Junaid Rashid was five when his father disappeared from the Indian army’s custody nearly three decades ago in Jammu and Kashmir. But after years of searching and court battles, a judge declared what Rashid already believed: his father, Abdul Rashid Wani, was dead.
The judgment ordered the issuance of a “death certificate”, but also acknowledged a police probe that identified the army officer who took Wani into custody in July 1997. Wani, a timber trader, was stopped near his home in the city of Srinagar while carrying “a good amount of cash” on his way to pay suppliers, according to his family.
That evening, his wife and two children sat “all dressed up,” waiting for him to return and take them to a wedding reception. “He never came back,” Rashid told AFP.
“The government has now, after 29 years, acknowledged in court that such an atrocity was done,” said Rashid, now 34.
In Kashmir, the wives of the missing men are known as “half-widows” — unable to mourn fully until they know their husbands are dead.
“If this had happened earlier, I think Kashmir would look different,” Rashid added. “Our lives would look different, and my mother’s health would be something else.”
In 1989, after failed political struggles for self-determination, Pakistan-backed militants launched an armed struggle. They sought Kashmir’s independence or its merger with Pakistan. New Delhi rushed soldiers, accusing Pakistan of backing the militants — allegations Islamabad denies.
Nearly 500,000 minority Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) were expelled from the valley by Pakistani-trained militants who enjoyed massive support from the local muslim population. Hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits were murdered in broad daylight, their houses burned, and females targeted.
Nearly 95% of the minority Hindu population fled the Kashmir valley overnight, never to return again.
Today, the Indian military has successfully crushed the Pakistan-sponsored rebellion, but at least 500,000 Indian soldiers remain stationed there.
Meanwhile, the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), a civil liberties group based in Delhi, said Wani’s judicial death “encapsulates the human rights story” since violence surged in 1989.
It says Wani was just one case among many of “enforced disappearance”.
There could be as many as 8,000 people, according to the rights group Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). Some of them, it said, were likely abducted by militants.
It mapped in 2009 what it claimed were 2,700 unmarked graves in remote mountain zones along the de facto border with Pakistan. It also quoted residents alleging that they had buried mutilated bodies left by the security forces.
Among those sites was Kupwara, where residents today showed AFP rows of graves marked by rusting metal numbered signs.
One man, in his mid-40s, told AFP that between 1990 and 2000, he and the villagers buried an estimated 500 bodies left by the police as “humanitarian work”.
The police left the corpses, without saying who they were, he said.
“Later, we opened graves for relatives of missing Kashmiris,” he said, adding that some families were able to identify the bodies.
New Delhi and the security authorities insist the bodies were of fighters killed in clashes, whom they could not identify. They say the missing men are likely to have crossed into Pakistan.
Kashmir’s State Human Rights Commission also examined the graves. In 2011, it found bodies buried at 38 locations identified by APDP, and said the government had identities for only 464 of the 2,730 corpses at the sites.
The commission said it was possible that “many disappeared persons” may be found in the unmarked graves.
But the DNA testing it called for has not been carried out, and the commission was shut in 2019, after New Delhi’s central government took direct control of Kashmir.
Rashid said his family had “spared no effort” to find Wani, including selling their family home to raise funds.
They faced pressure to stop, saying they were offered cash from army officers to abandon their search — after being told privately by them that “what has happened has happened”, Rashid said.
“I remember my grandmother telling a colonel at our home: ‘Just give me my son back’,” Rashid said.
They were also asked to pay for help to secure Wani’s release by a group of former rebels who had since surrendered and sided with the government.
Instead, the family pursued the case in court.
A police probe named the officer who had ordered that Wani be picked up by a civilian vehicle.
Rashid, who visited the army camp with his mother in search of Wani, said he had met the officer.
“I was very young, but I still remember his face,” Rashid said.
Wani’s case is just one among many.
In 2002, Jana Begum, her husband Manzoor Ahmed Dar, and their four children were woken by soldiers hammering on their door at midnight. They seized Dar.
“It felt like a bird of prey snatched him from us,” Begum told AFP at her home in Srinagar.
His family never saw or heard from him again.
The authorities, after protests and legal challenges, organized an identification parade.
Begum pointed to the officer she said took Dar away — but years of legal battles since have proved fruitless.
The family performed symbolic funeral rites in 2016, after police officers told them privately that Dar had died “during interrogation”, his daughter Bilkees Manzoor said.
She was 15 when her father vanished.
“I know my father is not in this world,” she told AFP. “The only justice possible is for them to tell us what exactly they did with my father and his body.”
Three other families of disappeared men told AFP of similar traumatic campaigns for answers, but they did not want to be identified, fearing reprisal.
“Generations of our children will have to silently endure this pain and injustice,” said an aging man, mourning his missing son.
Impunity
Few hold out hope that those responsible will face justice.
Security personnel can be tried in civilian courts only with special government permission.
At least 50 requests from local authorities for prosecution were made after police investigations found prima facie evidence of human rights abuses, including enforced disappearances, records show.
No such permission has ever been granted.
New Delhi signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 2007 but has not ratified the universally binding UN human rights treaty, meaning the offense is not criminalized in India.
Local police and ministries of defense, home affairs, and the prime minister’s office did not respond to AFP requests for comment.
“Impunity is built into the system of governance in Kashmir,” a senior lawyer who has represented many of the families told AFP, declining to be identified.
Even honoring their memory is hard.
Families once held monthly vigils for the missing men, staging silent protests in a Srinagar park, holding up their photographs.
But those gatherings have stopped since a curtailment of civil liberties in 2019, and part of the site they once gathered in has been turned into a memorial — to police killed in the conflict.
“Denying even silent protests amounts to an assault on their memories,” the lawyer added.
For Rashid, like many others, the pain of the disappearances is as fresh as the day they vanished.
“These things will go to the grave with us,” Rashid said. “In the time to come, when we have children, they too will have to face what happened to us.”
- Story Edited & Modified by ET Online Desk
- Original Story: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
