For 8 months now, a father in J&K has been digging for son's body

For the past eight months, Manzoor Ahmad Wagay has been searching for the body of his son Shakir Manzoor, a rifleman with the 162 Battalion of Territorial Army (TA) abducted by militants, in the volatile Shopian district of south Kashmir.

The TA soldier was abducted on August 2 when he was travelling between the Balpora and Bahibagh army camps in Shopian. Hours later that day, his burnt vehicle was recovered from a field in the neighbouring Kulgam district. And a week later, his family found his blood-stained clothes in a nearby orchard.

A few days after Manzoor’s abduction, an unverified audio clip went viral on social media in which a militant who identified himself as Abu Talha took responsibility for his death. The voice in the clip sought to justify Manzoor’s killing and the decision to bury his body at an undisclosed location.

Over the last year, bodies of militants killed in gunfights are not handed over to their families by the police, citing Covid-19 safety protocols. The bodies are buried in remote places, under tight security, in the presence of close family members.

Justifying the denial of handing over the soldier’s body to his family, the voice says, “We did what the Indian forces have done by denying bodies of Mujahideen (militants) and burying them at unknown places.”

Senior Wagay is convinced that his son was killed and is in search of the body of his son for months now. He spends hours digging land in and around his village in hopes that his son’s body may have been buried there. “My heart says he lies buried within a radius of seven-eight kilometres from home,” he believes.

Of the militants suspected of having kidnapped Shakir, his desperate father has visited the families of some to seek their help in tracing the body of his son. “They just say that they are not in touch with their kids,” he says.

Of the four militants suspected to have abducted Shakir, three have been killed in various encounters. “All of them hail from our neighbouring villages. Only one of them is alive now,” he added.

The unending search has left the family in a severe financial crisis that has resulted in Shakir’s younger brother Shaan dropping out of college in Aligarh. However, Wagay is determined to find his son’s body so that they could give him a proper burial at their ancestral graveyard. “I will keep searching for him till the morning of the day of judgment,” Wagay vows.