Books | State’s Vengeance

Alpa Shah

Kashmiris had resisted the feudal regimes that ruled over them for at least a hundred years, so perhaps it was not that surprising that in the years after a rigged election in 1987, mass protests and an armed resistance broke out, by 1990 dubbed by some as the Kashmir ‘intifada’.

Armed insurgents included Kashmiris from both India and Pakistan, and foreign fighters trained in Pakistan. Kashmiri Pandits—a Hindu minority in the state—were targeted, and about 400 murdered, beginning the flights of several thousand Pandits out of the Kashmir Valley, many into refugee camps.

The Indian state openly massacred Kashmiri Muslims on the streets. Over the years, tens of thousands of Muslims were killed. Successive governments showed no interest in helping the Pandits return home and instead their story was used to further ignite Hindu-Muslim divides in an anti-Muslim narrative that also hid the horror of the violence against Muslims in Kashmir. Meanwhile, the armed resistance was diminished by the mid-1990s to a few hundred militants, but the counter-insurgency apparatus grew to establish one of the world’s most dense military occupations.

In the name of ‘crackdowns’ against Pakistan-based militants, between 1989-2009, the action of Indian soldiers in Kashmir had resulted in 70,000 people killed—many through ‘fake encounters’, massacres, extrajudicial executions and custodial brutality. Eight thousand people were ‘disappeared’, more than 100,000 children were orphaned, and torture and sexual violence was routine. These were astounding figures and far outnumbered the much more internationally well-known atrocities that Pinochet was said to have been responsible for in Chile.

Before Kashmiris’ own stories were given space in the international and national press, how did knowledge of the horrors get outside of the region? Gautam and a few other democratic rights activists had a large role to play through their numerous fact-finding missions to Jammu and Kashmir to expose the atrocities committed by Indian soldiers and the suffering of Kashmiri people.

One of their first reports, ‘India’s “Kashmir War” documented in 1990 how the use of indiscriminate force against people in Kashmir and the naming of people’s protests as the handiwork of Pakistani agents, was pushing the Kashmiri public away from India and into the arms of militants. They said that their investigation found indiscriminate killings, arbitrary arrests, unlawful searches and unprovoked assaults on peaceful demonstrators carried out by the Indian soldiers. These earl