The Kupwara massacre

A warning before Republic Day

Kupwara is the main town of the district of the same name, in the far north of the Kashmir Valley near the Line of Control. Under the Indian occupation the district had already lived through the Handwara massacre of January 1990 and the mass rape at Kunan and Poshpora in 1991. In January 1994 the town was called to observe a shutdown on 26 January, India’s Republic Day, as a protest against Indian rule over a people who have never been allowed the plebiscite that India and the United Nations promised them.

The army made clear what it thought of that. Abdul Rashid Dar, a government employee whose brother was among the dead, told Kashmir Life: “On 23rd January, army’s Punjab regiment came into the market and threatened the traders against observing a strike on January 26.” On 25 January, he said, soldiers beat a local cleric and worshippers without provocation. On 26 January the market stayed shut all the same.

Human rights investigators had already described what such warnings could mean. In a report published in May 1993, Asia Watch and Physicians for Human Rights found that Indian forces in Kashmir “frequently engage in collective punishment against the civilian population”, beating residents and burning homes, and that after attacks by fighters “any civilians who reside in the area become the target of retaliation”. In October 1992, near Handwara in the same district, a Border Security Force patrol that had lost a man in an ambush rampaged through the village of Battekut, killing ten people and burning houses and grain stores.

Eleven in the morning

On the morning of 27 January the town began to reopen. One witness told Kashmir Reader what happened next: “Around 11 am when shopkeepers were upping the shutters to start their routine business activities soldiers posted on (ROP) duty opened fire from all the directions.” ROP is the army’s road-opening party, the patrol that secures a road before convoys move.

Ghulam Hassan Sheikh, who was thirty-two, ran a tea stall at an intersection in the town. He saw “a soldier fired a shot. Seconds later, his colleagues emptied their magazines on innocent civilians.” He crawled under a drain and lay there for about three hours in the freezing cold to stay alive. He stayed on in the town and later ran a restaurant in the main market.

Dar was with a group of residents who had gone to the deputy commissioner to complain about the soldiers’ behaviour. “While we were returning after meeting the DC and reached the Kupwara bridge near Bus Stand, we faced a volley of bullets fired by army,” he said. His brother was hit by three bullets and killed. “In an hour’s time, army piled up 27 innocent bodies.”

After the shooting

The killing did not stop when the firing did. Dar described what he saw outside the hospital: “Just outside the hospital, vehicles carrying injured were stopped by an army officer and started registering the names of the people on board. The army officer dragged down a man from one of the vehicles and shot him dead from point blank.”

Soldiers then ordered the townspeople into a ground for an identification parade. “I saw how an injured son died in his father’s arms after army stopped his father from taking him to hospital,” Dar said. Another witness told Kashmir Reader that the father had begged the soldiers to let him carry his son to hospital, and that they ignored him. The wounded were not all treated as victims. “It was brutal when the injured were blindfolded and taken to Zangli army garrison and from there taken to Army interrogation centre somewhere in Srinagar,” Dar said.

For more than five hours, Sheikh said, soldiers went on breaking into houses, shops and offices and beat people “irrespective of age and gender”.

Counting the dead

Kupwara counts twenty-seven dead, and that is the figure used by the families and the Kashmiri press. Most were traders and shopkeepers. Three policemen and a government employee were among them.

The police’s own figures are lower. A report written in 2012 by the Criminal Investigation Department recorded that eighteen bodies, one of them a policeman’s, were recovered and handed to relatives, and that thirty-eight wounded people were taken to hospital. A fact-finding report compiled by the Institute of Kashmir Studies put the toll at no fewer than twenty-one killed and thirty-seven injured, and called the firing “deliberate and indiscriminate”.

Which unit fired

Survivors name the 15 Punjab Regiment, the unit that had warned the traders. The police investigation named soldiers of the 31 Medium Regiment, who were on road-opening duty that morning under a second lieutenant. In 2019 the petitioner before the human rights commission described the officer in command as a lieutenant of the 31 Madras Regiment, and the Institute of Kashmir Studies listed the 31 Madras, the 15 Punjab, the Rashtriya Rifles and Kilo Force among the forces in the town.

What the soldiers did is not in dispute among those who investigated. In its report of 11 May 2012 the Criminal Investigation Department stated that the “forces deployed for duty fired indiscriminately at Bus Stand Kupwara”, and the police described the troops as having fired “without any provocation and justification with criminal intention”.

The army’s silence

The police registered a case of murder and attempted murder by an unlawful assembly, FIR 19 of 1994, at Kupwara police station. Its text describes soldiers who “gunned down scores of people in indiscriminate firing in Kupwara market and its vicinity without any provocation”. When investigators asked the army for the names of the officers and men on duty, the army replied that it had set up a court of inquiry. It never told the police what the inquiry found.

On 10 April 1997 the police closed the case as untraced, citing the “non-cooperation of army authorities”. It was reopened on 24 September 2004 under an additional superintendent of police. Investigators recorded the statements of more than fifteen eyewitnesses, all of whom, a police official said, held that the troops had massacred innocent people without any provocation. The regiment replied that it had no documents. Letters sent to the army’s 28 Infantry Division from 28 May 2005 went unanswered despite reminders, and so did notices issued under the Code of Criminal Procedure. The second lieutenant who had led the party was served a notice to appear before the police on 27 February 2010. He did not come.

On 30 October 2012 a deputy secretary in India’s home ministry wrote to the defence ministry asking for the nominal roll of the soldiers on duty in Kupwara that day, and acknowledged that the army’s “negative approach” had held up the investigation. Kashmiri press reports say that the roll was never produced.

The rights commission

About sixteen years after the killings, Mohammad Ahsan Untoo, who heads the International Forum for Justice and Human Rights, took the massacre to the State Human Rights Commission. His petition named the 15 Punjab Regiment and said that the army had opened fire to avenge the shutdown. The police report of 2012 was filed in the proceedings on his petition.

On 8 April 2019 the commission, then chaired by the retired judge Bilal Ahmad Nazki, issued a fresh notice to the government. It asked for the latest status of the investigation and for warrants against the accused soldiers. Untoo told the commission that the army had ignored notices from the commission and from the magistrate’s court at Kupwara, and asked it to order “coercive measures” and issue warrants so that the investigation could finally be concluded. Seven months later the commission no longer existed. It was wound up with effect from 31 October 2019 under the law by which New Delhi dissolved the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and its chairperson and members ceased to hold office. The order dealt with the commission’s staff, vehicles, furniture and files, and said nothing about the complaints still pending before it.

How Kupwara remembers

Kupwara closes its shops every year on 27 January, and prayers for the martyrs are held at the Mazar-e-Shuhada at Rigipora. The authorities have not always allowed it. In 2016 the police sealed the martyrs’ graveyard, stopped families from praying at the graves and detained four men at Kupwara police station: Untoo, Shabir Ahmed Dar of the Muslim Conference, Sheikh Muhammad Afzal of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and Zahool Ahmed Bhat. “This is injustice and unlawful to prevent mourners from offering prayers in favour of victims,” one resident said.

In 2018 Engineer Rashid, then a member of the state assembly, led a march of his Awami Ittehad Party on the anniversary, demanding justice for the families and the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The police and India’s Central Reserve Police Force stopped it near Branwari and arrested him. Dar has said that the soldiers, shielded by that law, “continue to remain untouched by law”.

Where the case stands

Kupwara was one link in a chain. Gawkadal and Handwara in 1990, Sopore and Bijbehara in 1993, and Kupwara in 1994 followed the same course: unarmed people shot down in their own streets, an inquiry or a police case, and no trial. Here the police of the state itself concluded that the army had fired on a market without cause, and the home ministry in New Delhi asked the defence ministry for the names. The army would not give them, and under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act no soldier can be prosecuted without the central government’s permission in any case. The course of the investigation was itself the pattern: a local police force willing to name the unit, an army that met every letter and notice with silence, and a central government that holds the power of sanction over its own soldiers and never had to use it.

When this article was reviewed, more than thirty years after the killings, the findings of the army’s court of inquiry had not been disclosed, the human rights commission that pressed for warrants had been abolished, and no one had been charged with the killing of twenty-seven people in Kupwara.