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Mass graves in Kashmir: India officially guilty

World’s most dangerous border

By Eric S Margolis /New York

The state human rights commission of the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir reported its investigators had found 2,156 bodies buried in unmarked graves in 38 locations. Most were young men. Many bore bullets wounds.

Grisly and horrifying as this discovery was, there was hardly a peep from India’s allies, notably the United States and Britain, who have raised such a hue and cry over civilian deaths in Libya, Iran and Syria. India shrugged off the report.

There may be many more bodies to be found. Most, or all, were the product of the decades-old uprising by Kashmir’s Muslim majority against Indian rule that the outside world has largely ignored.

The fabled state of Kashmir lies in majestic isolation amid the towering mountain ranges separating the plains of India from the steppes and deserts of Central Asia. Nineteenth Century geopoliticians called Kashmir one of the world’s primary strategic pivots.
Historic Kashmir, with its distinctive Indo-European and Tibetan-Mongol peoples, has ended up divided between three nations: India, Pakistan, and China.

Some 9mn Kashmiris live in the Indian-ruled two thirds of Kashmir; over 3mn in the Pakistani portion, known as Azad Kashmir, and small numbers in the frigid Aksai Chin plateau at over 5,000m altitude.

Kashmir’s Tibetan-race people mostly live in Indian-controlled Ladakh, long called “Little Tibet”.

When Imperial Britain divided India in 1947, the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir opted to join the new Indian Union. But 77% of his people were Muslim (20% were Hindu, 3% Sikh and Buddhist). Muslim Kashmiris wanted to join newly-created Pakistan. Fighting erupted. India and Pakistan rushed in troops.

The ceasefire line that ended the fighting has become the de facto border between the Indian and Pakistani-ruled parts of Kashmir. India claims all of Kashmir, including Chinese-ruled Aksai Chin. Pakistan also claims all of Kashmir. The United Nations called for a plebiscite to decide this issue. Pakistan accepted; India refused the UN resolution.

India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars over Kashmir and innumerable border clashes, some of which I have witnessed.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Pakistani and Indian troops confront one another in Kashmir, backed by growing numbers of tactical nuclear weapons that are on a three-minute hair-trigger alert. Kashmir is the world’s most dangerous border.

In the early 1990’s, massive uprisings erupted in Kashmir against Indian rule, which was enforced by 500,000 troops and ill-disciplined police. Security forces struck back with maximum brutality, leading India’s human rights groups to denounce the repression.

Muslim villages were burned; suspects were tortured; large numbers of young men were taken from villages and simply disappeared.

Now we know where they went - filling many of the unmarked graves discovered last month.

An estimated 80,000 Kashmiris have so far died in the uprising, the majority Muslims. Muslims also committed bloody atrocities against Hindus and Sikhs. Now, Indian rights groups are demanding that India’s high courts investigate the crimes that have been committed in Kashmir, put an end to them, and punish the guilty parties.

Continued selective moral concern on our part is unacceptable. India’s allies must encourage Delhi to face this ugly issue and end this blight on India’s democracy and good name.

Resolving the Kashmir dispute will eliminate the gravest danger faced by mankind: an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange that could kill at least 2mn initially, 100mn thereafter, and spread clouds of radioactive dust around the globe.

Kashmir has poisoned relations between sister nations Pakistan and India who are locked in this sterile conflict. Clever Indian diplomacy has long kept the Kashmir conflict in the shadows.

The solution: erase all the borders and turn Kashmir into an autonomous, demilitarised free trade zone.
 
World’s most dangerous border

By Eric S Margolis /New York

The state human rights commission of the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir reported its investigators had found 2,156 bodies buried in unmarked graves in 38 locations. Most were young men. Many bore bullets wounds.

Kashmir-fatalities.jpg
 
Probe Requested of Unmarked Kashmir Graves

SRINAGAR: A state-run human rights body has asked authorities to investigate the alleged existence of unmarked graves holding thousands of unidentified bodies in the Indian-administered Kashmir.

The Jammu-Kashmir State Human Rights Commission on Friday acted on a petition by a local rights group claiming that 3,844 unmarked graves existed in 208 sites in remote Rajouri and Poonch districts.

Tariq Banday, secretary of the commission, says the Jammu-Kashmir state government has been asked to investigate the allegations and provide its findings within a month.

Local rights groups say the graves might contain the bodies of Kashmiri civilians who have disappeared and may have been killed by government forces in a decades-old armed conflict in the Himalayan region.


Probe requested of unmarked Kashmir graves | World | DAWN.COM


Kashmir-missing-people-543.jpg
 
Anti-militant protests in Pakistan's Neelum

Protests over renewed militant activity have been held in the Neelum Valley region of Pakistani-administered Kashmir,

Locals say that Pakistan-based militants are flocking to the area and crossing into Indian-administered Kashmir to launch attacks there.

They fear that retaliatory fire from the Indian side may threaten a 2003 ceasefire and life in the valley.

It is a long, narrow strip of land, most of which lies within the firing range of soldiers in Indian-administered Kashmir.

It was one of the worst-affected areas along the Line of Control (LoC) that divides the disputed region of Kashmir.

Its tricky mountain passes meant that it was an important transit route for militants crossing into Indian-administered Kashmir

During a congregation to mark the holy festival of Eid on 31 August, residents of the town of Athmuqam passed a resolution which declared that any attempt to disrupt peace in the area would be resisted by the people.

A week later, two large demonstrations were held in Athmuqam to protest against the influx of militants which it is argued has sparked border skirmishes between Pakistani and Indian forces.

BBC News - Anti-militant protests in Pakistan's Neelum valley
 
Clearly the savage terrorists of the Hind army are responsible for this. Pakistan is also indirectly guilty in this for it isn't taking a stronger political stance on this issue, and should be organizing International support for Kashmir. Pakistan also needs support the Kashmiri liberation movement making them an effective force. Until these things are done we can say Pakistan has disasppointingly fallen below the minimum it should do.

I agree :)
 
Clearly the savage terrorists of the Hind army are responsible for this. Pakistan is also indirectly guilty in this for it isn't taking a stronger political stance on this issue, and should be organizing International support for Kashmir. Pakistan also needs support the Kashmiri liberation movement making them an effective force. Until these things are done we can say Pakistan has disasppointingly fallen below the minimum it should do.

I agree :)
 
KASHMIR'S UNMARKED GRAVES: EXCAVATING THE TRUTH



B Dutt


[video]http://social.ndtv.com/buckstopshere/permalink/57970[/video]
 
Clearly the savage terrorists of the Hind army are responsible for this. Pakistan is also indirectly guilty in this for it isn't taking a stronger political stance on this issue, and should be organizing International support for Kashmir. Pakistan also needs support the Kashmiri liberation movement making them an effective force. Until these things are done we can say Pakistan has disasppointingly fallen below the minimum it should do.

There was time when we had chance to take stand on both political & military level. We lost it, we were postponed 10 - 15 years by WOT. This is proven reality that without solution of Kashmir dispute we can't step up toward our progress. This cause is so strong and vital in our people that government could not simply ignore and move ahead. All back door policies nothing but defeat if result will against our interests & plans. Policy should be refresh for freedom of Kashmir from Indian occupation but reduce involvement on western border if concentration need to shift on LOC.
 
We will need help from Pakistani side to identify most of these bodies.

Given past experience regarding dead bodies, kind of difficult.

I hope Pakistanis here do not deny that thousands and thousands of pakistanis were sent to Indian Kashmir for jihad and India had no way of identifying their remains. Heck a living and talking Ajmal Kasab was so difficult.
 
Unidentified remains discovered in unmarked graves scattered across Kashmir could undergo DNA testing in an effort to provide crucial information about an unknown number of "disappeared" people who went missing during the valley's years of violence.

The state's most senior politician has said he is prepared to carry out tests where family members are willing to provide a DNA sample of their own and help identify where they believed their relative might be buried.

"We would be prepared to consider DNA testing provided the people come forward with a sample," Kashmir's Chief Minister Omar Abdullah told The Independent. He said he also wanted to push forward with the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission for the region.

In an unsettling reminder of the untold numbers of "disappeared" who were killed or went missing during the region's dark recent history, officials announced last month that a total of 2,156 remains had been located in 38 different grave sites. Other sites have also been identified and more corpses could yet be identified.

The State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) called for "all modern" techniques and methods to be used to identify the bodies, including the use of DNA. Its chairman, Justice Syed Bashiruddin said: "It is not just DNA tests, there are other tests [that can be used]. We have to try to identify all these nameless graves." There is no agreed figure for the number of people who lost their lives as a result of separatist militancy that took hold in the valley in the late 1980s and the subsequent crackdown by the Indian security forces. Anywhere up to 70,000 people may have died, while many thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, or Pandits, were forced from homes they had occupied for centuries.

Activists say large numbers of people, suspected of either being militants or having linked to such groups, were summarily detained and killed. Across the valley, untold numbers live in a state of enduring uncertainty, hoping that missing relatives may one day come home alive.

Among those actively watching progress on identifying the remains is 23-year-old Bilqis Manzoor. Ten years ago her father, Manzoor Ahmed, was picked up by counter-insurgency troops from the 35th Battalion the Rashtriya Rifles from his home near Srinagar's old airport. Mr Manzoor, who ran a chemist's shop and also worked as a distributor for fruit juices and snacks, was 32 and had four children. Apparently the soldiers gave no explanation as to why they were taking him. His family never saw him again. "DNA testing is a moral victory for us. For all these years, the state was in denial about the missing persons," she said, speaking from Srinagar. "Now, it shows that the government is willing to accept that people are missing... and DNA tests of the bodies in unmarked graves would prove the untold brutalities unleashed by Indian security forces and gross human rights violation in Kashmir."

Two years ago, the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir issued a report that identified at least 2,943 bodies, located in unmarked graves in 55 towns and villages. It is this information that has been used by the SHRC for its own inquiry. Khurram Parvez, a human rights activist with the group, said up to 8,000 relatives are waiting for news.

Mr Abdullah's call for a commission has been derided as a "farce" by some activists who say that there can be no justice for the people of Kashmir if those responsible for crimes are not charged and tried. Campaigners have long demanded the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) from Kashmir, saying the law prevents troops and paramilitaries being held accountable, even if there is evidence they have committed offences.


Chief Minister Abdullah said that, while the formula for a commission had not been fixed, the process had to be transparent. "We say that no one would be able to claim immunity from the process," he added. "The truth and reconciliation commission would have to recognise you don't give people immunity and that justice is seen to be done."

DNA testing to identify Kashmir's 'disappeared' - Asia, World - The Independent
 
india's genocide of Kashmiris will never be acceptable nor will it be forgiven.....they will continue to face repercussions for it
 
me personally, i don't have the answer.


i'm sorry to hear of these mass graves though....I think the families deserve to know what happeend to their loved ones. To find out why they were killed by your trigger-happy occupation forces.
 
Now, 2,500 unidentified graves in Jammu

Even the dead would turn in their graves at such a startling revelation. Mail Today has found mass graves in Jammu's Poonch district where 2,500 unidentified bodies were buried by a lone gravedigger.

It is pertinent to note here that the state human rights commission (SHRC) had found in an inquiry over 2,100 unidentified bodies at 38 sites in the Kashmir Valley. The commission's report had come out last month. But this is for the first time that graves unknown men have been identified in the Jammu region. Sofi Aziz Joo - the lone gravedigger in this frontier town - claims that he has buried over 2,500 unidentified bodies, sometimes in mass graves, handed over to him by the police and the army.

The 90-year-old gravedigger said the bodies handed over to him by the police and the army were usually bullet-ridden, without limbs or mutilated. He also pointed out that most of the bodies had their faces disfigured beyond recognition.

Sofi used to bury the bodies, and sometimes only heads without any other part the body attached to it, in a graveyard opposite a small shrine near the army garrison.

"The bodies would come anytime and burials were to be made without involving townsfolk for fear of provoking " anti- India" protests. So, I used to take the help of two labourers," he said.

None of the dead was known to him or his apprentices, he asserted.

"Once when the police brought 16 unidentified bodies and asked me to bury them, I along with a couple of labourers dug out a single grave to bury them all," said Sofi, pointing towards a raised ground in the graveyard, now covered by grass. "I don't remember the date. But I recall that the police said they were killed in Modpichae village," he said.

There are other mass graves in the graveyard too, he said and pointed out a grave which, according to him, has five bodies.
"They (the police) used to hand over bullet-ridden or disfigured bodies and tell me that they were militants killed by the army in gunfights," he said, when asked about the identity of the persons he buried.


He also pointed out that the faces of most of the bodies used to be mutilated beyond recognition. There have been times when Sofi buried only heads, without bodies, a process that he objected to later on.

"Over a period of time, it appeared fishy and I started refusing heads only. I started asking questions and demanded the full body," Sofi said. He recalled that once the police and the army handed him six heads for burial.

"It was the first time I was witnessing such a horror. I broke down," the gravedigger said. Moreover, Sofi was pressured to give in writing that he received six bodies.

THEY TOOK it in writing from me despite my protests. What could I have done?" In another instance, Sofi was asked to bury seven heads.

"I wrapped the heads in shrouds and buried them. But, they took a receipt of seven bodies," he said. However, in the third such incident when the police came up with some 15 heads, Sofi protested.

"I thought come what may, I will not do it anymore," he said. "Then they left."

Talking about the time during which he was burying all these bodies, Sofi said the police started giving him bodies with the beginning of militancy in Kashmir - a time when crossborder infiltration and exfiltration picked up. He recalled that he used to get one or two bodies everyday and unlike the Valley, in Poonch, no local was permitted to help him in the burial.


For each body Sofi received, he was supposed to put his signature on a foolscap paper, apparently a takeover. The police personnel, after handing over bodies to Sofi, would remain on guard until he completed the burial process.
The burials have cost Sofi around Rs1.85 lakh, maximum of which was spent on purchasing cloth for shrouds and remuneration to the labourers.

Deputy Commissioner Poonch Ajit Sahoo, did not see this correspondent, despite a prior appointment. Sahoo kept the correspondent waiting for two hours inside his office but did not come out to speak.

After the discovery of 2,156 unidentified bodies at 38 sites in the Valley, the SHRC had issued notices to the state government on a petition filed by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), seeking investigation into the graveyards of Jammu division's Poonch and Rajouri districts.

Ironically, there are seven graves of policemen too in this graveyard but all of these bear a proper epitaph. The remaining are housing mysteries along with their dead.


Now, 2,500 unidentified graves in Jammu : North: News India Today


how horrible can it get !!
 
One sodden evening in April 2010, an Indian army major from the 4 Rajputana Rifles arrived at a remote police post where the mountains gather in a half-hitch around Kashmir, India's northernmost state. Major Opinder Singh "seemed in a hurry", a duty policeman recalled. Up in the heights of the Pir Panjal range, down through which the major had descended, it was snowing and his boots let in water. "The officer reported that the previous night his men had killed three Pakistani terrorists who had crossed over into our Machil sector," the policeman recalled. "Where are the bodies?" the policeman had asked, filling in a First Information Report that started a criminal enquiry. "They were buried where they were shot," the major retorted, before taking off in his jeep.

"It was not unusual," the policeman later told investigators, when questioned as to why he had not insisted on viewing the corpses or checking the identities. Kashmir had been in turmoil since Partition in 1947 and on a virtual war footing for the past two decades, with some estimates placing the dead at 70,000. Strung with razor wire and anti-missile netting, the state had been transformed into one of the most militarised places on earth, with one Indian paramilitary or soldier stationed for every 17 residents. The Pakistani intelligence services and military trained and funded a legion of irregulars, who infiltrated over the mountains to kick-start a full-blown insurgency in 1989, keeping the Indian-ruled portion of the Muslim-majority state permanently alight.

Once picture-perfect, a place of pilgrimage for backpackers and mystics of all religions, Kashmir had become one of the most beautiful and dangerous frontlines in the world. Machil, the sector in which Singh had sprung his operation, was especially treacherous, consisting of a clutch of isolated villages strung along the Line of Control (LoC), a high-altitude ceasefire line that had split Kashmir in 1972. Up here in the thin air, India had created a fearsome barrier, made lethal with the help of Israeli technology, a partially electrified series of fences connected to motion detectors, surrounded by a heavily mined no-man's land.

On 30 April, 2010, an armed forces spokesman in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, confirmed Singh's story. "Three militants have been killed in a shootout," said Lieutenant Colonel JS Brar, detailing how three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees had been recovered. The standard-issue infiltration kit. The corpseless triple-death inquiry was an open and shut case.

However, a few days later, at Panzalla police station, 30 miles from Machil, a simple missing case was causing everyone problems. Three Kashmiri families from nearby Nadihal village had turned up to report the disappearance of their sons: Mohammad, 19, Riyaz, 20, and Shahzad, 27, an apple farmer, a herder and a labourer. They had not seen them since 28 April and would not be calmed by detectives. Soon, their appeals drew the attention of Kashmir's most dogged human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz, whose response to what would become known as the "Machil Encounter" was about to create a watershed in Kashmir.

Dressed in the uniform of the Kashmiri bar, a crisp white shirt and sombre morning suit, over the past two decades Imroz had become a fixture at the high court in Srinagar, filing thousands of habeas corpus actions (which literally translates as "produce the bodies") on behalf of families who claimed their relatives had vanished while in the custody of the Indian security forces.

These actions rarely succeeded, the Indian army insisting that the missing had flitted over the LoC to Pakistan, recalling historic scenes at the start of the insurgency that terrified New Delhi, when tens of thousands of young Kashmiris jumped aboard buses manned by youthful conductors shouting: "Pakistan, Pakistan here we come." But what the writs did achieve was to create a paper trail from which Imroz was able to estimate that 8,000 Kashmiri non-combatants had vanished from army custody in a state the size of Ireland – four times more than disappeared under Pinochet in Chile. "The military grip has been suffocating," he told the Guardian, "and making someone vanish sows far more fear than spilling their blood".

Imroz had spent much of his career facing down security forces protected by specially drafted laws. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, soldiers and paramilitaries enjoy total immunity from prosecution, unless the ministry of defence sanction their trial. Using new Right to Information (RTI) laws, Imroz obtained confirmation that despite the fact that hundreds of soldiers stood accused of murder, rape and torture, not a single case had proceeded. In contrast, Kashmiri citizens are dealt with using the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, under which they can be jailed, preventively, for two years, if deemed likely to commit subversive acts in the future, with an estimated 20,000 detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

Imroz's campaigning achieved other things. He caught the attention of the UN, and this year Christof Heyns, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned India that all of these draconian laws had no place in a functioning democracy and should be scrapped. The price for confronting the security forces and the militants they faced down was severe. In 1992, Imroz mourned the loss of his Hindu mentor, an activist who was gunned down by Muslim insurgents. Three years later, Imroz was driving home from court when he felt a cold draught grip his chest. "I slumped over the wheel, inexplicably," he recalled. Bystanders who came to his rescue told him he had been shot. A militant group later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. In 1996, the Indian army abducted Imroz's friend and fellow lawyer, Jalil Andrabi, whose mutilated body was found after three weeks. Imroz shut himself off. For years he refused to marry or have children, worried they would be targeted. In 2002, his accomplished protégé, Khurram Parvez, a young Kashmiri graduate, was badly injured in an IED attack that killed his driver and a female colleague, Asiya Jeelani. Two years after that, a gunman posing as a client, shot dead another of Imroz's legal allies. In 2005, when Imroz was awarded the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, first given to Nelson Mandela, he was unable to accept it in person as India declined to issue him a passport.

But Imroz's reputation began to build in the countryside, from where terrified villagers travelled to besiege his rickety chambers on the Bund, in central Srinagar, carrying with them stories. In 2008, these accounts enabled the lawyer to make his greatest discovery. While surveying disappearance cases in villages across two of Kashmir's 23 districts, including Baramulla, from where the three Nadihal men would vanish in 2010, villagers showed him a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves: muddy pits and mossy mounds, pock-marking pine forests and orchards. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the Indian security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. Some were fresh, others decayed, hinting at a covert slaughter that went back many years.

Imroz widened his search, mapping almost 1,000 locations. He was shocked by the implications. Indian law requires that the police probe every violent death and that corpses be identified. But in the village of Bimyar, white-haired Atta Muhammad Khan came forward to describe how he had been forced to inter 203 unidentified bodies under cover of the night – men whose identities and crimes were unstated. "Some corpses were disfigured. Others were burnt. We did not ask questions." It was a similar story in Kichama village, where the lawyer mapped 235 unmarked graves and in Bijhama, where 200 more unidentified corpses had been interred. In Srinagar, Imroz's team alerted the government's State Human Rights Commission (SHRC). "We suspected the missing of Kashmir were buried at these secret sites," he said, publishing a report, Facts Under Ground.

An official response came two months later, just after 10pm on 30 June, 2008. Imroz had at last married Rukhsana, a business woman, and they now had two children, his daughter Zeenish, 12, and a boy, Tauqir, aged seven. The family lived in Kralpora, a tree-lined suburb eight miles from Srinagar city centre. No one called round on the offchance. Rukhsana heard a rap at the door and glanced outside to see that their security lights had been smashed. "I knew what this meant," she said, the door knock immediately conjuring memories of murdered friends. Imroz ran to the back of the house and shouted for his brother, Sheikh Mushtaq Ahmad, who lived next door.

As Ahmad emerged with a torch, a shot was fired, narrowly missing his son. A stranger screamed: "Put that light out." Then, a grenade exploded, shrapnel pitting the front door. Tear gas shells followed, waking neighbours who unlocked the village mosque. The imam mobilised residents to surround Imroz's house, as an armoured vehicle and two jeeps from the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and police Special Task Force, took off. "They had come to kill us," Rukhsana recalled. "We need protection," she said. Who do you need protection from, we asked her. "From our own government of course. It's jungle law."

After the attack, Human Rights Watch called on India to "protect Parvez Imroz, an award-winning human rights lawyer" and his case was raised in the European parliament. His family pleaded for him to quit. "I was terrified," the lawyer conceded. "I was starting to have horrible dreams. But being silent is a crime."

Imroz and his team redoubled their efforts, spreading their net across 55 villages in three districts, Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara. An ad-hoc inquiry run by volunteers and funded by donations saw the number of unmarked and mass graves mapped rise to 2,700. Inside them were 2,943 bodies; 80% of them unidentified. "These were hellish images from a war that no one has ever reported," said Imroz. "We suspected this to be prima-facie evidence of war crimes," he added. "Who are the dead, how did they die, in whose hands and who interred them?"

The SHRC finally agreed to an inquiry. Soon, it had its work cut out. Using RTI laws, the police were forced to concede that they had lodged 2,683 cases for the covertly interred in just three districts. And a new deposition submitted by Imroz's field workers covering two more districts, Rajoori and Poonch, mapped 3,844 more unmarked and mass graves, taking the total number to more than 6,000. There are still another 16 districts yet to be surveyed, leaving Imroz to wonder how many violent deaths and surreptitious burials have been concealed across Kashmir. Finally, last September, the SHRC made an announcement, stating that Imroz's discovery was correct: "There is every possibility that unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves … may contain the victims of enforced disappearances." The UN weighed in this year, a report to the Human Rights Council warning India of its obligations under human rights treaties and laws. Kashmiri families had a "right to know the truth" and that "when the disappeared person is found to be dead, the right … to have the remains of their loved one returned to them, and to dispose of those remains according to their own tradition, religion or culture".

After the Nadihal men disappeared, Imroz's field worker, Parvaiz Matta, travelled to the village. He found an eyewitness, Fayaz Wani, a close friend of the missing men. Wani finally revealed the Indian army had offered the men jobs, in a deal brokered by a Special Police Officer (SPO), who had given them a sum equivalent to £7 each, "as a show of good will", before taking them to a remote army camp in Machil.

The families of the missing men filed a complaint against the SPO, Bashir Lone. "This man broke down, admitting his role, claiming that nine soldiers at a remote army camp had shot the three men, so they could claim reward money," Matta said. (The army routinely gives financial rewards to soldiers who kill militants.) On 28 May, 2010, three bodies were exhumed from unmarked graves close to the camp, some of those already mapped by Imroz, and in which the government said were foreign fighters. Their families identified Shahzad, Riyaz and Mohammad by their clothes.

The Nadihal cash-for-killing story and news of a legion of unidentified dead lying in unmarked graves, sent hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets in the summer of 2010. Sensing the building anger, the army and central government in New Delhi promised an inquiry, offering, without irony, talks to anyone in Kashmir "who renounced violence". However, when no answers came, Kashmir went into convulsions, as crowds of youths armed with stones ambushed soldiers, police and paramilitaries who returned fire with live rounds. I arrived in Kashmir shortly after. More than 100 demonstrators had been killed, many of them children. International news channels briefly took an interest, asking if Kashmir was experiencing its own Arab Spring. But the cameras left quickly, as a vicious crackdown began clearing the streets: the government's own statistics showing that more than 5,300 Kashmiri youths, many of them children, were arrested.

In 2011, Imroz went to work again, investigating how India had restored the peace, and I shadowed him. He took statements from those who had been released and the families of those still incarcerated. "The affidavits made for chilling reading," he said. The majority of youths alleged torture, with independent medical examinations confirming that many had their fingernails pulled and bones crushed. One teenage prisoner told the Guardian: "The police started on our hands and fingers, breaking them with gun *****, and by the end when tears were streaming down our faces, we were hung by our ankles and had chilli rubbed in our wounds." Others claimed to have petrol funnelled into their rectums. One group alleged in court that they were forced to sodomise each other, while a police cameraman filmed.

This year, Imroz and his field workers widened the research to commence the first state-wide inquiry into the use of torture. Their findings will go to the UN and to Human Rights Watch later this summer but a draft seen by the Guardian suggests that not only is torture endemic, it is systemic. In one cluster of 50 villages, more than 2,000 extreme cases of torture were documented, any of which would kick-start an SHRC inquiry, and all of which left victims maimed and psychologically scarred. Methods included branding, electric shocks, simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

This work suggests that the statewide ratio for Kashmiris who have experienced torture is one in six. "For the 50 villages, in this small snapshot, we located 50 centres run by the army and paramilitaries in which torture had been practised," Imroz said. The methods, language and even the architecture of the torture chambers are identical. "What we are looking at is not a few errant officers." Files released under RTI laws show how these practises go back to 1989. These documents, seen by the Guardian, also reveal horrific practises, including one sizeable cluster, confidentially probed by the government itself, where men from the Border Security Force (BSF) lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh.

The Guardian traced one of the victims, a shepherd Qalandar Khatana, 45. Hobbling on crutches, bandages covering his ankles, both feet having been sawn off, he recalled: "I was held down, a BSF trooper produced a knife and then I passed out as the blood gushed from me." His file says a government investigator confirmed the story and produced eyewitnesses.

Another villager, Nasir Sheikh, a carpenter, who lost both legs below the knee and one hand, added: "The smell was of death – urine, ****, sweat. You knew you were about to be slowly murdered. It was like being thrown down a well where no one can hear you scream." His file confirms the story and suggests that compensation be paid. The UN special rapporteur on torture has been refused entry to Kashmir since 1993. Domestic legislation to outlaw torture has stalled. "When will the world start asking as tough questions of India as it is of Syria?" Imroz asked. "Or are we Kashmiris invisible?"

The mass graves of Kashmir | World news | The Guardian
 
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