Torture in Indian-occupied Kashmir

Three men from Topa Pir

On 21 December 2023 fighters ambushed Indian army troops in the Bufliaz area of Surankote in Poonch and killed four soldiers. The next day, 22 December, soldiers of the Indian army’s 48th Rashtriya Rifles took eight or nine men from the nearby village of Topa Pir to their post for questioning. Three of them died in army custody: Safeer Hussain, 45, Mohammad Showkat, given as 22 or 26 in different reports, and Shabir Ahmad, given as 30 or 32. Five more were taken to hospital.

“They died in front of my eyes,” Lal Hussain, an eighty-year-old eyewitness, told Scroll. “The soldiers in the Army camp rained sticks on them continuously for five-and-a-half hours.” A video circulated that appeared to show soldiers rubbing chilli powder on detainees; Al Jazeera could not verify it. “There were torture marks on his body. What kind of justice is this?” said Noor Ahmad, Safeer Hussain’s brother. “The government will give us everything but our wounds will not heal.”

The police registered a murder case against “unknown” persons. The army moved three officers, among them a brigadier, and its inquiry found “serious lapses” in the conduct of seven or eight personnel. As later recorded by the Armed Forces Tribunal, the officiating commanding officer had directed the use of “slightly harsh” methods, and Brigadier P. Acharya had “displayed anger, assaulted a suspect and failed to ensure that officers under his command exercised restraint”. His punishment, in July 2024, was a censure called “severe displeasure”. On 20 August 2026 the tribunal upheld it. When this article was reviewed no one had been charged with the three deaths.

A practice since 1990

Topa Pir was not new. From 1990, as the uprising against Indian rule spread across Indian-occupied Kashmir, Indian forces detained men in great numbers during the cordon-and-search operations that Kashmiris call crackdowns. Amnesty International reported in January 1995 that “almost all those detained are tortured: many do not survive, others are left disabled or mutilated”, and listed more than seven hundred people who had died in custody between 1990 and 1994. It also recorded kidnapping, torture and murder committed by armed groups.

Human Rights Watch wrote in 1999 that torture “has been used routinely by all the security forces operating in Kashmir”: to extract information, to punish, to force men to become informers and to extort money from their families. The methods it recorded included severe beatings, electric shocks, suspension and the roller, a heavy log rolled over the legs whose extensive use frequently leads to kidney damage. The Soura Medical Institute in Srinagar had registered more than 180 patients with kidney damage caused by torture since 1994, and six had died of renal failure. The state’s chief secretary, Ashok Jaitley, told the organisation: “people are punished. But it is disciplinary action only; it’s impossible to prosecute in a court of law, as no witness will step forward.”

Papa II and the other centres

The places where this was done became known across the Valley by name. Papa II was the Fairview guesthouse in Srinagar, a bungalow for visiting officials before 1989. India’s Border Security Force took it over and fitted it out for interrogation, with black blankets nailed over the windows. Hari Niwas, a former royal palace, became the Joint Interrogation Centre in the 1990s. Cargo, a concrete building of the police Special Operations Group, has been in use since 1994; the rights defender Parvez Imroz told the Christian Science Monitor that hundreds of young protesters were tortured there between 2008 and 2010. Human Rights Watch named others in 1999, among them the army camp at Badami Bagh, the Border Security Force camp at Karan Nagar and the jails of Kot Bhalwal and Udhampur. The People’s Rights Movement, an organisation of former fighters, counts more than 670 places in Kashmir where its members were tortured.

Abdul Qadeer, then a commander of the armed group Al Jihad, was arrested in 1995 and spent twenty-five days in Papa II. “I was blindfolded and my hands were tied behind my back. Everything smelled of stale flesh,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. “I was never questioned there; only tortured. Those 25 days seemed like 25 lifetimes gone wrong.” The buildings were later refurbished. By 2007 Hari Niwas had become the official residence of the chief minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad.

In survivors’ words

Human Rights Watch recorded the accounts of men it identified only by initials, to protect them. J., aged twenty-five, was detained in October 1998. “They didn’t ask us any questions. They blindfolded us with a piece of cloth,” he said, and then they beat him for an hour and a half with “belts, boots, and thick sticks”. X., also twenty-five, was arrested in November 1995 and held for three years in several centres, among them the Border Security Force camp at Karan Nagar. For about six months he lost the sight of his right eye, and when Human Rights Watch met him his left arm, paralysed in Udhampur jail, still had no feeling.

The 2019 report of two Kashmiri organisations described the cases of Muzaffer Ahmed Mirza of Tral and Manzoor Ahmad Naikoo, who suffered internal injuries under torture. Mirza died in hospital a few days later of a ruptured lung. Naikoo needed five operations before his wounds healed.

What the Red Cross told diplomats

In December 2010 WikiLeaks released United States diplomatic cables. One, dated 6 April 2005 and headed “ICRC frustrated with Indian government”, recorded a confidential briefing given to American diplomats in New Delhi on 1 April by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Between 2002 and 2004 its staff had made 177 visits to detention centres in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere, chiefly the north-east, and met 1,491 detainees, 1,296 of them in private interviews. The Red Cross considered them a representative sample of detainees in Kashmir, though it had not been given access to all of them.

Of those interviewed, 852 reported ill-treatment. According to the cable as reported by Foreign Policy, 171 had been beaten and 681 had been subjected to one or more of six forms of torture: electric shocks in 498 cases, suspension from the ceiling in 381, the roller in 294, stretching of the legs in 181, water torture in 234 and sexual abuse in 302. The ill-treatment was “regular and widespread”, it “always takes place in the presence of officers”, and all branches of the forces used it. Detainees were rarely fighters, the Red Cross said, because fighters were routinely killed; they were people “connected to or believed to have information about the insurgency”. It had never obtained access to the Cargo building, which it called “the most notorious detention center in Srinagar”.

Because more than ten years of raising the issue with the government had changed nothing, the Red Cross told the diplomats it was forced to conclude that the Government of India “condones torture”. Indian officials dismissed the cable as an internal assessment by American diplomats that did not merit a reply.

The 2019 report

On 20 May 2019 the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons published “Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir”, a study of 560 pages built on 432 cases since 1990. Of the 432 victims, 301 were civilians. Among them were students, juveniles, political activists, human rights workers and journalists. Twenty-four were women, and twelve of them had been raped.

Beating was reported in 326 cases, electric shocks in 231, being stripped naked in 190, the roller in 169, hanging in 121, sexual torture in 238 and forcing of the head under water in 101. Forty-nine victims died after torture, forty of them as a direct result of their injuries. Survivors were left with chronic illness and post-traumatic stress, and 44 were recorded as suffering psychological difficulties. The report also described the collective punishment of whole neighbourhoods during crackdowns.

Parvez Imroz called it “an effort to break the silence around this heinous crime”. Khurram Parvez, one of its researchers, said that “the report is a challenge to state-imposed erasure of history and memory”. Its authors asked for an international investigation led by the UN human rights office and for India to ratify the Convention against Torture.

Denial and the UN

The Director General of the Jammu and Kashmir police, Dilbag Singh, dismissed the report: “There are no such cases, if there have been any allegations, there are magisterial inquiries and other investigations.”

Two months later, in July 2019, the UN human rights office expressed concern over “new allegations of torture and deaths in custody” in Kashmir. India dismissed its report as a “false and motivated narrative”. The denial was not new either. Human Rights Watch had found in 2006 that the torture of detainees “remains the norm”, and that despite several letters the Indian government had given it “no details of any cases in which members of the Indian security forces have been prosecuted and convicted for serious human rights violations”.

A convention never ratified

India signed the UN Convention against Torture on 14 October 1997. It has never ratified it, and Indian law still contains no express definition of torture. A Prevention of Torture Bill introduced in 2010 would itself have required government sanction before an official could be prosecuted, and would have given victims only six months to complain, though many remain in custody far longer. It lapsed in 2014. India promised ratification at its UN reviews in 2012 and 2017; in 2022, 28 countries urged it again, and officials described the delay as merely “procedural”. A briefing by the organisation REDRESS in March 2026 recorded that the convention was still unratified and called on India to repeal every provision that grants officials immunity or requires government sanction to prosecute those accused of torture, and to amend or repeal laws including the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Public Safety Act.

No one prosecuted

In 1999 Human Rights Watch was “not aware of a single prosecution in a case of the torture or summary execution of a detainee in the ten years since the conflict began”. Twenty years later the Kashmiri groups’ report found that “not a single prosecution has taken place in any case of human rights violations”. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the criminal procedure code bar the prosecution of soldiers without New Delhi’s permission, and the UN human rights office reported in 2019 that the government had not granted it once since 1990.

Topa Pir followed the same course. The army inquired into its own men and found lapses; the only penalty made public was a censure. Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief minister, put it plainly: “be it Pathribal, Machil or Shopian fake encounters no action followed any of the enquiries. Those responsible for the cold blooded murder of innocent civilians got away scot free.”

What the record shows

For more than three decades Kashmiri families, Kashmiri lawyers and international organisations have recorded the same facts: men taken in crackdowns or from their homes, held in camps and centres beyond the reach of courts, beaten, given electric shocks and worse, some killed, many left disabled. The Red Cross concluded in private that the Indian government condoned it. India’s answer has been denial in public, refusal of the UN convention, and laws that keep the men responsible out of court.

When this article was reviewed, the names of Papa II and Cargo were still remembered in Kashmir as places of fear, the families of Topa Pir were still waiting for a trial, and no member of India’s forces was known to have been convicted by a civilian court for torturing a Kashmiri.