Homesick Militants Are Offered a Way Back to Kashmir

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Liaqat Ali Shah, center, in his house in Lolab Valley, Kashmir, is one of hundreds of fighters trained in Pakistan-controlled territory who have returned home.

LOLAB VALLEY, Kashmir â€" Many of them left as teenagers, impulsive boys fired by indignation who sneaked across the border to Pakistan-controlled territory without telling their mothers.

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Ghulam Mohammad Mir said a recruiter’s lie got him to leave at 14.

But even militants get homesick.

“My first contact with my mother was three years after I’d left, and my parents had no idea what had happened to me,” said Abdul Hamid Rather, who left India-controlled Kashmir in 2001 when he was 14. “She was weeping, and I was weeping.”

More than 350 former militants have returned here to India-controlled Kashmir recently in a quiet new effort to deal with the growing problem of rehabilitating some of the thousands who left home in recent decades to fight for Pakistan in its long-running separatist feud with India over the disputed territory.

“It turns out that it’s not as dangerous as it might seem,” said Shuja Nawaz, the director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington. “It’s probably better to have them under scrutiny in India than out of reach in Pakistan.”

In addition to the prospect of seeing aging parents, Kashmiris, in their bowl-shaped valley and its breathtaking vistas, find an unusually powerful incentive for putting down arms.

Under the new program, once a former fighter has decided he wants to return, his family files an application with the Indian authorities. If there are no accusations that he attacked India or killed anyone, the application is usually approved. After that the former jihadi is required to meet with the police regularly for at least a year.

There have been hiccups in the program, in part because Pakistan has chosen not to participate. Returnees must fly to Nepal and cross into India by bus or car. And like all peace efforts between India and Pakistan, it has been overwhelmed this summer by some of the deadliest fighting in a decade between the nuclear-armed rivals. Dozens have died, and life near the Line of Control that separates the Indian and Pakistani claims has once again become dangerous and uncertain.

But even as fighting continues, former militants continue to trickle back into India-controlled territory, where returnees say they have found life both better and worse than they expected.

Ghulam Mohammad Mir, 27, was 14 and just finishing the ninth grade in 2000 when a recruiter he had once played cricket with asked if he wanted to cross the line. The border was fairly porous at the time, and the recruiter told Mr. Mir and four of his classmates that they could return after just a few days, Mr. Mir said.

It was the first of what Mr. Mir and his friends would soon discover were many lies. “We were trapped there,” he said.

They were sent to camps, where for eight months they received intensive religious indoctrination. Then for another eight months they trained in weaponry, including machine guns. At the end of his training, Mr. Mir made clear that he had no stomach for war, he said. So he left the camps and began driving an auto-rickshaw. In 2007, he married a Pakistani woman and soon had three children.

He spent all of his savings to return to India-controlled territory last year, and has since started a small tea shop. Of the four boys who ran away with him, he said, two were killed, one returned and one remains in Pakistan-controlled territory.

Mr. Mir said that his first year back was challenging. Neighbors were suspicious. His paperwork was not in order. But he is convinced that his children will have a better life in India than they would have had in Pakistan, with its myriad economic, social and political problems.

“My life is better here,” he said. “I am living with my mother, and that is a pleasure.”

Khazir Mohammad Sheikh, 32, is less cheery. He left the Lolab Valley in 1997 when he was 16. He had been working in a bakery after leaving school at 13, but fighting led to the bakery’s closing and his own decision to leave for Pakistan.

He is vague about how he spent his first years in Pakistan-controlled territory, but he married in 2002 and soon had three children. After his wife died a year ago, he decided to return.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 7, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Homesick Militants Are Offered a Way Back to Kashmir.