Explosives in Kashmir, mishandled across eras, have repeatedly turned routine procedures into disasters, underscoring the urgent need for stricter, safer handling.
Kashmir has lived with explosives for so long that the Valley sometimes forgets how little margin for error truly exists. The blast at Nowgam last week was a brutal reminder. It arrived not as an act of militancy, nor as a hostile intrusion, but as a failure inside a system that believed it had everything under control.
At nearly 11:30 pm, when Srinagar shook with a force that sent windowpanes flying and residents stumbling out of their homes, the shock was not just from the sound. It was from the realisation that danger had travelled into a residential neighbourhood through official channels, stored and handled as evidence, yet still capable of wiping out lives in an instant.
Explosives, even in small quantities, demand absolute respect; in large quantities, they demand isolation, expertise and infrastructure. Kashmir has learnt this lesson before, and harshly.
In 1994, when an inspection went wrong inside the fortified confines of Badami Bagh, the explosion not only killed senior military officers. It demonstrated that even within a heavily regulated space, assumptions are fatal. Inside the Army’s nerve centre, amid layers of security and discipline, one lapse was enough to unleash destruction that no inquiry could later fully explain.
Thirteen years later, the Khundroo disaster amplified the warning. A depot holding nearly 21,000 tonnes of ammunition erupted into hours of firestorms, killing soldiers and civilian firefighters, raining shells over villages, and changing the lives of thousands who had lived for years in the shadow of an installation that had quietly outgrown its safety perimeter. Khundroo exposed how prolonged familiarity with risk often dulls institutional vigilance. What should have been a protected buffer had become a belt of homes, schools and fields, until the day the depot burned and the landscape itself testified to human error.
Nowgam sits at the intersection of those earlier lessons. It was neither a battlefield recovery nor a military stockpile, but a police procedure, routine, lawful, and mandated. Yet the outcome was the same: men at work killed instantly, families devastated, a neighbourhood scarred. Three tragedies, in three different eras, in three very different circumstances, and still the single common denominator is clear. Explosives, once brought into human spaces, behave only one way: violently, unpredictably and often irreversibly.
The inquiry will assign responsibility, but the principle does not need investigation. Kashmir cannot afford to treat volatile material as administrative paperwork. The systems designed to safeguard the Valley must not become new sites of danger. Handle with care is not a slogan here; it is the difference between procedural efficiency and preventable catastrophe.
