When Healing Becomes a Threat: Doctors Under Siege in Kashmir


When the Red Fort blast happened, most people in Indian-occupied Jammu & Kashmir thought the consequences would fall on the usual suspects—activists, journalists, maybe the students who shouted slogans too loudly. Nobody imagined that the next group under suspicion would be the people who literally kept society alive, the doctors. It began quietly, like most things in Kashmir do. One week there were social media whispers, a few arrests, and some vague headlines. Then, suddenly, names started appearing in black letters: Dr. Muzaffar Ahmad, Dr. Adeel Ahmad Rather, Dr. Muzamil Shakeel, and other men and women who had spent years memorizing anatomy and treating patients in overcrowded hospitals. They were not spoken about as doctors anymore.


They were labeled “threats,” “suspects,” and “security risks.” Within days their medical licenses were canceled and careers paused, not because they harmed someone, but because the political moment demanded a spectacle. In Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, doctors discovered they were living in two wars at once. In the morning they battled infections, trauma patients, and old men with weak lungs. At night they worried if someone would knock on the door, asking questions they didn’t know how to answer. The irony was sharp. A society that once begged these doctors to save lives was now treating them as if saving lives was a dangerous activity. The occupation, people said, had entered a new phase—not bullets and barbed wire, but white coats and stethoscopes. It felt like intelligence itself had become suspicious. No one said it openly, but everyone understood the logic.


When an occupying state wants to weaken a territory, it doesn’t only target locals who resist occupation. It targets the thinkers, the professionals, the ones who build the future. A local who resists can be replaced. A surgeon cannot. A medical professor cannot. Those people carry knowledge, influence, and respect, and that kind of power scares governments more than guns sometimes. The crackdown didn’t stop at arrests. In Jammu, protests erupted not against violence, but against merit. Forty-two Kashmiri Muslim students had secured admission into MBBS programs through competitive exams, and Hindutva groups called it “religious imbalance.” They demanded new rules. They demanded exclusion. They demanded that being brilliant on paper wasn’t enough if you belonged to the wrong identity.


Patients in Kashmir noticed the change before the newspapers did. Clinics felt emptier. Students studying for medical entrance tests began to question if intelligence was worth the trouble. Parents whispered advice that sounded like warnings: “study hard, but don’t stand out too much.” Kashmir has lost people to bullets and prisons before. But losing doctors feels different. It feels like losing the future. Doctors are not just healers; they are witnesses. They know how trauma shapes a society, they know how conflict ages the body, and they know how to remember. And in a place where memory itself is seen as resistance, even those who heal are not safe anymore

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