Kashmir sees thousands detained and homes razed after policeman’s killing

SRINAGAR (MNTV) — Within hours of a policeman being shot dead in a crowded market square in south Kashmir this week, Indian security forces launched one of the largest sweeps the region has seen this year: at least 1200 people detained for questioning across six districts, with 700 taken in Srinagar alone.

By the following night, two family homes had been reduced to rubble.

The pattern is by now familiar in Kashmir — an attack, a mass round-up, and the destruction of houses belonging to alleged militants and their relatives.

What is contested is whether it constitutes legitimate counter-terrorism or, as a growing chorus of Kashmiri politicians, clerics, and rights advocates argue, a form of collective punishment inflicted on families and communities for acts they had no part in.

The attack

Head Constable Ashiq Hussain Qureshi, 45, was on patrol near Lal Chowk in Anantnag town on Wednesday afternoon when he was shot at close range by an unknown gunman.

He was rushed to the Government Medical College hospital and declared dead on arrival. Officials said the attacker fired from a moving motorcycle.

Qureshi, a Kashmiri from Beerwah in Budgam district, was serving with the 3rd Battalion of the India Reserve Police and had been deployed on security duty for the Amarnath Yatra, the annual Hindu pilgrimage that draws hundreds of thousands to the region each summer.

His father, also a police head constable, had been killed on duty in the 1990s; Qureshi joined the force under a compassionate appointment scheme after his death.

The Resistance Front claimed responsibility on social media. It was the first targeted killing of a police officer in the region this year.

Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha condemned what he called a cowardly and heinous act and said it would not go unpunished. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah also condemned the killing.

The response

The crackdown began almost immediately, and its scale was extraordinary.

Director General of Police Nalin Prabhat visited the scene, after which operations rolled out across Anantnag, Pulwama, Shopian, Kulgam, Srinagar, and Budgam.

Officials described those detained as suspected “overground workers” — a broad and elastic category used in Kashmir for civilians alleged to provide logistical or informational support to militants.

In Budgam district alone, more than 200 people described as suspects, miscreants, and narcotics offenders were held for questioning and verification.

Estimates of the total detained ranged from 1,000 to more than 2,500 depending on the source and the point in the operation.

Then, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday, authorities demolished the homes of two men identified as active operatives: Adil Thokar of Guree in Bijbehara, and Haroon Rashid Ganaie of Hassanpora.

Officials described the demolitions as part of an ongoing crackdown against militants and what they termed their support infrastructure.

Neither man has been convicted of any offence in connection with Wednesday’s killing. Both remain at large.

Practice now routine

The Anantnag demolitions were not an anomaly but the continuation of a policy that has become standard in Kashmir over the past several years — and which reached its widest application after the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, in which 26 people, mostly tourists, were killed.

In the days following that attack, security forces used explosives to blow up the family homes of at least five alleged members of anti-India armed organizations, across south Kashmir, in Pulwama, Shopian, Kulgam, Anantnag, and Tral.

At least 1,500 people were detained. Families of the accused said openly that they were being punished for the actions of relatives.

The accounts that emerged from those villages were stark. In Pulwama, the sister of one suspect described security forces arriving hours in advance, locking neighbourhood cattle into sheds, and instructing residents to put their fingers in their ears — before the family home was blown apart.

In another village, a neighbour recounted family members being confined to a room while the house next door was destroyed.

Notably, one of the two men whose home was razed this week — Adil Thokar — was also named as a suspect in the Pahalgam attack, and his family home in Bijbehara was demolished then too.

“Accountability must be individual”

Criticism of the demolition policy has come from across Kashmir’s political spectrum, including from figures who have unambiguously condemned the attacks that prompt it.

Mehbooba Mufti, former chief minister and president of the People’s Democratic Party, urged the central government to tread carefully and distinguish clearly between militants and civilians, warning that alienating innocent people — particularly those who oppose militancy — serves the aims of the very groups the state is fighting.

She noted reports of thousands arrested and homes of ordinary Kashmiris demolished alongside those of militants.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Kashmir’s chief cleric and chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, made the same argument.

While Kashmiris collectively condemned the Pahalgam killings and it was imperative that the perpetrators face justice, he said, the indiscriminate arrests and the widely circulated videos of houses and neighbourhoods being destroyed were disturbing and distressing.

He urged authorities not to punish innocent Kashmiri families in the pursuit of justice for innocent victims.

The principle at issue was summarised by the former media analyst Tahir Sayeed: accountability must be individual, not collective.

Legal question

The practice sits uneasily with basic principles of criminal justice. The men whose homes are destroyed have not been tried, let alone convicted. Their parents, siblings, and children — who in most cases face no allegation whatsoever — lose their homes and possessions in the middle of the night.

International humanitarian law prohibits the destruction of property as a punitive measure against people not individually responsible for an offence.

India’s own constitutional guarantees of due process and the right to shelter have been invoked by lawyers challenging similar demolitions elsewhere in the country, where the practice — colloquially termed “bulldozer justice” — has been applied disproportionately to Muslim households in several states and drawn adverse comment from the Supreme Court.

In Kashmir, where the demolitions are framed as counter-terrorism rather than municipal enforcement, that scrutiny has been thinner.

Strategic argument

Beyond the rights question, critics raise a practical one: whether the policy works.

The logic offered by officials is deterrence — that families will restrain young men from joining militant groups if they know their homes are at risk.

The counter-argument, made by Kashmiri politicians and by security analysts alike, is that mass detentions and home demolitions generate precisely the resentment that sustains recruitment, and that the cycle has repeated often enough over three decades to be self-evident.

Wednesday’s killing itself points to the limits of the approach.

Adil Thokar’s family home was demolished in 2025. He remained active. His family’s house was demolished again this week. He remains at large.

The wider context

The crackdown comes amid the Amarnath Yatra, during which security deployment across the Kashmir Valley is at its heaviest, and against the backdrop of the region’s continuing political limbo since New Delhi stripped it of statehood and special constitutional status in 2019.

For the thousands of people picked up this week, the process will typically involve questioning, verification, and — for most — release without charge.

For the families whose homes were levelled, there is no such process.

There is only the rubble, and the knowledge that whatever their relatives are accused of, no court has yet been asked to decide it.