Anantnag (Jammu and Kashmir): Abdul Rashid Ganaie’s son, Haroon, disappeared in 2018. His family went to the police and searched for him, but never found him. The house Haroon had lived in with his wife and daughter in Hassanpora, Anantnag, was blown apart late on April 24, 2025, two days after the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in which 26 people were killed.Fifteen months later on July 21, 2026, head constable Ashiq Hussain Qureshi of Jammu and Kashmir Police was shot dead while on duty in Anantnag. It was the first militant attack in Kashmir since the Pahalgam terrorist strike. Just about 24 hours later, on the intervening night of July 22–23, another house belonging to the Ganaie family was blown apart.Eight years have passed since Haroon’s disappearance, and the authorities continue to identify him as a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist. A police official in Kashmir says, speaking anonymously, that Haroon and another man, Adil Thokar from Guree village, also in Anantnag district, are believed to have crossed over into Pakistan.However, the police have not publicly identified the terrorists responsible for the attack on Qureshi or said whether Haroon or Thokar were linked to it. The Wire contacted Nalin Prabhat, Director General of Police, Jammu and Kashmir, regarding the official designation of the two men and their connection with the Anantnag shooting. He declined comment, saying he does not speak to the media.Ganaie says the family never knew Haroon to be involved in violence and that there was no FIR against him before he disappeared. They do not know whether he is alive or dead.Around 11 kilometers away from Hassanpora, in Guree, the family of Adil Thokar has also had its homes blown up twice in a 15-month period. Adil disappeared in 2018. His family reported him missing. They never found him.The forces blew up the Thokar family’s first house on April 24, 2025, following the Pahalgam attack. It was done on the same day as the Ganaie house was razed. The Thokar family constructed a new house and moved into it earlier this year.Then in July 2026, the forces returned and blasted the new house. The Thokars’ two houses now stand broken, side by side, on the same plot. When the demolitions occured, media reports citing unnamed officials said that the authorities had identified both men as an LeT terrorists. But Adil’s family says that no FIR exists against him and the police have not made public any connection between him and Qureshi’s killing.As The Wire previously reported, Jammu and Kashmir Police claim to have identified 14 local militants active in Kashmir. Officials told this publication earlier that the homes of eight of those 14 have since been demolished.Abdul Rashid Ganaie at the tin shed he is constructing as a new shelter in Hassanpora, Anantnag. Photo: Pragya SinghThe double-demolition anti-terrorism tacticThe government has long defended the hardline approach of the forces, with Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha declaring in November 2024 that demolishing homes suspected to “shelter” terrorists was “not an atrocity” but “a demand of justice”. He says that anyone who provided such shelter would have his house “razed to the ground”.However, there is no official stand on blowing up the houses of active or suspected militants.Earlier, said a former senior officer who has worked in Kashmir for over a decade and wished to remain anonymous, houses were broken down only when a terrorist was holed up inside it. “It never happened that you demolished houses of suspects. There was always an attempt to call the family members of trapped terrorists and tell them to surrender and only when the risk became too much [was a house demolished],” he says.Kapil Kak, retired Air Vice Marshall and a prominent peace activist, says a pre-emptory demolition of houses of suspected militants “does not serve the security interests of India in the comprehensive or long-term sense, and certainly not the security of the people in the Kashmir Valley”.“Due process of law has to be followed, and the people who formulate strategies need to consider their long-term effects and downside effects,” Kak says.Also read: Pahalgam Attack: Shah’s Statement in Lok Sabha vs NIA Probe Report on TerroristsAfter the Ganai and Thokar homes were blasted in July, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah had pointed out that the search for the culprits in the Pahalgam terrorist attack had not turned up even a single local. “All the attackers in 2025 had come from outside,” he says, criticising the move.Former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti had also called the mass detentions and demolition of the homes of the two families “collective punishment that has no place in a democracy”.For both these families, who have lost their homes twice, the disappearance of their sons has become entangled with the state’s campaign against terrorism. As a result, years after their sons went missing, they are still paying the price for what the authorities say they have become.“There may be a sense of normalcy, but the hearts and minds of the people have been further alienated. That alienation could trend towards people adopting paths like joining militancy as a result of the resentment against the state,” Kak says.Punished by associationSixty-year-old Abdul Rashid Ganaie is a living example of the consequences of the government’s anti-terrorism tactics. Two weeks after the forces blew up his house in July, he was still digging through the rubble. The large spade in his hands made clanking noises as his wife and daughter-in-law looked on. It would be weeks before they had a structure resembling a shelter.Ganaie and his younger brother, Ali Mohammad, lived in the same house until Haroon disappeared. Ali, his wife and children moved out because the police and armed forces had started regularly visiting the house to enquire about Haroon.“Whenever the forces came, they would detain the male members of the family, including the younger members, so we moved out,” says Ali.“That name is khatarnak, we are afraid of taking his name,” he says with a pained smile as he recalled his nephew, Haroon.Ganaie says neither he nor Haroon had any political affiliations, mainstream or separatist. His family describes the hours before their house was blown up, for which they say they were not given prior notice.On July 22, a man in plainclothes came to the house and looked through the kitchen window. The family says he took a photograph and quickly left. Hours later, a large contingent of armed personnel “dressed in black uniforms” arrived, they said. The family believed it was there to conduct a talaashi, or search.The personnel first asked the women to move to a neighbours’ house. Later, they and the neighbours were told to move farther away.At around 3 am they heard an explosion. The house was gone.Abdul Rashid Ganaie. Photo: Pragya SinghThe shards from the exploding windows flew all over the neighbourhood. Some are still visible, glittering in the muddy lanes.Ganaie was not there when the house was blasted. He had been taken to the Joint Interrogation Centre (JIC) in Anantnag as part of the sweeping detentions that followed Qureshi’s killing. More than 2,000 people were picked up across Kashmir on that day, July 22. He learnt that his house had been destroyed as he was being released. “I told the others, you are going back home, but I have no home left to return to,” says Ganaie.The morning after the blast, the women were also taken to the JIC.“We got devastated when they blasted our house,” says Ganaie, walking through the rubble outside what had been a 50-foot-by-33-foot single-storey house. In its place, the family is building a shelter from corrugated tin sheets fixed to a slender wooden frame.“Large-scale arrests do further exacerbate people’s resentment against the very hardline measures adopted against people suspected to have been helping terrorists,” says Kak.The family says nobody from the administration or forces has visited them since the house was blown up. Neighbours came to see the damage, but none came to help clear the rubble.“Everybody is scared. Even my brother was afraid to shelter us. I told him that we did not invite these troubles on ourselves,” says Ganaie.Haroon, meanwhile, remains absent from the family’s lives, except when forces come asking about him, or to blow up their house.“We have not been in touch with him since his disappearance. Even when his brother died, Haroon did not get in touch with us,” says Ganaie. “Were he alive, he would have contacted us at that time. We don’t know if he is alive or dead.”For Waheed Para, a People’s Democratic Party MLA from Pulwama and critic of home demolitions in Kashmir, the fear surrounding families such as the Ganaies is the point of such actions.“When they blast homes today, it is to send a message – not just to the person at the receiving end but to all of us [Kashmiri people],” he says.“The government’s intention is to recreate in people’s minds their memories of the conflict. Nobody wants to re-set things, to give people closure,” Para says.Nothing left to rebuildThe sense of being under siege was palpable at the site of the demolished homes of the Thokar family in Guree. Before we knocked at the gates, a neighbour stopped us and says, “There are spies everywhere.”“After you leave,” another man tells The Wire team, “The family will get a call. They will be asked, ‘Who came from Delhi to meet you?’”The Thokar family’s two demolished houses stand on a single plot. When their first house was demolished in 2025, the family was detained and questioned for several hours. The questions were mostly about Adil.“We told them we don’t know whether Adil is alive or dead,” says his mother, Shahzad.Adil was a schoolteacher. He disappeared in 2018 after leaving home to appear for an examination for a government teachers’ job.The government also confiscated some of their land. The police told the family after the first demolition that “what had to happen has happened” and that nobody would harm them now.So the family rebuilt, spending nearly Rs 38 lakh. They sold some land and borrowed money to construct the new house. They had moved their belongings into it only a few months earlier.The new house the Thokars had moved into in Anantnag months before it was blown apart in July 2026. Photo: Junaid DarLess than a day after the July 21 killing of Head Constable Qureshi, on the intervening night of July 22–23, the forces returned to blast their new house to pieces. “We did not get any notice, and we thought it was just a talaashi,” says Shahzad. “Now we feel that whenever something happens in Kashmir, it is we who will be in trouble.”The senior officer who has served in Kashmir cited earlier said that a family whose home is demolished loses a lot more than their shelter. “Your documents are gone, your memories are gone, even your family photos are gone. So it has a larger impact, not merely the structural demolition. Bringing down a house should be the last resort,” he said, claiming that the army has no role in such demolitions.The Thokar family describes some of its losses: “We are farmers. We had stocked five tins of mustard oil in the new house just a day earlier,” Shahzad says. All the family could save was Shahzad’s youngest son Zahid’s educational degrees.Zahid works in a private company and is still repaying the loan they took out to rebuild their home. He says he failed to secure police verification for a government job he had applied for. The youngest brother, a painter, lives away from the family.Adil, the family says, never contributed a penny to rebuild their home. He had disappeared long before either demolition.“My husband and sons worked very hard to build this house,” says Shahzad, “Now, everybody is afraid of helping us, not even our relatives call us.”Vibhuti Narain Rai, a former police officer deployed in anti-insurgency operations in Kashmir in the early ’90s, says, “Anti-militancy operations include an element of psychological tactics – you also have to win over people. That is why home demolitions should be avoided. With the right steps, people can be brought back into the mainstream,” says Rai.The official formerly posted in Kashmir who did not wish to be identified also said that the army pays attention to programmes like sadbhavna in order to get the civil population on its side. “[Demolitions] could be counterproductive to that.” he said.He suggested that the government distinguishes between short-term impact and long-term strategy and between conflict management and conflict resolution: “We are reasonably good at conflict management – but we aren’t focused enough on conflict resolution.”