While PIB’s Rathore had not yet been posted to New Delhi, a suspected intelligence operative named Mufti Zia-ul-Haq, a resident of the village of Kreeri, who had left for Pakistan after Partition, visited the valley and held meetings with Zahgir, Nazir Ahmad and Fazl-ul-Haq Qureshi to discuss Al-Fatah's expansion plans. While Al-Fatah was focusing on recruiting new cadre in the valley, its unit in Doda was only involved in covert surveillance activities.
Run by Ghulam Hasan Bhat, an ethnic Kashmiri who lived in the remote Kishtwar area, Al-Fatah’s Doda unit generated much of the military intelligence the organisation gathered. It also engineered a dramatic robbery of potassium cyanide from the laboratory of a college in Bhadarwah. The members would use this as a means of suicide in the event that any of Al-Fatah’s operatives were captured. PIB: Pakistan Intelligence Bureau
The Master Cell Is Born
The ambiguity of the National Conference towards accession to India manifested itself in March 1964 in the form of certain fringe elements in the organisation establishing the Students’ Federation (SF) and Young Men’s League (YML) to push the case for separation from India more aggressively. Three SF and YML members, Ashraf Batku, Bashir Ahmed Kitchloo and Zafar-ul-Islam, along with another valley resident-turned-Pakistani spy, Ghulam Sarwar, set up what was called the Master Cell to supervise their covert campaign against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir.
Within two weeks of the launch of Operation Gibraltar on August 5, 1965, the Master Cell started printing and posting anti-India posters on the streets of Srinagar. On August 29, 1965, it organised a students’ strike in Srinagar. They also set off a grenade, carrying the Pakistan Ordnance Factories’ seal, on the same day in Srinagar’s Regal Chowk. On September 6, 1965, they also convinced the students of the Government Medical College to go on a strike. On September 11, 1965, another grenade was let off in Lal Chowk. More grenade attacks followed and the campaign of terror unleashed by the Master Cell continued. These activities ran concurrently with the 1965 Indo-Pak War. However, Indian intelligence caught on to the tracks of the Master Cell and by early 1966, it was shut down.
Despite the clean-up, some remnants of the Master Cell remained. One of its sub-cells, Poster Cell-1, had a rather nondescript member called Ghulam Rasool Zahgir. It will not be out of place to credit Zahgir for being the father of Pakistani subversion in Jammu and Kashmir. In mafia parlance, he was the capo di tutti capi or the boss of all the bosses. Men like Masood Azhar, Hafiz Sayeed and Syed Salahuddin were worthy successors of this trailblazer. Zahgir showed the way to initiate and execute subversion in the valley with the support of the PIB and the ISI. The Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba had only to follow his trail.
Zahgir was detained on October 21, 1965. However, since he was then only on the fringes of the ring, he was released on parole in January 1966. Indian intelligence had unfortunately underestimated him. Upon his release, he established contact with intelligence operatives working out of Pakistan.
They (Pakistan) asked him to develop contacts with underground student groups like the Students’ Revolutionary Council. Zahgir’s arrival charged up this group and he took over their leadership. By December 1966, Zahgir and his group mailed posters bearing a map of India with Jammu and Kashmir coloured red and marked as a separate entity to a wide range of people in Jammu and Kashmir. This act caused his group to be named ‘Red Kashmir’. However, his handlers at the Pakistan High Commission wanted him to do much more.
In July 1968, Zahgir, along with Nazir Ahmed Wani, travelled across the Ramgarh-Sialkot border into Pakistan. The two met a Pakistani IB official, who identified himself as Zafar Iqbal Rathore; Rathore was to become their case officer. They also met Maj Tufail and Col Bashir. Zahgir and Wani were instructed to send small groups of men for military training and were themselves to return again for a longer period of specialised training. Shortly after Zahgir’s return from Pakistan, two new recruits joined him. They were Mohammad Aslam Wani and Zahoor Ahmad Shahdad.
The two planned to rob rifles from an armoury used to store rifles for the National Cadet Corps, situated at the Islamia College. The robbery was a failure and one of the groups of robbers that was caught on the spot led the police to Wani and Shahdad. Once the dots had been joined, the trail revealed the role of Zahgir. He swiftly fled to Pakistan in November 1968. Over there, he was trained by the Pakistan Army field intelligence unit in all the skills he would require to wage a guerrilla war against the Indian state.
Master Cell’s Transformation into Al-Fatah
As early as 1968, during the waning years of Ayub Khan’s presidency, Pakistan’s greater strategic imperatives were being integrated with the planning and execution of a widespread covert war with India. Zahgir became the nucleus of this effort. He had developed a map that would not just cause the defeat of the Indian security forces but would also bring down its entire apparatus of power and control. In this visionary plan, tax strikes, protests by the unemployed and demands by bureaucrats for higher pay—all had a role in the larger political struggle against India. Zahgir now chose the name Al-Fatah for his organisation. In Arabic as in Urdu, the name means liberation, salvation and conquest. The initiation of this major plan to subvert India through the starting point of Jammu and Kashmir predates the Bangladesh War and the new turn of militancy in the state beginning from 1987.
In January 1969, Zahgir, Fazl-ul-Haq Qureshi and Musadaq Husain returned to India from Pakistan via Punjab. They then made their way back to Srinagar. Nazir Ahmad Wani was eagerly waiting for them. The old networks were reactivated and new members recruited. Having achieved this, in May 1969, Zahgir, Qureshi and Wani then travelled back to Pakistan where they received specific instructions from PIB’s Zafar Iqbal Rathore, Brig Asghar and Maj Tufail. The latter two were, in all probability, ISI officers seconded to assist Rathore. Wani received military instruction and learnt how to operate machine guns, rifles, hand grenades and explosives.
All of them were taught how to fabricate improvised explosive devices from easily available materials such as potassium chlorate and arsenic sulphide. In July 1969, they returned to India, again via Punjab and started teaching courses in guerilla combat tactics for eight recruits in the Hak-Khul forests above the village of Arizal, in Beerwah. Significantly this was the same village where some years earlier, in May 1965, in the run-up to Operation Gibraltar, the subversive group of Hayat Mir, an affiliate of the Master Cell, had carried out a savage terrorist attack.
It was also the place where an old prison mate of theirs, Salim Jehangir Khan, a former Pakistani covert operative, had opened a poultry farm. This poultry farm would serve as a cover for Al-Fatah’s training activities. All of their time was spent in building up the organisation and fine-tuning their tradecraft. In January 1970, Zahgir again travelled to Pakistan, this time with two new members of Al-Fatah— Bashir Ahmed and Gulzar Ahmed ‘Khaki’.
Zahgir provided his case officer and the ISI support team with a detailed account of AI-Fatah’s organisation-building activities as well as some intelligence of military value. The group was now told it was time to act. Rathore told Zahgir that he would shortly be posted to the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi. A fortnight later, the group returned to Srinagar. Their first target would be the office of the education department at Pulwama.
Late on the night of April 1, 1970, Zahgir’s group travelled in a stolen jeep to Pulwama. Outside the education department’s office, they encountered three unarmed guards. Confronted with the heavily armed group, two of these guards promptly surrendered. One, who put up more of struggle, was injured in the process. The group then picked up the office safe and loaded it on to the back of the jeep and drove down the deserted Avantipora Koil road. The safe contained `71,847.60, an astronomical sum in those days. Not surprisingly, the Pulwama dacoity created a sensation and the police went into a tizzy trying to solve the case.
They suspected the groups of Kashmir-based Naxalites. In the time the police spent in pursuit of the Naxalites, Zahgir was able to spend the cash without arousing suspicion. He found a piece of land in the village of Barsoo, in the district of Anantnag, which seemed an ideal location for Al-Fatah’s new quarters. He spent `50,000 or so, to construct a building which was to serve as Al-Fatah’s headquarters. Zahgir also rented a house in Srinagar’s Buchwara, which served as the political headquarters for the activities of the YML and the SF. The rest of the funds were used to purchase equipment for Al-Fatah; notably, a camera, a tape recorder, a projector for viewing microfilm and a typewriter.
Interestingly, the National Conference had no qualms in permitting the YML and the SF from operating out of these premises. Does one wonder how many senior officials of the National Conference knew what these people were up to?
By May 1970, Zahgir was ready to report on his activities to intelligence officials at the Pakistan High Commission. Accompanying Abdul Hai to New Delhi, Zahgir carried an account of the Pulwama dacoity case as well as some military intelligence data that had been transferred to microfilm. It appears that the cash-strapped high commission had little to offer Zahgir for his efforts. His visit, however, compelled the PIB and the ISI to assess the credibility and efficacy of Al-Fatah.
In April 1968, soon after Zahgir was released from jail, he had received a visit from the Plebiscite Front leader, Mirza Afzal Beg. Beg was Abdullah’s right-hand man and was the Founder-President of the Plebiscite Front in 1955, which would provide an attractive pool of recruits to promote Pakistan’s subversion in the valley.
He had also been jailed along with Abdullah in 1953 and was released in 1954. In a seminal treatise called Report on Pakistani Organised Subversion, Sabotage and Infiltration in Jammu and Kashmir, Surendra Nath, former Director General of Police, Jammu and Kashmir, bluntly stated that it was a political decision to release Beg from imprisonment to ensure that those close to Abdullah could at least, by proxy, participate in the deliberations of the constituent assembly. In later years, Beg became Abdullah’s representative in talks with the Indian Government in 1974, clinching the 1975 accord between Abdullah and Indira Gandhi.
While Beg had expressed his support for Zahgir’s activities, there is no available evidence to suggest that Beg knew precisely what these specifically were. However, both of them were united in their struggle to get Jammu and Kashmir to secede from the Indian Union. The relationship was to prove highly beneficial for both of them. Al-Fatah had a major concern—it needed a legitimate political front as a cover. It is surmised that, with a nod from Beg, two senior Al-Fatah members, Abdul Rashid Dar and Mohammad Yousaf Mir, were put in charge of building the YML and the SF.
The political situation of the day required that Beg had access to Zahgir’s network while Zahgir needed access to Beg’s legitimacy. Moreover, after the arrests following the Islamia College robbery and the Nawakadal murder, a charge sheet was filed, and prosecution had been initiated. Zahgir had been named an offender in the murder, but he continued to evade arrest. A sympathetic lawyer was needed to defend Syed Sarwar, Mohammad Aslam Wani and Zahoor Shahdad, all of whom were behind bars. Afzal Beg was an excellent lawyer who had previously defended himself in the Kashmir Conspiracy case. He had his own reasons to partner with Al-Fatah, despite the obvious risks of associating with Zahgir.
Soon after the Pulwama robbery, Zahgir, Dar and Beg held another meeting, this time in the Chashm-e-Shahi gardens on the banks of the Dal Lake in Srinagar. This time Afzal Beg had matters other than the law to discuss. General Elections were due in 1971, and the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly elections were due in 1972. The 1967 elections had made it clear to Beg that the Plebiscite Front ran the risk of being marginalised.
In Srinagar, the police were about to make some headway in their hunt for Al-Fatah. The bank cashier told investigators that one of the robbers resembled a student he had known while he was a student at Srinagar’s Sri Pratap College in 1967. When police officials presented the cashier with photographs of students who had been at the college around that time, he quickly identified the man he knew as Farooq Ahmad Bhat. Bhat, it turned out, was well-known as he was the son of a prominent politician who had served in the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly.
Bhat’s involvement in the Hazratbal robbery intrigued investigators; he had been an outstanding student who was elected to head the students’ union. He was pro-India in his public pronouncements and decidedly secular in his personal life. Police officials promptly raided Bhat’s home, but he had fled by the time they got there. They then searched the room he had occupied at the medical college hostel, even though he had vacated the room sometime earlier. The police were in luck. Among his books, they found a small diary with seven names scribbled on one page.
As the year 1971 drew to a close with India’s decisive victory against Pakistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi capitalised on this, and, in the next few years, used it to negotiate a political settlement with Sheikh Abdullah. Abdullah eventually agreed to some limited political autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir, renouncing his demand for a plebiscite once and for all. As part of the political settlement, Chief Minister Sadiq’s successor in office, Syed Mir Qasim, launched a programme to win over the erstwhile members of Al-Fatah.
Pir Ghulam Hassan Shah, the officer who finally broke the Al-Fatah network, was now charged with winning its cadre over. In 1975, having been unconditionally pardoned as a result of the accord between Abdullah and Indira Gandhi, the bulk of Al-Fatah’s cadre went mainstream, forming the Inquilabi Mahaz, or Revolutionary Union, which supported the Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Abdullah agreement. The absolute collapse of this agreement and the grave error of entering into it is what still haunts the Indian state.
The 1975 Accord
Abdullah had killed two birds with this accord—he was back in power and the cadres of AI-Fatah had been pardoned. Zahgir, despite being tried for both murder and sedition, was released but certain key players like Fazl-ul-Haq Qureshi, Nazir Ahmad Wani, Hamidullah Bhat, Mohammad Shaban Vakil and Farooq Ahmad Bhat had rejected the deal. Despite holding out, Qureshi struck his own deal with Abdullah’s new government and was reinstated in his old government job, in 1980. This underscored the influence that both Abdullah and Beg exercised over Qureshi. Mirza Afzal Beg had faithfully protected his boys and delivered them their freedom.
With Abdullah in power, Al-Fatah lost its relevance but held on to the ethos and passion with which they functioned. Abdullah’s return to mainstream politics had obviated, for some time, the necessity for organisations like the Master Cell and Al-Fatah. It is interesting that till 1975, the National Conference had used mainstream politics to attract agitated youth and then dispatched them into the twilight zone inhabited by the Master Cell and Al-Fatah. Pakistan, because of its own internal turmoil, was unsure of what position to take on Kashmir.
Al-Fatah Rises from the Grave
Away from the spotlight of the insurgency, in the spring of 1988, eight years after his rehabilitation and while working in his government job, Fazl-ul-Haq Qureshi, the veteran of the struggles of the Master Cell and Al-Fatah, emerged from political hibernation to found the Armed Reserve Force, along with his close friend Abdul Majid Dar, who would go on to become Commander-in-Chief (Operations) in the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. Qureshi was once again detained under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act in February 1990 and released on June 3, 1992. Qureshi founded the PPF (People’s Political Front) on August 8, 1993.
Of those Al-Fatah members opposed to the Indira-Abdullah accord of 1975, the key ones—Nazir Ahmed Wani, Hamidullah Bhat and Mohammad Shaban Vakil—were party to the decision to revive Al-Fatah on September 14, 1991. Abu Khalid was made its new chief. Soon after its revival in the valley, the group claimed responsibility for the abduction of a French engineer, Silva Antonia, in the Doda district on October 14, 1991. Abu Khalid, talking of the need to revive the organisation, said that the old stalwarts had decided to make their contribution to the achievement of the right of self-determination. In October 1994, the SOG of the Jammu and Kashmir Police killed three Al-Fatah terrorists in a joint operation with the 26 Punjab Regiment at Koil Muqam and Malangam.
The moot question is—was the split in Al-Fatah a genuine split or was it an engineered split to once again send agent provocateurs or ‘transients’ into the ‘twilight zone’? The Al-Fatah story reveals the limitations of the process of political accommodation of violent secessionists and their induction into the mainstream.
The unanswered question is—were there channels of communication and control between the National Conference and the breakaway group of Al-Fatah after 1975? Was Fazl-ul-Qureshi this link? Was his action of founding the Armed Reserve Force, along with Abdul Majid Dar, and its absorption into the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, an act of extending the shadows of the ‘twilight zone’ into an overlap between Pakistan-controlled non-state actors? And in this saga, the final question that emerges is - was the air crash that killed Surendra Nath, a former IPS officer, and in 1994 the Governor of Punjab, actually a political assassination executed by the ISI? Governor Nath was in the crosshairs of the ISI because he had exposed their duplicity in the valley and in Punjab. Perhaps it is time for the Government of India to revisit his seminal report and implement his conclusions, which could still be valid.
All the militants of the Master Cell and Al-Fatah were beneficiaries of a political system that sought rapprochement, rather than the perpetual exile or neutralisation of those who transgressed its limits. It is obvious that rapprochement failed miserably in the valley and perhaps it failed because the doorkeepers to the ‘twilight zone’ wanted to keep the doors open for the continuing cross-fertilisation of newer ‘transients’ and never really wanted die rapprochement to succeed?
In Srinagar, on the night of February 3, 1967, a BSF constable was on duty at the Nawakadal Bridge. He was armed with a .303 army-issued rifle, loaded with five rounds in its chamber. Armed with daggers, Zahgir and Sarwar stabbed the BSF guard in the chest. Officials at the Maharaj Gunj Police Station registered a First Information Report recording the murder but had no information on who carried it out.
The police investigation of the Nawakadal murder moved no further even after Red Kashmir claimed responsibility for the murder in the next issue of its newsletter. Soon after the murder, Zahgir was arrested under the Defence of India rules because of intelligence reports that said that he had resumed his anti-India activities. However, the Jammu and Kashmir Police had no idea that Zahgir was involved in either the Red Kashmir posters or the Nawakadal murder.
What the police did learn, was that all of Al-Fatah’s senior members were close to a Srinagar paan shop owner, Mohammad Yusuf Mir. For all of Al-Fatah’s careful security measures, its top leadership had been careless enough to patronise this paan shop. Mir was arrested and interrogated for several days and finally, on January 16, 1971, he cracked and told police officials of the Al-Fatah safe-house at Barsoo. Deputy Inspector General of Police, Fir Ghulam Hassan Shah, personally led the raid, along with another officer who acquired much prominence thereafter—Deputy Superintendent of Police, AM Watali. Nazir Ahmad Wani and Farooq Bhat were both in the Barsoo safe-house when the police arrived and both opened fire with their revolvers but were arrested alive.
Farooq Abdullah was replaced by his brother-in-law GM Shah as Indira Gandhi was reluctant to follow Jagmohan’s advice of imposing Governor’s rule by Article 92 of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution. Indira Gandhi’s intention was apparently only to discipline the young Farooq, but his removal only gave Farooq’s popularity a boost, and it has been argued that Farooq’s ouster had led to the insurgency that devastated the state since 1989.
Kashmir had also begun to see the revival of Islamist political parties in the 1980s. The MUF (Muslim United Front) was established in August 1986 by a number of Muslim parties led by Jamaat-e-Islami (including the People’s Conference), the Ummat-e-Islami and the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen.
Simultaneously, Rajiv Gandhi worked towards the restoration of a constitutional government in Jammu and Kashmir. A dialogue with Farooq led to the Rajiv-Farooq accord in November 1986, but the Kashmiris viewed this initiative as a blow to their self-respect. Farooq lost much of the goodwill that had followed his ouster in 1983. By 1987, the stage was set for a political confrontation between the Jamaat and the National Conference; the Jamaat had, by then, emerged as the leader of the MUF under the leadership of Syed AH Shah Geelani.
He had steadily worked towards building its influence, since 1979, through madrasas which were allowed to proliferate by Sheikh Abdullah. Apparently, his aim was to keep New Delhi on the edge by keeping alive the possibility of religious revival, in case it interfered with his government’s freedom within Jammu and Kashmir. These developments hadn’t gone unnoticed in Pakistan, where the military was back in power, after dismissing Bhutto in 1977.
In May 1965, in the run-up to Operation Gibraltar, the subversive group of Hayat Mir, an affiliate of the Master Cell, had carried out a savage terrorist attack. It was also the place where an old prison mate of theirs, Salim Jehangir Khan, a former Pakistani covert operative, had opened a poultry farm. This poultry farm would serve as a cover for Al-Fatah’s training activities.
Governor Nath was in the crosshairs of the ISI because he had exposed their duplicity in the valley and in Punjab. Perhaps it is time for the Government of India to revisit his seminal report and implement his conclusions/ which could still be valid.
The Punjab Police had ruled out sabotage of Nath’s aircraft, but civil aviation officials are still sceptical about the police’s explanation. Both the pilots of the Beechcraft were highly-trained and experienced, and the plane had so far logged zero-defect flights. The Punjab Government’s inquiry to probe the cause of the crash was not conclusive nor was any forensic investigation undertaken. Nath became Punjab’s Governor in August 1991 when it was the most sought-after seat in the country. The state was under President’s rule and terrorism was at its worst. By putting to use his stints as a troubleshooter in Mizoram and Kashmir and as an advisor to Arjun Singh when he was Punjab Governor, Nath succeeded where his predecessors had failed.