As Far As The Saffron Fields

In March 2019, two militants were killed during a siege at a house in Nowgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar. One of them was known simply as ‘Idrees Bhai’. The encounter was forgotten for the most part, until investigators came upon a mangled phone that had been destroyed by Idrees Bhai. When the Samsung smartphone began to reveal its secrets, investigators realized they had hit upon a motherlode. For, Idrees Bhai was none other than Umar Farooq Alvi, the mastermind of the Pulwama suicide attack of February 2019 which had killed forty CRPF personnel, the deadliest terror attack on Indian security forces since 1989.