When news broke that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in a US-Israeli airstrike on 28 February, thousands of Kashmiris poured into Lal Chowk in the heart of Srinagar, scaling its iconic clock tower to drape it with his portrait and Palestinian flags.
The authorities responded with criminal cases, sweeping detentions, and the shutting of Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid for Friday and Eid prayers. Kashmiri women offered their gold, and young children happily sacrificed their piggy banks to send relief for victims in Iran.
In the last six years, such spontaneous eruptions of outrage and grief are not just a rarity in India-administered Kashmir, they are almost unheard of.
Yet in June 2025, too, during Muharram – which marks the start of the Islamic lunar calendar, and, for Shia Muslims, the commemoration of the Battle of Karbala – Kashmir hummed with defiant energy. The flags of Iran and Palestine, and also of the Iran-backed Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, emerged during protests. Police summoned Shia elders and asked them to keep their community from waving Palestine flags or raising slogans against Israel, and an order prohibited acts that disturbed “communal, ethnic or religious harmony”. Muharram processions were held under tight security, with several protesters detained for defying the order.