The Zakura and Tengpora massacres

Marching to the United Nations

In the weeks after the Gawkadal massacre of 21 January 1990, the people of the Kashmir Valley came out in numbers that the governor’s administration could not stop. Many of the processions had one destination: the office of the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan at Sonawar in Srinagar. There the marchers handed in memoranda that, Kashmir Life reported, demanded freedom from India and protested against the killings. In 1948 the United Nations Security Council had called for a free and impartial plebiscite to decide the state’s future, noting that India itself had declared that the question should be settled that way. India never allowed the vote to be held.

By then thirteen organisations had formed an alliance, Tehreek-e-Hurriyat Kashmir, with the lawyer Mian Abdul Qayoom as its main face; the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front stayed outside it. At the head of the processions walked the kafanposh, men wrapped in burial shrouds to show that they were ready to die. The marchers carried green flags inscribed with verses of the Quran. They did not carry weapons. Jagmohan, the governor sent by New Delhi, later complained in his memoir that the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front had “blatantly misused the facilities provided for the religious festivals and organised a very large number of processions”.

The million march

1 March 1990 was the largest of those days. Kashmir Life calls it the day “when more than a million people marched on Srinagar streets”. In Budgam crowds began assembling at half past eight in the morning; “thousands came, from villages on foot and in buses.” Tens of thousands from across Kashmir joined a huge crowd at the Eidgah in Srinagar and marched through Lal Chowk. They were protesting against the killings at Gawkadal, Alamgiri Bazar and Handwara.

The marchers reached the United Nations office at about half past two in the afternoon. Only a few of the men in shrouds were let in to present the memorandum. “Only few Kafanposh were allowed to enter and rest of us, were asked to return,” one marcher told Kashmir Life. Then they turned for home. That day, at two places on opposite sides of the city, Indian soldiers opened fire: at Zakura on a procession still on its way in, and at Tengpora on buses carrying marchers home.

The convoy at Zakura

Zakura lies on the northern edge of Srinagar, on the road that leads out of the city towards Sonamarg. More than two thousand marchers, many in shrouds, were on that road, heading for the United Nations office, when an army convoy returning to Srinagar from Sonamarg found its way blocked near the Zakura crossing. One Kashmir Life account describes five vehicles under three junior commissioned officers; another describes three vehicles. Local policemen asked the soldiers to wait until the road was clear or to take another route. The soldiers refused, and there was a heated argument. Then, witnesses told Kashmir Life, the soldiers turned towards the procession and opened fire from three machine guns mounted on their vehicles.

A report cited by Kashmir Life, Kashmir Bleeds, recorded that the soldiers had snatched one of the green flags inscribed with verses of the Quran, which angered the marchers. Mehraj-ud-Din, who was twelve and lived in Theed village near Harwan, said: “It was going on peacefully till the army vehicles came.” He was shot in the ribs. “They fired around hundred bullets in a few minutes, all directly aimed at people,” he said. Twenty-six years later his right arm still did not move.

Hassan, as Kashmir Life calls a shopkeeper who watched from his shop, said: “They fired to kill. They were aiming at people.” He and others carried away the dead and the wounded. “We got a truck from a poultry farm nearby to ferry injured and dead in it to SKIMS,” he said, meaning the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences at Soura. He picked up seven bodies before he fainted. Most were young men, shot in the head. He later learned that fourteen people had been killed and more than fifty seriously wounded.

The dead of Zakura

Eleven people died at the crossing and fifteen more on the way to the hospital at Soura, according to eyewitnesses quoted by Kashmir Life: twenty-six in all, with about fifty others wounded by bullets. Other Kashmir Life reports give fourteen dead, the figure Hassan heard, or eighteen. The police case recorded eleven dead and thirteen injured.

Manzoor Ahmad Bhat of Burzuhama was eighteen. He was shot twice at close range and died on the spot, the first martyr from his village. His father, Mohammad Maqbool Bhat, a gardener posted half a kilometre away, ran towards the crossing with three colleagues when he heard the shots. “As we reached near the Chowk, soldiers wearing turbans shot at us but we saved ourselves by hiding behind a government hut,” he said. He found his son at the hospital at Soura. “Manzoor was lying on the floor among the dead.” The father collapsed, and for four days he could not see.

Mohammad Ismail Bhat of Mukhti Bagh was the sole earner for his wife, Azi, and their three sons. He joined the march despite her pleas. She never saw his face again; he was buried without her seeing the body. Kashmir Life reported that she had lived on anti-depressants ever since, and that their son Shakeel, who was four in 1990, grew up a depressed adult.

The buses at Tengpora

The second shooting came later in the day at Tengpora, on the bypass road near Batamaloo on the western side of the city. Buses were carrying marchers home towards Budgam and the south of the Valley, some of the passengers riding on the roofs and still shouting slogans for freedom. Soldiers drew three vehicles across the road and stopped them.

Ali Mohammad Dar of Batamaloo was driving bus number JK 2Q-1591. “They first snatched my keys and then, started firing indiscriminately towards the bus top,” he told Kashmir Life in 2016, when he was eighty-two. A woman and her child on his bus begged the soldiers not to fire, he said, and they did not listen. When the soldiers left he walked round the bus. “I saw piles of bodies.” Men of the Central Reserve Police Force from a nearby bunker then ordered him: “First shift all corpses into your bus and then wash the blood drenched road.” He counted twenty-two bodies, and drove the dead to the Bones and Joints Hospital at Barzulla himself.

Rouf Ahmad Mir of Kreimshier was fourteen and on the roof of the same bus. Some passengers, not knowing how else to protect themselves, raised their pherans against the bullets. “I saw soldiers finding those alive after hit by bullets and then firing upon them again,” he said. Seven people were killed outside the bus’s two doors. Mir reached home at three the next morning. A neighbour came back only after eighteen days.

The dead of Tengpora

Twenty-one people were killed at Tengpora, five of them women, according to Kashmir Life. Abdul Kabir Sheikh, a gravedigger, said that he buried at least fifteen bodies in Batamaloo that day.

Abdul Majeed Sofi was killed on Dar’s bus. He was a baker and a daily wager in the irrigation department, and lived with his family in a single room. He left a wife of twenty-three, Shameema, and two daughters, one two years old and the other six months. Manzoor Ahmad Dar of Ompora and Abdul Qayoom of Narkura were killed in the same bus. Gravestones at Magarmal Bagh, Kashmir Life reported, carry the names of others: Abdul Rashid Dobi of Ichgam, Abdul Razak Dar of Naru Ichgam, Abdul Aziz Kutey of Kreimshier, and Ghulam Hassan, Ghulam Mohammad Rather and Ghulam Ahmad Tildoz of Budgam.

Shameema turned the bakery into a small provision store and took in needlework to keep her daughters in school. Around 2008 she developed a heart condition, and her daughters gave up their studies.

Counting the dead

Forty-seven is the toll remembered in Kashmir: twenty-six at Zakura and twenty-one at Tengpora. The same figures, with fourteen injured, are attributed to Asia Watch’s report Kashmir Under Siege of May 1991. Kashmir Life’s history of the media in 1990 gives lower figures, eighteen at Zakura and fourteen at Tengpora, while the driver Ali Mohammad Dar counted twenty-two bodies at his bus alone. A report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on summary or arbitrary executions, published in February 1991, recorded information that at least twenty-nine people had been killed during demonstrations at Tengpora and Zakura, and that Indian forces had allegedly “opened fire indiscriminately and without warning at the demonstrators including women and children”.

The only official count is in the Zakura police file, with eleven dead. No official list of the victims of either shooting has ever been published. Kashmiris remember all of them as the martyrs of 1 March.

What the authorities said

Jagmohan did not accept that the army was to blame. In his memoir, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, he wrote that the processions showed the Jama’at-e-Islami, Hizbul Mujahideen and other “pro-Pakistani organisations” being relegated to “secondary and even insignificant positions”, which was “not to the liking of these organisations”. He concluded: “Most probably, it was they, who directly or indirectly, caused these two serious incidents on March 1, 1990.”

After widespread protests the army, on the government’s directions, held an inquiry into Tengpora under Lieutenant General M. A. Zaki. According to India’s Kashmir War, the report of an Indian civil liberties team quoted by Kashmir Life, the inquiry “sought to justify the killings on the ground that the people had pelted stones at an army vehicle carrying school children of military personnel”. The state government had ordered on 20 February that schools, colleges and other educational institutions stay closed until 15 March.

Replying to the rapporteur’s inquiries on 23 July 1990, the Indian government said that its forces had used force “only when it was strictly necessary and to the extent required for the performance of their duty”, and as “a last resort in self-defence and to protect public property”.

The civil liberties team

Between 12 and 16 March 1990 four members of the Committee for Initiative on Kashmir, an Indian civil liberties group, toured the Valley and Jammu: the filmmaker Tapan Bose, Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, the journalist Gautam Navlakha and Sumanta Banerjee. Their report, India’s Kashmir War, appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly on 31 March 1990.

It held the governor responsible. “Jagmohan’s return to Jammu and Kashmir as governor signalled the unleashing of state repression on a massive scale,” it said. “The government’s tendency to treat mass demonstrations as the handiwork of Pakistani agents and use indiscriminate force against the people has alienated the Kashmiri public from India and pushed them into the arms of militants.” Banerjee later wrote that the national newspapers never carried its findings. Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal on the Zakura and Tengpora killings.

One file closed, one missing

The police registered the Zakura killings as first information report number 38 of 1990, under section 188 of the Ranbir Penal Code, for disobeying an official order, and section 302, for murder. Two assistant sub-inspectors, Ghulam Mohammad Khan and Abdul Khaliq, investigated. Their three-page report, two pages of which list the dead, found that prohibitory orders under section 144 had been in force and that the incident happened because the restriction was defied. “People were carrying green flags, shouting slogans and they had defied curfew,” the third page says. The case was closed with the finding that the “crime has happened but eye witnesses couldn’t identify the accused”.

For Tengpora the police produced no file at all, and no first information report was found. When Kashmir Life asked at the office of the senior superintendent of police in Srinagar, an officer replied: “There is no investigation file related to Tengpora incident … I guess you have been misinformed. No such incident has happened.” A shooting that killed twenty-one people, and that the army itself investigated, does not exist in the police record. No soldier has been charged for either shooting.

After the marches

Curfew was imposed again and lasted seventeen days. After the twin massacres and the killings at Hawal on 21 May, the great processions stopped. According to Kashmir Life, people came out on the streets in such numbers again only in 2008, eighteen years later.

The marchers of 1 March had attacked no one. They walked to the office of an international body and handed over a paper asking it to keep a promise it had made to them. Indian soldiers shot them at a road crossing on the way there and on a bus on the way home. The army’s inquiry spoke of a vehicle carrying schoolchildren at a time when the schools were shut, the Zakura case was closed because the soldiers could not be identified, and the Tengpora file cannot be found. When this article was reviewed, no soldier had been charged for the killings, and the vote the marchers asked for had still not been held in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.