In Kashmir, a desperate father set himself on fire. India looked away

On Saturday, 15 November, Jammu and Kashmir police raided the home of Bilal Ahmed Wani in Srinagar, picking up his son, Jasir Bilal, and his brother, Nabeel Ahmad.

Their arrests came as part of a string of raids in Kashmir following a recent bomb blast in Delhi that killed 13 people, an assault authorities have pinned on several Kashmiris.

Since the initial arrests, police have reportedly detained more than 1,500 people in Kashmir in a sweeping and indiscriminate operation that has prompted panic across the Valley. 

On hearing that his son and brother were among those arrested, the 50-year-old Wani travelled to the police station, but he was denied access to them.

The encounter left him shaken. He returned home gripped by anxiety. His family told The Wire that he couldn't even walk properly.

On Sunday, he set himself alight.

He was taken to Srinagar's Sri Maharaja Hari Singh hospital, where doctors tried to save his life. He was declared dead on Monday. 

"He had 70-80 percent burn injuries and passed away last night," Dr Andleeb Bashir from the hospital said.

By most accounts, Wani's self-immolation appears to be the first of its kind in Indian-occupied Kashmir, but it has barely made a dent in India's imagination.

The desperation that drove Wani to set himself on fire evokes the story of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, in December 2010.

Like Bouazizi, Wani was a daily wage fruit vendor in Srinagar. Like Bouazizi, he lived under the crushing weight of a system built against him.

And like Bouazizi, Wani was pushed to take the drastic step of self-immolation after serial abuse and humiliation.

But whereas in Tunisia, Bouazizi's act catalysed the Arab Spring, in Kashmir, Wani's story has been quickly extinguished - buried.

Growing suffocation 

It's difficult to be certain about everything happening in Kashmir right now, but Wani's death gives us a clue.

Under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and especially since Delhi's 2019 decision to end Kashmir's semi-autonomous status, the ability to talk, assemble or even debate in Kashmir has long disappeared.

India has tightened its grip on Kashmir using a motley of colonial tactics, including economic strangulation, land seizures and collective punishment

Not only is the Indian government using "development" to consolidate its control over the state, it is rewriting land laws, bringing in thousands of Indian settlers, eroding livelihoods and changing the demographic character of the state. The level of suffocation created through an ever-increasing web of surveillance has become simply unfathomable.

Over the past six years, India has tightened its grip on Kashmir using a motley of colonial tactics, including economic strangulation, land seizures and collective punishment.

Apple farmers have seen their livelihoods plummet due to disruptions to their harvests and the confiscation of land in the name of "development".

These measures have transformed everyday life into a cartography of fear designed to weaken Kashmiri political agency and reorder the region on India's terms.

By the time his son and brother were arrested, Wani would have known that his neighbour, Dr Adil Ahmad Rather, was among the suspects identified by Indian authorities in connection with the Delhi attack.

We will never know what actually led Wani to set himself on fire.

But he understood that the mere association as neighbours with someone the state had decided to punish made his family collateral; that their lives, as they knew them, were over.

Either way, Wani recognised that his son and his brother were likely to disappear into the abyss of the Indian prison system.

There would be no fair trial, no just adjudication by the state. 

As it stands, thousands of Kashmiris have been detained on spurious charges by the state.

Among them are journalists like Irfan Mehraj, who has now been held for more than two and a half years; the internationally recognised activist Khurram Parvez, held for four. Then there is scholar Shafat Wani and lawyer Mian Abdul Qayoom, imprisoned for seven months and a year and a half, respectively.

It is far from the first - and will not be the last - time that those remotely associated with a suspect are ceremoniously punished by the Indian state. 

But what this incident signals is a growing desperation and frustration seeping into a region India insists has returned to "normal" over the past six years - and a deep exhaustion.

Families of suspected rebel fighters or individuals accused by the state are routinely stigmatised, their homes demolished.

Last week, the family home of Umar Nabi - said to be responsible for the blast in Delhi - was demolished, leaving them effectively homeless. The demolition damaged other houses in the neighbourhood, as it often does.

According to the Legal Forum for Kashmir (LFK), Indian forces have partially or totally destroyed at least 1,172 civilian homes in Kashmir between 2020 and 2024. 

Earlier this year, following the attack on Indian tourists in Pahalgam, at least 10 homes belonging to the families of suspected rebel fighters were destroyed. 

Entrenched impunity

The level of lawlessness in Kashmir - exemplified by the Public Safety Act (PSA) and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) - is such that impunity has become the only rule that consistently applies.

And now, with the accusation that doctors have "conspired" against the national interest, the Indian government has leaned into a narrative that India's right wing has been pushing for several years: the spectre of "white collar terrorists", implying that an entire society - from poor working class stone pelters to professional doctors, writers and academics - is actively plotting violence against the Indian state.

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In other words, everyone is fair game. 

In Gaza, Israel paved the way for assaults on hospitals by accusing doctors of harbouring militants or being part of Hamas's military infrastructure. This stripped them of their right to protection.

Kashmir is now seeing a similar narrative take shape. Kashmiri doctors are being cast as members of "white-collar terror modules" and India is therefore laying the same rhetorical groundwork to cast doubt over the medical fraternity, to justify raids of hospitals and even delegitimise medical testimony. 

And this began long before the Delhi attacks. Academics have lost their jobs or been threatened; journalists are being called up by the police and told to explain their stories, show their payslips, and offer their loyalty.

This week itself, the offices of the openly defiant Kashmir Times were raided, with police reporting that they "found" a cache of weapons in it. The precedence this sets cannot be overstated. First doctors, now journalists. Any newsroom can be turned into a crime scene overnight.

Others are being asked to sign bonds to preserve their ability to travel.

Those abroad who defy are sent nervous messages from families still living in Kashmir. It's precisely what China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or any other authoritarian regime does to dissidents, except, of course, India is still widely considered a democracy, whereas the others are flagship dictatorships.

They are being warned not to produce content that goes against the national interest.

And the price of defiance is plain to see - in the string of Kashmiri journalists who no longer write, or who have had their passports confiscated.

So again, no one can know exactly what went through Wani's mind when he decided to set himself on fire, but the conditions that produced his despair are unmistakable.

We know enough.

We know that a man self-immolated because he believed there was no institution left to hear him, no just court that would protect his son.

He knew, as many Kashmiris know, that he was left entirely to his own devices.

Wani's death, then, is not an aberration in Kashmir.

It is the result of a world India created, in which despair is far more fathomable than any semblance of justice.

And India would do itself a favour not to ignore it, because denying it will have consequences far beyond Kashmir.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.