On the evening of 1 January, Tilak Raj Sharma was at home in Dhangri with his family when he heard what he first thought were firecrackers. He quickly realised the bursts might be much more serious. Tilak Raj, aged 62, took out his personal weapon, a .303 rifle that was gathering dust in a steel trunk. It had been provided to him by the government in 1995 to protect his village against a spiraling insurgency that had grown in response to increasingly 'undemocratic acts' by the Indian state, but he had never used it.
Hearing cries, Tilak Raj rushed to his brother Pritam Lal's house, a stone's-throw away. "I first saw my nephew outside his house and he told me that somebody came and shot him and his father," he told me. Inside, he found his brother's lifeless body, and his sister-in-law locked away in another room. Tilak Raj's nephew, Shishu Pal, later succumbed to his injuries in hospital.
Pritam Lal and his son were not the only victims that night. Suspected militants shot four people dead and injured six in three separate houses in Dhangri, a village in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir, close to the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. Two of the injured also later died. The attack terrorised the area and outraged much of India, marking another step in an ongoing escalation of militancy in the Jammu region. In response, the government resurrected an idea it had first used decades ago, the last time that militancy spilled beyond the Kashmir Valley and into this part of Jammu and Kashmir.
Tilak Raj had received his weapon as a member of a Village Defence Committee, one of a large number of such voluntary groups set up in 1995 under a Congress government in New Delhi led by P V Narasimha Rao, but these had largely gone dormant in recent times. Last August, India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led government approved a scheme to raise and arm Village Defence Groups in Jammu. But little was done about this until recent incidents of violence, and the Dhangri attack in particular, brought these VDGs back into the spotlight. Now, armed civilian groups are once again being activated in large numbers.