Kashmir HopeMemory · Rights · Freedom22 October 1993 · Bijbehara
The Bijbehara massacre
On 22 October 1993 men of the 74th Battalion of India’s Border Security Force fired for more than ten minutes on an unarmed procession leaving Friday prayers in Bijbehara, killing at least thirty-one people by the official count and fifty-one by the town’s, many of them schoolboys. A magistrate’s inquiry found the firing unprovoked, deliberate and well planned. Thirteen men charged with murder were acquitted in a closed trial by their own force, and the Indian government refused to show the record even to its own National Human Rights Commission.
The siege of Hazratbal
In the middle of October 1993 the Indian army surrounded the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar, the most revered Muslim shrine in Kashmir, saying that armed fighters, most of them from the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, had taken refuge inside. The siege brought protests across the Valley. By Friday 22 October it was in its eighth day.
Bijbehara is a town on the Jhelum in Anantnag district, south of Srinagar, on the highway that links Kashmir to Jammu. Like every town in the Valley in 1993 it lived under the Indian occupation’s camps, patrols and crackdowns. The force that fired that day was the 74th Battalion of the Border Security Force, a paramilitary force under India’s home ministry.
After Friday prayers
After the Friday prayer about fifteen thousand people, most of them students, gathered in the courtyard of the Jamia Masjid of Bijbehara for a peaceful protest against the siege. That is the town’s count; the inquiry magistrate later put the procession at two to three thousand. The procession moved through the town’s streets, unarmed, with slogans for freedom and against Indian rule, the demand of a people still waiting for the plebiscite promised to them in 1948.
When it reached the highway near the Goriwan quarter, men of the 74th Battalion blocked the road. Reyaz Ahmad Ganaie, who was thirteen and walking in the procession, later wrote that “the 74th Bn BSF allowed the whole procession to come out on the Highway and then started indiscriminate firing on the procession from all sides.” The shooting went on for more than ten minutes, and witnesses said that the soldiers fired even on people who came forward to carry the dead and wounded. Ghulam Nabi Rah, who was there with his father and brother, said: “When BSF men started firing, the empty cartridges were falling on the road like hailstones and were bouncing.” An eleven-year-old boy was shot dead in the middle of the road as he tried to move to a safer place.
The hospital gate
Ganaie was hit several times: “I was in procession in which I got many bullets in my chest and my both hands got serious injuries.” Neighbours carried him to the local hospital. “When we tried to enter the hospital, the BSF at the hospital gate did not allow us in. But my mother did not want her son die for want of treatment.” She tore her clothes and told the troops to kill her or let her son in, and they gave way, but the local hospital had nothing to treat him with. On the way to the district hospital the army stopped them at Padshahi Bagh, three hundred metres from the firing, and when the people with the wounded shouted slogans for freedom the soldiers fired on the vehicle. They were stopped again at Khanabal and at the Sangam bridge. At SMHS hospital in Srinagar, he wrote, the doctors “diagnosed least chances of my survival”. He lived.
Others did not. International reports at the time quoted doctors as saying that most of the dead could have been saved had ambulances and medical aid been allowed to reach them. Mukhtar Ganie, hit in the same procession as his brother Tariq, died at Pampore as a fire service vehicle carried him towards the institute of medical sciences in Srinagar. Zainab, whose younger son Afroz was in the seventh standard, went looking for him: “I saw a long line of dead bodies in the hospital premises but could not trace my son.” When she returned, she found a little coffin in the neighbourhood. It was his.
The dead
Many of the dead were boys. Afroz was in the seventh standard. Arshid Hussain Tak, sixteen, had a few months earlier carved his name into the concrete fence of the town’s new children’s park. Muhammad Shafi Hamdani was sixteen, and neighbours said his mother died of shock in the days that followed. A Kashmiri Pandit boy was killed too: Kamal Ji Koul, a student of the eighth class in the court record and thirteen years old in Ganaie’s account, whom a rights activist quoted by Kashmir Life called Kenwal Ji, known as Babloo, aged seventeen. He was the only family of an ailing mother, and she died of the shock soon after. Manzoor Ahmad Bader and Mukhtar Ganie were among the other young men killed.
Amnesty International counted at least fifty-one dead and two hundred wounded, and that is the figure remembered in Bijbehara, where local people say twenty-five of the dead were students. Kashmir Life has given forty-one dead and seventy-three wounded. The official figures are lower: the inquiry magistrate recorded thirty-one killed and seventy-three injured, the toll the state accepted in the High Court, and India’s home ministry told the National Human Rights Commission that thirty-seven had died. The Times of India also reported thirty-seven dead, and a United Nations refugee agency document, citing Indian newspapers, thirty-five dead and seventy-six wounded. A review by a South Asian rights centre in 2001 put the toll at about sixty.
A playground turned graveyard
The town had just built a park for its children in the New Colony area. On 22 October it became a graveyard. Thirty-two of the dead were buried there, twenty-five of them students between eleven and seventeen. “Little did we know that we will be burying our younger ones in the same park,” said Ghulam Nabi, whose teenage son was among them. Arshid Tak lies under the fence where he had carved his name. “Now he lays buried just beneath his engraved name,” his brother Ijaz said.
A memorial raised in the park soon after the killings carries the names of all the slain. Bijbehara remembers its martyrs every year on 22 October, the day the park became their grave.
What the magistrate found
The police at Bijbehara registered a case of murder and attempted murder, FIR 90 of 1993, and the station officer recorded that the crowd had been peaceful. No one was arrested. The force claimed that it had come under fire and had shot back in self-defence. The state government ordered a magisterial inquiry. Its report, number EM/BFC/93/23-24, submitted on 13 November 1993, found that “the procession was entirely peaceful and un-armed” and that “firing upon the procession was absolutely un-provoked and the claim made by the security forces that they were forced to retaliate the firing of militants for self defence is baseless and concocted”. There had been no casualties on the force’s side, the magistrate wrote, which “conclusively establishes the fact that there was no firing from the side of the processionists”. Years later, before the High Court, the force claimed that a sub-inspector, Malhar Singh, had been hit in the shoulder by a rifle bullet; the court noted that no medical certificate had been produced to show it.
The magistrate went further. “The security forces/personnel have committed offence out of vengeance and their barbarous act is deliberate and well planned,” the report said. It held that the deputy commandant, J. K. Radola, was “equally culpable because of tacit approval given by him to the indiscriminate and un-provoked firing”, and it recommended the immediate dismissal of the men responsible, followed by criminal proceedings against them.
A closed trial
India’s National Human Rights Commission took up the case after reading press reports. On 1 November 1993 it called for reports from the defence and home ministries and the state government. The defence ministry denied any involvement, and the home ministry reported thirty-seven dead and seventy-three injured. On 17 January 1994 the commission recommended compensation of Rs 50,000 for the family of each person killed, Rs 25,000 for each person wounded by gunfire and Rs 10,000 for others injured, and asked the government to review “the circumstance and conditions in which units of the Border Security Force are deployed”. In March 1994 the government indicted the force for firing into the crowd “without provocation”, and thirteen of its men were charged with murder.
They were not tried in a criminal court. In 1996 General Security Force Courts, the force’s own tribunals, tried them in private: twelve men in one trial, and the sub-inspector Malhar Singh separately on the murder charge, a trial that ended on 30 October 1996. All thirteen were acquitted. The proceedings were never made public.
The record India would not show
The human rights commission asked to see the record of the trial, to satisfy itself that the force had made a genuine attempt to convict. The government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee refused. In a letter of 5 May 1998 the home ministry informed the commission of “the inability of the government of India to show records of GSFC to any authority other than those provided under the Border Security Force Act”. The commission issued a conditional summons to the home secretary, was refused again, and in 1999 went to the Supreme Court for the records.
It never got them. Kashmiri accounts say that the case ended in September 2000 without the record being produced; Ganaie wrote that the commission withdrew it after New Delhi pleaded national security. A review published in November 2001 noted that the Supreme Court had still not ruled. Either way, the body that India created to protect human rights was told by India that it could not read the trial of men accused of killing dozens of civilians. In 2002 the Times of India reported that the force had been charged with the execution of innocent people and with torture in the early 1990s, and that “in not a single case have the persons concerned been convicted”.
Compensation without justice
The families went to the Jammu and Kashmir High Court. On 10 September 2007 Justice Hakim Imtiyaz Hussain ordered the state to pay Rs 4 lakh to the family of each person killed, in thirty-two cases, calling the firing a “gross violation of the human rights which caused an irreparable loss to the petitioners”. The state government argued that the force was a central one and that it should not have to pay. On 9 September 2015 a division bench of Chief Justice N. Paul Vasanthakumar and Justice Hasnain Masoodi upheld the order. The state had deposited Rs 31 lakh with the court and was directed to deposit the remaining Rs 93 lakh.
Money was the only thing the courts could make the state give. In the same case the state police told the court that they had found the force’s men involved and had sought sanction to prosecute them. No prosecution followed, and no member of the force has been punished.
The families since
Mohammad Subhan Rah, wounded in the procession with his son Ghulam Qadir, went through twenty minor and ten major operations over twenty-three years and died, bedridden, on 25 May 2017. Abdul Gani Hajam lost a limb and died years later. Mohammad Rafiq Ganie’s father, Mohammad Shabaan, died in 2012. “Doctors told us he died of trauma,” Rafiq said.
Sara Begum lost her only son, Arshid. In January 1997 gunmen came to her house one night and asked her husband, Ghulam Mohiuddin, a retired doctor, to treat one of their wounded; the next morning the police recovered his body. She fled to Srinagar and lived there for years. Afroz’s father, Abdul Rasheed Zargar, said: “We are unable to forget the loss.” Ubaid Zargar, whose father was killed when he was a small child, said: “The pain that killers of my father roam free gives me nightmares.”
What Bijbehara shows
Bijbehara is one of the few massacres in Kashmir in which the Indian state’s own inquiry said plainly what happened. A magistrate found that a paramilitary force had fired, without provocation and out of vengeance, on a peaceful procession of thousands, and named the officer who allowed it. The government charged thirteen men with murder. Then the force tried them in secret and acquitted them all, and the government refused to let its own human rights commission see why.
It came ten months after the same force burned Sopore, and it fits the pattern of the years around it, from Gawkadal and Hawal in 1990 to Kupwara in 1994: unarmed crowds shot down, inquiries ordered, and no one punished. More than three decades later the families of Bijbehara have received some money and no justice. The men who fired, and the officers who commanded them, have never answered for the dead in a court that anyone was allowed to see.