Women pass in front of a damaged house in Bandipora, India, April 27. After the attack on April 22, which killed at least 26 people, India ordered Pakistani nationals to leave the country and the Indian security forces have demolished houses linked to active activists across cashmere, officials.
Images Faisal Khan / Middle East / AFP / Getty Images
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Images Faisal Khan / Middle East / AFP / Getty Images
Bandipora, India – In his dark living room, Zahida is on the floor, under a blanket. She is often tired, she says, a consequence of breast cancer for which she receives treatment.
“I’m not worried about my illness,” she said. “The idea of going back to Pakistan kills me.”
She and her husband Bashir asked NPR not to use their family name for fear of reprisals from the Indian government. Back in Pakistan – The country where Zahida, 30, was born but has not lived for 14 years – was not even on his radar until India blames Pakistan for a militant attack at the end of April where armed men killed 26 people, which led India to order the country’s Pakistani. The attack took place at the cashmere administered by the Indians, a Muslim majority of Himalayan divided between India and Pakistan, and affirmed by both in its entirety.
India argued that the group which initially claimed the responsibility of the attack on April 22 – the resistance front – was an indirect indirect for the Pakistani army. Indian police too said Two of the armed men were Pakistani nationals. Pakistan has denied any link with the attack.
It was the worst attack on civilians in India for more than a decade. Eyewitness said that some of the armed men deliberately targeted Hindu men. The victims, many of whom visited the region as tourists, came from across the country.
Shortly after the attack, the Indian government announced a series of punitive measures, including cancelation Visas from most Pakistani nationals in the country. Pakistan has announced countermeasures, including the expulsion of Indian nationals.
By the end of April – the deadline for Pakistanis to leave India – local media reported that more than 780 Pakistani nationals had left. The Indian government has not officially released from figures, but community leaders and cashmere politicians indicate at NPR that a significant number of people expelled from cashmere were Pakistani wives of Indian nationals.
“They have been married for decades for decades. Some of them are even grandmothers,” said Mehbooba Mufti, who had been chief minister of the Jammu-et-Cachemire, before the Indian government reveals the autonomy of the territory in 2019. “Many consider themselves as Indian citizens. Where will he go now?”
Registered journalists videos Women who cry who leave their villages and cities adopted, sometimes accompanied by dozens of parents and neighbors seeing them.
But Zahida has not left. She says she couldn’t separate from her family.
“I cry all the time when I think of all this. My children cry too,” said Zahida. “We are not at peace.”
The marriage and the move of Zahida in India reflect something of the arc of the own problems of cashmere.
Her husband Bashir is cashmere administered by the Indians. He said he crossed the Pakistani cashmere more than two decades to receive arms training after an armed conflict broke out in the Himalayan valley against the Indian regime in 1989.
But Bashir says he didn’t end up fighting. Shortly after crossing Pakistan, he started working as a carpenter in a city in cashmere administered by Pakistan called Athmuqam. His neighbors installed him with Zahida.
Zahida was one of the hundreds of Pakistani women who married Cashmere activists, who then abandoned arms. The Kashmiris through Pakistan-India divide, share cultural and family ties that have persisted despite seven decades of rivalry between the two nuclear countries.
Zahida gave birth to the couple’s first two daughters in Athmuqam. Then, in 2010, the cashmere administered by the Government of India offered amnesty activists if they abandoned their weapons and returned home. Hundreds, including Bashir, took the offer and they returned with their Pakistani women and children.
He returned to his hometown of Bandipora with Zahida and their two daughters. Zahida had another son in Bandipora, who acquired Indian nationality at birth.
Once in India, Zahida obtained an Indian national identity card. But like the other spouses and children born in Pakistan, she says that requests for Indian citizenship from her daughters and daughters have never been approved. Zahida says she dropped the case – she did not intend to leave the village of her husband or her country.
Now that India has ordered Pakistanis to go out, Bashir says he’s going to work every day, his spirit bursting with anxiety. “I think of my wife and daughters. I think of my young son and who will take care of him if my wife and my daughters are (forced to go) in Pakistan,” he said.
When the Indian authorities offered him the amnesty over ten years ago and allowed his wife and Pakistani girls to settle in India, he said he thought it was a real offer. “Why do they cover their own policy now?” he asks. “It’s not fair. It’s an injustice for us.”
The Indian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Kashmir Police did not immediately respond to requests for comments from the NPR.
It’s been about three weeks since the deadline for return to Pakistan has expired. The two countries made air strikes in the days following this deadline. Bashir says that his family has received no appeal or assignment from the immigration authorities. But he says that when he thinks when his wife and daughters may have to leave, he can no longer see a future. “Without them, my life will have no goal,” he said. “Whether I’m alive or dead, it’s only one and the same thing.”
