In the summer of June 1990, just months after militancy erupted in Kashmir and the forced exodus of Pandits began, Girija Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit woman working as a lab assistant at a government school in Bandipora, became a victim of unimaginable brutality. By then, most Pandits had fled, but she returned briefly to collect her salary after colleagues assured her that it was safe. It was a fateful decision. On her way, she was abducted by militants, taken to a secluded location, and subjected to repeated gang-rape and torture. Her ordeal did not end there. In one of the most chilling crimes of the insurgency, the perpetrators placed her on a saw machine in a mill and cut her alive into two pieces.

Her mutilated body was later found, shocking even those hardened by months of killings. Girija was not a political activist, nor did she pose any threat—she was a simple woman earning her livelihood, targeted only because she was a Kashmiri Hindu. Her story, suppressed for decades, resurfaced when survivors and her family spoke out about the horrors of that time. Her sister and niece later recalled the unbearable trauma, saying that Girija’s fate symbolized the inhuman cruelty unleashed on Pandit women during the insurgency.

Like the murder of Sarla Bhat, Girija Tickoo’s killing remains one of the most haunting reminders of the genocidal violence faced by Kashmiri Pandits. To this day, it epitomizes both the savagery of the terrorists’ campaign and the long silence of justice. Her memory survives as part of the collective wound of a community uprooted from its homeland, demanding that such crimes never be forgotten.