In April 1990, Sarla Bhat, a Kashmiri Hindu woman was murdered after being tortured and reportedly raped by Muslim militants of the JKLF during the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. Originally from Anantnag, Bhat was 27 years of age in 1990 and served as a staff nurse at SKIMS in Srinagar. She was abducted on 15 April from her hostel in Srinagar, allegedly raped, tortured, killed, and her body mutilated by her captors, who accused her of being a "mukhbir" (). Her dead body was found on 19 April and handed-over the next day to her family in Anantnag, who were unable to provide an appropriate cremation due to threats by militants and a grenade attack on the familyâÂÂs home. Her death caused panic in her mostly Hindu ancestral mohalla () in AnantnagâÂÂwhich had been nearly emptied due to threats received during the then-ongoing exodus of Kashmiri HindusâÂÂcompelling all the remaining Hindu inhabitants there to flee. A police complaint was filed in 1990 but did not result in any proper investigation. In 2025, the special investigation agency of Jammu and Kashmir police reopened the investigation.
Sarla Bhat was the eldest child of Shambhu Nath Bhat and was born sometime in 1963. Her father worked as a school teacher, and they lived in the Qazi Bagh mohalla of Anantnag, a neighbourhood whose residents were mostly Kashmiri Hindus, primarily Pandits. She had graduated with a degree in English literature from a government college in Anantnag and later pursued a BSc in Nursing. According to a cousin, Bhat had refused to get married and instead decided to work to support her family. In 1990, she was working as a staff nurse at the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) in Soura, Srinagar. Many members of her family, including her uncle, had fled the Kashmir Valley during the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus that year due to threats and violence of the insurgency in the region.
On 15 April 1990, Bhat was abducted from her hostel in Srinagar. Several reports mention that Bhat was raped and tortured in captivity. Her mutilated dead body was found on the morning of 19 April on the side of a road in Mallabagh, Soura of downtown Srinagar, with a hand-written note attached to it. In the note, militants of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) had taken responsibility for killing her, and accused her of informing the police about the presence of militants at the hospital. The acronym JKLF had been engraved upon her body.
On the night of 20 April, the body was handed over to BhatâÂÂs family in Anantnag. A neighbour who had been present at BhatâÂÂs house and helped with her funeral, noted in a memoir that the body: Only three Hindu families had remained in their formerly Hindu-majority neighbourhood. According to the memoir, though Muslim neighbours had been gathering to offer condolences, they were soon warned by militants against doing so. In the absence of Hindu neighbours and of help from Muslim ones, the family experienced difficulties in arranging for appropriate cremation of the body. Some individuals also attempted to prevent funerary rituals related to BhatâÂÂs cremation, and a handgrenade was hurled at the familyâÂÂs home. Her death and the events that followed spread panic in the area, with both Hindus and Muslims expressing apprehensions and rumours of more targeted killings and rapes. Several Hindu families in the region, including all remaining ones in the Qazi Bagh neighbourhood, fled the Kashmir Valley as a result.
After the murder, a police complaint was filed for murder, criminal conspiracy and terrorism under the Indian penal code and TADA. But an investigation did not materialise. A postmortem examination reportedly concluded that Bhat had been raped prior to killing. According to journalist Ahmed Ali Fayyaz, BhatâÂÂs murder was not seen as "high-profile." In 2025, the murder case was transferred to the special investigation agency (SIA) of Jammu and Kashmir police. The police statement did not mention rape. The SIA denied the accusation of Bhat passing information to the police and said that her murder followed the prevalent pattern of "targeted killings of Kashmiri Pandits during the 1990s." In August 2025, eight locations in Srinagar were raided by the SIA in relation to the murder, including the houses of former JKLF militant Yasin Malik and others.