Value my Severed Head_world

Value my Severed Head

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It was difficult not to feel a misplaced but grotesquely perverse sense of pride following the discovery that my severed head was of more value to the militants than that of a government cabinet minister, and also worth marginally more than that of one of Kashmir\'s most feared men, S, head of the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB). It was also difficult not to feel anxious about whether there would really be any need to use the machine gun in my bedroom, placed there, so I was told, in case militants stormed the house in the middle of the night.

However, the greatest struggle was trying to comprehend what the hell I was doing as a personal guest of S, drinking tea with him on the expansive lawn of his house in Srinagar, Kashmir. This was a man who not only had the authority and power to have someone driven over the edge of a cliff, no questions asked, but who had also, so I was told, had invoked the questionable privilege a number of times.

Rationally of course I knew how I had got there, picked up in an armour plated Ambassador from the airport. But the unexpected events of the previous few months had unfurled at such a breakneck speed I was still reeling and it was hardly surprising that I felt bemused at finding myself in such surroundings and wondering what kind of kick there was from an AK 47

I had arrived in India about six months earlier with the aim of making a photographic record of the life that teems in and around New Delhi station and also drawn by the curiosity of watching an Indian friend from London, Sukhi, find himself a wife. As he crept past 30 years of age his mother and sisters descended on him like birds pecking at freshly sown seeds pointing to his thinning scalp as immutable evidence that if he did not find a wife soon he was doomed to live a forlorn and lonely life bereft of any consolation. Of course I attempted to convince him otherwise but discovered I was not only wrangling with a friend but centuries of Hindu tradition too. It was no contest. Unsurprisingly he did find a wife and surprisingly so did I when I wasn\'t even looking.

However, that\'s another story, but it was thanks to my newly acquired brother in law, Naveen, and his mysterious IB contacts, that I was now pondering the terrain that bordered S\'s wire ringed garden to see if it was possible for mujhadeen to creep up on the house undetected, while listening to tales of their moral depravity. For instance the militant who gave an unwitting child a bag loaded with a bomb and directed him to a restaurant where it went off causing a massacre, blowing the child to bits too. According to S the militants were as much in interested in financial gain as they were political and religious gain: "They have an extensive wireless network throughout the region and when they have made a killing we listen in to them chattering about how much they have made."

This is where my head came into it. Apparently Americans top the list with a value of one lakh rupees, approximately ?,500. They gained top ranking because of the FBI\'s insistence on placing Osama Bin Laden number on one its most wanted list. Europeans came in at 50,000 rupees close to ?00 and government ministers and S were worth around 35,000 rupees. The values then descended on a sliding scale according to the rank of the victim, with a policeman worth about 7000 rupees or a mere ?00 or so and ordinary Hindu\'s bringing up the rump.

When S was telling me this I was quietly sceptical. After working as a business journalist for long enough to learn that most people in a position of power or authority have an agenda I realised that he may have been hoping that I would take the bait and scuttle back to the UK with tales of nefarious deeds financed from the mosques of Birmingham, Leicester and London. After all he was adamant that funding for the militants came from three main sources, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

However, one week later I visited a newly acquired family member, Detective Superintendent Kailash Chibber, CID, Jammu - Naveen certainly had contacts - who not only corroborated but also elaborated. The militants families in Pakistan received a one off payment when their kin went into Kashmir and their tour of duty lasted for about 18 months. Any killings, kidnappings, decapitations earned them bonus payments and if they survived they also received another payment. This information was extracted from captured militants many of whom, according to Chibber, were weary of the militant life and wanted to give it up.

Chibber lived in a large compound near Jammu railway station, exclusively for police officers and their families. The day after arriving a rapid \'thak thak thak\' sound came from the direction of the station. Four militants had got off a train as it was pulling in and machine-gunned seven people waiting on the platform before they were in turn killed. The entrances to the compound were quickly sealed off and people were prevented from entering while police rushed out. It was then that I understood why Chibber\'s wife chattered incessantly, she was not an incorrigable gossip, she was actually very frightened and understood only too well that she and her family were prime targets.

S, however, made light of the militants. He told Naveen, my wife Shabnam and I not to get too close to army vehicles or personnel as they were most often the targets and also to get back before darkness descended. This was not as easy as it sounds given that the presence of the Indian army in Kashmir, and particularly Srinagar, is so ubiquitous that it resembles an army of occupation. This impression is reinforced by the atmosphere that pervades Srinagar, it\'s like a Pakistani town. There are no Hindu temples or Sikh gurdwara\'s, no English, Hindi or Punjabi writing on the side of buses or outside shops, nothing that bears witness to it being an Indian city, only mosques and Urdu, framed pictures of anonymous and fierce looking mullahs and the cries of the mussein calling the populace to prayer while the Indian soldiers look on nervously. There is the Hindu Shankarachrya Temple, dedicated to Shiva and said to have been built in 2,600 BC, which sits on top of a 1,000 foot hill that overlooks the city. However, given its prominence both symbolically and physically, one side of the hill virtually drops into the back garden of chief minister Farookh Abdullah and garden\'s of other prominent dignitaries, it is heavily guarded and not accessed easily.

Bolstered by the presence of our own personal bodyguard, Gurinder, who alarmingly appeared very sleepy for most of the time, the day after arriving we ventured down to the side of the famous Dal Lake. Like bees to honey, we hired a shikara to glide across the placid waters and surprisingly encountered a handful of Western tourists staying in houseboats. I was surprised to see them given that Kashmir has been dubbed the most dangerous place in the world but perhaps that was part of the attraction and perhaps they would have been surprised to discover that some of the men who plied their trade on the shikara\'s, according to S were also local militants. During the course of his explanation to me about the Kashmir situation he explained that broadly speaking there were two types of militants, the indigenous

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