In a region where truth often lies buried, the raid on the deserted office of Kashmir Times, the region’s oldest English daily, became the newest reminder that powers prefer a single narrator. Instead of leaning on credible media to carry its story to the world, the raid shows how far that arc has bent.
Kashmir Times, founded in 1954 by the late Ved Bhasin, had long stopped printing. Dust may have covered the tables, cobwebs hung from broken ceilings, and memories packed in forgotten files.
Kashmir Times was not raided because it was powerful. It was raided because it still remembered how to be.
Financial Choking to Physical Threats
After 2019, post-Article 370 abrogation, the newspaper’s print edition barely survived. In 2020, its Srinagar office was sealed. Advertisements, which sustain most regional media, were stopped, leaving its collapsing lungs deprived of oxygen.
This didn’t happen for the first time.
Under Farooq Abdullah’s government (1996-2002), the State had already withheld ads for six years. After the 2008 Amarnath agitation, and again in the 2010 uprising, Home Ministry circulars instructed government departments and public sector units to stop advertising altogether. Even private advertisers were quietly discouraged. The idea was simple: starve it into submission.
I remember officials telling me in Delhi: Why doesn’t Ved Bhasin meet the Prime Minister or Home Minister? A quiet conversation could restore ads.
But Bhasin refused. He would not bow to the marketplace of favours.
That principled stubbornness cost him dearly. Kashmir Times had to sell its modern press in Srinagar, land and machinery, just to stay afloat. Circulation dropped, salaries shrank, and staff scattered to other publications.
But values did not bend, nor did editorial spine. There was something monastic in his refusal, a gentle asceticism. Worldly loss was acceptable. Moral compromise was not.
I still remember my school days in Sopore, when the Kashmir Times was at the zenith of popularity.
People stood outside Universal News Agency waiting for the newspaper to arrive from Jammu. Within seconds, hands flew, shouts rose. The queue dissolved into a wrestling pit.
Police sometimes intervened so that nobody got hurt. It is difficult to imagine a newspaper that powerful enough to cause chaos at 4.00 PM.
That was Kashmir Times. A paper that carried dissent, grief, testimonies, and paid for it in sleepless nights and endless struggles for survival.
The state was not the only tormentor. When the insurgency started in Kashmir, the newspaper was accused of treachery by every side. One year, the JKLF banned its distribution; another year, Hizbul Mujahideen stopped circulation.
When counter-insurgent commander Mohammad Yusuf alias Kukka Parrey became the new sovereign of fear, he issued a decree of death against staff in the Srinagar bureau. Through the 1990s, reporters attended work as though entering a war zone.
Yet presses rolled on.
In the 1990s, a new Secretary for Information once ordered Srinagar newspapers to be “reined in” for reporting militancy. The Director of Information, Kanhiya Lal Dhar, a wise Kashmiri Pandit, refused without written orders and advised the Secretary to get orders from the Governor’s office. The Secretary yielded and approached the Governor along with Dhar. The Governor, Girish Chandra Saxena, reprimanded the Secretary. “If you silence the press, he argued, where will your feedback come from?”
Back then, for the government, the illusion of freedom was tactically necessary. That logic is obsolete today.
The Shift the Raid Embodies
Governments now believe they no longer need media as soft power. They command direct access to citizens through social media platforms, controlled channels, and algorithmic propaganda. Why rely on an independent press when the story can be told without dissent, without scrutiny, without the inconvenience of facts?
The Kashmir Times raid embodies this shift. In this information war waged by force, credibility doesn’t matter and truth is not allowed to breathe. Those who remain loyal to power will be permitted space, but those who interrogate state narratives are threats.
When Anuradha Bhasin, Ved Bhasin’s daughter, went to the Supreme Court in 2019 to challenge the internet blackout in Jammu and Kashmir, she lived up to her lineage. With lawyer Vrinda Grover, she argued that press freedom was impossible under digital siege.
And on 10 January 2020, after five months of blackout, the Supreme Court agreed that indefinite restrictions on communication were unconstitutional.
Her subsequent book, Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370, was banned alongside 24 others by the Lieutenant Governor’s administration recently as part of the systemic policy of erasure.
The newsroom had physically died by 2022, but the voice flickered online. The digital edition of Kashmir Times limped back, managed by a skeleton of freelancers and idealists.
Then came the raid. A legacy, the 70-year-old argument for truth, everything suddenly stood accused.
Flashback to 1999
Soon after the Kargil conflict in 1999, among those who grasped the urgency of a credible narrative was Brajesh Mishra, the then National Security Adviser.
He understood that credibility cannot be commanded. It must be earned, and for that, India needed media that could speak honestly at home and convincingly overseas.
In the war’s aftermath, the government in New Delhi was deeply uneasy about how global audiences had responded to its narrative. Brajesh Mishra, then National Security Adviser, was bluntly dissatisfied. Indian media lacked credibility abroad, and global trust was fragile.
Private television was still a young, audacious creature. Star News and Zee News were beginning to reshape consumption. NDTV at that time was only a content provider, anchoring English-language segments for Star News.
In a small but consequential meeting, Mishra suggested that NDTV chief Pranoy Roy launch an independent channel. Uplinking from India was still disallowed, but Mishra quietly removed this bureaucratic wall. The government even agreed to shoulder part of NDTV’s budget.
A deal was made. NDTV could criticise the government freely, hold it accountable, and question ministers live on air. But during moments of national crisis, it would frame a narrative that could travel globally, palatable, persuasive, and professional. This model worked.
NDTV built credibility in the way BBC and CNN had - with rigorous reportage and relentless scrutiny. At times when the Kashmir streets roared, the same neutrality, the same gravitas was often used as narrative force.
It was proof of a political philosophy of the times – that independent media is not an enemy, but an asset, especially when truth must be believed beyond borders. That philosophy now feels quaint.
Twenty-six years later, the raid on Kashmir Times announced the opposite. There is no need for a neutral witness, but a narrator.
The Memory Keeper
The State claims the Jammu office yielded AK-47 cartridges, pistol rounds, and grenade-safety levers. A newsroom turned armoury! It is a visual that feeds suspicion like tinder feeds fire. Lawyers, activists, and journalists call the recovery implausible. Editors call it a fabrication. The building had been locked for years, without staff, presence or movement.
The outrage circles back to a chilling question: If evidence appears conveniently, does it matter whether history does?
The target is not only the Kashmir Times but the very right of Kashmiris to record their own experience.
A newspaper doesn't just report facts. It arranges them into memory. It stores pain, hope, protest, disappearance, devastation. It builds an archive against amnesia. History is rewritten by destroying that archive, physically or through stigma, without even writing a word.
Who gets to describe Kashmir, those who live it, or those who govern it? Will our future scholars read only official press statements, not first-hand reportage? Will testimonies of the disappeared, the bereaved, the exiled be classified as seditious or inconvenient?
As I write this, the old Kashmir Times office remains under lock. Its pages, archives, and computers, sealed in a decaying building that once held the heartbeat of our journalistic youth.
I walk mentally through that corridor again. I hear the rattle of typewriters, the rustle of evening proofs. I smell ink, newsprint, spilled tea. I hear the argument over a headline. I hear pages turning in the editor’s room where Ved Bhasin sat, eyes sharp with gentle fire as he finalised a story.
He told us once, almost as a warning, that in Kashmir, journalism was not a profession. It was a wound you learn to live with.
The raid has reopened that wound but also reminded us of what it means to heal - not by silence, but by testimony.
In the end, a raid can shut an office. It cannot shut memory and history, unless we allow it. The real question now is not what they found in the newsroom. The real question is what they wish to bury. And whether we journalists, readers, and citizens will let them.
Poet Akhtar Ansari was perhaps prophetic when he wrote:
یادِ ماضی عذاب ہے یارب
Yaad-e-maazi azab hai yaa rab (Memory of the past is a torment, O God)
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