Who is attacking
Attackers chop off women’s long, braided hair, prompting vigilante street patrols
women in Kashmir and cutting off their long braids of hair?
SRINAGAR, India — Hundreds of young men — armed with knives, cricket bats and iron rods — patrol the nighttime streets of India-controlled Kashmir these days, hoping their ad-hoc vigilante groups will deter the mysterious bandits reportedly chopping off women’s long, woven hair.
In more than 100 cases confounding police over the past month, women said they were attacked by masked men who sliced off their braids.
The attacks — most reportedly occurring inside people’s homes — are so strange that police initially suggested women were suffering from hallucinations, until the government-run Women’s Commission warned them against making dismissive comments.
The region’s top elected official, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, tweeted recently that the braidchopping was an attempt “to create mass hysteria and undermine the dignity of the women in the state.”
Still, police have no suspects and no leads, and no clue about the motives for the attacks.
“We’re frightened,” said Tasleema Bilal, a 40-yearold woman whose hair was hacked off last week while she was in her home in Srinagar, the region’s main city. She said she tried to remove the man’s mask, but “he was very strong, and like a commando almost snapped my neck” before escaping, leaving her hair behind.
Just days earlier, Bilal’s 16-year-old niece had also been knocked out by a blow to the head with a brick, only to wake up later in a hospital to find her hair also gone. Other women have said they were knocked unconscious with a chemical spray that authorities have yet to identify.
Similar incidents of hair banditry were reported earlier this year elsewhere in India, including in the northern states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
But nowhere have the attacks sparked such panic and vigilantism as in Kashmir.
While Kashmiri Muslim women traditionally wear their hair long like women in other parts of India, most cover it with headscarves out of cultural modesty.