A handful of Intelligence Bureau men “gheraoed” their station chief, Amarjit Singh Dulat, in Srinagar amid mounting body bags of their colleagues as militants were relentlessly targeting the country’s domestic spy agency in Kashmir Valley in the winter of 1989-90.
Dulat, who went on to become chief of the R&AW, recalled in his recently-released book, Dulat book Kashmir – The Vajpayee Years, the Valley’s darkest days when militancy was peaking.
He says the IB was most active, feared and denounced in Kashmir and the Pakistani spy agency, ISI, directed Valley militants to target IB men who were mostly Kashmiri Pandits. They were easy pickings because most of these men used to live and mingle with the general public.
“During the killing spree of IB officials there came a day when I was sort of gheraoed by my IB colleagues in my office. The staff came out, all twenty of them, and they told me they felt very insecure in Srinagar. All the central government employees had run way from Kashmir that winter,” writes Dulat, who spent 30 years with the agency.
This was after the kidnapping of then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed’s daughter Rubaiya and her subsequent release after the government set free five militants in a hostage swap.
{{/usCountry}}This was after the kidnapping of then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed’s daughter Rubaiya and her subsequent release after the government set free five militants in a hostage swap.
{{/usCountry}}“I am not going anywhere, I said, and neither are you, guys,” writes Dulat, who later joined the prime minister’s office under Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s watch.
The 1965-batch IPS officer says he dreaded the thought of being shot by a sniper in his own office.
RNP Singh from Bihar was the first IB officer to be killed in Anantnag, followed by Krishan Gopal, ML Bhan and TK Razdan.
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