Showkat Ahmad Tak killed in Srinagar: LeT commander among resentful Kashmiris who prefer death to normalcy in Valley

Panzgam, Kashmir: When pre-dawn fireworks rattled the congested Chattabal locality of downtown Srinagar on 5 May, the government forces were oblivious of the fact that they were finally up against the most mysterious Lashkar-e-Taiba commander in Kashmir, who for the last seven years had managed to bypass cordons, changed appearances and emerged as the instrumental force of Hafiz Saeed’s militant group in Kashmir.

Eight hours and multiple boomeranging blasts later, an under-construction “safe house” yielded three bodies buried under the torn ceiling and brick walls. Among the slain militant trio was Showkat Ahmad Tak, Lashkar’s top commander in Kashmir.

But it took security agencies a while to confirm and reveal his identity. Apparently, they were aware of how they had cut a sorry figure for themselves six years ago when they had confused a militant killed in a Kulgam gunfight in November 2012 with Tak. However, when the body was handed over to his family, they turned it away, saying it was a case of mistaken identity.

“There was a resemblance between the dead man and my son. We told police it was not him,” Ghulam Hassan Tak, father of the slain militant told Firstpost at his home on Sunday morning.

The incident had taken place a year after Tak went missing from a seminary in north Kashmir to join militancy. Since then, like a textbook militant, he didn’t give much of a clue about his operations to security forces and continued bypassing the surveillance, until his last moves were traced to a congested Srinagar neighbourhood on Saturday.

The Tak family lives in abject poverty. The senior Tak was a utensil maker, who stopped working a few years back. Showkat’s two brothers work as daily wage labourers. They live in a four-room single storied house in Panzgam village.

Ghulam told Firstpost that he never saw his son after he became a militant. He never came back to his village. “Yesterday evening the police called to say that we should identify the dead body of Showkat,” Ghulam said, adding, “He was given to me by God. He took him back, rest I have nothing to add,” he said.

As per the police officers involved in the operation, Showkat was LeT’s mover and shaker in the Valley — especially after the outfit lost scores of commanders last year. In seven years as a militant, Showkat rose in the ranks to become Lashkar’s Pulwama chief, but according to the police, surprisingly, he hardly stayed in the area.

“Most of the times the intelligence gathered by various agencies found that he was either in north Kashmir or in Srinagar and its adjoining areas,” said Mohammad Aslam, SSP, Pulwama.

On close heels of launching Operation All Out against active militants in Kashmir in summer 2017, Showkat figured in the Indian Army’s ‘kill list’. Among the 12 wanted militants, Showkat enjoyed a reputation of being one of the oldest hands in Kashmir insurgency, who had survived many anti-militancy operations.

One police officer, regularly seen leading the counterinsurgency operations in the Valley, describes Showkat as a “model militant”.“As a militant, he was very proficient in executing a low-profile strategy to his success,” the officer says.

“This is how Hizb-ul-Mujahideen survived after it was decimated from the mid-90s to early 2000s. Besides a low-profile militant, Showkat was a local contact of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militants. His killing is indeed a big dent for the outfit,” he added.

Even though Showkat didn’t become a household name like Burhan Wani, he had become one of the “deadliest militants” for security forces in the Valley.

A resident of Panzgam village in Pulwama district in south Kashmir, Showkat was 21 when he left home to join militancy. He was memorising the Holy Quran in a Darul Uloom in Bandipora in north Kashmir when one day, in October 2011, he left to join the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Like most of his militant methods, the trigger behind his rebel foray stays mysterious. He had landed in the seminary after clearing his 12th class.

A quick look at his pre-militant profile reveals that Showkat hardly had any history of harassment at the hand of security forces, which, as per the families of many militants, force the Kashmir’s new generation on the path of militancy.

“His (Showkat’s) was a clear case of conviction,” said Muzamil Ashraf, a friend of Showkat who was present at the funeral. “During our school days, he used to get very much disturbed over the manner India was handling Kashmiris and their legitimate demand of freedom, with a brute force. Not everyone can make peace with a life, which comes with daily harassment. Showkat was one of them,” he added.

Showkat’s militant tribe, his friend says, sees only one solution to the long pending promise of ‘right to self-determination’, made by New Delhi to Kashmiris. “And that’s a gun solution,” he says.

“Today, most of them prefer dying as militants than make peace with the so-called normalcy, which is bleeding every other day in Kashmir now. I believe, it’s high time for the (Narendra) Modi-led Indian government to think why youngsters like Showkat are leaving behind all possible comforts of life and die fighting its forces, which they denounce as an occupation force, in Kashmir?”

Such anguish is nothing new during militant funerals in Kashmir. But in case of Showkat, it speaks of the larger resentment alarmingly gripping the new generation of Kashmiris. Scores of them have already left home to become militants. Many more, intelligence inputs claim, are on the waiting list.

On the other side, the security forces — now frequently entering into gunfights with militants in Kashmir — are in a celebratory mode.

“Showkat’s elimination is a big success for us because as a commander he was swelling the Lashkar’s Kashmir base by recruiting young boys,” a top police officer says. “He was very much proficient to do that, as he had his schooling under LeT’s biggest guns in Kashmir, including Abu Qasim, Abu Dujana, and others.”

The sleuths would often trace Showkat’s movements to Srinagar outskirts throughout his seven-year-long militant stint in which he rose to become an A++ category militant.

“Militants of Showkat’s stature are beyond the usual gun-yielding guerrillas,” the police officer said, adding, “They are the brain behind the war of attrition against Indian State in Kashmir.”

Outside Showkat’s house in a makeshift tent, after his funeral was attended by thousands of people, a man with a long flowing beard stood up and read Islamic verses from the Holy Quran.

“This is the death we all aspire for,” he said, and the mourners nodded their heads in agreement.

“If he were a drunkard you would not even care, but he was a Mujaheed. You all want to die like him. One is dead, another is born. Don’t think it will stop. It won’t,” he added.