The laws and practices that govern daily life under occupation: impunity for the armed forces, detention without trial, disappearances, unmarked graves, shutdowns, displacement and the jailing of those who document them.
The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act of 1978 lets officials imprison a person for up to two years without charge or trial on the strength of a police file. The government’s own figures show 16,329 people held under it between 1988 and 2015, and those detained have included children, journalists, lawyers, protesters and three former chief ministers, more than six hundred in 2019 alone, many in prisons far outside Kashmir. The High Court quashes most of the orders that reach it, months after the fact, but no official is known to have answered for an unlawful detention, and the Act was still in use in October 2026.
Since 1989 Indian troops, paramilitaries and police in Kashmir have taken thousands of men into custody who were never seen again; the families’ association counts 8,000 to 10,000 disappeared, most of them last seen in the custody of Indian forces, while governments have given lower and contradictory figures. Parveena Ahangar, whose son was taken by the army in 1990, founded the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in 1994, and its members have pursued the forces through police stations and courts for three decades. No soldier is known to have been prosecuted for a disappearance, and the first court order declaring one of the disappeared dead, in April 2026, named the army major who killed him without bringing him to trial.
Between September 1989 and the summer of 1990 armed men killed Kashmiri Pandits, the Hindu minority of the Kashmir Valley, and threats and fear drove most of the community from their homes into decades of exile, many of them in camps in Jammu. The Indian administration did not protect them where they lived and, in Human Rights Watch’s account, encouraged and assisted their departure; almost none of the killings has been tried. Their suffering has since been used in Indian politics and in the 2022 film The Kashmir Files to cast suspicion on Kashmiri Muslims, while the families still wait to go home.
Since July 1990 the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act has allowed Indian soldiers in occupied Kashmir to shoot to kill, arrest without warrant and search homes, and it bars every court from trying them without the consent of the government in New Delhi. That consent has not been given in a single case: New Delhi refused 47 of the 50 requests it received from the state between 2001 and 2016 and left the other three pending. When this article was reviewed the law was still in force across the territory and no soldier had been tried in a civilian court.
Since 1990 Indian troops, paramilitaries and police in Kashmir have tortured detainees in army camps, police stations and dedicated interrogation centres, as Kashmiri groups, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN human rights office have documented. A 2019 study by two Kashmiri organisations examined 432 cases, 301 of them civilians, and found that 49 victims had died. India has never ratified the UN Convention against Torture, and no member of its forces is known to have been prosecuted in a civilian court for torture in Kashmir, including for the deaths of three men from Topa Pir in December 2023.
Jalil Andrabi, a Kashmiri human rights lawyer who had taken Kashmir’s case to the United Nations in Geneva, was taken from his car in Srinagar by Indian army soldiers of the 35th Rashtriya Rifles on 8 March 1996 and found in the Jhelum on 27 March, shot in the head, his hands tied and his eyes gouged out. The army told the High Court it did not hold him, but a police team set up on the court’s order named Major Avtar Singh. Singh was never produced in court, fled to Canada and California, and in 2012 killed his family and himself; no one has ever been tried for Andrabi’s murder.
Kashmiri rights groups documented thousands of unmarked graves in the graveyards of north Kashmir, Poonch and Rajouri, where bodies had been buried as what the Indian authorities called unidentified “militants” killed in clashes. In 2011 the State Human Rights Commission’s own investigators confirmed 2,730 bodies at 38 sites in north Kashmir and found that 574 of them were local residents, and the commission called for DNA testing to match the dead with the families of the disappeared. The government refused, the commission was abolished in 2019, and when this article was reviewed no forensic examination had been carried out and no one had been held to account.
In June 2018 and July 2019 the UN human rights office published the first United Nations reports on human rights in Kashmir, documenting unlawful killings and blinding by Indian forces, detention without trial, disappearances and legal immunity for soldiers, and asking the Human Rights Council to consider a commission of inquiry. India rejected both reports, refused the UN access, and told its special rapporteurs that it would no longer engage with them on Kashmir. No international inquiry has been set up, and the law the reports singled out still shields Indian soldiers from prosecution in civilian courts: in nearly 28 years, the 2018 report found, the central government had not sanctioned a single prosecution.
On the night of 4 August 2019 the Indian government cut mobile phones, landlines and the internet across occupied Kashmir, hours before it revoked the territory’s autonomy, and restored them only in stages over eighteen months: full 4G mobile internet came back on 5 February 2021. Patients, students, traders and journalists bore the cost, and India’s Supreme Court, while ruling that an indefinite shutdown was impermissible, never ordered the internet restored. No official has been held to account, and shutdowns remain a routine instrument of Indian rule.
On 5 June 2026 the authorities of Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu and Kashmir banned the Joint Awami Action Committee, a civic movement that had campaigned since 2023 for cheaper flour and electricity and against official privilege, under an anti-terrorism law, cut the internet and sent police and Pakistani paramilitary forces against its supporters. A Kashmiri rights group had documented ninety named dead by late September and reported thousands of arrests, and the committee’s leader was reported arrested and then said by the police not to be in their custody. No inquiry has published a finding into any of the killings since 2024, and no member of the forces is known to have been charged.
India’s National Investigation Agency jailed Khurram Parvez, the Kashmiri human rights defender whose coalition documented killings, disappearances, torture and unmarked graves, under its anti-terrorism law on 22 November 2021, and the journalist and researcher Irfan Mehraj on 20 March 2023. They were released on bail in Delhi on 22 July 2026 after 1,703 and 1,219 days, on conditions that keep them away from Kashmir and silent, while the agency appealed against their release. No one has been held to account for detentions that UN experts called arbitrary, and journalists jailed in the same years were held for long periods without being convicted of anything.
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