SRINAGAR: On what should have been a day spent marvelling at Kashmir’s famed beauty, terror struck unexpectedly in the serene meadows of Baisaran, Pahalgam, leaving innocent tourists running for their lives. Among them was Prasanna Kumar Bhat and his family from Mysuru, who lived through the nightmare to tell a story of survival, courage, and sheer willpower.
Bhat, who described himself as belonging to the “common tribe of software engineers,” had postponed his Kashmir trip by two days due to bad weather — a decision that fatefully placed him, his wife, his brother (a senior Indian Army officer), and his sister-in-law at Baisaran on the afternoon of April 22.
Reaching Pahalgam town around 12:30 pm, the family took ponies up the muddy, pine-shaded trail to Baisaran valley, reaching by 1:35 pm. As they entered the meadow through the main gate, Bhat recalled how they were instantly captivated by the place’s grandeur. “We were taken away by the majestic view and the landscape and enjoyed it with a cup of tea and kawa,” he wrote in a series of notes on Twitter after reaching home. At 2 pm, they set off for a casual stroll, hoping to capture what he called “the cover photo of the Kashmir trip album.”
But by 2:25 pm, dreams of paradise were shattered by gunfire.
“We heard the first two gunshots loudly… followed by a pin-drop silence. Everyone was just comprehending what had happened,” Bhat recounted. Children continued playing in blissful ignorance even as panic slowly crept across the meadow.
Realising the gravity of the situation, Bhat and his family took cover behind a mobile toilet, around 400 metres from the entrance. “I could see two bodies lying on the ground already,” he wrote grimly. His brother, trained for such moments, instantly identified it as a terrorist attack.
Then came the burst fire — loud, relentless, and chaotic. “There was a cacophony of the crowd screaming out loud and running for life,” Bhat wrote. Yet the meadow was fenced from all sides, trapping hundreds with no easy escape. “Most of the crowd ran towards the gate where the terrorists were already waiting — like sheep running to the tiger.”
Spotting a terrorist advancing toward them, Bhat and others decided to run the other way. Fortune favoured them — they found a narrow opening in the fence created by a nala (water channel) pipe. His brother, showing remarkable calm, quickly gathered about 35 to 40 terrified tourists, urging them not to bunch up and exposing themselves as easy targets.
“He guided the people to run in the downward direction to move away from the place where the firing was happening,” Bhat recalled. They stumbled, slid, and slipped along a muddy, sloping stream bed, “terrifyingly aware that no place was safe” and that “anything could happen in the next moment.”
Desperate and helpless, the group found cover a few hundred metres away, hiding in a pit under the trees. “Words cannot describe the terror and horror one feels in such a situation,” he wrote, noting the added helplessness of not having mobile network coverage to call for immediate help.
Despite the peril, Bhat’s brother managed to alert the Army unit stationed in Pahalgam and the Army headquarters in Srinagar by around 2:45 pm. The family and other survivors clung to hope for over an hour, listening to the echoes of gunfire reverberating through the valley.
It was only around 3:40 pm that they heard the first sounds of helicopters — a glimmer of salvation. “By 4 pm, we spotted the soldiers from special forces and Army and heaved a huge sigh of relief,” Bhat wrote.
Still in shock, numb from the trauma, the survivors walked down under Army protection. “We saw people affected, covered in blood, being carried down and a range of emotions and thoughts — still unable to believe the events unfolded in the last two hours,” Bhat recalled with deep pain.
Reflecting on the experience, Bhat wrote movingly: “It’s beyond words and expressions to describe the horrific act and the monsters who took the life of those innocent people in front of their loved ones. The gunshots still echo in our ears, and the terror still makes my gut wrench. This will leave a permanent scar, a memory that cannot be erased of what Kashmir’s beauty hides underneath.”
The Bhat family is now back home in Mysuru, trying to piece together normal life after a trip that turned into a desperate battle for survival.
