Four Deaths and No Answers in Kulgam

Kashmir police silences questions as bodies emerge from the Veshaw River

- JATINDER KAUR TUR

NAZIR AHMED MAGRAY WAS WORRIED. Few could afford not to be, in a Kashmir traumatised by a militant attack that killed 26 men, mostly tourists and one local, 11 days earlier. Few could not be when the police picked up several thousand youth for interrogations, as the clock ticked towards a war that everyone knew was coming. But Nazir had recieved every reassurance that could have been had over the course of the day. This was more than any other family whose 20-year-old son had been picked up in a night raid by the Special Operations Group—a specialised counter-terrorism operations unit of the Jammu and Kashmir Police—would have had.

At the break of dawn on 3 May, a group of men in the black uniforms of the SOG, with traditional pherans over the top, broke into Nazir’s home. “They asked my father his name, and then asked where my brother was sleeping,” Riyaz Magray, his son told me. Riyaz worked quarrying rock from the dry riverbed of the Veshaw River—called the Veshaw Nullah by locals—that bounds the north of their small village of Tangmarg. “They then barged into the room my brother was sleeping in and hauled him out,” Riyaz said. “They only told us it was an inquiry and that he would be taken to Manzgam police station.” There was nothing unusual about Imtiaz Ahmad Magray, Riyaz’s brother. Like many in Kulgam’s deprived dry riverbed belts—contrasted starkly against the wealthy orchard regions of the rest of southern Kashmir—he had to migrate for work. Imtiaz had been in Himachal Pradesh since last December and had only returned recently to Tangmarg after a dispute with his contractor in Himachal. He had no previous police cases against him, a rarity in a state famous for detaining and policing youth with ferocity.