“The most potent weapon of the oppressor
is the mind of the oppressed.”
- Steve Biko
They say war ends when the firing
stops. But in the valleys of Kashmir, another kind of war continues quietly, one
not waged with bullets, but with beliefs. As our QRT staggered back from yet some
blood-stained operations, many times incidents left us standing over the fallen
- one body slumped beside a half-burnt Quran, another clutching a radio still
crackling with coded desperation. And yet, the most chilling sight wasn’t
death. It was life - a captured militant
who stared through us, not at us, his eyes emptied of all but one idea:
obedience. That moment compelled me to ask - how does a man become hollowed out like that? What happens between
boyhood and battlefield to make someone not just dangerous, but numb?
This chapter is an attempt to walk
backward - through the fog of radicalisation, the trenches of trauma, and the
manufacture of militant minds across the border.
The concept of "brainwashed terrorists from Pakistan"
is both controversial and complex, shaped by historical grievances,
geopolitical games, and deliberate ideological distortion. The term is often
used to describe those recruited by militant organizations who are
psychologically conditioned to become unthinking tools of terror. This process
- more accurately known as radicalization
- aims to sever the individual from empathy, family, and personal agency,
replacing all that with dogma and death
as duty.
In regions like Jammu and Kashmir,
this concept becomes more than academic. It becomes personal. Over the years,
we have encountered multiple terrorists, many from across the LoC, who behaved
like human robots - unresponsive,
expressionless, even under pain or threat. Some refused water or medicine
with a mechanical headshake, as if their operating system wouldn’t allow deviation.
What transforms
a human into such a conditioned vessel?
The answer lies in layered
manipulation - religious distortion,
socio-economic vulnerability, and militaristic control.
In militant training camps scattered
across remote areas of Pakistan-occupied
territories, a disturbing curriculum is followed. Recruits - usually
between 15 and 25 - are isolated, indoctrinated, and stripped of individual
thought. Their daily exposure to selective
religious sermons, edited war footage,
and anti-India propaganda shapes a
worldview in which violence is not just justified but glorified.
Many come from economically and
socially marginalised backgrounds - orphans, school dropouts, or angry young
men disillusioned by real or perceived injustice.
These youths are told:
“Your suffering has a reason. Your death will
have glory. Your revenge is divine.”
By erasing their previous identity -
through renaming, forced detachment from family, and enforced rituals - the
handler becomes their parent, prophet, and planner. Critical thinking is outlawed. Doubt is punished. The body is
trained, but the mind is untrained, except in hatred.
A captured teen,
no more than 17, once told me in broken Urdu during interrogation:
“Sirf do cheezen yaad thi - nishana aur namaz.”
(Only two things I remembered - my target and
my prayer.)
And
even the prayer, it seemed, had been edited for war.
The most grotesque by-product of
this indoctrination is the suicide bomber
phenomenon. Recruits are convinced that martyrdom brings eternal paradise, with
rewards distorted from actual scripture. Through visual aids, dream
manipulation, and reward-promise to their families, they are programmed for detonation, often without
fully comprehending their mission’s geo-political implications.
A recurring motif is silence. Once captured, many of these
terrorists say nothing, not even their names. As though their training included
self-deletion.
One Pakistani fidayeen taken alive in 2011
whispered to an officer after three days of no response:
“Hum zinda rehne ke liye nahi aaye, Sir. Aap
humse kuch poochho mat.”
(We did not come to survive, Sir. Don’t ask
us anything.)
This hollow submission is
terrifying. Not because it is loud, but because it leaves no space for redemption.
And yet, not every recruit is
brainwashed. Some are coaxed by money
- their families promised Rs. 10-15 lakhs
upon a successful mission. Others come seeking revenge, having lost a brother or father in a border conflict. A
few are just misguided ideologues,
chasing martyrdom as identity in an otherwise invisible life. This complexity
must be understood to prevent blanket
vilification of a people or a religion. Indeed, many Pakistani civilians
themselves live in fear of these radical groups, often paying the price for
violence they neither supported nor initiated.
The tragedy is not just the violence
these young men commit - it is the lives they never lived. Behind those
hollow eyes were children once - taught to hate before they learned to love,
handed rifles before they were handed books.
When we interrogated captured
militants, the conversations were surreal. Some spoke of never having met a
Hindu before joining. Others were shocked that our soldiers offered water to
them after gunfights.
One 19-year-old whispered:
“Aap log toh insaan lagte ho.”
(You people seem human.)
That
line haunted me for weeks. What was he taught we were?
They arrived with blank stares and fanatical
certainty, but behind those hollow eyes were once children - lost not to war,
but to a story they were never allowed to question.
The
Chapter ends not with death, but with
possibility - because one of these young men did begin to talk. And what he
shared in the darkness of interrogation room would shake us in a way no ambush
ever did.
He didn’t just speak. He cracked. Not out of fear, but out of
memory.
In the next chapter, we journey into
the mind of a captured militant, not as an enemy, but as a broken boy trying to
remember who he once was. A trembling voice pierces through the numbness of
radicalisation, revealing not just what
he was made into, but what was taken
away from him in the process.
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