KUKKA PARREY

1.         Parrey, known as the “king of counter-insurgency” operations in the Kashmir Valley, was credited with having broken the back of the militancy in the Valley in the mid-1990s. A militant who received training in Pakistan, Parrey surrendered to the Indian security forces in 1993. Along with some other surrendered militants, he then formed a pro-government militia – the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen – with the blessings of the Indian government. “Friendlies”, as the Indian soldiers called these “pro-India militants”, gave the intelligence network and the counter-insurgency operation in the Valley a big boost.

 

“It was the logic of setting a thief to catch a thief that lay behind the Indian army’s strategy of using the surrendered militants” to fight the Hizbul Mujahideen and other Pakistan-supported militant groups in the Valley, a senior army officer told this correspondent some months back. After all, these were once militants, many of them armed and trained in Pakistan. “They knew who was who in the various militant groups and understood the mind of the militant far better than the armed forces did.”

 

2.         The Ikhwanis are mainly ethnic Kashmiris with a deep hatred for the Islamist militants and their political backers, the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the early 1990s, militant groups such as the pro-Pakistan and Islamist Hizbul Mujahideen had trained their guns on such groups as the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and al-Jehad. Scores of militants from these groups were killed not by guns held by the Indian security forces but by weapons wielded by fraternal militant groups. Many of the Ikhwanis were those who had been at the receiving end of the fratricidal fighting.

 

3.         Now with backing from the Indian forces, they went after the Hizbul Mujahideen and the other militants. The Ikhwanis were particularly successful in marginalizing the Hizbul in northern Kashmir. Several surrendered militants have also been absorbed into the police as well as units that were specifically fighting militancy in J&K. It was to the credit of the Ikhwanis led by Parrey that militancy declined in the mid-1990s, enabling India to hold elections to the J&K state assembly in 1996. Parrey formed a political party, the Awami League, contested the election and won, becoming a legislator in the state assembly.

 

4.         Parrey inspired many militants to switch sides and cooperate with the security forces. “The power that Parrey and his boys came to wield and the new-found legitimacy they got by strutting around with the Indian forces and flaunting their weapons in the open was undoubtedly a big attraction for several militants who were fed up with life underground and disillusioned with ‘the cause’,” a Kashmiri police officer pointed out. Consequently, hundreds of militants surrendered to the Indian forces.

 

5.         The Indian forces have used the Ikhwanis for information about the militants and their movements as well as to carry out counter-insurgency operations. What is more, they used them to terrorize the local population as well. A mid-level army officer admitted to this correspondent that he had used the Ikhwanis to persuade “locals who had filed baseless complaints and cases against his men to withdraw their charges”. The officer said he was “not alone in using the Ikhwanis in this manner … This is a dirty war. The enemy is not fighting according to civilized rules of armed conflict. The surrendered militants were willing and able to give as dirtily as they got from their erstwhile comrades,” he added. But while the Ikhwanis proved useful in killing hundreds of militants, their use came with a very high price. They added a new, complicating dimension to the militancy. They unleashed a new wave of terror on the Kashmiri people.

 

6.         Not only did they train their guns on militants but they did so against unarmed civilians as well. They were brutal in their methods to elicit information from the locals. They used their weapons to fight the militancy but gradually they used it to settle personal scores, to extort and to further their individual interests. “And since they were fighting militancy, they would get away with anything,” said the police officer. Several killings, where the identity of the killers was not clear or where the motive for a massacre was hard to explain, came to be blamed on the Ikhwanis. The terror unleashed by the Ikhwanis has been so serious that many Kashmiris say they fear them more than they do the militants or the security forces. “Undermined both by public dislike of their ruthless tactics as well as Islamist propaganda campaigns, they found the political establishment arrayed against them,” wrote Praveen Swami in The Hindu. They were stripped of official cover in 1998. That led to another spate of bloodletting, with the militants gunning Ikhwanis down for cooperating with the Indian forces. Hundreds of Ikhwanis are said to have been killed by militants since 1998.

 

7.         The role of the Ikhwanis in turning the tide against militancy was substantial. But their contribution has not been acknowledged enough by Delhi, prompting some to accuse India of not doing enough to protect its own in the Valley. All the men of a village in Ganderbal near Srinagar were pro-government militants. Militants swooped down on that village one night and wiped out its men. Its residents recall the contribution of their men to fighting militancy and point out with bitterness that India had left them unarmed to fend for themselves. Several Ikhwanis, discontented with their lot, told this correspondent in December 2000 that they had ended up falling between two stools. While Kashmiris reviled them as “renegades”, the Indian armed forces had never treated them with respect, never fully trusted them. “Hundreds of our cadre laid down their lives for India, but we have received only harassment and insults in return,” 26-year-old Khurshid, Parrey’s son, told Swami.

 

8.         While some in the Valley describe the pro-government militias as “misguided policy”, the strategy, notwithstanding its flaws, did contribute to the decline of militancy. Besides, as one officer in the Border Security Force (BSF) said, the creation of the pro-government militias was the “best thing to do with a militant”. “Rehabilitation of these militants rarely works,” he pointed out. “They return to militancy soon after they are freed.”

 

9.         A senior army officer in Jammu said: “If I have to put a militant through the police or judicial process, it is a waste of time, energy and effort. I have to put five of my men to guard the militant, find a vehicle with armed guards to take him to Srinagar or Jammu and, after all this, he will either escape or walk free, only to surface again as a militant. “It makes more sense to put a bullet through his neck,” he said. “The [alternative] to that is that we use them to fight the militants.”

“The policy became a problem when the surrendered militants forgot they were once fighting the state and with considerable blood on their hands. Some had murdered policemen. They wanted bulletproof cars and armed guards and fancy salaries,” recalled the BSF officer, adding that these were “unreasonable demands” that could not be met. “They were just terrorists, after all.”

 

10.       The story of Kuka Parrey is perhaps the story of several others in the Valley. They might have switched sides, but that did not necessarily mean they had mended their ways. At the end of the day, they were “just terrorists after all” and ended up living and dying by the gun.

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