Monitoring Desk: Pahalgam attack left 26 tourists dead and mysteries behind the incident. However, reading the book “The Meadow,” written by British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, can help peeling off the layers of deceit, falsehoods, and manipulation to reveal the startling truth of how Indian intelligence agencies ruthlessly operate just to defame Pakistan as a “terrorist state”.
Six western tourists and their two guides were kidnapped in the Liddarwat area of Pahalgam in the Anantnag district of Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir, on the night of July 4-5, 1995. According to the Indian government, the kidnappers demanded the release of 21 Pakistani and Kashmiri militants, including Masood Azhar, however, the investigation of Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark suggests otherwise, claiming that the Indian intelligence agencies staged the incident. Till now, the Indian government has failed to reject claims of both journalists, although the book was published in January 2012.
Norwegian Hans Christian Ostrø was beheaded on 13 August 1995. American John Childs managed to escape on 17 August, while the rest have never been found. Four months later, the Indian government announced that the Al-Faran team, led by an Afghan war veteran, Hamid al-Turki, who had kidnapped the tourists, had been killed in an encounter with the army. The Indian government claimed a Pakistani militant had confessed that the militants had murdered the four trekkers and buried them in Anantnag’s remote Magam village.
“The Meadow” exposes deceit, falsehoods, and manipulation and reveals the astounding truth of what happened to the hostages. After 100 plus interviews with families of the hostages, diplomats, policemen, bureaucrats, intelligence officials, and former counter-insurgents in Kashmir, the authors found the truth that the hostages were not killed by Al-Faran or Harkat, but by Nabi Azad or Alpha, a dreaded counter-insurgent of Indian intelligence agencies who operated from the mountain villages of Anantnag and worked with the anti-militancy Special Task Force (STF) of Kashmir Police, intelligence agencies, and the Rashtriya Rifles of the Indian army.
Scott-Clark and Levy show that all along, the central government and intelligence agencies knew about the whereabouts of the hostages in a remote mountain valley in Warwan. The government, meanwhile, continued telling the press, foreign diplomats, and families that it knew nothing and was trying its best to find the hostages. Scott-Clark and Levy recreate the secret talks between Rajinder Tikoo, an Inspector General of Kashmir police, and an Al-Faran negotiator. The prolonged hostage crisis served a strategic purpose: to show the Western powers that Pakistan was behind the insurgency in Kashmir.
Most members of the Al-Faran, including its leader Hamid Turki, were killed in an army ambush in Dabran village in Anantnag in November, finishing every chance of surfacing the truth about who kidnapped the tourists and who was behind Turki. The investigation of British journalists claimed that the killing of tourists was inevitable, so “No one could risk the hostages being released and complaining of collusion, having seen uniforms and STF jeeps, possibly hearing things they understood.
Written with access to diaries, letters, unprocessed film, personal recollections, drawing on classified police reports and secret tape recordings of Indian government negotiations, as well as interviews with the jihadis themselves and excerpts from their journals, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s book is a real-life thriller, a startling but compelling story told from the perspective of all involved.
Packed with explosive revelations, The Meadow provides the first definitive answers as to what happened to the missing backpackers, revealing how the kidnapping of July 1995 changed the dynamics of the operations of Indian intelligence agencies.
