Portrait of a Killer: An interview with Bitta Karate

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) summoned two Kashmiri separatist leaders to its headquarters in Delhi on May 29 in connection with a case related to the funding of terror and subversive activities in Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader Farooq Ahmad Dar alias ‘Bitta Karate’ and Javed Ahmed Baba alias ‘Ghazi’ of Tehreek-e-Hurriyat were asked to bring bank and property documents, besides other documents, before the NIA team that had questioned them here for four consecutive days earlier this month.

The NIA grilling will also address Karate’s on-camera extra-judicial confession to me that he had “killed” 20 people, and that he would have ‘killed’ his own brother, and even his own mother if he had been ordered to do so by his Area Commander Ishfaq Majid Wani. Karate’s admission, that he always blindly obeyed orders while killing the individuals marked for extermination; and that he himself had no way of knowing whether the persons he was killing were ‘guilty or innocent’ was chilling. More than his words, it was the conviction in his voice, and the convincing spontaneity of his response that revealed that he was not speaking under duress, even though he was in custody in Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu.

It would not have been possible for me to be able to interview Karate without the extraordinary access granted, especially by top sources in the establishment. It is telling that I was not briefed very much about Dar (nicknamed Bitta Karate for his brown belt), before the interview actually occurred. It was left for me to discover for myself the kind of character I was dealing with. It worked better that way. The interview was a smooth-flowing conversation in which Karate revealed that he felt betrayed by Pakistan which had assured him (during his training in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) that once internal disturbances were triggered off by the JKLF— of which Karate was then merely a ‘soldier’—then Pakistan would launch a full-fledged attack on India. Karate felt cheated that, despite doing his part (of efficiently killing people with unquestioning dedication), Pakistan did not fulfil its commitment of launching an overt war on India. Karate’s interview was more by way of journalistic serendipity than anything else.

On January 31, 1991, I was told by a top source in the establishment that the war of attrition in Kashmir had reached a favourable turning point. I immediately informed my boss Madhu Trehan, the head of Newstrack. I was promptly granted permission to do another story on Kashmir. Karate’s story had a significant backdrop—Newstrack had done several specialised stories on Kashmir and had become known for covering all the salient turning points in Kashmiri militancy. In fact, Newstrack had been the first to report, in its lead story of July 1989, that terrorism was about to erupt in the Kashmir valley. When the story came out, Farooq Abdullah was furious and said there were no such thing as Kashmiris militants. Abdullah, along with the then home minister, Buta Singh went to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi demanding that Madhu Trehan be arrested. Gandhi did not follow up on their suggestion.

For some ‘secular’, ‘progressive’ ‘liberal’ ‘intellectuals’, my story had exploded on the landscape like a bomb. In several seminars conducted by these ‘enlightened’ personalities, that path-breaking story (buttressed by glaring, incontrovertible evidence) had been denounced as objectionable fiction. But the story survived the ‘liberal’ onslaught by virtue of its factual merit. Five months after that story, Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union Home Minister (and sister of the present Chief Minister of J&K), was kidnapped. And early next morning Trehan dispatched me to Srinagar to cover the story. What I witnessed and reported then was shocking. The Government had capitulated and obtained Rubaiya’s release in exchange for five militants. Tricolour-burning mobs in downtown Srinagar celebrated the release; not Rubaiya’s, but of the militants. A month later, I was carrying out my next Kashmir assignment, about the mass exodus of panic-stricken Kashmiri Pandits from the valley to Jammu and to various other parts of the country. This story had brought me and the rest of the Newstrack team close to death, twice, in Shopian in South Kashmir. Just before those two almost lethal encounters, I had interviewed Governor Jagmohan in Jammu, and he had strictly advised me not to travel to the valley. But I had sought, and had been granted permission to go to the source of the migration.

All these stories were why the establishment trusted Newstrack. That trust was enough for them to facilitate the interview with Karate. So, in February 1991, when I informed my boss that the situation in the valley had changed dramatically, resulting in such a surfeit of intelligence that the Government was not able to act on all of it and that terrorists were raping Muslim girls and extorting money from fellow Muslims at gunpoint (a fact highlighted, also, in Karate’s interview), Trehan once again sent me off to the valley to cover the scenario.

To my mind, Karate’s interview formed a powerful part of the lead story of the March 1991. Trehan was quick to realise that Karate’s transparent body language revealed his intrinsic nature which needed to be highlighted independently. In my interaction with him, I had sensed that he was inflexible in his ‘cause’. Only his size was smaller then than it is now. In the last 26 years since that interview, Karate has ‘progressed’ from being a soldier to organising a mass-scale, paid war on the streets of India. Today he is taking a ‘supari’ for attacking our security forces in Kashmir.

Tomorrow, given a chance (appropriate monetary rewards, and an opportunity to operate outside the valley), he would readily wound the rest of the country

The author can be contacted on Twitter @manojraghuvansh.