The Topa Pir torture deaths

A village of herders

Topa Pir is a hill settlement of about fifty homes, most of them Gujjar, in the Surankote area of Poonch district, in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir. It has no motorable road and no piped water. Its people belong to the Gujjar and Bakarwal community, listed by India as a Scheduled Tribe, and live by farming and herding.

The village had lived on good terms with the Indian army post nearby. Villagers told Scroll that soldiers often asked them for milk, tea and bread, and that families fed soldiers posted in the village; no one from Topa Pir, they said, had ever taken up arms. One of the men who would die there in December 2023 had a brother serving in India’s Border Security Force.

The ambush at Dhatyar Morh

On 21 December 2023 armed fighters ambushed an army column at Dhatyar Morh, on the road between Dera Ki Gali and Bufliaz, close to the village. Four soldiers were killed and three wounded. Two of the dead were reportedly beheaded. Indian officials and the Indian press called the attackers “terrorists”.

The next morning soldiers of the 48th Rashtriya Rifles came to Topa Pir looking for suspects.

Taken to the camp

On the morning of 22 December the soldiers took a group of men from the village for questioning. Al Jazeera counted eight; Scroll, which spoke to villagers, counted nine. “My relatives had seen the Army men bringing my husband and others to the camp around 9.30 in the morning,” said Fatima Kounsar, the wife of one of them. When she and other relatives went to the gate, the soldiers shouted at them and threatened to drag them inside. “They said ‘Go home or we’ll shoot you,’” she said. “They were beating them ruthlessly and dumping them in a water tank. We watched helplessly but could not do anything.”

The army base where the men were questioned was the company operating base at Mastan Dhara, the tribunal later recorded. Lal Hussain, a villager of eighty, was also taken inside.

Five and a half hours

“They died in front of my eyes,” Lal Hussain told Scroll. “The soldiers in the Army camp rained sticks on them continuously for five-and-a-half hours. They did not even stop for a minute, it was as if they were threshing maize.” When a soldier struck him, he said, the company commander stopped it, asking why an old man had been brought in. “I remember they died around 4 pm because I could hear the asr azaan,” the call to the afternoon prayer. One man, he believed, died later while being moved to the army’s camp at Bufliaz. The soldiers sent him home and told him not to speak of what he had seen.

Mohammad Ashraf, fifty-two, one of the survivors, spoke from his hospital bed: “They removed our clothes and beat us with lathis and iron rods, and rubbed chilli powder on our wounds.” The teenage daughter of another injured man told Al Jazeera: “They were given electric shocks and chilli powder was inserted in their private parts, no questions were asked to them.” Five survivors were taken to hospital.

Videos spread on social media that appeared to show men in army uniform beating detainees and sprinkling chilli powder on their bodies. Al Jazeera could not verify them independently.

Safeer, Showkat and Shabir

Safeer Hussain, a farmer in his forties, left four children and elderly parents. His brother, Noor Ahmad, a head constable in India’s Border Security Force, said: “There were torture marks on his body. What kind of justice is this? He died of excessive torture.” Safeer’s small son had seen his father’s body, Noor Ahmad told Scroll, and now babbled “Fauji, chachu, katt”, which his uncle rendered as “Soldiers cut my father.”

Mohammad Showkat, a shepherd in his twenties, left a pregnant wife, Fatima Kounsar, aged twenty-two. “I know I am alone without him,” she said. “But I will live like this. I am not going to leave his house.”

Shabir Ahmad, also a shepherd, was the son of Wali Mohammad, an elderly man who had lost his wife four months earlier and depended on his son. “I am yet to finish mourning her loss and here I have been struck by another tragedy,” the father said. “I can’t move much, so he would take care of me at home.”

The first response

On 23 December the army said: “Reports have been received regarding three civilian deaths in the area. The matter is under investigation.” Internet services in the area were cut. The administration announced compensation and a government job for each family. “Had they not died in army custody, the government would not have announced compensation and jobs. They want to cover it up,” a relative told Al Jazeera. Noor Ahmad said: “The government will give us everything but our wounds will not heal.”

The police registered a case of murder under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code at Surankote police station against unknown persons, whom official sources described as unidentified army personnel. Their report recorded that the three young men had “succumbed to injuries” and concluded: “As such a cognizable offence under section 302 of IPC is made out.” The army ordered a court of inquiry, moved the brigade commander and the battalion’s commanding officer out of the area, and began action against three officers of the 48th Rashtriya Rifles. India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, visited the families and promised justice. Kashmiri parties protested in Srinagar. “The tribal community has never been involved in any anti-national activity,” said Guftar Ahmad Choudhary, a tribal activist. “The government must clarify what happened to these men, is there no law in place? We demand answers.”

The army’s own inquiry

In April 2024, citing a media report of the inquiry, the Kashmiri press reported that it had found serious lapses in the conduct of seven or eight personnel, among them officers. Other people familiar with the inquiry told reporters that it had found only some procedural lapses by a few personnel. The army itself said that the proceedings were still in progress, that it maintained “zero tolerance towards any human rights violations”, and that further action would follow the outcome.

Mehbooba Mufti, a former chief minister, said she hoped the inquiry would bring the families justice, and recalled what had gone before: “Unfortunately be it Pathribal, Machil or Shopian fake encounters no action followed any of the enquiries.”

A brigadier goes to court

The fullest official account of the deaths emerged only because one officer contested his punishment. Brigadier Padmasambhava Acharya commanded 13 Sector Rashtriya Rifles, the formation over the battalion. The court of inquiry held that he had failed to exercise proper command and control during the interrogation, failed to prevent excessive or unlawful force and failed to give adequate instructions on handling civilians. He received a show-cause notice in April 2024, and in July 2024 the general officer commanding 16 Corps at Nagrota awarded him “severe displeasure” for two years, an administrative censure.

He appealed to the Armed Forces Tribunal in Chandigarh. Senior commanders, he argued, including the corps commander and the general commanding the counter-insurgency force, had been present in the control room and should share the blame, and the corps commander had judged his own cause.

What the tribunal recorded

On 20 August 2026 Justice Sudhir Mittal and Lieutenant General Rambir Singh dismissed the appeal. Their order, as reported, records that the suspects were taken to the base at Mastan Dhara, that the officiating commanding officer of the 48th Rashtriya Rifles had directed a company commander to use “slightly harsh” methods, and that Brigadier Acharya had himself displayed anger, assaulted a suspect and failed to exercise adequate command and control. The tribunal found that “excessive force was used in violation of the law. It was, thus, a failure of command and control function.” It held that direct command of ground operations lay with the commanding officer and the sector commander, not with senior officers who visited the control room. Because the two years of the censure had already run out, it directed that the penalty not be kept on his record.

The tribunal accepted that the ambush had roused intense emotion and a wish for revenge among the troops, but held that such feelings could not override discipline or the legal duty to treat civilians humanely. Where the two conflict, it said, “human emotions must yield”. “Even in war, the Indian soldier is known for his discipline and adherence to the Geneva Conventions is the rule.”

Where the case stands

A censure for failure of command is the only penalty that has been made public. When this article was reviewed, no soldier had been reported arrested, court-martialled or charged in a criminal court for the deaths of Safeer Hussain, Mohammad Showkat and Shabir Ahmad. Nothing had been reported of progress in the murder case at Surankote, which names no accused. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act no soldier can be prosecuted without the sanction of India’s defence ministry, which, Al Jazeera reported, had never been granted in any earlier case. The tribunal record, as reported, names the battalion’s officiating commanding officer at the time as Major Raj Kumar; what action, if any, was taken against him and against the men who wielded the sticks and rods has not been made public.

The families have said what they want. “The government has announced jobs and compensation for us. But we want justice, those who killed these innocent people should be punished,” Noor Ahmad said. A relative told The Tribune that the families wanted the camp moved away from the village.

What Topa Pir shows

In Topa Pir the central facts have been recorded by the army’s own processes. Three unarmed villagers were taken from their village by Indian soldiers after an attack, and died within hours under interrogation in an army base where, an official tribunal has recorded, excessive force was used in violation of the law. None of them has been accused of any part in the ambush. The village’s good relations with the army, and a brother in India’s border force, protected no one.

The sequence that followed is a familiar one in Kashmir: compensation, an inquiry, a defence minister’s promise of justice, transfers of officers, and then silence. Mehbooba Mufti’s reminder that inquiries into Pathribal, Machil and Shopian led to no action was a warning of how such cases end. In Topa Pir, so far, the deaths of three men have been answered with a reprimand that is not even to stay on the officer’s record.