

So disenchantment with New Delhi was running high when the ISI took some of the senior leaders of the JKLF to Muzaffarabad and Islamabad, to persuade them to revolt. But they soon found that while these were willing to accept Pakistan’s assistance, their goal was to win independence from New Delhi, and not to join Pakistan.

By the late eighties, therefore, Pakistan had been forced back on to the only remaining alternative.

This was to find impressionable young men in Jammu and Kashmir, bring them to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), give them intense indoctrination and military training, supply them with arms (sent separately), get them to launch attacks on Indian soldiers, policemen, Kashmiri Pandits and pro-India leaders of opinion in Kashmir, and allow the inevitable police response, which would involve mass arrests, crackdowns on entire villages and the use of varying degrees of coercion, to create the discontent in spreading ripples that would pave the way to a wider insurgency.

The rigged elections of 1987, and the Gawkadal massacre in 1990 came to it as Manna from Heaven.

Latram was an even earlier convert to separatism than Malik. Belonging to a middle-class family from Srinagar’s old town, he had been arrested on a petty charge and mistreated by the police in 1983 and had never gotten over it. Among the thousands who crossed over into POK to seek revenge for the betrayal of their rights in the 1987 elections, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar was one of the earliest and, as it turned out, most lethal.

In August 1988, after a falling out with Malik over the use of violence, Zargar crossed over to Pakistan through Trehgam in southern Kashmir and received training at a camp that had been organised by the Pakistan army for the JKLF¹.

He came back, formed the Al Umar Mujahideen (AUM), went back to PoK for a second round of training in May 1989 and came back to form an even more violent assassins’ group within the AUM. He named it the Al Umar Commando Force and put it under a close confidant and possibly also a relative, named Shabbir Ahmed Zargar.

Together with the much more publicised (and dispensable) Hizbul Mujahideen, the AUM and the Al Umar Commando Force became Pakistan’s most valued weapons for unleashing targeted violence aimed at triggering an Indian over-reaction that would alienate Kashmiris, and to assassinate prominent Kashmiris who were prepared to discuss paths to peace with New Delhi.

Spate of kidnapping-murders, not yearning for release, made Malik order JKLF to lay down arms

Latram was one of the four men who kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed on December 9, 1989. One of the prisoners whose release the kidnappers demanded in exchange for her release was Javed Ahmad Zargar. Zargar is a common surname in Kashmir, but he too may have been a relative of Latram or of Shabbir Ahmad Zargar. Latram was therefore almost certainly responsible for getting Javed Ahmad Zargar on the list of prisoners to be released.

Six weeks after his release, Javed Ahmad Zargar was accused by the CBI of being one of the planners, if not assassins, of the Rawalpora murders. Given the strained relations between Latram and Malik, there is a strong possibility that it was Latram, not Malik, who planned the Rawalpora killing.

Latram’s presence among the terrorists who kidnapped Sayeed could also be the reason why Malik not only accompanied the kidnappers but was willing to let her see his face. He may have joined the plot to ensure that Sayeed would not be killed even if the government did not accept the kidnappers’ demands, and shown her his face to reassure her that she would be safe. That would explain why he was the only person whom Sayeed was able to identify.

The kidnapping of Sayeed almost certainly completed the split between the JKLF and the AUM. That would explain why Malik played no part in the kidnapping of Mushir-ul-Haq, the vice chancellor of Kashmir University, his secretary Abdul Ghani Zargar, and H.L. Khera, the general manager of the Hindustan Machine Tools plant in Kashmir, all of whom were killed when the kidnappers’ ransom demand was not met.

Those murders set the mould in which violent militancy flourished for the next four years. These years saw a spate of kidnappings of children of politicians and senior civil servants. There were 169 in 1990, 290 in 1991, 281 in 1992 and 349 in 1993. All these occurred while Malik was languishing in jail.

No one has kept count of how much money the militants collected from the parents, but it undoubtedly became the bait that lured more and more disaffected and poor Kashmiri youth into the insurgency.

Malik was in jail when all this was happening. So all Kashmiris know that the JKLF played no part in these kidnappings.

The HAJY  [i.e. Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Wani, Javed Ahmad Mir, Jasin Malik] group’s initial outburst of rage had been at the rigging of the 1987 elections, and the reversal of the election victory of their candidate, Mohammad Yusuf Shah (now Salaheddin). But Malik was appalled by the spate of murders and kidnappings that followed. That, more than the yearning to be released from jail, was what made him order the JKLF to lay down its arms in 1994. He had understood within months of taking up arms in 1987 that acts of violence alone would not secure ‘Azadi’.

What is certain is that with Malik in jail and the JKLF in disarray, Latram’s AUM and Commando Force became the main killing instruments of the ISI in Kashmir. Unlike the dozen or so other militant groups that were spawned by the uprising, these did not advertise themselves. In the almost daily news reports carried by the print and television media in the 1990s, there are only occasional references to the AUM, and none to the Al Umar Commando force.

Kashmir’s police and intelligence services credited them with at least 40 murders, but apparently had no idea of Latram’s pivotal role in Pakistan’s game plan. This only became apparent to Delhi and Srinagar when the terrorists who hijacked IC 814 to Kandahar included him in the three terrorists whose release they demanded in exchange for allowing the plane to fly back to Delhi.

What is more, it had become clear even before 1990 that Pakistan was prepared to arm and train only those who espoused the goal of making Kashmir a part of Pakistan.

Hashim Qureshi, the second hijacker with Maqbool Butt of an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan in 1971, had absolutely refused to fight for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan and had to flee to Holland to save his life. In an article in Chattan, a celebrated Urdu magazine published from Srinagar, he had warned Kashmiris to beware of Pakistan’s enticements.

This became glaringly apparent when by mid-1990 itself, the ISI had withdrawn arms and training from around 5,000 JKLF youth who had crossed over into PoK in the wake of the Gawkadal massacre of January 21, 1990, and had created a rival tanzeem, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, out of those who were willing to make this commitment. By October, the Hizb numbered close to 1,500².

Malik’s first act upon coming out of jail in 1994 therefore, was to order the JKLF to lay down its arms and adopt non-violent methods of agitating for independence. The JKLF paid a heavy price for following his instructions, because it became an easy prey for both the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and security forces personnel hungry for the prize money that the government was offering for the head of every slain militant.

In the next two years it lost somewhere between 100 and 300 of its cadres in the internecine three-sided war that erupted in the valley.

Despite this heavy toll, Malik stuck to his resolve. In the golden period of Vajpayee followed by Manmohan Singh in Delhi, Musharraf in Pakistan and Mufti Sayeed in Kashmir, Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq became intermediaries in ironing out details of the Delhi agreement of 2005. Both made it clear to Musharraf that Kashmir wanted to retain its own identity and not become a part of Pakistan.

At a conference held at the Islamabad campus of the National University of Science and Technology, they both told an audience of Pakistan army officers bluntly that Kashmir did not wish to become a part of their country. This took place in this writer’s presence.

In 2007, Malik launched a Safar-e-Azadi – a ‘journey to freedom’ – in which he covered virtually every village in the valley, urging the people to shun violence and fight for self-determination peacefully. This was two years after Manmohan Singh and Musharraf had agreed to a four-point programme for bringing peace to Kashmir and ending the hostility between Pakistan and India, but were dilly-dallying over its details.

Malik did this to speed up the process. India and Pakistan came within an inch of success then, and again between 2012 and 2014. But Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007, by terrorists widely suspected to have been employed by the ISI, and the UPA’s defeat in the 2014 election, killed both initiatives. The rest is history.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

Footnotes

1. Manoj Joshi: The Lost Rebellion, 1998.
2. Indian intelligence reports seen by the author in October 1990.

Those Speaking of Kashmir as an Independent State Err in Conflating Freedom With Independence

Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation and presupposes democracy. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory. 

Sometime in October, I became aware that the Oxford Union was holding a debate on the motion ‘This House Believes That Kashmir Should Be An Independent State’. What had brought it to my attention was a refusal by Vivek Agnihotri, the maker of the film Kashmir Files, that he had put up on the internet. Agnihotri was within his rights to refuse, but the tone of his reply, which was belligerent and defensive, was an implicit admission of defeat. The Union had then asked a second speaker from India, a member of the pro-BJP ‘Chanakya Forum’, who had apparently first accepted and then withdrawn from the debate. 

Knowing that refusal to engage in a debate is an implicit acceptance of defeat, I volunteered to join the debate to oppose the motion. My offer was immediately accepted. The Oxford Union paid neither my air fare to England, nor my hotel bill at Oxford. Both were paid by me, because I felt that my country needed to be defended against allegations made by organisations sponsored by the very country that had turned Kashmir from a little bit of heaven on earth into the first circle of hell. 

The following is the full text of my speech, slightly edited for style and clarity, given at the Oxford Union on November 14, 2024 on the motion, ‘This house believes that Kashmir should be an independent state.’

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Those who have spoken in favour of the motion have talked about independence for only the Indian part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. I am sure this house will agree that whatever we decide, whatever solution we recommend, should apply to the whole of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, because it was the whole of this state that had acceded to India. I see that none of them have proposed independence for their part of the Kashmir state. My response will therefore be confined to the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir. I will leave it to the House, to judge its relevance for ‘Azad’ [i.e. Pakistan-occupied] Kashmir.

It is my belief that the people of Kashmir are entitled to freedom. But Independence, more specifically the creation of an independent state, will not give them the freedom they desire and is their right. On the contrary it could lead to a different, and worse, form of servitude. 

Let me illustrate this by highlighting the difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’

The demand for freedom is a demand for control over our lives – over how we wish to live, the freedoms we wish to enjoy, and whom we wish to worship. It is a personal demand and the desire for it is as old as time. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt in the 13th century BC to make them free to live as they wanted to. Slaves in America pined for freedom not to return to Africa but to acquire the rights that free American men and women enjoyed. 

Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory. 

The motion we are debating implicitly assumes that independent statehood is a necessary requirement for freedom. This idea is not only simplistic but, in the chaotic world that is being created by the convergence of decolonisation with economic globalisation, it is rapidly becoming the opposite of the truth. 

The proof is all around us. For the people of most of the new nations of the world, independent statehood has led not to freedom, but to one or other form of servitude. When I speak of servitude I am referring not only to their country’s economic servitude to other larger nations, which is pervasive but does not impinge directly upon their everyday lives. I am speaking of the servitude that dominant economic, linguistic, religious, or tribal majorities in these countries have imposed upon their people, and especially minorities. 

To understand the profound misgivings that the proposal for creating an independent state of Kashmir arouses in me you only need to remember the tribal war, stoked by copper mining conglomerates using hired European mercenaries, that broke out after independence was achieved by the former Belgian Congo; or the civil war that broke out in Angola immediately after it gained its independence from Portugal, or the Hutu massacre of the Watutsis in Rwanda. In none of these countries did independence bring freedom to their people. Instead, it brought poverty, and death. 

The only true guarantee of freedom within a nation is a vigorous democracy. 

All the members of the United Nations are independent countries. But how many are democracies, even in name? Here are a few observations:

The UN began with 51 charter members. By 1958, the number had risen to 82. By 2011 its membership had risen to the present 193 countries. Nearly all the post-colonial members started out as democracies. But how many were able to sustain it? The answer is that in 2010, only five of the 61 states that joined the UN between 1958 and 1975 had been able to do so. 

Very few in the following wave of decolonised countries have succeeded in staying democratic. When I asked on Google how many of the present members of the UN are democracies the answer I got was: “There isn’t much information about how many UN member states are democracies, but here’s some related information…”

The United Nations requires only sovereignty, not democracy as a precondition for membership. How low democracy stands in its concerns can be judged by a finding published by Ideas International, an intergovernmental organisation that supports democracy worldwide, on September 26 this year. It estimated that democracy had ranked 27th in the issues discussed that the UN between 2015 and 2023! 

So let me repeat once again: Independence is not a prerequisite even for peace, let alone freedom. On the contrary, far too often in the past three-quarters of a century, it has become a prelude to tyranny and genocide. There is one going on even as I speak. 

Then why do we keep conflating freedom with independence? 

The answer is that our minds have been moulded into this belief by the era of the nation state in which we were born, and are still living. Nation states require clearly defined territories over which their governments have total control. They are not natural entities, but have been created by a ruthless suppression of feudal forms of rule, through war.

The main driver of this change has been the inexorable expansion of markets which has been driven by advances in technology. These have steadily increased the minimum size of the market needed for their efficient use, from the city states of the 15th century, to the nation states of the 18th to 20th centuries, to the global market of today.

Nation states have required protected markets, in which infant industries can develop free from the threat of competition. That has required them to create sharply defined frontiers, to restrict, if not ban the import of foreign products, and create barriers to the entry of foreign labour. The capacity to create and maintain these protective walls, has therefore become the yardstick of freedom. 

Today, despite the fact that globalisation has begun to destroy these protective walls, the identification of freedom with territorial sovereignty continues to dominate our minds. We have therefore forgotten how violent the creation of nation states has actually been. In country after country throughout Europe, it has subordinated regional languages, dialects and customs to a single “national” language. 

Age-old cultural practices, and even religions, have been forcibly homogenised and those who have resisted this, have been identified as irredeemably alien and been ‘ethnically cleansed’. I would therefore like to ask the house about the kind of independent state they would like Kashmir to become.

What do Kashmiris really want even after 14 years of police rule?

Despite 34 years of interaction with Kashmiris from every walk of life, I do not feel qualified to give any definitive answer to this question. As I have pointed out earlier, it certainly isn’t the kind of independence Kashmiris in Indian Kashmir want. 

This was made abundantly clear by two opinion polls carried out in Jammu and Kashmir, by MORI [editor’s note: now known as Ipsos] and Gallup, Europe and the US’s most respected polling agencies. 

The MORI poll of 2004 was commissioned by a British organisation headed by Lord Avebury, called the Friends of Kashmir. I think to their surprise it showed that almost no one in any part of Indian Kashmir wanted the state, or any part of it, to merge with Pakistan. 61% of those polled said they felt they would be better off politically and economically as Indian citizens. Only 6% said the same about Pakistani citizenship. 33% said they “did not know”. 

Its other, more significant, finding was that 81% the respondents in Jammu and Kashmir wanted ‘the unique cultural identity of Kashmir,’ i.e its Kashmiriyat, to be preserved in any long-term solution’. Even In Srinagar, the epicentre of the Kashmiri uprising, 76% were of this view. 

The core of Kashmiriyat is its form of Sufi Islam. There are five variants of this in Kashmir: the Naqshbandi, the Qadri, the Suhrawardi, the Kubrawi and the Rishi. None of these come even close to the brand of Sunni-ism advocated by the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is now the form of Islam encouraged in Pakistan. 

Sufism is derived from Sunni Islam, but it came to India from Iran and not Arabia. It is therefore not only different in important respects but is intermixed with practices adopted from Hinduism, to make the conversion of Hindus easier. 

Since its first abortive attempt to annex Kashmir through an invasion in 1965, Pakistan has spared no effort to annex Indian Kashmir by other means. These have been the source of the misunderstanding and distrust of Kashmiriyat in India, especially but not only, by the present government.

 In the 2004 MORI poll the respondents cited their goals as follows 

• 86% wanted free and fair elections to elect the people’s representatives; 
• 87% wanted direct consultation between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir; 
• 86% wanted an end to militant violence in the region ;
• 88 % wanted the government to stop the infiltration of militants from Pakistan, across the Line of Control. 
• Finally, and not at all surprisingly, 93% of those polled wanted economic development of the region to provide more job opportunities and reduce poverty. 

The MORI poll’s results came as a shock to its promoters, so a second poll, with a larger sample size was organised in 2009-10 under the auspices of Chatham House, Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Its results were very similar to those of the MORI poll of 2004. But for Indians its most welcome finding was that in the four most militancy affected districts of Kashmir valley in India only 2.5 to 7.5% said they preferred becoming citizens of Pakistan. 

According to the poll, the vast majority of those polled wanted ‘Independence’. But the polling was not done in English. The respondents would have used the word ‘azadi’. But azadi and its companion demands, “khud mukhtari“ and “nizam-e Mustafa,” do not have the connotations that the English word ‘independence’ has. Azaadi and khud mukhtari are demands for the right to make one’s own decisions and choose one’s way of life. These could be for oneself, one’s family, tribe, religious group or nation. Nizam-e Mustafa is the right to live by “the order of the Chosen One” – in the case of Muslims, by the dictates of the Prophet. 

All three are expressions of the way people wish to live. They are what the late professor Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University defined in his celebrated essay on Two Concepts of Liberty, as Positive freedoms, i.e the freedom to control oneself, to act rationally and choose responsibly. As the 2004 MORI poll showed, none of these were demands for the separation of Kashmir from the rest of India.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.