February 11, 1984, marked a grim milestone in the political history of Kashmir. On that day, Maqbool Bhat, a 45-year-old Kashmiri revolutionary and the architect of the region’s first armed rebellion, was executed in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The Indian state buried him unceremoniously within the prison’s grounds and refused his family the dignity of mourning or a proper burial. Today, two graves—one in Trehgam, his ancestral village, and another in Srinagar’s martyr’s graveyard—remain empty, waiting for his mortal remains.

Bhat’s life was a story of defiance. Born under the oppressive Dogra regime, his political consciousness was shaped by the injustices and feudal tyranny that defined the era. As a young man, he rose to prominence in the Plebiscite Front, advocating for Kashmir’s right to self-determination. His journey took him across the border, from launching magazines in Peshawar to forming the Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front (JKPF) and leading Kashmir’s first armed resistance. Bhat’s audacious return to the valley, knowing the risks, speaks to the unrelenting spirit of a man who refused to compromise on his ideals. His execution was inextricably linked to the abduction and killing of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre by the Jammu Kashmir National Liberation Front. While Bhat himself was uninvolved, his death served as a grim spectacle to pacify public outrage in India.

Kashmiris do not see Bhat’s execution as a matter of political act. It symbolizes the Indian state’s broader strategy of using Kashmiri bodies to appease the collective conscience of its citizens.

Nearly three decades later, history repeated itself. On February 9, 2013, Muhammad Afzal Guru was hanged in the same prison. Convicted of involvement in the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, Guru’s trial was fraught with inconsistencies, and the evidence against him remains widely disputed. India’s Supreme Court, in its judgment, acknowledged that his execution was necessary to satisfy the collective conscience of the nation—a phrase that has since become synonymous with state-sanctioned violence against Kashmiris. Critics, including prominent voices like Arundhati Roy and Gautam Navlakha, have called it “judicial murder.”

Guru’s final moments reveal a stark humanity often overshadowed by the narratives of guilt imposed upon him. Kobad Ghandy, an Indian activist, recalls Guru pleading for better working conditions for the prison staff as he walked to the gallows—a gesture that moved those present to tears. His family, like Bhat’s, was denied the chance to perform last rites. Guru’s grave, like Bhat’s, remains inside Tihar Jail, while an empty grave in Srinagar stands as a symbol of the Kashmiri demand for justice.

This denial of burial rights has now become institutionalized. Since 2020, under the pretext of COVID-19 protocols, Indian authorities have refused to return the bodies of Kashmiri resistance fighters to their families. Instead, they are buried in unmarked graves in remote areas like Sonamarg, Uri, and Handwara. These burial sites, overlooked by military installations, strip families of the right to mourn and sever the dead from their communities.

India’s tradition of satiating the lust of its bloodthirsty people with Kashmiri blood has not gone. The Indian state is poised to continue this tradition, with Yasin Malik now in its crosshairs. Malik, the chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), has been languishing in prison for years and his fate sealed not by evidence or a fair trial but by a manufactured narrative designed to appease the collective conscience of the Indian populace. The Fascist state uses these actions as deliberate acts of political theater aimed at quelling Kashmiri aspirations and satisfying the bloodlust of a hyper-nationalist Indian psyche.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose ideological parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) draws inspiration from fascist movements like Nazism, is now trying to make a similar spectacle of Yasin Malik. The RSS has long envisioned a Hindu Rashtra—an exclusionary, majoritarian state—and sees Kashmir as both a symbol and a testing ground for this vision. Hanging Malik, a prominent resistance figure and a symbol of Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination, would serve multiple purposes. It would reinforce the state’s iron-fist policy in the region, rally nationalist sentiments, and send an unmistakable warning to any dissenting voices within and beyond Kashmir.

The BJP’s strategy hinges on dehumanizing Kashmiris and reducing them to expendable bodies. Whether it was Maqbool Bhat’s execution to satisfy the collective conscience, Afzal Guru’s hanging to assuage public outrage over the Parliament attack, or Yasin Malik’s potential execution as a political statement, the narrative remains unchanged. The state manipulates tragedies, frames individuals as scapegoats, and offers their deaths as trophies to a nation intoxicated with nationalism.

What makes this cycle even more grotesque is the veneer of legality under which it operates. Courts, the supposed guardians of justice, have been reduced to instruments of state propaganda. The verdicts in these cases are not about determining guilt or innocence but about perpetuating a colonial order in Kashmir. The infamous phrase from Guru’s judgment—“to satisfy the collective conscience of the society”—encapsulates this perverse logic.