What is the Sarla Bhatt murder case, being probed 35 years after the Kashmiri Pandit woman’s death?

Bhatt, a 27-year-old from south Kashmir, was abducted by the militants of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in 1990. Her bullet-riddled body was recovered after five days from old Srinagar city.

A resident of Anantnag, she was posted at the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) in Srinagar. After the eruption of militancy, she was among the few Kashmiri Pandits who stayed put in the Valley.

On April 14, 1990, she was at her hostel in SKIMS when militants abducted her, claiming she was a police informer. After the body was found, allegations had also emerged that she had been tortured and raped.

In 2023, the SIA reopened the murder case of Ganjoo, who too was killed by JKLF militants. Ganjoo, who had sentenced to death JKLF founder Mohammad Maqbool Bhat, was killed in November 1989 in Srinagar.

In 2017, the Supreme Court rejected a petition seeking the reopening and investigation into the killings of several hundred Kashmiri Pandits by militants since the beginning of the insurgency in Kashmir. A Bench comprising the then Chief Justice of India J S Khehar and Justice D Y Chandrachud dismissed the plea, arguing that 27 years had passed since the Pandit exodus from the Valley, and evidence “is unlikely to be available”.

In 2023, the apex court again dismissed a curative petition by an organisation, Roots in Kashmir, seeking investigations into the killing of Kashmiri Pandits. Two months after the dismissal of the curative petition by the Supreme Court, however, the Lt Governor Manoj Sinha administration reopened the judge murder case and hinted that other cases would be reopened too.

A report compiled by the Jammu and Kashmir Police in 2008 on the basis of a survey of its own cases revealed that from 1989 onwards, militants had killed 209 Kashmiri Pandits – 109 of them in 1990 alone. Kashmiri Pandit groups, however, say that the number is higher.

The police survey revealed that 140 cases were registered at police stations across the Valley, chargesheets were filed in 24 cases, while in 115, the perpetrators were yet to be identified. Thirty-one local militants were booked in the 24 cases in which chargesheets had been filed.