The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict

This book is a collection of testimonies from the families of the disappeared in Kashmir. Inspired by their long quest for the truth about their missing relatives, it is based on the idea that preserving memory is central to the struggle for justice and to someday rebuilding the society shattered by two decades of armed conflict. Based on extensive fieldwork in collaboration with the families, it weaves together “insider” and “outsider” narratives to produce an understanding of life and struggle under two decades of military rule. The collaboration between insider and outsider voices enables us to see disappearances as human rights violations which fall under the legal definition of crimes against humanity, and also as a continuing story of loss and struggle in a society which is bound together by suffering and resistance. The loss of a relative—a son, a father, a husband, a brother—ripples through the web of social relationships of kin and community, and through time, creates its own webs of connectedness with strangers who share the same sorrow.

In 1991, historian Alastair Lamb wrote that “… at the moment of writing it has become apparent that the Indian Republic is faced with, at least in that part of the Vale of Kashmir which it occupies, what can only be described as a terminal colonial situation” (1993, 22). Simmering Kashmiri resentment against political repression had burst out into an armed struggle in 1989. Contrary to the dominant Indian narrative, which has attributed this to the rise of Muslim fanaticism and Pakistani interference, writers like Baba (2014), Bose (2005), Schofield (2010) and Robinson (2013) see it as an indigenous Kashmiri response to the decades of political repression and the denial of the Kashmiri right to self-determination. Pakistani involvement was not a cause but a product of the insurgency, which offered an opportunity to inflict low-cost damages on the Indian army.

In September 2011, Parveena Ahangar traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to a gathering of human rights defenders from around the world. She traveled alone; the Indian state limits passports issued to Kashmiris. Even the few issued are valid for only one year, while regular Indian passports are valid for five or ten years. In April 2011, she had been chosen as one of the six finalists for the Frontline Defenders award, which intends to “… honour the work of a human rights defender who, through non-violent work, is courageously making an outstanding contribution to the promotion and protection of the human rights of others, often at great personal risk to themselves.” In Dublin a small and committed group, Indian, Pakistani and Irish, formed to support her through the three days spent in a country where she did not speak the language and did not know anyone. They came to regard those days spent with her as a rare privilege. Parveena’s gift of inspiring and communicating with people works across all barriers of language, religion, nationality and experience. Her words are simple, and the story she tells is one of universal grief, the mother mourning for her lost son. Her words also prefigure expert legal opinion on the state of lawlessness and impunity under which the Indian army operates in Kashmir.

Individual narratives as told by fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and wives, of the process of arrest, search, and struggle, reveal the outlines of a system of military control and fear. The search for the missing is a desperate, all-consuming endeavor. It forces the families—housewives, elderly parents, young children, brothers and sisters with families of their own—to confront the army and police. The army camps are infamous as torture centers, where they “eat people.” Prisons, hospitals, morgues become familiar destinations, with each visit raising new fears of what might have befallen the missing one. Dangerous, expensive journeys are undertaken to the far-off Indian cities, where Muslim Kashmiris are treated as foreigners, required by law to register with the police and inform them of all movements, to search the prisons there. In the popular Indian imagination, Kashmiris are tagged as “terrorists,” making them fair game for a spot of nationalist violence, at any time and any place. And yet through the search, the only fear is that there might be some road, some jail, some location, that one might miss, that one step that would release the dear one from unthinkable torture and pain. The tortures practiced upon prisoners in the army camps and interrogation centers are common knowledge in Kashmir.

The struggle for sovereignty in Kashmir thus throws into sharp relief two different claims to life and death. While the Indian state claims and exercises absolute power over life and death as an attribute and display of sovereign power, its victims speak the language of justice, kinship, and love. It takes the Poet, again—Rumi himself—to remind us that the tears of the weak and powerless are not to be despised, for they have great power.

While the levels of violence have receded since 2003 (Iqbal et. al. 2014, 52), the massive military presence and its attendant abuses continue. Despite tremendous odds, including the legal impunity provided to the Indian military, there are growing efforts by Kashmiris to bring the perpetrators to justice. These initiatives together with recent visits and reports by UN Special Rapporteurs on the situation of human rights defenders, on extrajudicial executions, and on violence against women can form the basis for UN-led efforts to begin the work of documentation with a view to future criminal prosecutions. While international tribunals and criminal prosecutions have so far addressed post-conflict or transitional societies, the case of Kashmir demands the urgent recognition that justice is an essential component of the peacemaking process itself. Bringing human rights abusers to justice cannot wait until the establishment of peace; rather, the prosecutions themselves point to the direction the peace process should take.

The paradoxes of sovereignty-without-legitimacy are endless and self-perpetuating. The execution of Afzal Guru in February 2013 produced another upsurge of protest in Kashmir, violently repressed. Jim Drummond writes: “When India executed Afzal Guru without even letting him exhaust all his appellate remedies, to feed the putative public cry for vengeance, it taught J&K that, as to their citizens, there could be no reliance on the rule of law or fair play” (2014, 48). The protests now reach Delhi, with small groups of students, academics, human rights advocates carrying reminders of a quarter century of violence and injustice. The rallies are attacked and abused by police and right-wing Hindu nationalist counter-demonstrators, but they persist. In May 2013, families of the APDP travelled with a group of 150 Kashmiris to protest in Delhi. They demanded that the body of Afzal Guru be released to his family for burial in Kashmir, and an end to military violence in Kashmir.