Jammu re-activates Village Defence Groups – and old fears
On the evening of 1 January, Tilak Raj Sharma was at home in Dhangri with his family when he heard what he first thought were firecrackers. He quickly realised the bursts might be much more serious. Tilak Raj, aged 62, took out his personal weapon, a .303 rifle that was gathering dust in a steel trunk. It had been provided to him by the government in 1995 to protect his village against a spiraling insurgency that had grown in response to increasingly 'undemocratic acts' by the Indian state, but he had never used it.
Hearing cries, Tilak Raj rushed to his brother Pritam Lal's house, a stone's-throw away. "I first saw my nephew outside his house and he told me that somebody came and shot him and his father," he told me. Inside, he found his brother's lifeless body, and his sister-in-law locked away in another room. Tilak Raj's nephew, Shishu Pal, later succumbed to his injuries in hospital.