Two reports on Kashmir were issued in 2019.
One titled “Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir” was published in May 2019, by the joint efforts of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society. Second on “The Situation in India-Administered Kashmir and Pakistan-Administered Kashmir from May 2018 to April 2019” was released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Both the reports mentioned excessive use of force by the Indian security forces and the armed groups to abuse and torture Kashmiris. India, in its usual practice, dismissed the report as “false and motivated”.
Some of the common highlights of both the reports are — Indian security forces used the pellet-firing shotgun as a crowd control weapon to respond to protest; the absence of justice for past abuses such as killings and forced disappearances of Kashmiri separatists and other citizens; sexual violence by Indian forces; excessive use of force during cordon and search operation resulting in civilian deaths; the Indian’s Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Power Act (AFSPA) “remained a major obstacle to accountability”; and the Public Safety Act, an administrative detention law, allowed detention without charge or trial for up to two years. Moreover, the trail of Kashmiri detainees outside Kashmir after the amendment of section 10 of the Public Safety Act had burdened both the families of the detainees and the council making it hard for them to reach out to their detainees outside the state; prison had been harsh for the Muslim detainees, where they were forced to eat and drink filthy and harmful substances like human excreta, chili powder, dirt, gravel, chili powder mixed water, petrol, urine, and dirty water.
India has refused to acknowledge the report saying that it ignored the core issue of cross-border terrorism. Ever since 9/11, India has used terrorism as a shield to hide its injustices against the Kashmiris, to force them to drop the idea of independence.
Bracketing the struggle for freedom with terrorism was done on the design Israel used to assimilate Palestine. From changing the demographics of Kashmir through the elimination of its quasi-autonomous states by repelling Article 35(A) of the Constitution to introducing new delimitation for equitable representation in the state assembly from all regions, and finally terminating Kashmir’s autonomous status with the stroke of a pen on August 5, 2019, PM Narendra Modi knew that finding an international audience inspired by the Israeli model will never be difficult.
Nevertheless, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E Mendez, was hopeful that the report would be “enormously helpful in drawing the attention of the international community to the need to express concern about India’s human rights record”. This never happened, though.
The Human Rights Chief had also asked the UN to set up a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) to investigate human rights violations in Kashmir. The CoI is one of the highest levels of probes reserved only for a major crisis.
Torture has been used on a large scale in Kashmir. Take a few glimpses: Of the 432 cases studied in the Torture Report, 24 are of women of whom 12 had been raped by the armed forces.
Forty-four suffered from psychological issues. Civilian casualties are rising with each passing year. Only last year, 586 people were killed of whom 160 were civilians, the highest since 2008.
In its 2015 report, Doctors Without Borders informed that at least 19% of the population in the region suffered from post-traumatic disorder.
Despite being a signatory to the UN Convention against torture since 1997, India has not ratified the treaty to date. The Indian parliament dragged its feet on the Prevention of Torture Bill 2010, which eventually lapsed in 2014.
Torture is not confined to Kashmiri separatists alone. Anyone supporting or promoting the idea of independence of Kashmir is taken through the damning torture grind. Journalists being one such breed. Reporters are intimidated and their movement is restricted. Newspapers were parched of funds through a ban on government advertisements.
The Kashmir Reader and Greater Kashmir, the largest English-daily newspapers, were the worst victims of this oppressive policy. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, these moves were aimed at silencing criticism against the government. Such narrow political purposes, the critics said, would backfire, emboldening the Kashmiri freedom fighters and the journalists.
Depicting the struggle for the right to freedom as acts of terrorism, India could hoodwink the Western and its Middle Eastern allies but not the Kashmiris and the regional countries in South and East Asia where the Modi government’s credential as a good neighbour and a reliable partner has become questionable.