A nurse at a medical institute in Srinagar, Sarla Bhatt was gangraped and murdered on April 14, 1990. Her body was found on the roadside in Lal Bazar Road area. Nearly 35 years later, there is hope that her soul and her family will finally find closure. But this brutal act was not an isolated incident.

In this case, the police did not return Bhatt’s clothes to her family. As a nurse at a medical institute in Srinagar’s Saura, she witnessed terror activities making her a target.

The period from 1980 to 1990 was marked by ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Sikh women and men. Even children were not spared, resulting in the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from their ancestral homeland.

This was not a sudden event of 1990, but began much earlier as Ratan Sharda notes in his book, Conflict Resolution – The RSS Way.

The first visible signs appeared on April 7, 1986, when newspapers warned that a large number of Hindus might migrate out of Kashmir Valley. The RSS was one of the earliest to raise the alarm.

On April 24, 1986, the then Union home minister PV Narasimha Rao admitted to the grim situation in the Rajya Sabha. State elections were held under the Congress-NC alliance in March 1987, with Farooq Abdullah becoming chief minister with 66 seats and backed by Rajiv Gandhi.

Governor Jagmohan, an appointee of Rajiv Gandhi, wrote in his book My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir: “Any suggestion or warning [to Rajiv Gandhi] was either smiled away or lulled with false........

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