The Jammu and Kashmir State Investigation Agency (SIA) has reopened the investigation into the 1998 Wandhama massacre, in which 23 Kashmiri Pandits were killed, as part of a determined push to resolve long-pending cases of targeted killings from the peak years of militancy in the Valley.
On the night of January 25, 1998 — the eve of Republic Day and during Shab-e-Qadr in the holy month of Ramzan — heavily armed terrorists entered the homes of the remaining Kashmiri Pandit families in Wandhama village of Ganderbal district. They gunned down 23 people, including nine women and four children. The first is the September 13, 1989, assassination of Tika Lal Taploo, a prominent lawyer and then vice-president of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir.
He has stated that the administration is committed to ensuring every eligible terror-affected family receives support, that pending cases will be investigated to hold perpetrators accountable, and that “we will not rest until justice reaches every family,” LG Sinha has said. The attack wiped out nearly the entire non-migrant Pandit presence in the village, with only one teenage survivor. He was shot dead near his residence in Srinagar, in one of the earliest targeted attacks that signalled the onset of the campaign against the community. The renewed focus on these unsolved terror cases aligns with the repeated assurances of Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha that every terror victim’s family will receive justice. Sinha has consistently emphasised that the long wait for accountability and rehabilitation is ending.
