"Pain Will Not Go, But...": Pahalgam Victim's Wife On Operation Mahadev

NDTV

6 days ago

The pain will not go, but "some peace" will come to us, Aishanya Dwivedi, the wife of Jammu and Kashmir terror attack victim Shubham Dwivedi, told NDTV on the day the Army eliminated three terrorists in an encounter near Srinagar, two of them involved in the Pahalgam attack.
Twenty-six people, mostly tourists, were killed and several were injured when terrorists opened fire at a meadow near the popular tourist town of Pahalgam in south Kashmir's Anantnag district on April 22.
"I'm really kind of in a relief that it is a good start. At the end of the day, the pain will not go. The closure will not happen but at least some peace will come to us," Ms Dwivedi, who was holidaying with her husband and other family members in Pahalgam when the terror attack took place, told NDTV.
Ms Dwivedi stressed that terrorism is a like a cancer and it needs to be finished.
"Somewhere, somewhere we will now sleep well knowingly that those people who actually killed my husband are dead and the people who are behind this, people who are actually sitting somewhere and doing this, these operations, commanding these terrorists, they will also be dead soon and I know this because I have faith in our India Army," she said.
Shubham Dwivedi, a businessman from Kanpur, got married on February 12. On April 22, the Dwivedi household was devastated as news came in that the 31-year-old was gunned down by terrorists right in front of his wife in Pahalgam.
Asked to recount how the attack unfolded, Ms Dwivedi said," They were not doing it in groups. They came through different sides. Because Shubham was the one who was shot first, so the person who fired the first gunshot, he came from near the entry gate.
Yeah, I really remember that very well. He came from the entry gate."
"Also, I do not know how these people got those weapons up there because it's a trail and you cannot carry those big weapons. But it happened. Yeah. It did happen and we are the victims. We are going through this. I cannot sleep even a day without thinking about it," she added.
Suleiman Shah, identified as the mastermind of the J&K terror attack and a Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist, was killed today in an operation codenamed Operation Mahadev, named after Mahadev Peak in Jammu and Kashmir's Srinagar.
Asked to describe her husband, Ms Dwivedi said he was the "heart of the family".
"He was a beautiful soul, happy soul. I know that I've been with him six months, 22 days and there was not a single day when I wasn't happy with him. I was happy every second. He made sure of it. He loved me so, so, so much that he could actually bring the world to me. He was like that. He was the heart of the family," she said.
Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, had visited Shubham Dwivedi's family in Kanpur.