On a cold mid-October night in 1993, a handful of gunmen turned faith into a weapon. They burrowed into Srinagar’s Hazratbal—home to the revered Moi-e-Muqaddas, believed by devotees to be a hair of Prophet Muhammad and used its sanctity as cover. India’s security forces, staring at a trap designed to inflame sectarian fury, chose patience over fury. The month-long standoff that followed presented a contrast of terror in the garb of religion versus professional restraint to protect a sacred space and prevent the incident from blowing into a wider communal blaze.

Hazratbal isn’t just a mosque. It is a shrine woven deep into Kashmir’s religious memory. The relic at its heart has twice before convulsed the Valley’s emotions. It was owing to this that the authorities understood that a bruised stone or a damaged reliquary could set the region alight and that is precisely why the militants had picked it. By occupying a site millions revere, they sought insurance against a forcible storming and a propaganda victory if a bullet so much as chipped a wall.

The siege took shape in mid-October 1993 after reports that armed men had entrenched themselves in the complex. Security forces surrounded the compound but held their fire, instead opening a negotiating channel. The standoff lasted for nearly 34 days—a rare instance in the 1990s insurgency when the state deliberately absorbed the cost of time to minimise the risk to faith and to civilians inside.

Inside the shrine complex, the militants trapped civilians and used them as a human-and-holy shield.

Through it all, the security grid kept distance. Negotiators shuttled. Phones were reconnected at times to sustain the talks and access to food and water fluctuated with the rhythm of bargaining. The only objective of it all was to end the siege without a firefight inside Hazratbal and that is exactly how it ended. In mid-November 1993, after nearly 34 days, the stand-off closed without bloodshed. No damage to the shrine was recorded. The relic, too, remained unharmed. A negotiated exit that prioritised the sanctity of the site was kept above the use of force. Around 40 militants were among those holed up.

Outside Hazratbal, protests and clashes spun off deadly violence. Most grimly, the Bijbehara killings on October 22, where the Border Security Force fired on demonstrators, left dozens dead. Those tragedies showed how brittle the moment was. Any misstep inside Hazratbal could have cascaded into catastrophe far beyond the Valley. Yet, against that backdrop, the operational choice at the shrine remained one of restraint.

At the time, during the 1993 Hazratbal siege, curfews and protests swept the Kashmir Valley, with over 60 killed on 22 October, cutting off access to the shrine and fuelling anti-India sentiment. Though the standoff ended peacefully, a prolonged security presence disrupted daily life for months, affecting schools, trade, and healthcare.

The militants sought a spectacle. The storming of a holy site that could be cast as an assault on Islam, magnified across television screens and Friday sermons. Retellings from the period are explicit—the aim was to draw the state into a fight in a mosque and then ride the outrage. The government’s counter at the time was strategic patience. Surround, stabilise, negotiate and deny the enemy the image it craved were some things that were taken care of.

Why this episode matters now

Sanctity as a shield is a recurring extremist tactic. Shrines, schools, hospitals, even processions, which are spaces of moral immunity, are repeatedly abused to deter response and to shape narrative. Recognising that gambit early is vital to crisis design.

Professional restraint can be an operational strength. The “fastest” option is not always the safest or the shrewdest. At Hazratbal, the measured cordon-and-negotiate posture preserved a sacred site and denied militants a sectarian flashpoint—an outcome force alone may not have secured.
Narrative control is part of security. By keeping weapons out of the shrine’s final scene and ensuring the Moi-e-Muqaddas remained untouched, the state undercut the militants’ storyline and reduced fuel for wider communal mobilisation.

In October 1993, terror wore the vestments of religion and tried to turn Hazratbal into a trap. India’s Army and security forces, amid a volatile street and intense scrutiny, chose professionalism calibrated to protect faith and prevent a communal conflagration. The siege ended not with a blaze, but with a door opening and people walking out. A win measured in what Kashmiris did not have to go through. No ruined shrine, no desecrated relic, no valley-wide firestorm.
In October–November 1993, the Hazratbal standoff disrupted daily life across the Valley—curfews, shutdowns, and protests surged, culminating on October 22 in the Bijbehara shootings that killed at least 37 civilians. The 34-day siege itself ended by negotiation with militants given safe passage without weapons, leaving the shrine and the Moi-e-Muqaddas relic unharmed, yet a heavy security cordon lingered until August 1994, prompting months of strikes and hunger strikes. The operation at the time was guided by codified shrine-sensitive rules of engagement such as cordon-and-negotiate, third-party verification, humanitarian corridors, robust crowd-risk protocols, such as clear escalation ladders and independent after-action reviews.