An hour or so before he was consumed by the Kothi Bagh car bomb, Pradeep Bhatia, of The Hindustan Times was polishing his lenses in the foyer of a downtown hotel. “Picture hi nahin ban rahi,” he had told me as he strode off, “Aaj shaayad kuchh milay.” (I haven’t got a good picture yet, perhaps I’ll get one today.)
A while later he was being lifted out of the mayhem of Kothi Bagh into a paramilitary van. One of his boots, charred to soot, had fallen off his feet. His camera, its lens cracked, lay flung in the pavement dust. His life was oozing out of him. He hadn’t got a picture; he had probably become one.
I had gone a different way from the hotel in search of invisible leads to a story that has been confounding to say the least. My blind pursuit had taken me to the Gogji Bagh residence of the Hurriyat chairman Prof Abdul Ghani
Butt where all that awaited me was the usual: absences and no comments.
After a week’s relentless heat, Srinagar had suddenly turned pleasant; it was drizzling and bracing breeze was surfing across town as I drove back. At last, Srinagar felt like Srinagar.
Then, quite suddenly, Srinagar became a little more like Srinagar. A bomb blew. The birds all flew off Residency Road’s resplendent chinar trees like pins off a cluster device. Everything was aflutter. Cries rose, people on the pavements ducked and scattered. And just as the echo of the blast was settling, there was gunfire. Burst after short burst.
We were driving right into the blast. We were probably a couple of hundred metres away on the Eastern end of the Residency road when it ripped the crammed lane opposite the Kothi Bagh police station, mauling automobiles to
twisted metal, tearing through glass and concrete and taking away a dozen curious lives that had converged there to see what damage a grenade lobbed minutes earlier may have done.
The first I saw alighting from the cab was troops kneeling in the middle of the road and firing at a building behind me. Shots were whistling out of the windows of the white building just behind the police station. The troops were blindly returning fire. “There, there, shoot them, search them out, shoot them,” an officer was crying out. Behind the officer was a cluster of cameramen, bleeding, wailing, looking for help where everybody was running scared. Nobody quite seemed to know what was happening. For a few minutes after the blast nobody quite cared.
Some armed policemen, frazzled and panic-stricken, were running back into the safety of the police station as the exchange of fire continued. It was upto a lathi-wielding hawaldar to scream them out onto the streets. “Tumhare paas bandooken hain, bahar jaao, baahar jaao,” he shouted. (You have guns, go out, go out onto the street.) But it was mostly paramilitary jawans who held their guns and returned fire.
It was a task to extract a vehicle from the melee to load the injured —- mostly cameramen and photographers —- and despatch them to hospitals. So many security jeeps and armoured personnel carriers had converged on the road from all sides, any movement seemed impossible. One photographer, his leg broken, his face streaked with blood, lay on the steps of the police station. Another, his broken arm unable to lug the camera bag, had collapsed on the street and was asking around for cigarettes. “Someone, someone give me a cigarette, I cannot believe I am alive, God, am I alive after that blast, am I talking?” Yet another was wailing inconsolably. “He’s dead, he’s dead, my friend, he could not be alive, the state I saw him in, he could not be alive.”
The lane was a mangle of confusion: burning metal, shards and shrapnel, abandoned personnel effects, guns and ammunition the jawans had lost, policemen, troops, journalists looking for other journalists, shouting, crying. Several of those who died lay flung around the skeleton of the Ambassador car which bore the bomb, like vultures had visited them. An ambulance —- or a makeshift one —- arrived, blaring. But there was no point taking anyone away from the site of the blast any longer. They were gone. Terror had come back. Srinagar, this morning, was Srinagar again.
