Paddy in Kashmir's killing fields

My job is to install an elected chief minister in Srinagar,” Paddy told us on an August evening in 1996.

- R. PRASANNAN

Elections to the Jammu and Kashmir assembly, the first after the outbreak of insurgency in the late 1980s, had been called. He had called some of us on the defence beat to his Lodhi Estate home for a farewell drink, before leaving for Udhampur to take charge as the northern army commander.

We took it with large gulps and a pinch of salt. Elections to the J&K assembly had been called and called off several times, once from Ouagadougou. No joke! Narasimha Rao had announced J&K polls on a 1995 midnight from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Now, in 1996, prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda had called for polls again, and was sending Lt.-Gen. S. Padmanabhan to sanitise the valley. Sceptical scribes, we thought either the polls would soon be called off citing rising violence, or that Paddy, then the army’s spymaster (journalese for director-general, military intelligence) would do a 1987.