"They Killed Him": Wife Of Pahalgam Terror Victim Recalls Horror
As the nation bids farewell to its loved ones who lost their lives in the Pahalagam terror attack, survivors of the attack that took place in the Baisaran valley meadow on April 22 recollect the horrific ordeal. Eshanaay, wife of Shubham Dwivedi, one among the 26 victims, said that they had sat down for a meal when a man appeared from behind and asked them about their religion.
"We gave an order for Maggi, then Shubham and I sat down. Dad was also in the bathroom. At that time, one person came from behind and he asked, 'Are you a Hindu or Muslim?' If you are a Muslim, then you first read the Kalma'. We didn't even know, we looked back to see what was happening," the wife said. "They asked me whether he is Hindu or muslim, I told them Hindu, they killed him. The first shot was on him."
A pall of gloom descended on Kanpur when the body of Shubham reached his native village in Kanpur on Thursday morning.
Sanjay Dwivedi, a resident of Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, is still grappling with the loss of his son, Shubham Dwivedi, who was killed in the recent Pahalgam terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir. According to Mr Dwivedi, his son, along with his wife and sister-in-law, had visited a scenic spot known as "mini Switzerland" in Pahalgam.
Mr Dwivedi said that Shubham's wife, who survived the attack, asked the terrorists to kill her as well. However, they spared her life to use her as a witness to convey a message to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The family had stopped at a restaurant 7 km before reaching the destination. While they were having snacks, terrorists arrived and asked about their religious identity. After learning that Shubham was a Hindu, the terrorists shot him in the head.
Recounting the horror, Mr Dwivedi told ANI, "...My son, his wife, and sister-in-law went to a place called 'mini Switzerland', which is at a high altitude, and we stopped at a restaurant, 7 km before that place. They were having some snacks when the terrorists came. They asked about whether you are Hindu or Muslin, and after that, they shot my son in the head. My daughter-in-law asked them to kill her as well, but they didn't. They told him that we are leaving you alive so that you can tell Modi about all this. We met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Srinagar, and we have told him what we want."
In a heartbreaking response to the Pahalgam terror attack, his father demanded the harshest possible action against the perpetrators, asserting that "action should be so severe that their seven generations would never dare to kill anyone again."
"Strict action should be taken against the terrorists. They (terrorists) said to my daughter-in-law that we are not killing you so that you can tell it to Modi. Action should be so severe that their seven generations would never dare to kill anyone again," said Sanjay Dwivedi, the father of the dead, Shubham Dwivedi.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
26 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Derek O'Brien writes: 79 suggestions for the Union government on 79th I-Day
As India celebrates its 79th Independence Day, here are 79 suggestions for the Union government. Unemployment 1. Reduce unemployment. Eight out of 10 unemployed are youth. 2. Create jobs for the youth. Youth unemployment is over 15 per cent. 3. Introduce urban employment guarantee schemes. 4. Increase wages of rural workers— real average annual growth is just 0.2 per cent. 5. Increase the female Labour Force Participation Rate. Among youth, this is around half that of men. 6. Boost skill training. Only 4 per cent of the youth workforce have formal vocational training. Health 7. Remove 18 per cent GST on health and life insurance. 8. Increase spending on public healthcare, currently less than 2 per cent of GDP. 9. Strengthen AIIMS. Over 18,000 positions are vacant in AIIMS hospitals. 10. Provide free medical and psychological treatment for acid attack survivors. Education 11. Restart discontinued minority scholarship schemes like the Maulana Azad National Fellowship. 12. Stop partisan changes to NCERT textbooks 13. Provide quality education to ST kids. A third of Eklavya schools are non-functional. Children 14. Bring down student suicides. 15. Eradicate child labour. 16. Fight drug addiction among children. 1.5 crore children aged 10-17 are addicted. 17. Focus on child health. Two out of five children up to five years of age are stunted. 18. Bring down number of zero-food children. Three out of 10 infants aged between six and 11 months are classified as such. Gender 19. Pass stronger laws for time-bound resolution of cases of crime against women. 20. Amend the Women's Reservation Bill, delink it from the census and delimitation. 21. Harmonise punishment for sexual violence against transgender persons with penalties under the BNS for women. 22. Legalise same-sex marriage. 23. Criminalise marital rape. Federalism 24. Make cess and surcharge a part of the divisible pool, to be shared with states. 25. Resolve ongoing unrest in Manipur. 26. Stop using the ED as a political weapon. Its conviction rate is 0.25 per cent. 27. Stop Hindi imposition. 28. Give full statehood to J&K. 29. Stop squeezing non-BJP states for funds. Bengal alone is owed over Rs 15,000 crore under MGNREGA and PMAY-G. Policy 30. Admit demonetisation was a failure. 31. Roll back Agnipath and bring back permanent recruitment in the Armed Forces. 32. Introduce a framework to reduce financial frauds, which increased by 97 per cent between 2020 and 2024. 33. Introduce a national elder care policy with support services and pension. 34. Ensure a five-year cooling-off period before retired judges can take up any other constitutional post. 35. Increase the judiciary's strength. Over five crore cases are pending across courts. 36. Delink MGNREGS payment from Aadhaar, which makes over 28 per cent of MGNREGS workers ineligible. 37. Strengthen RTI and include institutions like PM CARES under its purview. 38. Improve data privacy. The DPDP rules have not been framed. More than 81 crore citizens' data was leaked in 2023. 39. Improve press freedom, in which India is ranked 161 out of 180. 40. Strengthen the Armed Forces. There are 1.09 lakh vacancies in paramilitary forces. 41. Strengthen banking access. One in five Jan Dhan accounts is inactive. 42. Increase PM Kisan funds to Rs 12,000 43. Stop manual scavenging. Between 2014 and 2023, 736 people died cleaning sewers and septic tanks. 44. Reduce plastic pollution. 3.5 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated each year. 45. Build dedicated legislation for AI. Do not wait to take the cue from other countries. 46. Withdraw the SIR exercise in Bihar. 47. Implement a national bail reform policy to reduce the undertrial population. 48. Conduct the census, due since 2021, in 2026 instead of 2027. 49. Standardise gig/contract worker rights, including social security. 50. Increase the wages of MGNREGS and ASHA workers. Economy 51. Reduce poverty. Four out of five people earn less than Rs 171 a day. 52. Improve GDP growth, which was at a four-year low in 2024-25. 53. Increase value added by manufacturing. Manufacturing GVA was at 4.5 per cent in FY 2025, lower than FY 2013. 54. Reduce agriculture household debt. The average outstanding loan per agricultural household is over Rs 74,000. 55. Strengthen MSMEs. Between 2020 and February 2025, over 75,000 MSMEs were shut down. 56. Boost industrial growth, which in June was at its lowest in 10 months. 57. Create high-value jobs. Forty-six per cent of the workforce is in agriculture. 58. Reduce household indebtedness. Household savings touched a 50-year low in 2022-23. 59. Reduce per capita external debt, which rose by 132 per cent in 2014-2025. Infrastructure 60. Develop air connectivity. Of 619 routes operationalised under UDAN, only half are currently operational. 61. Improve internet access. Over 21,200 villages don't have internet connections. 62. Expand expressways. Twenty-five per cent of Bharatmala project isn't yet awarded. 63. Boost railway safety. There are over one lakh vacancies in the railways. 64. Expand KAVACH. In four years, it was installed in just 2 per cent of rail routes. 65. Ensure road safety. About half of unnatural and untimely deaths are due to road accidents. 66. Improve infrastructure. Work for only eight per cent of Amrit Bharat stations has been completed. Parliament 67. Give more time to the Opposition. Seventy per cent is used by the government. 68. Appoint a deputy speaker of the Lok Sabha. The post has been vacant since 2019. 69. Have a fixed parliamentary calendar with a minimum 100 days of sittings. 70. Stop bulldozing bills. The 500-plus-page Income Tax Bill was passed in under five minutes in the Lok Sabha this week. 71. Stop mass suspension of MPs — 146 were suspended in one session in 2023. Bad Laws 72. Repeal CAA. 73. Ban anti-conversion laws. 74. Scrap sedition and the UAPA law, which has a conviction rate under 3 per cent. 75. Repeal the Waqf (Amendment) Act. 76. Criminalise marital rape. For the Prime Minister 77. Answer a question in Parliament. 78. Hold a press conference. 79. Visit Manipur The writer is MP and leader, All India Trinamool Congress Parliamentary Party. Research credit: Ayashman Dey, Chahat Mangtani, Dheemunt Jain, Varnika Mishra
News18
an hour ago
- News18
Israeli military attacks Hezbollah terror targets in South Lebanon
Tel Aviv [Israel], August 15 (ANI/TPS): The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) attacked several underground routes of the Hezbollah terrorist organisation in South Lebanon on Thursday evening. 'The presence of the infrastructure that was attacked was a violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon," said the IDF will continue to act to remove any threat to the State of IsraelThe Upper Galilee Regional Council reported that a series of attacks began in the Lebanese sector, with an emphasis on the eastern sector, as part of what it called 'enforcement efforts." (ANI/TPS)
Hindustan Times
an hour ago
- Hindustan Times
Haryana to create roadmap to eradicate child begging
State launches SMILE-backed rescue and rehabilitation drive The meeting recognised that begging in many urban centres operates under well-structured rackets, exploiting children as income sources. In a move to dismantle organised begging rackets and protect vulnerable children from exploitation, the Haryana State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (HSCPCR) has rolled out a state-backed rescue and rehabilitation initiative under the Union government's SMILE scheme (Support for Marginalised Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise). A state-level inter-departmental meeting, chaired by additional chief secretary (women and child development department) Sudhir Rajpal, brought together top police, child protection, health, labour, and social welfare officers to target the root causes of child begging and create a clear roadmap for its eradication. Rajpal said that child begging is not an isolated act of poverty in many cases, it is a criminally organised industry where children are forced into the streets by cartels, traffickers, or even relatives for monetary gain. 'It strips children of education, exposes them to abuse, and traps them in lifelong cycles of vulnerability,' he said. Three phases to break the cycle The first phase is mapping the problem; joint mapping of begging hotspots — traffic lights, religious places, and markets —by district administration, WCD, and NGOs, headcount of child beggars and identification of orphans, abandoned children, or those without family support. The second phase is rescue and protection; while in the third phase focus will be on long-term rehabilitation and tracking, regular monitoring of rehabilitated children and education. The meeting recognised that begging in many urban centres operates under well-structured rackets, exploiting children as income sources. Rajpal said that child begging is an exploitation of innocence and a violation of basic human rights. 'Haryana is committed to breaking this vicious cycle through rescue, rehabilitation, and strict action against those who profit from it,' Rajpal said, adding that a follow-up meeting will be held in 15 days to assess progress, review the first rescue operations, and finalise strategies for scaling the model across the state.
