24 November 2002 | The Washington Post | Page A32
By Rama Lakshmi
SRINAGAR, India — The three young guests left as soon as the wedding feast ended. It was not safe to be out late on the streets of Srinagar. As they sped along on their motor scooter, relatives said, the men were stopped at a security checkpoint outside the city and an officer of India’s feared counterinsurgency police, the Special Operations Group, emerged from the shadows and began to question them. That was not a good sign.
When they did not arrive home in the Srinagar suburb of Soura that night three years ago, their families went to the local police station. Although the motor scooter was parked outside the station, the relatives could find out nothing about the men’s fate. Finally, after a week, news arrived: Someone had found a body in a jute sack that had floated to the surface of a nearby lake.
“It was my brother Nazir’s tortured corpse,” said Farooq Ahmed Gilkar, 50. The bodies of the other men were found elsewhere two days later.
Known as the “triple murder case,” the killings became the focal point of surging Kashmiri anger that summer against the Special Operations Group, or SOG. The widows of the three men and a prisoner who said he saw police torturing Nazir Gilkar filed a legal complaint, which is being heard now in a Kashmir state court. The main police officer accused is still at large, and another has pleaded insanity.
Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, has been the focus of a 13-year revolt by Islamic separatists backed by neighboring Pakistan. India has tried to crush the insurgency by sending thousands of troops to the Himalayan region and has been accused of running roughshod over civil liberties.
The SOG is perhaps the most controversial force in Kashmir. Comprised of local police, village informers and former militants, the group is accused of detaining people without cause and indulging in extortion, custodial killings and forced disappearances, according to the Public Commission on Human Rights in Kashmir.
That may now change. The group is under fire from a new coalition government that took over the state this month. Led by the Kashmir-based People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the government has promised a “healing touch” with the people and vowed to rein in the SOG, investigate killings of people in police custody, withdraw a tough federal anti-terror law and open talks with militant groups. Perhaps the most controversial promise is the one to make the SOG more accountable.
“The SOG became a law unto itself. They are killers. Can we let them go scot-free?” asked Mehbooba Mufti, deputy leader of the PDP and daughter of the new chief minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.
The SOG men were given cash rewards and promoted when they killed militants, making service in the group a fast lane for ambitious officers and turning the lower-rung officers into “bounty hunters,” according to Pervez Imroz, a human rights lawyer in Kashmir who has brought hundreds of cases against the SOG.
“There is no accountability in SOG. It is banditry in uniform,” said Ravi Nair, director of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center in New Delhi. “But it is not easy to put the genie back into the lamp. It’s now a Frankenstein.”
The PDP’s promise of reforms has sent shivers down the SOG apparatus. Once regarded as an elite police wing, it has become demoralized, and security officials say that under the new government, it has become inactive and no new suspects have been detained. On Friday, the government sacked the entire network of village informers called “special police officers” who worked with the SOG.
But many admit that the PDP may find it very difficult to dislodge the force and may be able to make only cosmetic changes.
The Indian army chief in Kashmir recently defended the SOG, saying it played a crucial role in India’s fight against militants by giving valuable intelligence on militant hide-outs and helping with cordon-and-search operations.
“When you fight an urban guerrilla warfare,” said a senior police official in the state who worked closely with the SOG, “you need a committed force” that is “flexible, quick, ready to risk social stigma and ready to die.” He said that sending the SOG officers back to the regular police barracks would make them easy targets for militant groups looking for revenge.
Questions about the SOG’s future are part of a debate in India over some of the tactics the country has used in dealing with armed insurgency over the past two decades, first in Punjab state and now in Kashmir. K.P.S. Gill, a retired police officer who is credited with clamping down on Sikh separatist violence in Punjab by creating a precursor to the SOG about 10 years ago, charged Sayeed of bringing “sentimentality” into his “perspectives on terrorism.”
“You cannot negotiate with terror on your knees,” Gill wrote in the South Asia Intelligence Review.
But a young Kashmiri police officer in Srinagar, who worked with the SOG for over a year, said he is still “filled with shame and guilt” when he remembers his association with the group’s operations. “I know you have to fight this war ruthlessly, but interrogation at SOG usually meant third degree torture, search operations meant humiliating people,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Indian officials are trying to work out a way to make changes without losing the gains made by the SOG. One official suggested that suspects be questioned by interrogation cells with representatives from the army, border police, state police and intelligence agencies.
But for the widow of Ghulam Masood Mattoo, who was killed with Gilkar, it is a battle that does not end with changing the SOG.
“They killed him once that night,” said Gulshan Mattoo, 27, her 7-year-old son at her side. “But I have died again and again every day since then. I would find my peace only if the killers are punished, no matter what it takes.”
© 2002 The Washington Post Company