Why Kashmir's mosques and madrassas are suddenly under spotlight?

Srinagar: When the November 10 blast outside Red Fort in Delhi reverberated through headlines, few beyond the national capital likely imagined its aftershocks traveling as far as the mosques and madrassas of Srinagar.

Yet for the past week, those very institutions — usually quiet centres of worship and community life — have become focal points for a security exercise that feels foreign to outsiders but intimately familiar to Kashmiris.

In neighbourhoods across the city, management committees that ordinarily handle routine affairs — like arranging winter firewood or maintaining courtyard lights — have been asked to open their ledgers, share lists of students, track visiting scholars, and outline donation records.

Police teams from CID and district intelligence units have visited mosque after mosque; seminaries across Srinagar and other parts of the Valley, have submitted enrolment logs, records of out-of-district boarders and guest-scholar stay-overs, and even copies of curricula taught within.

To many clerics, the demand for such detailed documentation is not just heavy-handed but deeply unsettling. One senior madrassa official recalled inspections during the 1990s — times of open conflict — when mosques and seminaries were searched, weapons seized, people arrested.

But in the last two decades, such visits were rare and were always tied to specific leads. What has changed now, they say, is the absence of any immediate cause in Kashmir itself: a blast hundreds of kilometres away triggered a blanket sweep.

Residents, especially parents of students, greet police vehicles outside seminaries with anxiety rather than normalcy. Neighbourhood chatter quickly shifts to fear. Parents demand reassurances. A door-to-door culture of trust built over generations begins to feel fragile, as unfamiliar forms and sudden inquiries replace the humdrum rhythms of community life.

Security officials, for their part, describe the exercise as a necessary precaution. The post-blast investigations, they argue, show cross-regional patterns and possible networks that rely on remote mobilisation. They maintain that updating records and documenting religious-institution data is a way to ensure that no void remains for exploitation.

In a region where social infrastructure often intersects with politics and identity, they believe such vigilance is not just warranted — it’s urgent.

But for Kashmiris accustomed to treating mosques and madrassas as places of sanctuary and solace, the line between vigilance and intrusion is uncomfortably thin. The fear now, as many admit quietly, is that this temporary scrutiny may harden into a long-term modality of suspicion — transforming spaces of faith into spaces under surveillance.

For readers in Bengaluru, Mysuru or Hubballi, this may appear as a distant echo of a security operation. Yet the lesson is powerful and immediate: in Kashmir, the weight of history — and the fragility of trust — means that even a blast far away can reshape everyday life. And when that happens, the ripples are felt not just in stone walls and minarets, but in the collective sense of belonging itself.