How Insurgency Turned Love Into a Casualty in Kashmir

“Taiyab Ali pyar ka dushman, haye haye.” In Kashmir’s insurgency years, even love found itself under suspicion.

Kashmir has always worn romance lightly — in its landscapes, its lore, its public spaces. Yet, when insurgency gripped the Valley, even the most private human emotions were dragged into the conflict’s crosshairs.

I witnessed this first-hand at the wedding of a vice-chancellor’s daughter in downtown Srinagar. After the wanun and the elaborate wazwan, Additional Chief Secretary Vakaya Saheb offered to drop me home to Afendi Bagh. We had barely covered 200 metres when an Army Gypsy blocked our Ambassador.

Despite the PSO identifying the ACS, the captain remained unmoved. We were ordered out of the vehicle and made to walk nearly 200 metres in the freezing night before being allowed back in. The wedding ended, but the night’s unease lingered.

The vice-chancellor, when told about the incident the next day, had a story of his own. His newly married daughter and son-in-law had just settled into the first-floor room after the ceremony. In the early hours, a loud knock broke the household’s exhaustion. When the door opened, around a dozen Army men walked in, guided by a local civilian. The captain insisted terrorists were hiding upstairs because lights had been turned on and off. It took considerable persuasion to convince them that it was only the newlyweds — on their first night.

That was the reality of romance on the first day of insurgency.

The years ahead did not ease. As recently as 2025, militants attacked honeymooners in Pahalgam, killing young newlyweds in front of their partners. Extremists, in their zeal, had turned themselves into self-appointed guardians against love.

One militant leader — a ninth-class dropout who had spent over twenty years in jail — once mediated a marital dispute between a woman doctor and her husband at her father’s request. The dispute was settled, but the mediator eventually married the doctor himself.

Through it all, Kashmir’s instinct for love persisted. Despite Islam’s general scepticism toward astrology, young boys and girls continued to visit the astrologer’s stall at Pratap Park. A medical student once asked him simply, “My boyfriend hasn’t spoken to me for two weeks. When will he come back?”

But militants kept tightening the space for everyday affection. They announced their own curfews during visits by the Prime Minister or Home Minister, and ahead of Independence Day and Republic Day. Under these restrictions, the synthetic honeymooners disappeared from Dal Lake, Lal Chowk and Boulevard Road. In normal times, thousands of young couples could be seen in parks, gardens or at Patnitop.

Even in peak tourist season, Shalimar Garden, Chashme Shahi, the Tulip Garden and the Zabarwan slopes remained unusually quiet. Militants discouraged public expressions of love. In 1990, Palladium Cinema Hall at Lal Chowk was burnt down, followed by nine other theatres. Heroes and heroines on screen — their songs, their scenes — were seen as unacceptable carriers of romantic culture.

In Patna or Muzaffarpur, you would seldom see young women hugging their boyfriends at bus stands. In Srinagar, once, it was an everyday sight — until insurgency rewrote even the simplest gestures of affection.

In a Valley where love had always been part of the landscape, conflict forced it to recede into the shadows — a quiet casualty of a long, unrelenting unrest.