SRINAGAR, PAHALGAM, TRAL & BARAMULLA
Amid-July drizzle brings with it a slight nip in the air. Gul Hassan Shah, 96, wraps a blanket tightly around himself and, with trembling hands, grips his walking stick. Slowly, he traces his way into the courtyard, which opens into a web of narrow lanes leading to misty forests that disappear into the mountains.
Nearly two decades ago, he had crisscrossed the same forests in search of his son. But there was no trace of him. The family was plunged into grief, yet Gul Hassan refused to give up. Every day, he went out searching, pleading with locals and policemen to help find what had happened to his son.
Gul Hassan lives in Inderwali, a hamlet in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district, with his wife Zulekha Banoo, their children and grandchildren. It was here that his life got torn apart in 2003. His 23-year-old elder son, Syed Aashiq Hussain, had just returned from his daily-wage job when gunmen dragged him into the nearby jungle. A year later, villagers stumbled upon a chilling sight: a skeleton and pieces of torn, blood-soaked clothing that belonged to Syed. But the discovery brought no closure.
Gul Hassan went from pillar to post, urging the police to register an FIR. “There was a flicker of hope when the police sent the skeletal remains to the Forensic Science Laboratory in Srinagar,” he recalls. Officials assured him that the forensic analysis would reveal the cause of death and the sequence of events. “Each time they told me to come back later. I just want to know why he was killed, and who killed him,” he says. As the years passed, Gul Hassan grew weary and tired, and also lost his eyesight. “I cried myself to blindness,” he says. “I cried for 20 years.” What he has not lost, however, is the will to fight.
Zulekha hopes the family will find answers before Gul Hassan breathes his last. “I know the killers of my son are living comfortably,” she says. “Look at our condition today. I want a job for my other sons.” Gul Hassan and Zulekha have four sons, all daily-wage earners, and two married daughters. One son, Zulkarnain Shah, says the family has never known peace. “Often, I hear my parents crying. I feel helpless. I want to work and support my family, but there are no jobs,” says the 27-year-old.
The family has long suspected that the killers may have come from their own neighbourhood. In police reports those days, civilian deaths were often attributed to ‘unidentified gunmen’ and buried in bureaucratic files. At other times, militants who surrendered were absorbed into the police or given government jobs, making accountability elusive.
This was the situation in the 1990s till the mid-2000s in Jammu and Kashmir when many families knew that some people in their own neighbourhoods were sheltering militants or actively joining terrorist ranks. Local communities were deeply fractured between those believed to be sympathisers and others accused of being informers or ‘mukhbirs’. This triggered a chilling pattern: anyone thought to be aiding the police, passing on information or approaching the police with complaints was marked, often killed.
In another part of south Kashmir, in the picturesque town of Tral, three generations of women live together, wiping each other’s tears. Seventy-year-old Sara Begum, her daughter-in-law Nasima Bano and her granddaughter Shabnum Ara lost their son, husband and father, Mohammad Yusuf Khan, a carpenter, in 2002. That day, Yusuf, 27, was approached by some local people claiming they had some work for him. Hours later, gunshots were heard in the vicinity. By evening, villagers followed a blood trail to recover his body. Yusuf’s father, Abdul Gani Khan, who had gone to the police to register the FIR, was picked up by militants and was tortured. Although he escaped, he succumbed to injuries soon.
At the time, Yusuf’s son Shabir Ahmad Khan was only a year old. His grandmother, Sara Begum, often went begging in nearby villages, and it was a local trust and the social welfare department that helped them survive. The family is once again applying to the lieutenant governor in the hope of justice. The family’s plea is simple: a job for Yusuf’s son. “We lost everything, including my grandfather. There was no one left to earn for us,” says Shabir. His sister Shabnam says she could not complete her studies but she hopes her brother will soon get a job and take care of the family.
These hamlets are far from the corridors of power, where a political slug-fest is going on over the restoration of statehood for Jammu and Kashmir. What is getting drowned in this chaos are the echoes of unresolved killings that haunt the elderly, widows and children who are left behind. From the 1990s till date, over 12,000 civilians have died in Jammu and Kashmir as victims of terrorism. Yet, not even a dozen of them got justice.
Today, one of the key steps being taken by Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha post Operation Sindoor is the reopening of past cases of unresolved terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. “Everyone knew that Pakistan-backed terrorists were involved in the brutal killings, yet no one delivered justice to the thousands of elderly parents, wives, brothers and sisters left behind,” says Sinha. “I am now reaching the doorsteps of all those families who have been waiting for justice for decades.... We are receiving hundreds of complaints dating back to the 1990s.”
The move not only offers a humanitarian gesture of a possible closure but also acts as a strategic tool to dismantle the deeply embedded terror networks that have evaded justice. It also raises some troubling questions: Why did successive administrations fail to bring closure to the victims’ families? And more importantly, is justice even possible today and does it serve any purpose?
“This is not an aberration or a slip in the system,” says R.R. Swain, former director general of Jammu and Kashmir Police. “Rather, it is a systemic subterfuge where the enemy succeeded in injecting fear sufficient to paralyse the justice system.” Swain admits the state failed to deal with the internal threat that spilled the blood of innocent civilians. At a strategic level, he argues, the terror perpetrators may have succeeded in muting the response of the criminal justice system. Swain recalls a case a few years ago, related to a 2011 incident involving incitement, endorsement and advocacy of violence under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). He says the court asked him why the case was being reopened after so many years. Swain responded that the delay was a direct result of systemic collapse—a failure not just of police functioning but also of the broader justice ecosystem. “The law and order and justice system presupposes there was some semblance of rule of law where the investigator, the prosecutor, the witnesses and the judges could investigate, prosecute, depose and adjudicate free from fear,” he says. “But in truth, the fear threshold was so high that the criminal justice system could not work freely.”
“If political parties genuinely wanted justice for terror victims,” says Swain, “they would have ensured that the police, which was directly under their control and supervision at the time, protected the human rights of the victims of terror.” There were also other reasons that crippled the response of the state administration. While it offered relaxation for jobs, many did not meet the age or education criteria. Sometimes, applications were barred as they had missed the one-year deadline. In some cases, since the police did not register an FIR, the victims could not avail of the rehabilitation measures for victims of terror.
Reopening decades-old terror cases is not easy. Evidence may be lost or degraded, key witnesses may have died, perpetrators may be missing and local records might be incomplete. The groundwork will be done by district magistrates/deputy commissioners and senior police officers before these cases can proceed in court. However, criminal law does not impose an expiry date on terrorism cases, and the courts have plenary powers that could become an effective legal tool to bring justice to the victims. “To meet the ends of justice, law cannot seem to be surrendering to the past failures of the governments in overseeing this and law must roll out in full swing,” says Swain.
Once reopened, these cases can have four likely outcomes. Some may lead to convictions, where the accused are identified and prosecuted. Second, the accused may face trial but get acquitted for lack of evidence. A third possibility is that the cases may be marked “untraced”, in common police parlance, when investigators fail to identify suspects. The fourth, but unlikely, scenario is where some cases are not admitted because the crime did not take place. Whichever the outcome, the truth is that 12,000 civilians died and the burden clearly lies with the state administration to address the long-standing systemic failures that allowed perpetrators to walk free.
“The fact that we are able to voice our concerns today is an achievement,” says Fayaz Ahmad Shaikh, 50, who lost his father, Mohamad Sultan Shaikh, in 1994 to terrorists in Badmulla village in Baramulla. “Militancy was at its peak and just less than 10 per cent families were not sympathisers. My father was a nationalist and my uncle was a special police officer. Both were gunned down by terrorists,” he says. On a September night, Sultan was having dinner with his family and some visiting relatives. After the meal, he stepped out into the backyard to go to the washroom. Moments later, gunshots were heard and by the time his wife rushed out, he lay in a pool of blood. “I was a teenager that time,” says Fayaz. “I remember peeping out of the window first. I saw armed men who vanished into the darkness. We tried to chase them but the killers escaped.”
The family lived in terror for years, unsure if the gunmen would return. Fayaz says the family named the people they suspected but the police registered the case against unknown gunmen and let it die. “They were not Pakistani terrorists but local people, yet no one bothered to bring them to justice.” Thirty-one years later, Fayaz lives just steps away from the site of his father’s murder, in a one-room tin shed with his wife, his school-going son and his 17-year-old daughter who dreams of becoming a cardiologist. Next to the shed stand the crumbling remains of the family home, the one his father built. “We pulled it down before it collapsed. We plan to rebuild it.” Till then, Fayaz says, the dream of ‘Naya Kashmir’ remains a distant one. “First it was the militants, then it was the state. We have lived a life of neglect and sacrifice. I can’t even afford a coaching institute for my daughter who wants to give NEET exam to study medicine,” says Fayaz. His daughter, Namrat, accompanies him to meet state government officials seeking compensation and assistance.
“My mother is a heart patient. I am studying hard to become a doctor. I want to study in another city but I don’t know if I will make it through NEET,” says Namrat. Her mother, Zahida Begum, holds the family together, bringing some laughter and cheer. She cooks their meals in the tiny kitchenette with neatly arranged utensils near the bed which her children use to study.
More than 3,000 applications have reached Minga Sherpa, deputy commissioner of Baramulla, after Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha relaxed the rules to allow families of terror victims to approach the state administration for relief and rehabilitation. As per the government order, a special exemption is being extended to two categories of applicants: those whose earlier claims were rejected for not meeting the criteria, and those who never approached the state government out of fear of retribution. “Both sets of applications are being verified by police and intelligence agencies,” says Sherpa. “Welfare benefits will be extended to eligible cases once verification is complete.” Sherpa and other senior officials involved in the process acknowledge the scourge of local terrorism that once peaked in Kashmir. Today, that fear is visibly lifting. “This is the first real rejection of terror by Kashmiris themselves.”
It is not just men who have stood up to terrorists in Kashmir. Barkat Bi lives in a tiny hamlet tucked away in the steep slopes of the Sangerwani hills in Pulwama district. She was a teenager in 1997 when militants stormed her house and killed her brother, Gul Hassan Bokda, a religious preacher. “They caught him as soon as he opened the door. He struggled and rushed back inside, but they fired at him through the windows,” says their brother Maqbool, who was then studying in Uttar Pradesh. “They shot him 30 to 40 times.” Maqbool recounts how Barkat, in desperation, tried to stop the militants who had covered their faces with veils. She pulled at their veils, pleading with them not to kill her brother.
But the militants shot her, too, and dragged her brother’s body out of the house. “I was hit by three bullets,” says Barkat. This was not the first time the family suffered a loss. In 1996, her eldest brother Abdul Rashid Bokda, a special police officer, was gunned down by militants. Today, Barkat walks with a limp but speaks with courage on behalf of many women from Kashmir who do not want to spend the rest of their lives as survivors, but want to begin their lives afresh.
“These men and women are the real bravehearts of Kashmir. It is a step in the right direction and we hope their voices are heard,” says Mudasir Dar, a social activist with Save Youth, Save Future, an NGO working with families of terror victims. “These voices are not just testimonies of pain, they are indictments against terror and reminders of what it truly means to stand with those who have suffered at the hands of terrorists.”
The road ahead is challenging, and it may well be an uphill task for the state administration to bring justice to the victims of terror, especially when there are allegations of involvement of policemen who continue to wield power. Nissar Ahmad Wani, 30, a resident of Sangerwani, has written to the Jammu and Kashmir Police demanding action against a constable he accuses of siding with the militants who killed his father and brother in 2004. Nissar wants justice from the very system he believes once sided with the militants who killed his family.
Kashmir’s terror victims have taken a leap of faith to come forward with courage after years of silence, fear and loss to raise their voice and demand justice. All eyes are now on the state administration, judiciary and the police.