Jagmohan was appointed on January 19, 1990. That night, in response to the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed and other militant attacks, Indian security forces conducted warrantless and thus illegal house-to-house searches in Srinagar, hunting for illegal weapons or other evidence of support to the militants. They dragged many people out of their beds into the bitter cold. Many Kashmiris complained that they were beaten and abused.Jagmohan maintains that he had nothing to do with the decision.
The next morning, as word of the searches and beatings began to spread, people began to pour out into the streets of Srinagar. From the mosques, loudspeakers urged Kashmiris to come out and fight for azaadi, or freedom. Thousands of Kashmiris gathered to protest the actions of the security forces.
The state government declared a curfew, but few if any Kashmiris observed it.It was early evening when one group of marchers reached the Gaw Kadal Bridge on Srinagar's JhelumRiver. They were shouting slogans and some were pelting the soldiers with stones. Troops from the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) opened fire into the crowd. Eyewitnesses say the shooting was a brutal and excessive use of lethal force against demonstrators. Many demonstrators were shot from behind as they turned to run away.Kashmiri news photographer Meraj-ud-din described the scene:
"When I reached Gaw Kadal, all I could see were the dead. I saw bodies of children, bodies of women, bodies of men.... Later they brought the bodies to the police compound. I saw them again. There I cried. I shouted, screamed. 'Don't do this to the people.' That day I saw everything."
Human Rights Watch, in its 1991 report on the shootings, criticized the killings and concluded that the use of lethal force was not proportional to the threat.
No nation in the entire world, in the entire history has been enslaved by foreign forces for such a long period of time as Kashmir. It has been over one thousand years that this land of Kashmir is witnessing tyrant oppression, a rule of brutal regimes and barbaric rulers. Those having a good insight in Kashmir’s history would agree with me that this is the land where the ‘cruel as death’ Huns ruled in the early sixth century; brutal “Unmattavati ruled in eight century and administered torture by the use of arm splitting, by the throwing of daggers which plunged into the hollows between the breasts of naked women, he then ripped the abdomens of the pregnant women apart to see their foetuses” (Majid Siraj: Kashmir Desolation or Peace). Despotic Harisha ruled in the tenth century who would plunder the wealth of commoners and subject them to huge taxes. And then the ‘Paradise on earth’ also witnessed the loot and arson of the Ferocious Tartars in the twelfth century who took with them fifty thousand slaves, nevertheless they perished in a blizzard crossing the Devasar pass to Mongolia alongwith all wealth and slave people. And we also remember the Afghans who invaded in the eighteenth century and raped and killed like lunatics. Then the Sikh governors in the nineteenth century who treated the people in Kashmir as little better than cattle for we know that the population was reduced from 800,000 to less than 200,000 in their barbaric regime.
