Blood Relations

In If the bomb blast on Srinagar’s Residency Road shocked the nation, it also brought into focus the perils facing journalists in the Valley. MUZAMIL JALEEL, who has been reporting from there for the past eight years, writes on what it is like to tread the razor’s edge

I am scared. The bodies haunt my dreams and it is extremely difficult to forget the faces that vanished within seconds. It’s hard to erase the memories of blood spilled over the road as if somebody wanted to create a painting — just in red.

Today, I am haunted by a new image, a dismembered human limb dangling from an electrical wire above my head, dripping blood. I don’t know if it’s the immediacy or the jolt of yet another close shave with death that’s affecting me so much. For, the deadly blast on Srinagar’s Residency Road, which claimed 16 lives including photojournalist Pradeep Bhatia’s, was nothing new. It is part of the ongoing terror campaign in the Valley, and perhaps the newest reprise of the story that I and other journalists like me have been writing for years.

For eight years, I have been reporting death almost every day, covering bloody encounters, gathering witness accounts, meeting victims, the affected families and writing their accounts to chronicle the horrors of Kashmir.

In the lull between these encounters all of us (the journalists, that is) simply wait for the next tragedy to happen. Like vultures we then swoop on the spot, into that by-now familiar environ of death, its smell, its sound and its touch. Death has become the most important ingredient of our professional as well as personal lives in Kashmir. Keeping a tab on the body-count each evening has become an essential routine — the way a shopkeeper carefully counts his cash before locking up.

When I started as a cub reporter every assignment was traumatic. It was difficult to eat, sleep and drink. It seemed to me as if I was continuously swimming in a sea of blood. But then after some time, the daily dose of violence inoculated me against all feeling, all pain. Twenty deaths a day became routine, and individual human life began losing its news value. ‘‘No one killed in Valley today’’ instead became worthy of a headline. Uncomfortably I thought, I had become numb.

But this blast on August 9, has pierced through that hard shell of emotional immunity. This time it was different because death came so much closer: a few feet away from where I stood, I saw friends and fellow scribes blown to smithereens, flung high in the air like bloody rag dolls. The authorised explanation was that the bomb was a trap for the security forces and that the journalists were caught in between, but I don’t believe that. Sure, it was not a direct attack on us, but certainly the perpetrators knew there was a likelihood of us being the victims. It was a typical strategy to use violence as communication. Our own penchant for death and bloodshed had caught up with us this time.

Violent deaths always make big news, and if a few of the victims were journalists, so much the better. The perpetrators were aware that a huge media party was camping at Hotels Ahdoos and Broadway, just a few dozen yards away from the site of the bombing. First, they detonated a small bomb, in which no one was hurt. But the sound of the blast was enough to empty the streets within seconds. Actually, this was an invitation for us to rush to the spot. As the police reached there to investigate so did the scribes to capture the moment, not knowing that a few seconds away, a far more horrible event awaited. Within seven minutes the improvised explosive device went off.

It was his sheer ill-luck that Pradeep Bhatia was hit by shrapnel straight in his heart, while many others escaped without a scratch. The AFP photographer Tauseef Mustafa had just left the spot to take pictures of soldiers taking position. If he had delayed another minute near that explosive-laden ambassador, he too would be dead today. But his trauma is that Pradeep had hugged him just a minute before his death. ‘‘I can’t believe that he is dead. One minute he hugged me, a huge grin on his face and then next minute he was lying there in a pool of blood,’’ he says. ‘‘I feel as if the shrapnels are still following me. I feel the pricks all over my body while I am asleep.’’

The Asian Age photographer H. U. Naqash was just a metre away from the car. He was saved because a parked auto-rickshaw took the entire barrage of splinters. But he was still injured when a metal shard bypassed all obstacles and blew a huge hole in his thigh. ‘‘Everything turned dark and I ceased to think or feel for a few seconds. I did not even hear the sound of the blast,’’ he said later while he was recuperating at home. ‘‘It was like a flash of lightning. I felt the sky has come down over us. I thought everything was over’’.

In his career of covering the decade-long violence, Naqash has had a close brush with death at least five times. The last time was when he was in the local office of the British Broadcasting Corporation office and a bomb went off, killing fellow photojournalist Mushtaq Ali. Naqash and the then BBC Srinagar correspondent Yousuf Jameel were injured. That blast damaged his eardrums.

Another time, on November 3, 1999, Naqash along with two others was stranded inside the Public Relations Office of the Army’s 15 Corps here during a Fidayeen attack in which the Army PRO Major P. Purushottam was killed. Naqash and the others owe their lives to Major Purushottam, who pushed them into the toilet for safety but got killed himself outside in his office. Naqash recalls their 12-hour-long ordeal, waiting for death to come. ‘‘Trapped in the toilet, we felt somebody will soon barge in and shoot us too,’’ he recollects.

But the most traumatic memory for Naqash, which also shook the collective psyche of the journalist community here, was the horrific death of a young colleague Mushtaq Ali. It was September 10, 1995, Naqash recalls, when a veiled woman visited their office.‘‘She had a book parcel in her hand which she wanted to present to Yousuf Jameel. She handed it over to me only after I assured her that it would be delivered untouched to him,’’ he said. ‘‘After some time Jameel came, and Mushtaq followed him inside the office. I too went in and soon the office boy entered the room with the gift in his hand. I gave it to Jameel Sahib. He opened it a bit but got distracted by a phone call. Mushtaq was curious so he took the parcel. The bomb exploded in his hands, making a sieve of his body. Again, both Jameel Sahib and I were injured,’’ he recalls.

The bomb had been meant for Yousuf Jameel, a high-profile local journalist whose objective reporting had rubbed many people the wrong way. But the message missed its mark and took the life of 30-year-old Mushtaq Ali. Ali, who had made it to AFP and ANI after much toil, had planned to get engaged soon. Six years after his death, his five sisters and old parents have yet to recover from the shock. In Mushtaq’s honour we renamed the Press Enclave, Mushtaq Enclave. That engraved plaque greets us every day and reminds us of the sacrifice he made in the cause of reporting the truth about Kashmir. It also renews the fears that we are treading on a razor’s edge while performing our daily duties.

Ali, however, was not the first to be caught in this maelstrom. In April 1991, when militancy was at its peak, unidentified gunmen barged into the office of the Alsafa newspaper and shot dead its outspoken editor Mohammad Shaban Vakil. Though the killing is still wrapped in mystery, many believe the provocation was his famous column — Kadva Sach (The bitter truth). His death came as a warning for the local scribes to ‘‘discipline’’ themselves and only follow the dictates of the various warring factions. The Government censorship was not always direct, though the papers were forced to stop their publication many a times. Often under pressure from the counter-insurgent brigades who are ruthless and brutal.

The militants were equally unsubtle. ‘‘Manu un shaya karien (Reproduce exactly)’’ was the order that accompanied each of their press releases. Local editors recollect that at times even headlines and column size were dictated with the press statements. Scribes were kidnapped and threatened hundreds of times and even the newspaper offices and printing presses were ransacked and bombed. The Urdu daily, Srinagar Times has had to close down its publication 10 times over the years. Under pressure from both Government and militants.

Two other leading Urdu dailies of the Valley, Daily Aftab and Alsafa, were forced to stop their publication at least six times during these years. There were dozens of grenade attacks by militants on newspaper offices, who wanted either enough print space to project their viewpoint or sought censorship on news from the rival groups. Labelling a scribe to be ‘‘anti-movement’’ was tantamount to death sentence.
Once a large group of journalists was taken hostage by a counter-insurgent leader Azad Nabi in Anantnag, and later the anti-militancy Ikhwan group too kidnapped scribes. The reason: They too wanted to be heard and have their statements published prominently, otherwise they would resort to guns and grenades. During the past two years, there has been no direct threat to any scribe, but writing boldly and bluntly without any fear of reprisals is still a far-fetched dream in Kashmir. Instead, caution verging on self-censorship has become a rule of survival.

Personally, I have never been harmed physically in my eight years of reporting. But the daily grind of violence has changed me in other ways. Often I cannot sleep, and I cannot prevent that knot of tension, the thump of fear, each time the phone rings late at night.

The recent blast has been much more traumatic because unlike other similar incidents, the faces were those of colleagues with whom I had worked for years, the bodies flying in pieces in the air were of friends whom I would meet almost everyday. The evening after the blast, I was so scared that while driving home, I stopped at least 10 times. Every ditch on the road seemed as if it camouflaged a land mine. Every shadow loomed like a menacing figure. And once I reached home and tried to sleep, the image of the bloody limb on the electric wire and the bits of bodies strewn across the lane would not let me close my eyes. The screams of wounded colleagues rang in my ears. Finally, I found oblivion with a sleeping pill.

But this tragedy has also brought us together. In the hospital corridor that day we cried together like a family, hugging each other to make sure we were still alive. For the first time, journalists from Kashmir and Delhi were bound by a common suffering. The way Star TV correspondent Barkha Dutt cried with anguish and concern for the injured local photographers, touched everybody. She literally dragged two local photographers out as they emerged from within the dust of the blast amidst indiscriminate gunshots fired by panic-stricken soldiers and policemen. Death and bloodshed can desensitise you, but when tragedy comes home, it makes you much more dependent on human bonds. We have lost another colleague, and we have returned to our routine of writing, breathing and sleeping death. But somehow, the personal loss has made us stronger, more determined.

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