1990 Gawkadal massacre
massacre in Srinagar, Kashmir
The Gawkadal massacre, named after the Gawkadal bridge in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India, where, on 21 January 1990, the Indian paramilitary troops of the Central Reserve Police Force opened fire on a group of Kashmiri Muslim protesters. At least 50 people died, some from being shot and others from drowning. The incident occurred two days after the state went under Governor's Rule, with Jagmohan appointed as the Governor for a second time in the Union government's bid to control mass protests by Kashmiris.
Background
January 1990 was a major turning point for the one-and-a-half year old Kashmir insurgency, having been launched by the Pakistan-based Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in July 1988 under Pakistani sponsorship. However, the pro-Independence JKLF was not in Pakistan's interest. By October 1989, its secret service ISI, working with the Jamaat-e-Islami Azad Kashmir, brought together some of the key Islamist insurgent groups working in Kashmir under the banner of Hizbul Mujahideen. In a key meeting in Kathmandu on 14 January 1990, Jamaat-e-Islami Kashmir was persuaded to take control of Hizbul Mujahideen. Henceforth, the Kashmir insurgency was to run along an Islamist paradigm. An often-heard slogan was "Azadi ka matlab kya, La Ilahi lilillah [illallah]" ("What is the meaning of freedom? It is Islamic State").
“1990 Gawkadal massacre” enters the record as massacre in Srinagar, Kashmir. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gawkadal, massacre and Srinagar can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5528422. Authority coordinates are 34.075, 74.809. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1988 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “1990 Gawkadal massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.