25 June 1990: "The Brutal Killing of Girija Tickoo: A Kashmiri Hindu Tragedy"

 

 

Girija Tickoo was a Kashmiri Hindu Pandit from Bandipora, working as a lab assistant at a higher secondary school in the Kashmir Valley. During the rise of terrorism in the 1990s, countless Kashmiri Hindus faced brutal killings and were forced to flee their homes overnight at gunpoint by Pakistani-sponsored terrorists, including Yasin Malik and Bitta Karate. Tickoo and her family were among those who fled to Jammu for safety.

 

 

 

One day, Tickoo received a call from someone claiming that the situation in the valley had improved and she should come to collect her salary from the school where she worked. Trusting the information, she went to the school, but on her return journey, she was unaware that she was being followed. She was kidnapped by five men from a colleague's home and taken to an unknown location. Despite witnesses, including her friend, seeing her being taken, they remained silent.

 

Days after her abduction, Tickoo's body was found by the roadside in a horrifying state. The autopsy revealed that she had been brutally gang-raped and tortured. She was alive when she was cut into two pieces with a carpenter's saw, right through the middle of her body. Her only "fault" was being Hindu.

 

Years after her horrific death, Tickoo's family still awaits justice, along with countless other Kashmiri Hindus who lost loved ones to terrorism. Some dismiss these accounts as propaganda to defame Islam, but while the axe forgets, the tree remembers.