A few months into joining Indian Express over two decades ago, a friendly voice in the Newsroom asked if I knew 'ABC.' Of course, I did. He was my close friend and classmate in journalism school in Kashmir. It was not an unlikely quest𝔍ion as I was far from home, and a fellow Kashmiri could enquire about another. However, I did not get the response I expected.
"He has been shot at aꦺnd is critical; some say he might have even passed 𒅌away,"
The last sentence seemed to come from a distance as I almost collapsed in my chair. He and a few other friends were interning with a local newspaper in Srinagar. We had barely finished our journalism cཧourse, and he wasn't even that 'big' a byline. His stories barely made it to the paper, and having 'enormous' implications was out of the question. Even Srinagar was relatively peaceful compared to our childhood in the 1990s.𓆏
There were so many 'whys🐻' in my head that I needed to find answers to.
Cell phones were the luxury of a select few in Kaܫshmir, as the government had not made mobile devices accessible to the general public in the state years after their advent in India.
The stoic and shy me was vacillating across the newsroom, asking people for updates. It was long before real-time news, and wires were still the only source of information. The vacuum in information had me howling and crying. Friends and colleagues tried to comfort me while making calls to find out mor💖e.
I also made failed attempts to reach the landline number of the office concerned and the homes of other friends working there. After hours, my then-friend and now-husband called to inform us that our friend 🍰had survived.
The bullet fired at the back of his neck by a gunman posing as aꦐ delivery man had passed through his skull, piercing his nose. It was a miracle, according to one of Delhi's top neur🏅osurgeons, that the bullet had not caused any permanent damage.
My friend later joined one of India's most popular news networks and🐎 worked with them foꦇr decades. He was the recipient of many top awards, including the Ramnath Goenka Award, during his years of work.
While he says it was just the "hand of God that repurchased him from the dead🉐", others were not lucky.
In the past decades, there have been attacks, blasts, many lives lost, and some miraculous escapes. Born and raised in Kashmir, I began seeing death when I was in Class VII. I can put hundreds of faces to the names of those killed. One afternoon, almost three years after I had left Kashmir to work in Delhi, a casualty once again became not just a number—it was a beautiful yo꧟ung face with a sparkling smile.
Asiya Jeelani, a young journalist working with a human rights monitoring group in Srinagar,🐬 my senior in school and then my junior in the journalism department at Kashmir University, was killed while on a work assignment when a landmine blew up her taxi. Another colleague of hers lost his limb.
News of journalists losing their lives was not a rare occurrence🅷; as children, we 🍸would hear dinner table talks about one newsman or another falling to bullets. The assailants are always unidentified gunmen.
As we grew, we understood what it meant when t🍨he news started hitting🏅 closer home.
We were in school when my best friend's family shifted to her ancestral home on the outskirts of Srinagar from their residence in the press enclave after a journalist working with AFP died i𒉰n a parcel bomb attack in the BBC office.
My best friend's father, also a renowned journalist, had his office a few feet away. The ജentire 1990s saw many such killings: the dire🍰ctor of the state-owned Doordarshan, a television anchor working in the same network, the owner and editor of a newspaper, freelancers, and even a calligrapher with an Urdu daily.
While still in journalism school, news of a Hindustan Times journalist killed in a car bomb while coverin🍌g an assignment made not just our parents wary but also had us question the choice of profession for a while.
During my initial years as a reporter in Delhi, covering health and visiting the swanky offices of renowned doctors made me feel guilty thinking about the fraternity, colleagues, and friends back home who had to fight bullets and batons every time they were out to cover aꦑ story.
Years later, when I went to head the bureau of one of the 🐠most prominent newspapers in India, I got a first-hand feel of the danger.
Jo✤urnalist, and that too a female❀, was not an easy designation.
I chose to go back to work in Srinagar for family support to raise my son, because "the situation" was supposedly getting better. However, being embedded in the milieಌuꦍ of conflict reporting is never easy.
Every line you wr⛦ite, every photograph taken, every social media post can put you in harm's way. You can get hurt, arrested, or🌜 even killed.
My husband, a fellow journalist, would never take the same route to the office and back; he would take alternative routes ♚if things got tough. Covering conflict impacts your life in more ways than one. It takes a toll on your physical and mental health, and even your family is not immune.
The fragile peace was not lasting and during the seven years I was stationed there, I saw four summers marred by protests and killings, the most devastati෴ng flood that 🃏ever hit Kashmir, and the second phase of rise of home-grown militancy with young men joining militant ranks in hordes.
As a reporter, when you encounter death every day for years, the initial shock and the welled-up eyes during assignments go away, and you graduall﷽y tend to ꧅get desensitised.
In 2016, as young boys and men were falling, the pressure of breaking news had me screaming across the newsroom, asking for the numbers of dead. At that time, it was just the "death toﷺll" I was bothered about.
However, when the protests waned and Kashmir started limping back to nor🎃malcy, the ꦏfact that the dead were young boys, mostly in the age group of 15 to 25, hit me hard.
It was hard because I also lost an unborn child to t🥂he days of challeng♎ing bike rides through the pits and potholes in the narrow lanes and bylanes of Srinagar, to give a miss to both the angry protestors and the security forces.
I wouldn't be able to close my eyes in the night. I slept with lights open for days, as my walls would appear splattered with red spots under the night lights. Whether the spots signified the youth killed or my unborn 𒈔child, which didn't grow beyond an empty shell in my womb, the trauma of covering Kashmir became unbearable after a ꦛwhile. I had to leave, so I did with the hope and prayer that no casualty figure should have a face for me.
However, you cannot stay lucky for l༒ong when your roots are in✤ a conflict zone.
On June 14, 2018, Shujaat Bukhari, editor of the Rising Kashmir, a much respected senior colleague, w🎶as shot dead outside his office in Press Enclave, Srinagar, by bike-born gunmen. A few days before Eid, the phone rang again, and I was told attackers fired from close range, and a critically injured Bukhari succumbed to his injuries in hospitꦰal. His two bodyguards were also killed in the attack.
The public killing of Bukhari was a devastating shock for those who knew him. Before this murder, the last journalist assassination had happened a decade prior. The killing remains a mys🅘tery but it again highlighted the fact that for those covering Kashmir threats, assault, attacks and censorship are part of being a reporter in Kashmir
