The Handwara massacre

News from Srinagar

Handwara is a frontier town in Kupwara district, in the north of the Kashmir Valley. In January 1990 it was part of the same rising as the capital. “It had been almost a year now that resistance had been gradually spreading in Kashmir,” Abdur Rashid, an eyewitness, told Kashmir Life. “The month of January brought with it news of heavy deployment of BSF and CRPF in the Valley. Massive protests and curfews in Kashmir had become the order of the day by that time.” On the first night of Jagmohan’s new term as governor, he said, curfew was imposed across the Valley.

Then came the news of 21 January: India’s Central Reserve Police Force had fired on marchers at the Gawkadal bridge in Srinagar and killed more than fifty people. From 21 to 24 January there were protests across Kashmir, Handwara among them. On 24 January an organised programme was drawn up: everyone was asked to assemble at Handwara Chowk the next day and join a protest demonstration.

The procession of 25 January

On the morning of 25 January people poured into Handwara from Ramhal, Vilgam, Rajwar, Kandi, Nagarwari, Qaziabad, Qalamabad, Kulangam and the villages around them. They carried green flags and shouted slogans for freedom and against India and Jagmohan. At about eleven o’clock a large procession from the Ramhal area reached the chowk by the Magam road.

The International Forum for Justice and Human Rights put the number of marchers heading for the chowk at about ten thousand. A later police report gave twenty to twenty-five thousand. Neither the survivors nor that police report says that any of them carried a weapon. Ghulam Rasool was among them. “I along with around thousands of people were heading toward Handwara Chowk,” he told Kashmir Reader.

The Border Security Force fires

As the procession passed the Handwara police station, a Tata 407 vehicle of the Border Security Force, registration HVN-7717, came from Waripora and tried to push through the crowd. The marchers did not let it pass. According to the account published by Kashmir Life, the men of the Border Security Force then opened fire on the unarmed crowd; only after that did protesters throw stones and set the vehicle on fire.

Survivors remember no warning. “When the procession crossed Handwara Police Station, troopers coming from opposite side jumped from their vehicles and without any warning turned their barrels at us and fired indiscriminately,” Ghulam Rasool said. Mushtaq Ahmad, another survivor, told Kashmir Life in 2016: “The troopers straightaway began marching towards the people, turned their barrels at them and fired indiscriminately without any warning.”

The troopers did not stop at the crowd. Kashmir Life’s account says that they went on into the Handwara police station, ransacked its records and furniture and beat the policemen inside. Nazir Ahmad, another survivor, told Kashmir Reader that the troopers kept up indiscriminate firing on people for three hours; the paper reported that hundreds of troopers cornered the demonstrators from every side and fired until no one was left standing in the chowk.

What Habibullah Khan saw

Habibullah Khan was in the procession when the Border Security Force fired on it near the police station. “Suddenly people hit by bullets were falling in front of me. Some of them died on the spot,” he told Kashmir Life. He named the men he saw hit and dying in front of him: Muhammad Shafi War of Divaspora, Shafi Khan of Sodal, Nazir Ahmad Dar of Braripora, Shiefud-din Khan of Wullarhama, Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh of Wajhama, Ghulam Muhammad Beigh of Wudpora, Ali Mohammad Itto of Chogal, and Ghulam Muhammad War and Muhammad Amin Masala, both of Kulangam.

“Doomsday cannot be worse than what I witnessed,” Khan said. “Within minutes bodies were piling on streets and blood was scattered everywhere. I escaped miraculously in the indiscriminate firing, BSF men didn’t allow us initially to remove the injured to the hospital.”

Abdul Rahman, whose son was killed, said in 2017, in a report carried by Kashmir Life, that the peaceful protesters from Rajwar, Ramhal, Langate, Qaziabad, Chogul and the villages around had been fired upon by the Border Security Force without any “provocation”. “Despite clinching evidence of the involvement of BSF personnel in the killing of civilians, justice continues to elude us,” he said. The report placed the shooting near the town’s branch of the State Bank of India.

The dead and the wounded

No official list of the dead has been published. Twenty-one dead is the figure used by most Kashmiri reports and by the petition filed with the State Human Rights Commission in 2012, which said that “twenty-one people fell to bullets of the paramilitary BSF men”. Reports of the wounded range from forty to more than seventy-five. Scroll put the toll at no fewer than twenty-six, and a Kashmir Life report of 2016 at twenty-five. Human rights activists quoted by The Kashmir Walla say that at least thirty-four people were killed and 175 seriously injured.

The police report to the commission gave the lowest figures: eleven civilians killed and thirty-nine injured. The dead named by Habibullah Khan came from at least eight villages across the area. Kashmiris remember them as martyrs, and prayers for them are held every year at the martyrs’ graveyard in Handwara.

The official version

The Border Security Force’s version, as recorded in the handwritten first information report that Kashmir Life saw, was that the protesters were “in thousands” and had “stoned and torched the BSF Tata 407”. A police inquiry report filed with the State Human Rights Commission told the same story at greater length. “The mob started pelting stones over police and injured police personnel who were deployed on duty,” it said. “In the meantime one vehicle TATA (Matador) of BSF was passing from the main Chowk Handwara with ration of deployed nafri which was set ablaze by the mob. The nafri of BSF for their self defense opened fire on the mob due to which 11 civilians were killed and 39 injured.” Nafri is the police word for a contingent.

The survivors’ accounts reverse the order: the firing came first, and the burning of the vehicle came after. In March 2018 the commission itself found a gap in the police version. The report, it noted, did not explain whether the eleven civilians killed and the thirty-nine injured had been part of the group that attacked the vehicle. Even the police account does not say that anyone in the crowd was armed.

First information report 10/1990

A case was registered at Handwara police station as first information report number 10 of 1990, under sections of the Ranbir Penal Code that include attempted murder, mischief by fire and house trespass. Kashmir Life reported in 2016 that it was registered five days after the firing and that its handwritten copy carried only the force’s version of events. The investigation identified no one. On 16 February 1993 the investigating officer, Inspector Ghulam Mohidin, closed the case as untraced. The competent court did not accept the closure report, and the investigation was reopened.

Reopening changed nothing. By January 2019 the police had told the human rights commission that the Border Security Force unit had not cooperated and that “all the accused BSF men are untraceable”. A known force, a vehicle from Waripora with a known registration number, a known place and a known date had not produced a single name in twenty-nine years.

The rights commission

In February 2012 Muhammad Ahsan Untoo, chairman of the International Forum for Justice and Human Rights, petitioned the State Human Rights Commission. “Till this date, the government has no answer to our queries as to what led to this massacre,” the forum’s spokesman said in 2019. “Killed persons were not militants but civilians who were protesting peacefully.”

The commission questioned the police report but went no further. By January 2019 it had disposed of the case. According to Untoo, it cited the lack of cooperation of the district’s officials and of the victims’ next of kin, and the failure to identify the men of the Border Security Force who fired. On 31 October 2019 the commission itself was wound up. Untoo’s demand, repeated on the anniversaries, is for “a transparent and fresh probe into the incident by the sitting High Court Judge”.

A bunker on the square

Every year on 25 January Handwara closes. Shops, transport, offices and banks shut, and people gather at the martyrs’ graveyard to pray for the dead. In 2019 the shutdown was called by the Joint Resistance Leadership and spread to Langate, Qalamabad, Mawer, Villagam and Rajwar. Police and paramilitary forces were deployed in the town to prevent any protest, an eyewitness told Kashmir Life.

The families have asked for a memorial in the main chowk where the firing took place. “Their memorial should be built in the main Chowk so that our future generations don’t forget the history,” a resident told Kashmir Reader in 2018. Instead, he said, “forces constructed a bunker there to add insult to our injuries.”

Kashmir Life traced the bunker in the square to an attack on an army convoy on 13 August 1993. After it, a shopkeeper told the magazine, villagers were forced to carry construction material taken from abandoned Pandit houses in the town to build bunkers in the square. A local grocer named Bashir said that a man called Subhan Goor was tortured to death inside the bunker in the nineties. Kashmir Life titled its report Terror Square. It was written in April 2016, after Indian forces killed two young men during a protest in the square and the protesters set the bunker on fire; the authorities then bulldozed it, and the square, the magazine reported, was back to a park.

What Handwara shows

Handwara showed that Gawkadal had not been a single loss of control in the capital. Four days later and far from Srinagar, a different Indian force met a different unarmed crowd in the same way. A United Nations special rapporteur recorded reports that more than fifty people were killed by Indian forces in demonstrations in various towns of Indian-occupied Kashmir between 21 and 30 January 1990 alone.

The same square saw a second massacre the same year. On 1 October 1990, after an armed man shot dead a member of the Border Security Force and was killed on the spot, Border Security Force men and army soldiers fired on people in the town and set fire to houses and shops. Kashmir Life, drawing on survivors and on Asia Watch, counted twenty-two dead, among them the National Conference politician Ghulam Rasool Malik, whom, a relative said, Border Security Force men dragged from his house and shot. Days later India’s home minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, told reporters in Handwara: “One bullet will be responded with 100 bullets!” Twenty-six years on, that case too had made no headway.

The legal record is short. The police case was closed as untraced, reopened and left without result. The rights commission disposed of the petition and was then abolished. When this article was reviewed, more than thirty-six years after the firing, no member of the Border Security Force had been named, charged or tried for the killings in Handwara. In 2018 the families were still asking for a memorial in the main chowk, where for more than two decades a bunker had stood instead.