[Reader-list] The massacre at Chattisinghpora

[Aditya Raj Baul]

The massacre at Chattisinghpora
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/The_massacre_at_Chattisinghpora

The March 20 massacre of 35 Sikhs in a Jammu and Kashmir village has
the potential to widen the communal divide in the State, a fallout
that could further the designs of the Far Right among all
denominations.


PRAVEEN SWAMI in Anantnag:
SMALL patches of earth stained by blood mark the spot where the
victims of Jammu and Kashmir's worst communal massacre lost their
lives. Impromptu shrines have come up to tell visiting VIPs and
ordinary people the story of the March 20 killings. Photographs of the
35 men shot that night have been pinned to a board inside the Singh
Sabha gurdwara. A blackboard in the adjoining Shankerpora hamlet has
the names of the 18 victims executed there scrawled in chalk. The
shrines will stay in place until March 31, when thousands of Sikhs
from around the country are expected to join in the last rites of the
victims.
After the last of the visitors leave, Chattisinghpora's real problems
will begin. The people of the village, like the rest of the Kashmir
Valley's tiny Sikh community, will have to decide whether to leave for
Jammu or to stay on and fight to defend their land and homes. That
decision, and the political forces set in play by the killings, could
be critical to the future of the State.


NISSAR AHMED
A mother follows the stretcher carrying her son's body in Chattisinghpora.
There is a shroud of fear over Chattisinghpora. Few people are willing
to talk to strangers. Ranjit Singh, the Singh Sabha Gurdwara's young
priest, acts as the village's official spokesperson, reading out a
stilted statement on the killings to visiting mediapersons. "How could
we know who committed the crime?" he asks. "They wore Army uniforms,
and spoke Urdu, but we recognised none of them." Karamjit Singh, a
local schoolteacher who was among the 17 men who were lined up for
execution outside the gurdwara, is even more scared. He had escaped
into the darkness before the firing began, but a single question on
what provoked his suspicion is enough to end all further conversation.
But others in the village are more willing to talk, at least after
being promised that their identities would not be revealed. Their
stories are consistent. About 20 men, clad in olive green combat
fatigues, arrived in the village at 7-15 p.m. They told the people
that they were soldiers, and ordered the men out to be questioned.
When the men were lined up in two groups, a few hundred metres from
each other, the firing began. As they started firing, the gunmen
shouted 'Jai Mata Di' and 'Jai Hind'. In th eatrical fashion, one of
them took swigs from a bottle of rum even as the killing went on.
While leaving, one of the men called out to his associates: "Gopal,
chalo hamare saath" (Come with us, Gopal).

Twenty two-year-old Arvind Singh, who was watching television in his
home, had not come out when the gunmen arrived. When the firing began,
he thought an encounter had broken out. "Terrorists used to come to
the village regularly," he says. "The Army used to patrol the village,
but had never carried out searches or interrogations. So the
terrorists often used to stay here." Just three weeks before the
killing, one group of terrorists, also in combat fatigues, had spent
an afternoon watching children play cricket. Most villagers in fact
feel betrayed. "Our sisters and wives used to serve them food and tea
at all hours of the day and night," says Babu Singh, a resident of
Shankarpora.
"How could they repay us like this?"

Others have not lived to ask the question. Jagir Singh, a retired
Subedar-Major, had made his peace with the terrorists in order to
survive, and his home was one of those most frequently used for
shelter. His appeals for mercy on those grounds did not help. He was
shot along with his sons Gurdeep Singh (who had married last year) and
six-year-old Ajit Pal Singh. There are no men now in the house, and
Babu Singh's wife has been sitting in their porch ever since the
massacre, too stunned to talk. Families like that of Jagir Singh had
bought their peace with the terrorists in the early 1990s, in order to
avoid meeting the fate of the Kashmiri Pandit communities around them
who were being mercilessly driven out. Now, with almost no Pandits
left, it was the ir turn to face the terrorist campaign.

NISSAR AHMED

An old couple grieves over the body of their only son.

FEW people in the village believe stories claiming that the assailants
were Indian Army soldiers. The reasons are simple. For one, the 7
Rashtriya Rifles, which is in charge of the area, is made up
overwhelmingly of Sikh soldiers from the Punjab Regiment. Its troops
and officers speak Punjabi, not Urdu. And the villagers, unlike
Lashkar-e-Taiba cadre indoctrinated on stories of Hindu and Sikh
barbarism, know that soldiers do not wander about on operations with
bottles of liquor, shouting religious sloga ns as they fire. The
terrorists evidently acted as they thought Indian soldiers would, a
caricature that finds repeated mention in Lashkar-e-Taiba literature.
The organisation's website even proclaims that Gurkha soldiers eat
their dead parents' bodies.

But the people of Chattisinghpora had one crucial piece of evidence
which pointed to the killers. Just before the firing began, one of the
men lined up had recognised someone among the gunmen. "Chattiya, tu
idhar kya kar raha hai?" (What are you doing here, Chatt?), he asked.
The person he spoke to immediately opened fire. Although police
investigators are not discussing the point, it is possible that either
of the survivors - Karamjit Singh, who escaped unhurt, or Nanak Singh,
admitted with multiple bullet injuries in Srinagar's Bone and Joint
Hospital - heard the exchange. Agitated residents pointed the Anantnag
Police to every Muslim whom they suspected of a role in the killings.
Mohammad Yakub Magray, nicknamed Chatt Guri, was just one of them.

IT took some of the best interrogators from the ruthlessly efficient
Jammu and Kashmir Police Special Operations Group almost 48 hours to
break Magray. He was, it turned out, a Hizbul Mujahideen operative
active on the organisation's wireless network wit h the code-name
Zamrood. On the night of the killings, Magray said, he had travelled
with the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Anantnag area commander, a Pakistani
national code-named Abu Maaz, to Chattisinghpora. Maaz, six feet tall
with a large birthmark on his right cheek, was accompanied by some
Lashkar members Magray knew by their code-names: Shahid, Babar, Tipu
Khan and Maqsood. Five Kashmiri Hizbul Mujahideen members, led by
Saifullah, possibly the code name for local operative Ghulam Rasool
Wani, also came along.
Abu Maaz, Magray said, had initiated the action after general
instructions were received asking Lashkar-e-Taiba units to launch
major attacks during President Clinton's visit to India. The first
targets to be considered were military installations, but n o
volunteers could be found for a suicide attack. Kashmiri Pandit
hamlets were then discussed, but the idea was quickly rejected. The
group attempted an assault on Kashmiri Pandits at Telwani, near
Anantnag, in February. Three Pandits were killed there, but Army and
police pickets in the area responded rapidly, and the Lashkar unit
only just managed to escape. Sikh villages were, by contrast,
unguarded. A random night patrol had been through Chattisinghpora
three days earlier, so it was likely to be at least a week before
troops would be there again.
Magray's continuing interrogation seems to be delivering at least some
retribution. Dawn raids on March 25 by personnel of the Anantnag
Police and 7 Rashtriya Rifles, led by Senior Superintendent of Police
Farooq Khan and Colonel Ajay Saxena, led to the elimination of five
members of Abu Maaz's unit at Panchal Thal, perched on the Pir Panjal
range 9 km from Chattisinghpora. Assault rifles, grenades and two
wireless sets were recovered from the killed terrorists. "We expect
further success soon," said Khan. "Magray has given us valuable
information on hideouts, and we are developing separate intelligence
which should lead us to those involved in the killings."

RETRIBUTION, however, will do little to secure the future of the
Kashmir Valley's estimated 60,000 Sikhs, many of whom live in rural
areas. Interestingly, the people of Chattisinghpora do not endorse
claims made by some Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leaders that the
community was not properly defended. "We never wanted protection
here," says Babu Singh, "because we never thought there would be a
problem... Our policy was to live, and to do that, we went out of our
way to avoid confrontation with anybody." N ow the villagers must
decide how they will respond to the state's proposals that they set up
village defence committees to guard their future. Few appear
enthusiastic about the prospect, however. "What will we do when we
have to leave the village?" asks local priest Ranjit Singh.
Yet the fact remains that the people of Chattisinghpora, and Sikhs
elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir, will have to do some hard thinking.
Although similar massacres may not be imminent, the fact remains that
the campaign of ethnic cleansing launched by the Islamic Right a
decade ago has now turned on the community. While some accounts claim
that terrorist groups have no anti-Sikh agenda, the truth is less
simple. Several Jammu and Kashmir Police officers at the cutting edge
of the anti-terrorist operations are Sikh - such as Director-General
of Police Gurbachan Jagat, Inspector-General of Police (Operations)
P.S Gill and Srinagar Superintendent of Police (Operations) Manohar
Singh. This fact has not passed unnoticed, and at least one
Srinagar-based Sikh j ournalist has found himself being subjected to
hostility on this account in recent months.
"The fact of the matter," says Rashtriya Rifles sector commander
Brigadier Deepak Bajaj, "is that we can't protect everyone,
everywhere, all the time. People have to learn to protect themselves
too." Should the people of Chattisinghpora agree in the comi ng weeks
to set up a village defence committee, it would be the first instance
in the Kashmir Valley of people's resistance to terrorism. That, in
turn, could have enormous knock-on effects, not just among religious
minorities but ordinary Muslims, the p rincipal victims of terrorism
in Jammu and Kashmir. Sadly, there has been little political effort to
bring about a genuine mass coalition against the Islamic Far Right.
Few politicians sought to tap the spontaneous outrage the
Chattisinghpora killings p rovoked across Jammu and Kashmir, cutting
across religious lines.

INDEED, the political fallout from Chattisinghpora could be just what
the Lashkar-e-Taiba wants to see happening. The disgraceful attacks on
Muslim properties in New Delhi, and the ugly anti-Muslim posturing of
Sikh and Hindu chauvinist groups in Jammu, have deepened communal
fissures. Hindu right-wingers who spoke of an Islamic conspiracy
against Hindus and Sikhs alone ignored the fact that terrorists killed
77 Muslims through Jammu and Kashmir in the first two months of this
year, while just 10 of the ir victims were non-Muslim. Last year, 723
Muslims and 98 non-Muslims were killed by terrorists, making it clear
that the majority community in the State is paying the price for the
violence that is enormously disproportionate to its numbers. Even the
me mbers of Magray's immediate family do not appear to share his
convictions. One of his brothers is a soldier in the Jammu and Kashmir
Light Infantry and a first cousin is in the Border Security Force's 4
Battalion, both deployed on counter-terrorist opera tions.

NISSAR AHMED
Two women, who lost their relatives, console each other.
Another problem has been the incorporation of the Chattisinghpora
massacre in a larger narrative of Sikh communal politics. Shortly
after mainstream politicians like Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh
Badal and Congress(I) leader Manmohan Singh visited the village,
right-wing Sikh politicians entered the fray. Former Akal Takht
Jathedar Ranjit Singh and former Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak
Committee president G.S. Tohra, both sacked by Badal, claimed that the
killings were part of an Indian conspiracy to defame a neighbouring
country. Ranjit Singh claimed to have developed a friendship in Tihar
Jail with Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader Maqbool Butt, who
was executed for murder. Ranjit Singh, who himself served a life term,
said that Butt and other Kashmiri terrorists would never target Sikhs.
Such unsavoury political abuse of massacres has, in the past,
contributed not a little to growing communal divisions in Jammu and
Kashmir. Hindu and Sikh politicians almost never visit Muslim victims
of violence, while Muslim politicians rarely make a sustained effort
to campaign for the rights of the minorities. Where there is little
political gain to be had from killings, politicians stay away
altogether. The line of dignitaries queueing up at Chattisinghpora,
for example, stands in stark contrast to the disgraceful treatment of
the families of the migrant workers from Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, who
were massacred at Sandu in the midst of the Kargil war. Individual
police officers had on that occasion used funds meant for
anti-terrorist intelligence gathering to hire buses for the families
to transport their dead home.
After the ceremonies of March 31, Chattisinghpora will most likely
disappear from the public consciousness, displaced by the next round
of killings elsewhere. Official India has been busy attacking Pakistan
for the killings. The terrorists trained in tha t country with
official sponsorship are indeed responsible for the carnage. But for
the communal hatred and bitterness that the killings have left behind,
politicians of the religious Right have no one to blame but
themselves.