16 Years Ago on this day, the Wadhama Massacre took place in Kashmir #NeverForget Wandhama is a small town near Ganderbal in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The state had a minority population of Hindu Kashmiri Pandits, over a half of a million of whom fled from the Kashmir valley to the Hindu-majority Jammu part of the state after militancy erupted in the region. The Wandhama Pandits consisted of Pandits who chose to remain in their homeland despite the rise in violence, as well as those Pandits who returned to the region from refugee camps in Jammu. On 25 January 1998, 23 Kashmiri Pandits living in the village of Wandhama were killed by unidentified gunmen. According to the testimony of one of the survivors of the incident, a 14 year-old Hindu boy named Vinod Kuman Dhar, the gunmen came to their house dressed like Indian Army soldiers, had tea with them, waiting for a radio message indicating that all Pandit families in the village had been covered. After a brief conversation they rounded up all the members of the Hindu households and then summarily gunned them down with Kalashnikov rifles. The massacre was allegedly committed by Abdul Hamid Gada of Hizbul Mujahideen and was timed to coincide with the Shab-e-Qadar, the holiest night of the month of Ramzan, when believers stay awake until dawn. Gada was subsequently shot dead by Indian security forces in 2000. Kashmirs Divisional Commissioner S L Bhat, who knew some of the Pandits personally, was quick to arrive at the scene of the carnage. He said, This is the worst incident I have witnessed, I believe foreign militants were involved in the massacre. After the massacre, the local Hindu temple was destroyed, as were the houses of the Pandits.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 05:30:00 +0000
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