SRINAGAR: Sarvanand Kaul Premi was a poet. Sarla Bhat was a nurse. Both were Kashmiri Pandits who stayed behind when militancy erupted and were killed in 1990. More than three decades later, J&K police’s SIA revived unresolved cases from the Valley’s darkest years. The agency searched Wednesday nine locations in its probe into the abduction-murder of Premi and his younger son, weeks after filing a chargesheet in Bhat’s killing.Premi, 66, a poet, teacher and Gandhian, and Verinder were abducted from their village, Soaf Shali near Kokernag, on Apr 30, 1990. They were shot dead the next day. Five days later, the grief-stricken Kaul family left Kashmir, never to return.State Investigation Agency’s searches were linked to FIR No. 45/1990 registered at Dooru police station in Anantnag. SIA is pursuing militancy-era cases that had lain cold for decades.On June 29, SIA filed a chargesheet in the abduction, torture and killing of Bhat, 27, a staff nurse in the neonatology ward at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Srinagar. She was allegedly abducted by JKLF from SKIMS Habba Khatoon Hostel on Apr 18, 1990, and taken to Illahibagh-Lal Bazar, tortured and shot dead. Her bullet-riddled body was found the next day at Omer Colony Malabagh in downtown Srinagar.Born in Soaf Shali in 1924, Premi joined Khadi Bhandar after completing his education and became associated with Mahatma Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement. His association with Kashmiri poet Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor inspired his literary career. He translated Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” into Kashmiri and the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana into Kashmiri and Urdu, and advocated secularism and interfaith harmony.
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J&K govt under then-CM Farooq Abdullah posthumously awarded Premi a gold medal in 1997 for his contribution to Kashmiri literature and communal harmony.The killings from Kashmir’s violent spring of 1990 were part of a wider wave of hostility against Kashmiri Pandits after militancy erupted, driving a mass exodus of the community from the Valley. In 2010, J&K govt under then-CM Omar Abdullah told the assembly that 209 Kashmiri Pandits had been murdered since 1990.
