21 May 1990 | Srinagar
On 21 May 1990, hours after gunmen of Hizbul Mujahideen assassinated Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq at his home, men of the 69th Battalion of India’s Central Reserve Police Force fired on the procession carrying his body past Islamia College at Hawal in Srinagar. The government counted 27 dead; lists kept in Kashmir name between 52 and 70. One of the Mirwaiz’s killers is serving a life sentence, but no member of the force has been tried, although a human rights commission investigator reported in 2017 that the force’s own court of inquiry had held fifteen of its men responsible.
The Mirwaiz of Kashmir
Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq was the chief preacher of Srinagar. He held the hereditary title of Mirwaiz of Kashmir, preached from the pulpit of the Jamia Masjid in the old city as his family had done for generations, and led a political party, the Awami Action Committee. For the people of downtown Srinagar he was a religious authority and a political leader at once. His followers call him Shaheed-e-Millat, the martyr of the nation.
By the spring of 1990 Indian-occupied Kashmir was in open revolt and under the direct rule of a governor sent by New Delhi. The Mirwaiz had not taken up arms. On the thirty-sixth anniversary of his death, in 2026, his son, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, said of him: “Shaheed Mirwaiz strongly abhorred violence. He saw violence and force as weakness, not strength. He advocated dialogue and practised it throughout his life.”
That made him a target. The prosecution’s case in court was that Hizbul Mujahideen and the Jamaat-e-Islami feared that he “would eventually assume political leadership of Kashmir”. The police said in 2023 that the group had branded him “a peacemaker and an agent” of the Indian government.
The killing at Nigeen
At about eleven on the morning of 21 May 1990 three armed men came to Mirwaiz Manzil, his house at Nigeen. According to the case accepted by India’s Supreme Court, one of them gave a false name, Gulzar Farooq of Batamaloo; The Tribune reported in 2023 that they had come on the pretext of seeking financial support for Hizbul Mujahideen. Zahoor Ahmad, known as Bilal, fired several rounds at the Mirwaiz from a pistol. A second man fired into the air as they came out, and the third, Mohammad Ayub Dar, had taken up position in the room of the Mirwaiz’s personal assistant. The gardener, Ghulam Qadir Sofi, tried to stop them as they ran; they pushed him aside, and Bilal broke free from him after a scuffle.
The Mirwaiz was taken to the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences at Soura, where he died at about half past twelve. It was the killing of an unarmed religious leader in his own home by armed men, and it had nothing to do with the cause of Kashmir’s freedom.
The case against the assassins
The police at Nigeen registered the killing as first information report number 61 of 1990. On 11 June 1990 the Indian government transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which charged five members of Hizbul Mujahideen. Two of them, Abdullah Bangroo and Abdul Rehman Shigan, died while the trial was pending; the police say both were killed by Indian forces in the 1990s. A designated court under the TADA Act convicted Mohammad Ayub Dar of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment, relying on a confession that the Supreme Court accepted as voluntary and truthful. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction on 21 July 2010.
The other two, Javaid Ahmad Bhat and Zahoor Ahmad Bhat, were arrested by a special investigation agency of the police on 16 May 2023, thirty-three years later. The police said they had spent the intervening years in Pakistan and Nepal before returning to Kashmir in secret, and handed them over to the Central Bureau of Investigation as proclaimed offenders. When this article was reviewed, no verdict in their case had been reported.
The procession from Soura
News of the killing spread through Srinagar within minutes. Thousands of mourners went to the hospital at Soura, took up the body and set out across the city for the old town. “A large number of mourners were taking his body to Rajouri Kadal,” the poet Zareef Ahmad Zareef told Kashmir Life; Rajouri Kadal is the ancestral seat of the Mirwaiz family. It was a funeral procession, and the people in it were mourners.
The route passed through Hawal and Gojwara. On the main road near the Islamia College of Science and Commerce, a large bunker held a contingent of the 69th Battalion of India’s Central Reserve Police Force. The force had also set up a makeshift interrogation centre inside the college.
Ten minutes at Islamia College
As the procession reached the gate of the college, at Mirza Kamil Chowk, the men in the bunker opened fire. Zareef watched from the third floor of his house at Makhdoom Sahib, from where, he said, the place is clearly visible. The firing went on for nearly ten minutes, Kashmir Life reported. “It was indiscriminate firing that killed 70 people on spot,” Zareef said. “The firing was followed by wails and the loud cries of La ilaha Il’lallah among the mourners.”
“People were hit all around their bodies,” Zareef said. “Bullets hit Mirwaiz’s body in the face. Some mourners lost their eyes, some legs and so on.” The mourners had come to carry one man to his grave. By evening they were gathering the bodies of dozens.
The Mirwaiz’s body was taken to the Islamia High School and kept there overnight. The next morning funeral prayers were said for him and then for those killed at Hawal, and they were buried in the Martyrs’ Graveyard at Eidgah. “Entire Kashmir observed strike for 15 consecutive days,” Zareef recalled.
The mourners who died
Nazir Ahmad Nowshehri of Hawal, who was twenty-six, ran a jewellery shop with his brother, Ghulam Muhammad. On 21 May Nazir was killed, and so was Ghulam Muhammad’s wife, Shakeela. “That was a difficult moment to live,” Ghulam Muhammad told Kashmir Life. “We were all together but two of us never returned home.”
Nazir left a wife, Mehjabeen, three daughters in primary school, and a son, Zubair, who was a year and a half old. “I do not know much about my father. I only have a vague impression of his face,” Zubair said twenty-one years later. He left school after the ninth class and opened a shop selling readymade garments near the memorial to the dead.
Muhammad Maqbool was among the others. “When Maulvi Sahib was martyred, Muhammad Maqbool left home to take part in the procession. We did not know that he will never return,” one of his relatives said. Kashmiris remember the dead of Hawal as martyrs.
Counting the dead
No official list of the dead has been published. The government gave twenty-seven. The Awami Action Committee compiled a list of fifty-two names. The memorial at the site carries seventy, and Zareef and other eyewitnesses speak of seventy or more. The International Forum for Justice and Human Rights said in 2017 that it had a record of fifty-three mourners killed. A figure of thirty-five civilians is attributed to the findings of the human rights commission’s investigation in December 2017. More than two hundred people are reported to have been wounded.
The gaps go back to the first investigation. The commission’s investigator found in 2017 that N. Sarvada, the police officer (an ASP at police headquarters) who handled the case from May to August 1990, had not recorded the statements of eyewitnesses, had recorded only those of officials of the force, who blamed “militants”, and had “failed to obtain even the list of the deceased and injured persons”. In 2013 the administration was asked under the right to information law what inquiry had followed the firing. The reply said there was “no information with the department as to whether there was any enquiry either judicial or magisterial ordered by the government or not”.
A governor removed, nobody tried
Jagmohan had returned as governor in January and presided over the killings at Gawkadal, Handwara, Zakura and Tengpora. After the firing on the funeral, New Delhi removed him, and Girish Chandra Saxena took over on 26 May 1990.
The change of governor brought no accountability. A first information report, number 35 of 1990, was registered at Nowhatta police station. A departmental inquiry identified the commandant and the deputy commandant of the battalion as the main culprits, according to the lawyers of the Awami Action Committee’s legal cell. “But later they threatened the witnesses so naturally, no one was punished,” they told Kashmir Life. The central government offered a commission of inquiry and ex-gratia payments to the families. According to Zareef, the people rejected both.
The commission’s findings
On 26 March 2013 Muhammad Ahsan Untoo, chairman of the International Forum for Justice and Human Rights, petitioned the State Human Rights Commission for an investigation, compensation for the families and the wounded, and a memorial to the dead. The officials the commission wrote to did not respond. On 28 February 2014 its acting chairperson ordered the commission’s own investigation wing to complete a time-bound inquiry within two months.
It took three years. On 16 February 2017 the investigating officer, Masood Ahmed Beigh, filed an interim report. It recorded that a court of inquiry of senior officers of the force, among them an inspector-general, had held fifteen men of the 69th Battalion responsible for the indiscriminate firing on the mourners, three of them officers: a deputy superintendent and two sub-inspectors. The report listed their names. The court of inquiry, according to the report, rejected the battalion’s claim that it fired only after an attack by “militants”: had anyone attacked the force, the people in the procession would have been hit too, and there was “no weight” in the battalion’s claims. It found it “ironical” that the force said it could not see the coffin, which the mourners carried on their shoulders, and concluded that its men had fired “for excess than it was actually called for”.
Untoo said in May 2017, as Kashmir Reader reported, that none of them had been punished and that the families had received no ex-gratia relief. “I will continue to fight the cases of the victims whose innocent loved ones have been murdered by the government forces,” he said. On 31 October 2019 the commission was wound up.
Remembering 21 May
Every year on 21 May Kashmiris remember the Mirwaiz and the martyrs of Hawal. On 21 May 2002, while commemorating the twelfth anniversary, another leader, Abdul Ghani Lone, was shot dead by gunmen.
In recent years the authorities have stopped the commemoration itself. In May 2024 the Awami Action Committee said that Mirwaiz Umar Farooq had been put under house detention again on 3 May, that he had not been allowed to go to the Jamia Masjid on Fridays to deliver the sermon, and that people should visit the Eidgah on 21 May to pray for the Mirwaiz and the Hawal martyrs “if authorities allow it”. The committee said the usual week of commemoration was unlikely because of “daily arrests and harassment”. On the thirty-sixth anniversary, in May 2026, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said that he had once again not been allowed to visit the Mazar-e-Shuhada, the martyrs’ graveyard at Eidgah where his father and the dead of Hawal lie.
Two crimes, one day
Two wrongs were done to Kashmir on 21 May 1990. Armed men killed its chief preacher in his home. Hours later the forces of the Indian state fired on the people carrying him to his grave. For the first, a court has convicted one man and two more have been arrested. For the second, the men who fired wore uniforms and were identified by their own force’s court of inquiry, as a state commission’s investigator reported, and none of them has been charged, tried or punished.
The petition of 2013 asked for an investigation, compensation and a memorial. When this article was reviewed, no court had heard the killing of the mourners of Hawal, the commission that investigated it no longer existed, and the Mirwaiz’s son was being kept from the graves on the anniversary.
About the evidence
That the 69th Battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force fired on the funeral procession is not disputed; the force’s claim that it fired only after an attack by “militants” was rejected by its own court of inquiry, according to the State Human Rights Commission investigator’s interim report of 2017. The toll is given as 27 by the government, 52 on the Awami Action Committee’s list, 53 on the record of the International Forum for Justice and Human Rights, and 70 or more on the memorial and by eyewitnesses; a figure of 35 is attributed to the commission’s final findings. The assassination of the Mirwaiz was the work of Hizbul Mujahideen according to the courts, which convicted one man; two more were arrested in 2023.