Enforced disappearances and the half-widows of Kashmir

Taken at midnight

In 2002 Indian soldiers came to the home of Manzoor Ahmed Dar at midnight and took him away in front of his wife and four children. “It felt like a bird of prey snatched him from us,” his wife, Jana Begum, told Agence France-Presse. He never came back. At an identification parade the authorities later held, Jana Begum pointed to the officer she said had taken him, but years of legal battles brought no answer. Police officers told the family privately that he had died “during interrogation”, and in 2016 they performed symbolic funeral rites without a body. “I know my father is not in this world,” said his daughter, Bilkees Manzoor. “The only justice possible is for them to tell us what exactly they did with my father and his body.”

Kashmiris have a name for what happened to Manzoor Dar and thousands like him: they were disappeared. Since the uprising against Indian rule began in 1989, men across Indian-occupied Kashmir have been picked up from their homes, from the street or at checkpoints by soldiers, paramilitary troops or police. Their families went from army camp to police station to interrogation centre asking for them, were often told that they had never been held, and never saw them again.

A number the state disputes

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and other Kashmiri rights groups put the number at 8,000 to 10,000. UN human rights experts wrote to India in March 2018 that an estimated 8,000 people had been subjected to enforced disappearance between 1989 and 2008. In 2008 the European Parliament recorded the two sides of the dispute: families’ associations spoke of more than 8,000, while the government claimed fewer than 4,000. The association has also said that some of the missing were probably abducted by armed groups.

The government’s own figures have never agreed with each other. Under the National Conference government of Farooq Abdullah the official figure was 3,184. In February 2003 the government of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed gave 3,744 for the years 2000 to 2002 alone. On 8 October 2012 Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said that 2,305 people had been declared missing by the end of July 2012, and that police cases had been registered in only 182 of them; the rest were recorded only as missing reports. New Delhi and the forces have long said that most of the missing were likely to have crossed into Pakistan. When the State Human Rights Commission’s investigators examined unmarked graves in north Kashmir in 2011, they found 574 local residents among the bodies buried as unidentified.

A mother’s search

Parveena Ahangar’s son Javaid was seventeen, by most accounts, when soldiers took him from a relative’s house on 18 August 1990. He and a cousin were picked up for an identification parade. The cousin was released; Javaid was put in an army vehicle and driven away. The next day his mother went to the police. For about a year she went from police station to interrogation centre to army camp across the Valley, and to politicians, officers and bureaucrats.

Then she went to court. She filed a writ petition, and after two years the court directed the police to investigate. The police identified three army officers, Captain Katoch, Captain Danoj and Major Gupta, Kashmir Life reported. None of them came to court; a colonel appeared on their behalf. For four years she tried to obtain the sanction needed from the home and defence ministries to prosecute them, and never got it. She was offered ten lakh rupees and refused. “I am myself a sufferer,” she said in 2020. “My 18-year-old son who was abducted by the Indian Army in 1990 has not been returned to me.”

The association of parents

In 1994, with the lawyer Parvez Imroz, Parveena Ahangar founded the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons. It turned scattered private searches into a collective demand. On the tenth of every month its members sat in Pratap Park in the commercial centre of Srinagar to ask where their men were. By 2020 it supported more than a thousand families, with medicines, food and clothes as well as advocacy.

Shabir Hussain Bhat was eighteen when the army picked him up from Bemina, near Srinagar, on 27 April 1996. “We even moved the court,” his brother, Shafiq Hussain Bhat, told The Kashmir Walla. “If it wasn’t for them, nobody would have raised voice for families like us.” Mohammad Irfan Khan was a student in the eighth class when the army took him from Haftyarbal in Safakadal in 1994. His mother, Jameela Khan, said of the association: “The hope of seeing my son again is alive because of them.”

Parveena Ahangar was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, and in 2017 she and Imroz received Norway’s Rafto Prize.

The half-widows

The wives of the disappeared are called half-widows in Kashmir: still married in law, with no husband and no grave. In its report Half Widow, Half Wife, released in July 2011, the association counted more than 1,500 of them. Without a death certificate a half-widow could not get access to family property or the family’s ration card. Government relief, an ex-gratia payment, could be claimed only after seven years, and only if a screening committee of police and officials accepted that the missing man had no link with the armed groups. The report asked for the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Public Safety Act, a simple system of compensation and a dedicated bench of the High Court for these cases.

Remarriage was a further burden. Interpretations of Islamic law on how long a wife must wait ranged from four to seven years to as long as ninety. In December 2013 Kashmir’s religious scholars ruled that a half-widow could remarry if her husband had been untraced for four years, once a Shariat court had inquired into his whereabouts. “It’s a welcome step,” Parveena Ahangar said. “I have also requested them to also take care of property issues the half-widows face.”

Courts without consequences

The families’ main legal weapon has been the habeas corpus petition, asking the High Court to order the state to produce the missing man. In some cases the court ordered inquiries, and some inquiries named the men responsible. None led to a soldier standing trial. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act no soldier can be prosecuted without permission from New Delhi. The defence ministry told parliament in January 2018 that it had received fifty requests from the state to prosecute soldiers between 2001 and 2016. Eight concerned disappearances; it refused seven of them and left one pending, and of the fifty it refused forty-seven and granted none. Human Rights Watch found in 2006 that despite repeated requests the government could point to no prosecution and conviction of its forces for serious abuses.

Families also complained to the State Human Rights Commission. On 23 October 2019, when Jammu and Kashmir was made a union territory, the commission was wound up with 765 complaints pending, and its cases passed to the National Human Rights Commission in New Delhi.

Recognition abroad

The European Parliament called in July 2008 for India to investigate all allegations of enforced disappearance, to give civilian prosecutors jurisdiction over cases involving soldiers and police, and to create a single public database of the missing and of bodies recovered. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances wrote to India about Kashmir’s unmarked graves in 2011 and 2013 and received no reply to either letter.

India signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance on 6 February 2007. It has never ratified it, and enforced disappearance is not a specific offence in the Indian penal code, so families can only file complaints under ordinary criminal law.

After August 2019

When New Delhi revoked Kashmir’s autonomy on 5 August 2019, the monthly sit-ins stopped; the pandemic that followed kept them suspended. On 28 October 2020 India’s National Investigation Agency, in what it called a terror-funding investigation, raided Parveena Ahangar’s home in Srinagar and the association’s office at Hyderpora. It took hard drives and copies of records on victims and families. “There is a grave apprehension that the same may be accessed by other agencies,” she said in a statement. “Am I committing a crime by demanding to know the whereabouts of my son?” she asked The Quint.

On 22 November 2021 the agency arrested Khurram Parvez, coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, which had published reports jointly with the association, under India’s anti-terrorism law. He spent 1,703 days in detention without trial before he was released on bail on 22 July 2026, under conditions that kept him in Delhi.

A death certificate at last

Abdul Rashid Wani, a timber trader from Bemina in Srinagar, was stopped at Rawalpora on 7 July 1997 by soldiers of the 2/8 Gorkha Rifles while he was carrying cash to pay his suppliers, and taken away. He never came back. His family sold their home to pay for the search and, by his son’s account, were pressed by army officers to take money and drop the case. “I remember my grandmother telling a colonel at our home, ‘Just give me my son back’,” said his son Junaid.

An inquiry by the sessions judge of Srinagar, ordered by the High Court, found that Major V. P. Yadav “had murdered Abdul Rashid Wani in his custody and had disposed of his corpse”. On 4 April 2026, on a suit brought by his wife, Farida Shabnum, and their sons, the court of the Special Mobile Magistrate in Srinagar declared Wani legally dead and ordered that a death certificate be issued. It was, Agence France-Presse reported, the first such ruling among thousands of petitions for the disappeared. The order says nothing of where his body lies. “The government has now, after 29 years, acknowledged in court that such an atrocity was done,” Junaid said. There is no public record that Major Yadav has been charged.

What the families still ask

For three decades the families of the disappeared have asked three things: where their men are, what was done to them, and who will answer for it. The Indian state has answered with denial, with lower numbers, with the claim that the missing went to Pakistan, with laws that keep soldiers out of court, and, after 2019, with raids on the families’ own association. When this article was reviewed, one family out of thousands held a court’s confirmation of what it had always known. The rest still had no answer, no grave and no trial.