experiences and ran many controversies with the security establishment. “..Yet, looking upon the siege with the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that what had appeared to me at that time to be undue haste by the administration was in fact deliberate. The objective was not only to protect the Relic. It was even more a bid by the government to regain control of this, the holiest of the many venerated shrines in a state imbued with Sufi mysticism,” he writes.
It was one such controversy, he believes, that led to the road accident in which he and Zaki were critically injured. “…On the way, a military truck rammed our car injuring Zaki and almost killing me, thus delaying the implementation of the proposed settlement arrived at (between holed up militants and the government), because of suspicions that the crash was no mere accident,” he wrote. “And although the terms of the final settlement were similar to those agreed to, and the shrine was vacated on November 16, when Maulvi Abbas (Ansari) came to call on me in March 1994, in New Delhi, he was bitter. He declared that the state home secretary had in fact reneged on the agreement, and allowed the militants to be held for longer than agreed.”
The accident sent Habibullah out of Kashmir for a long time. During that period he served the central government and had many years in the Indian Mission at Washington. He came back only in 1999 and was posted as vice chairman of the Lakes and Waterways Authority (LAWDA). Not in the list of most favored then, he could barely manage a year in the state. It was during that stint when he courted a controversy saying Dal has emerged as a bottomless pit and the conservation project needs to be reworked if not withdrawn.
Until his retirement in September 2005 as a secretary and the subsequent appointment as India’s first CIC, Habibullah was not posted in J&K again. But that never de-linked him from Kashmir. After the NDA government was replaced by the UPA, Habibullah was always in loop for every major development involving Kashmir. His year long stint with the American think tank United States Institute of Peace (USIP) where he did a research paper on Kashmir and later wrote his book, Habibullah always remained in news.
His June 2004 paper ‘The Political Economy of the Kashmir Conflict: Opportunities for Economic Peace-building and for U.S. Policy’ gives a clear indication of his “prescription” and the diagnosis of the mess in Kashmir. He has been very candid in handling some of the issues. On setting up of the Special Operations Group
(SOG), Habibullah said Army and the BSF constituted it “to reduce their own casualties and the costs of deployment, and looked to ‘outsource’ difficult coordinates in the security grid and escape the glare of media attention”. He actually took a potshot on Mufti Sayeed regime saying: “The state government has claimed that the SOG was shut down in 2002 due to public pressure, but it has been abolished in name only. It is still part of the Jammu and Kashmir police force and continues with its predations.”
Apart from putting on record that Kukka Parray founded a party and became a legislator under the patronage of the central government, Habibullah held the security forces responsible, besides civilian killings apart from killings, for the mass felling of forests. “Security personnel, only sporadically challenged by forest officials, set about felling timber for private use, building homes for themselves in villages in Punjab and Haryana,” he said in his paper.
The IAS officer was very objective in recording certain facts. Indian government, he said, discourages foreign involvement of any kind in J&K. “The first World Bank project in the state, one designed to capitalize on the region’s rich horticultural resources, was launched as recently (early) as 1977. After the outbreak of the revolt in 1989–90, government policy became even more insular.
