The Gawkadal massacre

Raids on the old city

On 19 January 1990 New Delhi sent Jagmohan back to Kashmir as governor and placed Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir under Governor’s Rule. The elected government had resigned the night before. Within hours, according to most accounts, India’s Central Reserve Police Force and the state police began house-to-house searches in Chota Bazaar and Guru Bazaar, crowded neighbourhoods of downtown Srinagar.

Kashmir Life later reported that more than four hundred people were dragged out of their homes into the cold of the January night and arrested. Not one of them turned out to be an armed fighter, and no weapon was seized. Other accounts put the number taken at about three hundred, most of whom were later released. What spread through the city the next morning was the residents’ account that women had been molested during the raids.

Who ordered the operation has never been settled. Jagmohan and the outgoing chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, both denied it. The Indian journalist Manoj Joshi, in his book The Lost Rebellion, attributed it to the state’s director-general of police and the inspector-general of the Central Reserve Police Force. No government investigation was ever ordered.

The march across Srinagar

On 20 January crowds came out across the city, and curfew was imposed by nightfall. On the morning of 21 January thousands of people defied it. Processions set out from Magarmal Bagh, Padshahi Bagh, Kursoo Rajbagh, Jawahar Nagar and Mehjoor Nagar, converged at Lal Chowk and headed for Chota Bazaar to stand with the families who had been raided. The marchers were unarmed. They shouted slogans for freedom.

At Ghanta Ghar in Lal Chowk, according to The Kashmir Walla, a deputy superintendent of police named Alla Baksh stopped the procession and forced it towards Gawkadal through Maisuma. Gawkadal is a wooden bridge over the Jhelum that joins Maisuma to Basant Bagh.

Rauf Ahmad, who was twenty-four, watched the marchers from a window of his family’s house. His elder sister, Zulehama, later told the news site Truthout what he said before he went out to join them: “How can we tolerate disgrace of our women? If we stay quiet, they will get up to anything. We all should join the protest, or it will be immodest on our part.”

Firing on the bridge

When the procession reached the bridge, the Central Reserve Police Force opened fire. Ghulam Malik Dar, a labourer, told Kashmir Life in 2016 that the troops “unleashed a flurry of bullets from three different sides”. “I saw a crimson river flowing over the bridge,” he said. People fell where they stood. Some jumped from the bridge into the Jhelum to escape the bullets, and some of them drowned. A retired police officer told Kashmir Life that more bodies, fished out of the river, were later brought to the police control room.

Ghulam Ali Dar, known in the neighbourhood as Gulle Kak, was coming back from delivering newspapers. “The troops were firing indiscriminately,” he told The Kashmir Walla. “I saw two people embracing each other, before falling into a ditch. Both of them died.” Shakeel Khan, another witness, said: “It was a peaceful protest. People from the nearby vicinity had gathered to protest against the highhandedness of troops.”

Witnesses describe the killing going on after the crowd had broken. Mohamad Sadiq, a marcher from Rajbagh, told Kashmir Life that Rauf Ahmad saw a trooper turn the barrel of his machine gun towards the women in the procession and went to him; his sister said he turned the gun on himself and was hit by thirty-two bullets. Eyewitnesses quoted by the Kashmir Observer said that troopers who found a youth named Irfan Ahmed still breathing among the dead fired eighteen bullets into his stomach, and that an entire carbine was emptied into the chest of his neighbour, Farooq Ahmed.

Among the dead

Farooq Ahmad Wani, an engineer in the water works department, survived. He told Truthout that he had been on his way to the divisional commissioner’s office for curfew passes when the forces on the road turned him towards Lal Chowk, and that he walked among the women of the procession. “I had walked amid women thinking that they would not fire on them, but the CRPF men did not spare them either,” he said. When the firing began he thought of his three daughters. A man running to jump into the river knocked him down, and he lay still among the bodies on the bridge so that the troops would take him for dead. “I lay flat on the ground, scores of dead bodies around me. Not a single person was alive.”

When he turned his face away from the hot ash of a fallen kangri, a heating pot, an officer saw him move. “‘He is alive,’ an officer said aloud, abusing me in Hindi,” Wani recalled. “Taking no sympathy on me, the officer shot the whole round of bullets into me with his carbine gun.” Later a second man put a gun to his temple, and the officer who had shot him shouted the words that gave the Truthout report its title: “I have shot him enough. He will die on his own. Do not waste your bullet.”

He begged a Sikh trooper standing near him to put him in the truck because he was alive. The trooper took hold of his muffler and dragged him into the truck “along with other dead bodies”. At the police control room a doctor saw that he was alive. “He immediately ordered me to be taken to hospital, and I was rushed to hospital and saved,” Wani said.

Hospitals, boats and a closed city

The wounded were carried wherever help could be found. Abdul Aziz Gujoo, a baker, told Kashmir Life that “Ratan Rani Hospital became a literal grieving centre”. Manohar Lal, a Kashmiri Pandit who lived at the edge of Gawkadal, saw the injured taken along the Jhelum by boat: “The people who sustained bullet injuries were crying with pain and even some died in boats as people were taking them to hospitals.” A scholar named Abeena told the same magazine that her grandmother, Fiza Begum, a nurse, treated bullet wounds at home that day.

Few outside observers saw any of it. No newspaper was published in Srinagar for many days after the massacre. Within days the governor’s administration confined about thirty foreign reporters to the Broadway Hotel in Srinagar, after the police warned of a plan to seize Radio Kashmir on 26 January; told later that the attempt would come on 11 February, it had the whole visiting press escorted to the airport and barred from returning, according to Kashmir Life’s history of the media in 1990. In April four Urdu newspapers in Srinagar were closed for printing what the government called “subversive and anti-national material”. The record of Gawkadal was rebuilt in later years from the testimony of survivors and neighbours.

Counting the dead

No official list of the dead has ever been published. The police case recorded twenty-two deaths, and the police report names twenty-two people killed and twelve injured. Indian authorities gave figures of between twenty-one and twenty-eight in the days after the firing; a police figure of thirty-two was later cited by Truthout.

In Kashmir the number remembered is fifty-two dead and some 250 wounded, the figure used by The Kashmir Walla, the Kashmir Observer and Greater Kashmir. Human rights groups have given fifty-one, and the Youth Forum for Kashmir fifty-five. The journalist Tavleen Singh wrote that more than a hundred were killed, and eyewitnesses quoted by Truthout put the toll at between one hundred and two hundred.

Those named in the Kashmiri press include Rauf Ahmad, also written Abdul Rouf, who was twenty-four; Irfan Ahmed; and Farooq Ahmed. Abdul Aziz Gujoo remembered a Farooq Ahmad as the first person killed on the bridge: “the way they [CRPF] killed the first person, Farooq Ahmad, was soul-shattering sight.” Kashmiris remember all of them as martyrs.

A case against the marchers

The police registered one criminal case, first information report number 3 of 1990, at Kralkhud police station on 21 January 1990. It was a case against the marchers. It invoked sections of the Ranbir Penal Code on rioting, unlawful assembly, attempted murder, disobedience of official orders and provocation. According to The Kashmir Walla, it stated that the Central Reserve Police Force had opened fire to stop an “unruly mob raising anti-India and anti-forces slogans” on its way to Lal Chowk. A police record quoted by Muslim Mirror adds: “Instead of dispersing, the unruly crowd started pelting stones at government buildings and security force personnel.” The witnesses quoted in the Kashmiri press describe a peaceful procession fired on without warning. In the Kashmir Observer’s words, the case was registered “against the atrocious mob”.

No case was registered against any member of the Central Reserve Police Force. A marcher told Kashmir Life that the party of police and Central Reserve Police Force men that stopped the procession at the bridge was led by an officer of the rank of deputy superintendent of police. A petition filed with the State Human Rights Commission in 2012 named him as Alla Baksh, then deputy superintendent at Kothibagh, accused him of planning the firing, and said that he had since “been awarded promotions and doles”. He died, Kashmir Life reported in January 2013, without ever facing an inquiry.

The case went nowhere. Kashmir Life reported in 2013 that the police had closed it fifteen years after the firing, declaring those involved untraceable, and that no charge sheet had been filed against anyone. In February 2019, The Kashmir Walla reported, the police said that they had closed the investigation because they had found no clue to trace the accused, and they told the rights commission that the records had been lost in the floods of 2014. The only people the police ever treated as offenders were the people who were shot at.

The rights commission

On 1 May 2012 the International Forum for Justice and Human Rights, a Srinagar group, petitioned the State Human Rights Commission. The commission issued notices to the director-general of police, the Union home secretary, the state home secretary and the inspector-general of police for Kashmir.

On 26 December 2012 a division bench of the commission, J. A. Kawoos and Rafiq Fida, ordered a special inquiry by the superintendent of police of the commission’s own police investigation wing and asked for a report within two months. The forum urged the inquiry officer to conduct the inquiry “in free and impartial manner” and asked officials to cooperate “so that justice can be delivered”.

On 22 November 2017 the then inspector-general of police, Munir Ahmad Khan, sent the commission a police report that named twenty-two civilians killed and twelve injured. It called “completely misplaced and misconceived” the observation of the commission’s superintendent of police that the authorities had failed to identify the magistrate on duty at Gawkadal that day. The commission could only recommend, not prosecute, and it was wound up with effect from 31 October 2019. On the anniversary in January 2022 the journalist Jahangir Ali, quoted by The Kashmir Walla, summed up the result: the case had been closed and the culprits declared “untraceable”.

Remembering 21 January

A stone in memory of the dead of Gawkadal stands in Srinagar, and every year on 21 January parts of the city close in their memory. The authorities have often tried to stop the observance. On the anniversary in 2017 they put up barricades and restricted movement in Maisuma and Lal Chowk while shops in the civil lines stayed shut. That year the joint Hurriyat leadership at first marked 21 January as a day of relaxation on its protest calendar, and called the shutdown only after Hilal Ahmad War of the People’s Political Party protested publicly.

In 2018 the Joint Resistance Leadership, the alliance of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik, held a peaceful protest at Basant Bagh despite curfew, restrictions and barricades. Yasin Malik had been taken into custody two days earlier and sent to the Srinagar central jail. Hilal Ahmad War called Gawkadal “the Jallianwala Bagh of Kashmir”.

Manohar Lal, the Pandit neighbour who watched from his window, stayed in Kashmir when most Pandits left. For a month after the firing he did not leave his house. “Our Muslim neighbours used to provide us the essentials,” he said. He told Kashmir Life in 2014 that he joins the anniversary protest every year without telling anyone he is a Pandit: “I participate in the demonstration to register my silent protest against the incident that took place before my eyes.”

What Gawkadal shows

Gawkadal was the first mass killing of the uprising, and it set the pattern for the months that followed. A United Nations special rapporteur later recorded reports that more than fifty people had been killed by Indian forces during demonstrations in various towns between 21 and 30 January 1990. Four days after Gawkadal, India’s Border Security Force fired on a procession in Handwara; on 1 March the army fired on marchers at Zakura and Tengpora; on 21 May the Central Reserve Police Force fired on the funeral of the Mirwaiz at Hawal. In the words of a Human Rights Watch report of May 1991, quoted by Kashmir Life: “In the weeks that followed the Gawakadal massacre, as security forces fired on crowds of marchers and as militants intensified their attacks against the police and those suspected of aiding them, Kashmir’s civil war began in earnest.”

The firing did not empty the streets. Kashmir Life wrote that “the raging struggle of a few angry Kashmiris morphed into a popular uprising”, and that thousands of young men crossed the Line of Control to get arms training, braving snow and the bullets of Indian soldiers.

More than thirty-six years later the legal record is unchanged. A paramilitary force fired on an unarmed procession on a bridge in the middle of Srinagar and killed dozens of people. The only criminal case named the marchers, and it was closed without anyone being traced. The rights commission ordered an inquiry, received a police report that named the dead, and was then abolished. When this article was reviewed, no member of the Central Reserve Police Force had been charged, tried or disciplined for Gawkadal.