Remebering Professor Mohammad Raafi Bhat
Shahnawaz Ganderbali
The month of May bleeds with memory. It carries within it the names and stories of our martyred commanders. Shaheed Reyaz Naikoo, Shaheed Junaid Ashraf Sehrai, Shaheed Professor Mohammad Rafi Bhat, and many other brave resistance fighters who laid down their lives in recent years. These were not ordinary men. They were the shining stars of our resistance and the torchbearers of a dream far greater than themselves. A dream of freedom, dignity, and self-respect for their people.
It is our collective moral and national responsibility to safeguard their legacy, to carry their stories in our hearts and pass them on to our next generations like sacred scripts. Nations are built on the blood of martyrs, and no nation can ever rise to a dignified future if it forgets those who gave everything to carve that path with their sacrifice. A nation that forgets its martyrs and fails to honour them, is doomed to lose not only its political soul but also its history, culture, and memory. Oblivion is the worst fate for a people and that is what awaits any society that allows the names of its martyrs to fade.
On May 6, 2018, Professor Mohammad Rafi Bhat was martyred along with top Hizbul Mujahideen commanders Sadam Hussain Padder, Bilal Ahmad Mohand, Towseef Ahmad Sheikh and Adil Ahmad Malik in Shopian district of Jammu and Kashmir. Bhat, a 32-year-old assistant professor, was, prior to joining armed resistance against illegal Indian occupation, teaching sociology at Kashmir University, Hazratbal Srinagar. Professor Rafi, besides being a professor, was a symbol of the suffocating despair that pushes even the most learned to forsake pen for the gun. His transition from lecture halls to the battlefield was not a tale of indoctrination as many Indian journalists, academics, political figures and military officers would have you believe. It was an awakening and a cry against a brutal occupation that leaves no space for dignity or dreams. In his martyrdom, he rose into history. Their sacrifice reminds us that the resistance is not just carried by those born into it, but by those who choose it despite comforts, careers and consequences. It is a choice made in the heart, not forced by circumstances but compelled by conviction. May the memory of these martyrs guide our collective conscience, and may their blood water the roots of a free and dignified Kashmir.
