Massacres, mass rape and the killing of unarmed protesters by Indian forces, from Gawkadal in 1990 to the pellet blindings of 2016, and the long refusal to hold anyone to account.
On 21 January 1990, two days after New Delhi imposed Governor’s Rule, India’s Central Reserve Police Force opened fire on thousands of unarmed Kashmiris crossing the Gawkadal bridge in Srinagar to protest against night raids in the old city. Kashmiris count fifty-two dead and some 250 wounded. The only criminal case was registered against the marchers, the police said in 2019 that they had closed it without tracing anyone, and no member of the force has ever been charged.
On 25 January 1990, four days after the Gawkadal massacre, men of India’s Border Security Force opened fire on thousands of unarmed people marching in Handwara, in north Kashmir, against the killings in Srinagar. Twenty-one dead is the figure most often given, and rights activists count thirty-four. The police closed the case as untraced, later told the rights commission that the accused were untraceable, and no member of the force has ever been charged.
On 1 March 1990 Indian army soldiers fired on unarmed Kashmiris marching to and from the United Nations observers’ office in Srinagar, where they were handing in memoranda demanding freedom: first on a procession at the Zakura crossing, then on buses carrying marchers home at the Tengpora bypass. Kashmiris count forty-seven dead, twenty-six at Zakura and twenty-one at Tengpora. The Zakura case was closed because the soldiers could not be identified, the police say no Tengpora file exists, and no soldier has been prosecuted.
On 21 May 1990, hours after gunmen of Hizbul Mujahideen assassinated Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq at his home, men of the 69th Battalion of India’s Central Reserve Police Force fired on the procession carrying his body past Islamia College at Hawal in Srinagar. The government counted 27 dead; lists kept in Kashmir name between 52 and 70. One of the Mirwaiz’s killers is serving a life sentence, but no member of the force has been tried, although a human rights commission investigator reported in 2017 that the force’s own court of inquiry had held fifteen of its men responsible.
On the night of 23 to 24 February 1991 soldiers of the Indian army’s 4th Rajputana Rifles cordoned off the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara, tortured the men and raped women in their homes. The police file recorded 23 women; survivors and rights groups give far higher numbers. The army has denied it for thirty-five years, the reopened case has been frozen in the courts since 2015, and no soldier has ever been charged.
On 6 January 1993, after Kashmiri fighters attacked one of their patrols, men of the 94th Battalion of India’s Border Security Force shot shoppers, traders and bus passengers in the main market of Sopore and set the town centre on fire, burning people alive. Kashmiri accounts count fifty-seven dead. The force’s own court punished seven men for burning property, the federal investigators closed the case after twenty years, and no one has been tried for a single killing.
On 22 October 1993 men of the 74th Battalion of India’s Border Security Force fired for more than ten minutes on an unarmed procession leaving Friday prayers in Bijbehara, killing at least thirty-one people by the official count and fifty-one by the town’s, many of them schoolboys. A magistrate’s inquiry found the firing unprovoked, deliberate and well planned. Thirteen men charged with murder were acquitted in a closed trial by their own force, and the Indian government refused to show the record even to its own National Human Rights Commission.
On 27 January 1994, the day after Kupwara town defied an Indian army warning and shut its shops on India’s Republic Day, soldiers on road-opening duty opened fire on the bus stand and market as traders raised their shutters. The town counts twenty-seven dead. The police’s own investigators found the firing unprovoked, but the army never named its soldiers, the case was closed as untraced in 1997, and no one has been tried.
Five days after gunmen massacred the Sikh men of Chattisinghpora in March 2000, the Indian army’s 7th Rashtriya Rifles announced that it had killed the five “foreign militants” responsible at Pathribal. The dead were five local Kashmiris taken from their homes, and when their families marched to demand the bodies, police and paramilitaries shot eight more at Brakpora. India’s federal investigators charged five soldiers with murder; the army, given the choice by the Supreme Court, closed the case itself in 2014 without a trial.
In May 2008 the government in Indian-occupied Kashmir agreed to hand forest land in the Valley to the board that runs the Amarnath pilgrimage, and Kashmiris rose against what they saw as a first step towards changing the Valley’s demography. When Hindu nationalist groups in Jammu answered the order’s revocation by obstructing the only highway into the Valley, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris marched, and India’s Central Reserve Police Force and the state police shot dozens of them dead, among them the Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz. The State Human Rights Commission found in 2013 that the force used was unjustified, but no member of the forces is known to have been prosecuted.
Neelofar Jan, 22, and her sister-in-law Asiya Jan, 17, disappeared on the way home from their orchard in Shopian on 29 May 2009 and were found dead the next morning beside a shallow stream, a few hundred metres from a camp of India’s Central Reserve Police Force. Kashmiri doctors, the state forensic laboratory and a judicial commission pointed to rape and murder, but India’s Central Bureau of Investigation declared that both had drowned and charged doctors, lawyers and Asiya’s brother with fabricating evidence. No one has been tried for their deaths.
On the night of 29 to 30 April 2010 soldiers of the Indian army’s 4th Rajputana Rifles shot dead three young labourers from Nadihal in Baramulla, who had been lured to the Line of Control at Machil with the promise of work and sold to the soldiers, and presented them as Pakistani “infiltrators” to earn rewards. An army court sentenced the battalion’s colonel and other soldiers to life imprisonment in 2014, but in 2017 the Armed Forces Tribunal suspended the sentences of five of them and freed them on bail. No final judgment on their appeal had been reported when this article was reviewed.
Between June and September 2010 India’s Central Reserve Police Force and the Jammu and Kashmir police killed well over a hundred people in the Kashmir Valley, most of them teenagers and young men protesting against Indian rule, after a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Tufail Mattoo, was killed by a police tear gas shell. A judicial commission later found that almost every death it examined was the result of “unprovoked and indiscriminate firing”, but its report was never published and no member of the forces has been convicted for any of the killings.
On 8 July 2016 Indian forces killed Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old commander of the Kashmiri armed group Hizbul Mujahideen who had taken up arms at fifteen, months after Indian security personnel beat him, and about two hundred thousand people came to his funeral. The Valley rose in months of protest that India’s police and paramilitary forces met with bullets, pellet shotguns, curfew, a communications blackout, thousands of arrests and a newspaper ban; around a hundred people were killed and thousands injured or blinded. No member of the forces is known to have been prosecuted for any of the deaths or blindings.
Since 2010 India’s Central Reserve Police Force and the Jammu and Kashmir Police have fired pump-action shotguns loaded with hundreds of metal pellets at Kashmiri crowds, and in the uprising of 2016 alone more than 6,200 people were wounded by pellets and over 1,100 hit in the eyes, among them children inside their own homes. Pellets killed at least fourteen people between July 2016 and September 2017 by Amnesty International’s count. The courts refused to ban the weapon, and no member of the forces has been prosecuted for blinding or killing anyone with it.
On 18 July 2020 soldiers of the Indian army’s 62nd Rashtriya Rifles killed three young labourers from Rajouri, Imtiyaz Ahmed, Abrar Ahmed and Mohammed Ibrar, at Amshipora in Shopian, announced them as “terrorists” and buried them as unidentified men more than a hundred kilometres away. Their families recognised them from a photograph, DNA tests confirmed it, the army admitted that its powers had been exceeded and a court martial sentenced Captain Bhoopendra Singh to life imprisonment. In November 2023 the Armed Forces Tribunal suspended the sentence and freed him on bail; no senior officer has been charged, and no ruling on his appeal had been reported when this article was reviewed.
On 15 November 2021 an Indian army, police and paramilitary operation at a commercial building in Hyderpora, Srinagar, killed four people, among them the building’s owner Mohammad Altaf Bhat, the dentist turned businessman Dr Mudasir Gul and Gul’s young office assistant Amir Magrey, whose families say all three were civilians. The police changed their account repeatedly, buried all four about a hundred kilometres away in Handwara, returned two bodies only after the families’ sit-in, and then cleared the forces in their own investigation. Amir Magrey’s father lost his fight for his son’s body in the High Court and the Supreme Court, and no member of the forces has been charged.
On 22 December 2023, the day after armed fighters killed four soldiers in an ambush in Poonch, soldiers of the Indian army’s 48th Rashtriya Rifles took men from Topa Pir, a village of Gujjar herders, and beat them for hours at an army base. Three of them, Safeer Hussain, Mohammad Showkat and Shabir Ahmad, died, and survivors described sticks, iron rods, chilli powder rubbed into wounds and electric shocks. The police registered a murder case against unidentified persons and the army censured a brigadier, a penalty an armed forces tribunal upheld in August 2026; no soldier has been reported charged in any court.
Kashmir HopeMemory · Rights · Freedom