Ahsaan Ali
Srinagar: The Bakerwal community in Kashmir faces a major problem: they don’t have a separate graveyard.
“In Kashmir, every settled community has its own graveyard. But when we Bakerwals ask for land, the answer is always no. Electricity, roads, schools, hospitals — all of that is denied to us. And we don’t even have a place to rest after our deaths,” said Muhammad Haroon Phamda, who lives in Dooru, Anantnag.
Bakerwals are a nomadic Muslim ethnic group in the Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, and parts of Pakistan. They are primarily goat and sheep herders who practise seasonal migration between high-altitude summer pastures and lower-altitude winter grazing areas.
In 2014, Phamda lost both his parents in a landslide near the Banihal tunnel. “It was raining heavily that night. The mountain slid, and my parents were buried alive along with 60-70 sheep and four horses. When I reached the spot the next day, I found their bodies but I couldn’t find land to bury them,” he recalled.
Phamda searched across Anantnag but was turned away each time. Finally, through a friend, he found a patch of forest land offered by members of the Gujjar community in Qazigund. “It was not our land, not our place, but we had no other choice,” he said.
Today, Phamda lives in a camp of about 200 tents near Dooru, where his family stays for six months every summer during migration. “When I think of my parents, my heart breaks. Their graves are far away in the Qazigund forests. Sometimes I try to go once a year, but it’s too far. If we had a graveyard here, I would go every day to offer fatiha,” he said.
No space to rest
Each summer, Bakerwal herders travel with their flocks from the lower hills of Rajouri to the high pastures of Kashmir. The journeys are long and uncertain. When death strikes along the way, there is rarely land to claim or a place to mourn. Many are buried on borrowed land, often through the goodwill of nomadic Gujjar families who let them use parts of forests or private meadows. Others are left with makeshift graves in mountain clearings that vanish with the seasons.
On a narrow hillside path between Sonamarg and Ganderbal, 75-year-old Muhammad Sadiq walks to a temporary ground where some members of the Bakerwal community are buried. His relative Qasim ud Din is one of them. “When one of us dies, it feels like we vanish. All we want is a resting place with dignity in death,” he said quietly.
A few Bakerwal families own land in the mountains. Those who do, bury their dead in personal community graveyards nearby, but most cannot. Without formal burial grounds, they depend on community elders to identify the deceased and arrange funerals — no certificates, no records. The elders identify the deceased and confirm whether they are from Bakerwal or not. Transporting a body to Ganiwan in Ganderbal, the community’s lone graveyard, is often impossible. Many deaths occur mid-migration—from illness, old age, landslides, or cloudbursts—leaving behind graves that fade back into the earth.
For Sadiq, who has spent his life moving between Rajouri and Kashmir’s upper meadows, the struggle is generations old. “We have been migrating from Rajouri and other areas for ages, but we still don’t have a proper graveyard,” he said. The land given to the community in Ganiwan around 20-25 years ago is already running out of space. “Around a hundred people are buried there. We don’t know when it will close for us too.”
Maintained by the local Gujjar community, the Ganiwan graveyard lies near the Sindh River, away from the main highway. “Whenever a Bakerwal dies, whether in Srinagar, Shopian, or elsewhere, families must travel nearly 100 kilometres to Ganiwan. Most cannot afford it, so when someone dies high in the mountains, we bury our loved ones nearby, in places with low human movement,” said Sadiq.
“If a death occurs during migration, we either manage to bury the person in Ganiwan or, in rare cases, request land from local Kashmiri residents. Such requests are often unsuccessful, but the Gujjar community usually provides space, ensuring that even in remote areas, our dead receive a proper resting place.”
According to the 2011 Census, there were about 1.13 lakh Bakerwals in Jammu and Kashmir —more than 6.4% of the state’s Scheduled Tribe population. Community leaders say the number has nearly doubled since.
Speaking to 101Reporters, Talib Hussain, a social activist from the Bakerwal community, said that under the Forest Rights Act, they are entitled to both individual and community rights.
“Community rights allow us to use forests; individual rights allow us to build houses, schools, even tribal villages. But despite existing as long as every other community and despite contributing to the state’s second-largest industry of meat, milk, and wool we still face one basic question: when one of us dies, where do we bury them?” he said.
Discrimination
“Our demand is simple,” said Hussain, a social activist from the Bakerwal community. “If there were even two common burial grounds across Kashmir where we could bury our people, that would be enough. According to Islam, burial should be on one’s own land. But now we have to beg others for a little space, or search faraway forests for some old graveyard. In Jammu, people have even purchased land for graveyards with their own money even if they cannot afford to build their homes.”
He added, “All nomads are registered voters of Jammu and Kashmir. There is not a single one among us who is not a voter. Yet we do not have even a single piece of land for a graveyard. If this is not extreme discrimination, then what is?”
Hussain blamed successive governments for neglecting the Bakerwals. “No policy has ever been made for us, and no leader has ever been allowed to emerge to speak for us,” he said. “After the abrogation of Article 370, forest rights were technically extended to us. But instead of empowering us, the government pushed Bakerwals out of their meadows in Jammu and demolished our homes so we could not claim land under the Forest Rights Act. This is oppression.”
“I myself fear that in future, when I die, where will I be buried? Even as a social activist, this fear haunts me,” he said.
Hussain also criticised Kashmiri society and religious institutions for their silence. “It was their duty to speak up for the Bakerwals — not just for the nomads of Jammu and Kashmir but for nomadic communities across India,” he said. “Kashmiris are the majority here, and they also hold political power. We expected them to speak for us too. But for them, we are Muslims only as long as we are inside the mosque. Beyond that, our name becomes an insult. In Kashmiri society, Bakerwal is a word used as abuse.”
“And even in death, we are abandoned.”
(Ahsaan Ali is a freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters)
