Kashmir’s Heroin Highway

Where militants and the threat of conflict with neighboring Pakistan were once the primary concerns of border agents like Puri, today heroin pouring out of Afghanistan has created an entirely new menace. Border stations like the one in Uri and others across India’s border with Pakistan in Kashmir and Punjab have become the last line of defense against the growing epidemic of heroin addiction in the country, one that threatens to change the culture of that region for decades to come.

Puri had only held his post at Uri for a few weeks at that point, supervising a team of officers who provided protection to the customs agents. That afternoon it was cold, and the agents folded their arms to their chests to keep warm as they watched Puri stick a long metal rod inside one randomly chosen sack of almonds.

As he poked at the bag, the officers noticed the rod reverberate against something. Puri opened the sack. Underneath a small sea of almonds, he found a tightly wrapped brick of something that looked an awful lot like heroin, pinned with half of a single pink Afghani, an almost insignificant note of currency worth approximately $0.02. More of Puri’s team descended on the scene. The driver dropped his head against the outside of his cab.

“We found 148 sacks of almonds, and 114 of them contained a one-kilogram brick of acetyl morphine, a kind of heroin, embedded in the center,” Puri says. “The drugs were completely pure, so after it reached suppliers in India, 114 packs could have easily been stretched to 500 kilograms or more and then shipped to America and all over the world. It was quite a find.”

Bags containing heroin confiscated by the Jammu and Kashmir Police seen at the district police station in Uri. Photo: Sami Siva

Jammu and Kashmir state police gradually learned that each Afghani note had a serial number on both ends: The bills were cut in half and pinned to the packs in order to establish a sort of tracking system, according to Puri. The other half of every Afghani had been couriered into places throughout India, so that recipients of the severed bills could then match the serial numbers with the halves attached to their allotted pack of heroin in the truck.

“Consider that that driver made friends with Border Security Forces across several years in order to gain their trust,” Puri says of the bust, shaking his head. “We’re talking about a sophisticated, well-planned system worth billions of American dollars.”

Eighteen miles from the line of control between the Indian and Pakistani-controlled portions of the contested region, Uri, a lush, mountainous no man’s land of toothy, imposing terrain, is a place few outsiders experience. The region is endlessly captivating, both for its natural beauty and its ongoing air of strife. Large contingents of police and military personnel buffer the divided nations.

The conflict in Kashmir dates back to the Partition of India in 1947 and the formation of Pakistan as a sovereign nation. Since then three wars have erupted between India and Pakistan over the predominantly Muslim region, and violent conflicts between militants seeking independence and the Indian army have been a common occurrence. A legacy of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Indian army and local police during the 1990s and early 2000s continues to haunt the area, leaving many Kashmiris distrustful of authority figures, and making cooperation between press and local officials a difficult balance to achieve.

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