Every year, nearly one crore pilgrims visit the shrine of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi in Reasi district.
On June 9, about 80 km from the shrine, a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims was shot at by militants, resulting in the driver losing control of the vehicle which fell into a gorge.
Nine pilgrims, including a two-year-old, died in the incident.
The bus was returning from Reasi’s Shiv Kohri shrine and heading to Katra, a town synonymous with the hill shrine of Mata Vaishno Devi. “Ninety five per cent of those who come to Vaishno Devi also visit Shiv Kohri,” said Rakesh Wazir, president of a hotels and restaurants association in Katra.
For a brief while, Wazir said, the Reasi attack scared off pilgrims. “There was a massive dip in pilgrims in the first days after the attack. It was primarily because it was wrongly projected in the media that the attack took place in Katra,” he said.
Ten days after the attack on the bus of pilgrims, Reasi police arrested a 45-year-old man from neighbouring Rajouri district.
Identified as Hakam Din, the police said, he had sheltered and fed the militants involved in the Reasi bus attack. For this job, police said, militants had paid Din, a member of the nomadic Bakerwal community, Rs 6,000.
“The person also acted as a guide and helped them reach the spot of the incident,” the Reasi police had said in a statement on June 19. “The arrested person is a prime militant associate who helped the terrorists in the execution of the attack.”
‘Just for money’
Investigations also provided security agencies a much-needed perspective on the modus operandi of the Pakistani militants behind the attack.
“Hakam Din was not a suspect in our records. We later came to know that he has had a history of sheltering militants in the past,” said another senior police official in Jammu, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He was an old asset for the militants but we did not know that. During interrogation, he revealed that the group of three militants visited his hut thrice and had food there.”
According to the officer, Din was not motivated to help the militants by any ideological inclination towards militancy. “He did it just for money,” the officer added. “The militants had categorically told Din that they had come to attack the Yatris.”
Din’s arrest, the officer said, revealed many aspects of the strategy adopted by militants active in the Jammu region.
“In the past, whenever militants would come to a house, they would demand food and shelter at gunpoint,” the officer said. “In many cases, they would extort money and harass women as well. This would frustrate the houseowner, who would then inform or provide intel on militants to the security forces.”
This time, however, human intelligence is lacking. This is primarily because the militants are not knocking on the doors of random people. “They only go to their assets,” the officer said. “Even if they demand food from some random villagers at gunpoint, they seek only raw material. They don’t take cooked food as they suspect it can be poisoned.”
“Secondly, this is the first time we are seeing that militants are giving huge amounts of money to guides like Din,” the officer added.
The support network of militants in Jammu also appears to have become formidably clandestine. Take the case of Din. According to the investigations, Din has no idea of the other guides or supporters of the militants he had helped.
“After they carried out the attack, he just dropped them at a particular spot,” the police officer said. “He doesn’t know who led them to safe haven from there. As a result, the investigations have more or less stopped at Din and there is no other lead, so far, about who others supported them or provided them help. It is a dead end in the investigations.”
A deliberate strategy
Two days after the Reasi bus attack, a gunfight broke out between militants in Kathua’s Hiranagar area, resulting in the killing of two Pakistani militants and a CRPF soldier. Towards the west, Kathua is on the international border separating India from mainland Pakistan.
In July, militants struck twice within a week – an army vehicle in the remote Machedi area of Billawar in Kathua district and a search party of army and police in Desa area of Jammu’s Doda district were ambushed.
Five soldiers were killed in the Machedi attack, while four soldiers and a policeman were killed in Doda district.
“There is a deliberate strategy on the part of Pakistan to shift militancy to Jammu,” said a senior police officer in Jammu, requesting not to be identified. “Due to the dense terrain and difficult topography of Jammu division, they have realised that militants have more survivability here than in Kashmir.”
As Scroll travelled to Kathua and Reasi districts, we found civilians on the edge and the security establishment grappling with half-a-dozen militant groups, who stay below the radar, are flush with funds and sophisticated weapons, and rarely make mistakes.
The terrain
Unlike Kashmir Valley, where most of the population is clustered on vast patches of land, villages and settlements in Jammu are dispersed across a treacherous, hilly terrain.
In some districts of Jammu, a single village can be spread over a mountain or many hillocks, with little or no road connectivity between houses.
The security establishment has admitted that the region is now the operating ground of six or seven militant groups.
“There were three to four groups of terrorists earlier but after the recent infiltration, the number has gone up to around six to seven groups,” Anand Jain, additional director general of police, Jammu zone told reporters after the death of three militants in an encounter with security forces in the Gandoh area of Doda district in June.
Given its dense vegetation and arduous topography, Doda is one of the remotest areas of Jammu region, which are difficult to man or patrol. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, a surge in militancy in Doda led to massacres of minority Hindus in the region.
Unlike Kathua, Doda does not share a border with Pakistan.
Well-trained and armed
The militants, by all accounts, seem to be well-trained and equipped with sophisticated weapons.
For example, in the Hiranagar and Gandoh encounters, security forces recovered three US-made M4 Carbine rifles from the killed militants. “The militants look well-trained and they don’t make any casual mistakes, like using mobile phones,” the officer explained.
With such tactics adopted by the militants, the biggest challenge for the security forces in the Jammu region is the dense foliage and treacherous topography. “Even if there is an input about some militants in an area, it takes security forces some four hours to reach that spot,” the officer said. “In that time, militants can easily shift to another mountain.”
In the case of the Reasi bus attack, the police said, the militants shifted to a neighbouring district and have been untraceable so far.
To counter the challenge posed by the topography, the security forces have increased the patrolling of troops in the region and also strengthened village defence guards in the vulnerable villages. “With the manpower we have, these are the tactics which we can resort to. Given the vastness of the area and the density of forests, securing the long stretch of roads in the higher reaches remains a challenge,” the officer added.
At present, the officer explained, the security forces are working on improving the response time to an attack. “Sooner we are able to react, higher the chances of nabbing the terrorists.”
