How a carpenter led the BSF to Ghazi Baba’s mirror hideout

After the 2001 Parliament attack, its mastermind Rana Tahir Nadeem, better known as Ghazi Baba, became hot property with every agency on the chase. Almost two decades after the incident, author of ‘The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur’ Rahul Pandita reveals how the elusive tikka-loving chief of the Jaish in Kashmir was smoked out. Exclusive excerpts...

In July 2001 — by this time the Jaish had replaced the Hizbul as the main terror outfit in Kashmir — Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey, a BSF officer on his second posting to the Valley, was in his office when he received a call from his commanding officer asking him to come to his office. As he reached there, he found the chief of the J&K Police’s Special Operations Group (SOG), Sunil Kumar, waiting for him. Kumar told Dubey and others that he had a source who had access to Baba. The source, he revealed, was responsible for supplying rations to the Jaish commander and his men at his hideout in Ganderbal.
The plan, Kumar said, was that the source would lace Baba’s food with the sedative diazepam and then a joint team of the SOG and the BSF would raid his hideout and arrest him. But by evening the operation was called off. It looked like the SOG’s mole had developed cold feet. Five months after this aborted mission Ghazi Baba’s planned attack on India’s Parliament was launched.



In July 2003 because of Vajpayee’s visit, the BSF had deputed personnel in every nook and corner of Srinagar city. In one of the narrow streets, the deployed BSF jawans saw a young nervous man on a cycle. He was stopped and searched. As the jawans opened his shirt, they were shocked to see explosives tied all around his body. He turned out to be Ansar bhai from Pakistan’s Faisalabad. He was initially not willing to cooperate but the BSF had found that Pakistani terrorists could not bear it if they were stripped. Ansar had the same fear. ‘Shoot me, but do not strip me, please,’ he pleaded. Something else also made Ansar tell his interrogators everything. A senior police officer had a small trick that he always deployed to work on the semiliterate militants.

During interrogation, the officer would tell a terrorist how ‘handsome’ and ‘fit’ he was and that if he cooperated the officer would ensure he was not only let off but also that he was made an ‘important policeman’ in the force. The threat of being stripped and the lure of being made a policeman worked well on Ansar Bhai; he confessed that he was from the Jaish. ‘Do you know Ghazi Baba?’ Dubey asked. ‘Yes,’ he replied. He said he had no idea where Ghazi Baba’s hideout was. ‘But we speak on the wireless set twice a day, at 9.30 am and 3.30 pm,’ he said.

As they kept questioning Ansar, he told them that his code name was 08. This meant he was the deputy of Ghazi Baba, whose code name was 39. A BSF wireless operator Gandharva Kumar had heard terrorists calling 39 several times and saying ‘Murga tapka diya hain’ (The chicken has been killed) every time they murdered a soldier. Dubey convinced Ansar to call 39 at his usual time of 3.30 pm and try to extract information from him. But as soon as they switched on the set, they heard Ghazi speaking to someone else. Ansar recognized Ghazi’s voice immediately. ‘This is Masterji,’ he said, using the name they called Ghazi out of reverence. As they listened on, Ghazi told the unknown man on the other side that 08 (Ansar) had been missing since yesterday. ‘Be alert,’ he said.

Now Ansar was of no use to them. However, he had led them to a carpenter who was employed by the Jaish to make hideouts. He was brought to the base. But he said he was always blindfolded before he would be taken to construct these houses, most of them in Old Srinagar. ‘But I can tell you the location of one hideout,’ he said.

Dubey put him in a Santro car with his men and took him to identify the house. Once the house was identified, a big meeting of police officials took place at Dubey’s office. He was woken up at around 3 am by his colleagues. ‘Sir, it is time to go.’

By this time the BSF had laid a cordon in the area. Dubey took with him nine men, including his colleagues C.P. Trivedi, Himanshu Gaur and Binuchandran. They decided to get down a mile before and walk to the house. ‘I asked everyone to tread softly so that their boots wouldn’t make noise and also to keep the rifle chains from jangling,’ he says. As he reached the spot, Dubey was livid. The advance party of the BSF had laid siege around the wrong house! In two minutes, Dubey corrected this. As the right house was cordoned off, Dubey saw that someone on the house’s top (third) floor had switched on a light and then switched it off. This was clearly a signal. Binuchandran kicked open the gate. Dubey checked his watch; it was 4.10 am.

On the third floor, the house’s top floor where Dubey had spotted someone switching the light on and off, there was nothing much except a few cushions and wall-towall carpeting. Against one wall was a dressing table of sorts with a mirror. Binu, remembers Dubey, picked up a comb and began combing his hair.

Dubey was getting frustrated. There was nothing here. He asked his men to bring the carpenter who was in a car on the road below. When he was brought, he said nothing except one word: sheesha (mirror). Binu lifted his rifle and hit the mirror. What Dubey remembers of the next five minutes is this: there was a deafening explosion as soon as the mirror fell down and a burst of bullets from inside the room that the mirror was hiding. Balbir Singh took the first hit and was dead. A hand grenade thrown from inside exploded and its splinters claimed two fingers of one of the BSF soldiers, Neelkamal. Dubey looked down after the grenade explosion. His right hand was nearly severed from his arm, but he felt no pain. He picked up his rifle with his left hand and fired inside, a total of fourteen rounds. Then another hand grenade came and landed at his feet. He kicked it back inside. As he did this he saw a man in a blue shirt lying motionless face down inside the room.

Later, the security forces barged into the house. The body upstairs of the man in the blue shirt was identified as that of none other than Ghazi Baba.