Law Kumar Mishra
Taiyab Ali pyar ka dushman, haye haye — romance became almost impossible in Kashmir during insurgency.
I had attended the wedding of the daughter of a vice-chancellor of a premier university in downtown Srinagar. After enjoying wanun and the tasty wazwan, we came out of the wedding hall. Additional Chief Secretary Vakaya Saheb offered to drop me at my Afendi Bagh residence. We had moved barely 200 metres when an Army Gypsy intercepted our Ambassador car.
The PSO of the senior IAS officer explained the identity of the ACS to the Army captain, but it made no difference. We were ordered to step out of the vehicle and march nearly 200 metres in the cold night before being allowed to re-board.
The next day, I told the host VC about our ordeal. He had a story of his own. “My newly married daughter and son-in-law had moved to the first-floor room of our house after the ceremony. In the wee hours, there was a knock on the door. We were already exhausted. When we opened it, we found about a dozen Army men had entered the residence with a local civilian leading them. The captain angrily claimed terrorists were hiding in the first-floor room because lights were being switched on and off. We had a hard time convincing them that it was just the newlyweds on their first night.”
That was romance and love on Day One of insurgency in the Valley.
And this continued into 2025 too, when militants attacked honeymooners in Pahalgam, killing young newlyweds in front of their wives. Militants had turned into enemies of romance and love in Kashmir.
The head of a militant outfit, who had spent over two decades in jail, once helped resolve a matrimonial dispute between a woman doctor and her husband at the invitation of her father — and eventually ended up marrying her himself. The extremist was only a ninth-class pass-out.
Romance and love are in the very air of Kashmir — but insurgency polluted it. Though Muslims are generally non-believers in astrology, I have seen young boys and girls visiting an astrologer at his Pratap Park outlet. One girl from a medical college asked him, “My boyfriend hasn’t spoken to me for two weeks. When do you see him coming back to me?”
Militant organisations used to declare curfew whenever the PM or HM visited the Valley, or before August 15 or January 26. During these restrictions, synthetic honeymooners vanished from Dal Lake, Lal Chowk markets and Boulevard Road. In normal times, thousands of young Kashmiri couples could be seen in parks and gardens or at Patnitop.
Shalimar Garden, Chashme Shahi, Tulip Garden and Zabarwan were deserted even in peak tourism season because extremists aggressively discouraged public display of romance and love. Palladium Cinema Hall at Lal Chowk was burnt in 1990, followed by nine other theatres, as heroes and heroines on screen “promoted” love through their romantic scenes.
In places like Patna or Muzaffarpur, young girls hugging their boyfriends at city bus stands is unheard of — but in Srinagar, it was once a common sight of affection.
(The author is a senior journalist based at Patna in Bihar and has worked in Kashmir as Times Correspondent)
