The Meadow tracks a decade-and-a-half old, but still haunting, story. The book is essentially an unravelling of the brutal 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists (two Britons, two Americans, one German and one Norwegian) which, some believe, changed the face of modern terrorism and, in a convoluted kind of way, paved the way for the urban attack of 9/11. The authors of this book – a veteran investigative reporting duo – suggest that the job is unfinished on the part of the rebels who started a mission of international terror from one corner of the Kashmir hills seventeen years ago.

The Meadow traces the escalating tension between kidnappers, victims and police while examining the high-level conspiracies surrounding the abduction. This work of meticulous investigation is written in the style of a novel rather than a documentary narrative of facts.

In contrast to the marvellous description of the scenic beauty of the valley, the truth about the journey of the hostages is gritty: the book unsparingly describes their incarceration in deep, remote forests, their rough hand-written notes, the counter-insurgency of militants, the horrific torture by security agencies and the routine killings of innocent civilians. The Meadow is a candid tract, leaving out little.

It discusses the narratives of global jihad; Kashmir, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, America, Britain. It deals in ideologies, clashes, deception, the making and unmaking of militancy, of Muslims and the western world. It also considers language, identity and cultural discourses in both indigenous and global contexts.

The whole tragedy of the kidnapping recorded in such meticulous detail in The Meadow is framed by two larger ‘action’ narratives— the narrative of the Pakistani involvement in Kashmir and the narrative of the Indian state. Neither of these tales of violence, exploitation and indifference lacks in the murky undertones and sinister overtones. Both have had major repercussions not just on the lives of the innocent foreign victims of the 1995 kidnappings but also on the continuing lives of the Kashmiri people. It exposes the overwhelming complicity of governments in ruining the psychological as well as physical environments in which the ordinary people live.

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The Meadow speaks of the unimaginable security conundrum in the Kashmir valley at the time. What distinguishes this book from the run-of-the-mill quickies on the world’s dangerous places is the human element. The authors crisscross between continents to present intimate stories of families of the kidnapped in the US, Britain and Norway.

Indoctrination is, indeed, more dangerous than nuclear weapons; an idea can destroy or build nations. A conscious and well-strategized ‘identity theft’, which happened with all militants fighting in Kashmir, was to make them re-identify themselves not as Kashmiris, Afghanis or Pakistanis but a more homogenous body of Islamic fighters, who would respond to any call to perform holy jihad, whether in Kashmir, Palestine or Azerbaijan. Such ‘defenders’ of Islam would be committed to defending any Muslim suffering at the hands of any ‘non-Muslim’ (p.90). This notion of global jihad, then, was sustained by the idea of global Islamisation.

As the story advances, the more it twists and gnarls, expressing a naked truth of which even the people of Kashmir were not fully aware. The Meadow highlights the role of India in the kidnappings. The authors claim that far from being utterly clueless, the Indian Security Agencies identified the hostages’ exact location early on but chose not to act simply to prolong the adverse international publicity for Pakistan. It also elucidates how the Government of India prolonged its dealing with the militants in its attempts to convince the world that it was not just India but the whole world which was affected by the Pakistan-sponsored war in Kashmir.

The narrative spells out how the families of six abducted tourists were kept in the dark while the deal between the militants and J&K’s the then Inspector General of Crime Branch was disclosed to the press in New Delhi by intelligence agencies. This move callously and knowingly aggravated the situation by putting the lives of the hostages at considerable risk.

The book reveals the reluctance of New Delhi not allowing either the J&K Police or the Scotland Yard or the FBI to pursue independent investigations that could have ended the hostage crisis. Levy and Scott-Clark write “Anywhere else in the world, the fraternity of police would have shared intelligence and war stories. Here (in Kashmir) everything was infused by politics, shrouded in secrecy and predicated by control” (p.386).

A focal point in the gripping tale that The Meadow reconstructs is the brutal, wretched and unfortunate beheading of one of the kidnapped foreigners, Hans Christian Ostro of Norway, on August 13, 1995, in the upper ranges of the Anantnag Hills.

 John Childs, the American hostage escaped, but here again the authorities just wanted him to hold his tongue and adopt a conveniently amnesiac stance. The remaining four abducted tourists were never found. Nevertheless, Levy and Scott-Clark’s account bluntly exposes the ‘real’ fate of these foreigners who, according to later disclosures, were handed over to the militants who have surrendered and subsequently worked with the Indian Army and to the shadowy Indian ‘intelligence agencies’. These forces allegedly ‘bought’ the four tourists from Al Faran for Rs. 4 lacs – and then shot them in cold blood on December 24, 1995.

To return to the terrain of Kashmir, Levy and Scott-Clark’s book finally highlights how the Indian government-sponsored ‘surrendered militants’ and security agencies created a reign of terror in the 1990s, killing thousands of innocent civilians in Kashmir – where the ‘official truth’ is always a manufactured narrative – and burying them in mass graves.

To ponder if the story could have been as powerful in shorter form, or might have offered a broader analysis of the region and of terrorism to justify its length, would be to quibble. The Meadow is as long as it is fascinating, minutely re-enacting a horrifying moment that was to send out ripples for decades to come.

It strongly questions the Indian claim to `finding a political solution’ and explains how the Indian state in effect practices the counter-insurgency doctrine – “get them by the balls, and the hearts and minds will follow”.

Following the shocking revelations in the book, Kashmir’s State Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to the state government to explain the 1995 abduction of the foreigners whose fate the authors of The Meadow relate. On August 13, 2012, The Hindustan Times from New Delhi reported: “The state police have told the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in Srinagar that the master file of the case of six foreigners’ kidnapping in south Kashmir in 1995 was gutted in a fire incident.” A ‘convenient truth’ indeed!

The brutal kidnapping of the ‘western’ hostages is clearly the tip of an iceberg. The region waits for more storytellers like Levy and Scott-Clark, including witnesses from within Kashmir.

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