Kashmir HopeMemory · Rights · FreedomTimeline
All 152 entries on the site in order of date, from the earliest settlements to the present. Search by a name, a place or a year.
152 entries
Kashmir Valley
The archaeological site at Burzahom preserves evidence of changing settlements, tools and habitation across prehistoric periods. India’s UNESCO tentative-list submission describes life spanning roughly 3000–1000 BCE.
Baramulla, Kashmir Valley
Excavations at Kanispur identified occupation before pottery use, followed by pottery-bearing settlements. Later layers belong to the Kushan and medieval periods.
Tral, Kashmir Valley
Gufkral preserves successive Neolithic phases, including an early level without pottery. Excavators found evidence of farming, animal husbandry and changes from pits to buildings above ground.
Bijbehara, Kashmir Valley
Semthan’s excavated sequence includes a pre-Northern Black Polished Ware phase followed by Northern Black Polished Ware. These layers connect Kashmir’s prehistoric and early historical records.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana remembers Ashoka through Buddhist foundations, Shiva shrines and the town of Srinagari. The account must be distinguished from contemporary inscriptions and from an exact chronology of rule in Kashmir.
Bijbehara, Kashmir Valley
Pottery, seals and coins from Semthan have been studied for their Indo-Greek connections. They provide material evidence alongside the much later written chronicles.
Baramulla, Kashmir Valley
Excavations at Kanispur uncovered structures and occupation deposits attributed to the Kushan period. The site is associated with the Kanishkapura named in Kalhana’s chronicle.
Kashmir Valley
Royal coinage, excavated settlement and later chronicles illuminate different aspects of Kanishka’s association with Buddhism and Kashmir.
Kashmir Valley
Xuanzang’s account describes royal support for an assembly, Vasumitra’s leadership and commentaries protected in a stupa. Its dating and precise location remain uncertain.
Harwan, Kashmir Valley
Harwan’s decorated tiles combine ascetics, human scenes, animals and plants. Museum records disagree about dates and some religious identifications.
Kashmir and Central Asia
Kumarajiva’s remembered education under Bandhudatta connects Kashmir with the Buddhist learning networks that later contributed to translation in Chang’an.
Kashmir and neighbouring regions
Inscriptions, coins and later narratives place Mihirakula in the history of Hun rule and conflict in Kashmir. Kalhana and Xuanzang preserve accounts of cruelty, religious patronage and persecution.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana remembers Meghavahana through a prohibition of killing, livelihood support and religious foundations, surrounded by miraculous stories. Coins offer a separate basis for reassessing his identity and chronology.
Srinagar
Kalhana associates Pravarasena II with the foundation of Pravarapura, identified with historical Srinagar. The account combines urban geography, religious foundations and supernatural stories.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana places Durlabhavardhana at the beginning of the Karkota succession. Royal marriage, ministerial support and religious foundations shape the account of his rise and reign.
Kashmir Valley
Durlabhavardhana begins the Karkota sequence in Kalhana’s chronicle. This period is central to the history of Kashmir as a kingdom with its own court and regional connections.
Kashmir Valley
Xuanzang’s travel record and biography describe Kashmir’s monasteries, scholarly traditions and royal support for study and copying texts.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana associates Durlabhaka Pratapaditya with Pratapapura and the royal family from which Chandrapida, Tarapida and Lalitaditya emerged.
Kashmir Valley
Chandrapida is remembered through Kalhana’s stories of justice and religious foundations. Chinese diplomatic notices provide a separate basis for placing his reign in the early eighth century.
Kashmir Valley
Tarapida’s short reign lies between Chandrapida and Lalitaditya in Kalhana’s Karkota succession. The surviving narrative centres on conflict with Brahmans and accusations surrounding two royal deaths.
Kashmir Valley and neighbouring regions
Kalhana describes Lalitaditya’s military campaigns, settlements and religious foundations. His account gives this Karkota ruler a prominent place in Kashmir’s political history.
Kashmir Valley and Central Asia
Kalhana describes Cankuna as a minister from the Tuhkhara country and a patron of Buddhist monasteries at Parihasapura and Srinagar.
Anantnag, Kashmir Valley
The surviving Martand complex belongs to Kashmir’s early medieval temple architecture and is dedicated to Surya. The government heritage description dates it to the eighth century.
Baramulla
Parihaspora’s royal and courtly foundations included Vishnu shrines, Buddhist institutions and other religious gifts. The chronicle and surviving remains illuminate different parts of its history.
Kashmir Valley
Ou-k’ong’s account describes full ordination, study of monastic discipline and Sanskrit, visits to religious foundations and Kashmir’s mountain routes.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana’s account of Lalitaditya’s sons describes rivalry, abdication, withdrawal of religious endowments and the sale of people, followed by further brief reigns before Jayapida.
Kashmir Valley
Jayapida’s reign is remembered through a struggle for the throne, literary patronage, Jayapura’s foundations and accusations of oppressive taxation. Kalhana’s detailed account also contains romantic and supernatural narratives.
Kashmir Valley
Udbhata’s treatise on poetic figures, his court association and the later transmission of his works illuminate Kashmir’s Sanskrit literary culture.
Kashmir Valley
The young king’s maternal relatives controlled offices and revenue, founded towns and shrines, and competed to appoint later rulers before the rise of Avantivarman.
Kashmir Valley
Anandavardhana’s account of poetic suggestion examines literal meaning, emotional experience, literary form and the creation of new effects from familiar subjects.
Kashmir Valley
Kallata’s place in the Spanda tradition connects a sparse historical biography with debates about consciousness, agency, liberation and the authorship of the Spandakarikas.
Kashmir Valley
Ratnakara’s fifty-canto poem combines divine conflict, councils, diplomacy, descriptions and hymns, while its manuscripts preserve evidence and uncertainties about literary patronage.
Kashmir Valley
Sura helped install Avantivarman and exercised influence through court patronage, religious foundations, a route station and coercive authority.
Kashmir Valley
The Shiva Sutras examine consciousness, limitation and liberation through short aphorisms developed by later Kashmiri commentators. Vasugupta’s biography and the traditions of revelation require separate treatment.
Awantipora
Two royal temple complexes preserve distinct histories of architecture, sculpture, endowments, excavation and later reuse.
Kashmir Valley
Avantivarman’s accession established the Utpala dynasty. Kalhana’s account associates his reign with new foundations, including Avantipura, and efforts to improve agricultural conditions.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana describes water-management works associated with Suyya, including efforts to control flooding and improve cultivation. Stein connects the account with the geography of the Jhelum and Wular basin.
Kashmir Valley
Sankaravarman succeeded his father after a contested transition. Kalhana’s account turns from Avantivarman’s internal works to renewed campaigns and revenue demands.
Kashmir Valley
Stein’s dynastic table places Gopalavarman’s accession in 902. His short reign forms part of the succession crisis preceding Sugandha’s rule.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana places Sankata between Gopalavarman and Sugandha and gives him a ten-day reign. His origins, the circumstances of his accession and his cause of death remain uncertain.
Kashmir Valley
Sugandha ruled Kashmir in her own name. Coins attributed to her survive in the British Museum’s collection, which dates her reign to 904–906.
Kashmir Valley
Partha replaced Sugandha in the dynastic sequence recorded by Kalhana. His later restoration belongs to a separate stage of the struggle for the throne.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana describes the destruction of the autumn rice crop by flooding, severe famine and profiteering by ministers and troops.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana’s succession history places Nirjitavarman between Partha and Cakravarman. Stein dates his accession to 921.
Kashmir Valley
Cakravarman’s first accession belongs to a period of repeated changes of ruler. The chronicle later records his removal and restorations.
Kashmir Valley
Utpaladeva developed the Pratyabhijna tradition of recognition. His works and intellectual relationships belong to tenth-century Kashmir.
Kashmir Valley
Suravarman I appears in the rapid succession of rulers described in Book V of the Rajatarangini. Stein places the beginning of his rule in 933.
Kashmir Valley
The Rajatarangini’s succession list records Partha’s restoration after Suravarman I. Stein dates this return to 934.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana’s sequence includes Cakravarman’s return, an intervening rule by Sambhuvardhana, and another restoration. The repeated changes belong to the same struggle over royal power.
Kashmir Valley
Unmattavanti followed the repeated changes involving Cakravarman. His accession is dated to 937 in Stein’s chronological table.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana describes a child installed before Unmattavanti’s death, then displaced when Kamalavardhana entered the capital.
Kashmir Valley
After Suravarman II’s brief rule, Yasaskara came to the throne. Stein’s table places the transition in 939.
Kashmir Valley
Yasaskara’s final illness brought two successive installations. Varnata was removed after a day; the child Samgramadeva later lost his throne and life to Parvagupta.
Kashmir Valley
Parvagupta took power after the brief reigns of Varnata and Samgramadeva. The sequence is described in Book VI of the Rajatarangini.
Kashmir Valley
Ksemagupta succeeded Parvagupta. His marriage to Didda connected the Kashmiri court with the ruling family of Lohara.
Kashmir Valley
After Ksemagupta’s death, his young son Abhimanyu succeeded. Didda exercised royal power as guardian and faced challenges from ministers and rival groups.
Srinagar
Kalhana describes a major fire beginning near the Tungesvara market and spreading through the city during Abhimanyu’s reign.
Kashmir Valley
Abhimanyu died after an illness in 972 and was succeeded by his son Nandigupta. Didda remained the dominant royal figure and founded institutions associated with mourning and family memory.
Kashmir Valley
Tribhuvanagupta followed Nandigupta while Didda continued to dominate the court. Coins preserve the fuller royal name alongside Kalhana’s brief notice of Tribhuvana.
Kashmir Valley
Abhinavagupta brought philosophical argument and tantric traditions together in the Tantraloka.
Kashmir Valley
Bhimagupta followed Tribhuvanagupta under Didda’s authority. Kalhana describes his imprisonment and killing before she took the throne in her own name.
Kashmir Valley and Poonch
Kalhana places Tunga’s rise at court within the account of Bhimagupta’s reign, before Didda ruled in her own name.
Kashmir Valley
Didda took the throne after years as regent. Coins bearing her name survive, and Kalhana describes her long exercise of power and her choice of a successor from Lohara.
Kashmir Valley
Kshemaraja continued the philosophical and scriptural interpretation associated with Abhinavagupta.
Kashmir Valley / Lohara
Sangramaraja succeeded Didda, beginning the first Lohara dynasty in Kalhana’s sequence. The transition followed her selection of him as heir.
Poonch and Kashmir’s southern approaches
Sangramaraja sent Tunga to support Trilochanapala against Mahmud’s forces; the expedition ended in defeat near the Tausi.
Loharin and the Pir Panjal approaches
The mountain fortress blocked Mahmud’s advance towards the Kashmir Valley.
Loharin, the Pir Panjal approaches and Punjab
Gardizi records a separate unsuccessful siege under AH 412, followed by withdrawal and raids in the foothills.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana assigns Hariraja twenty-two days between Sangramaraja and Ananta and credits him with an order concerning security in the market street.
Kashmir Valley
After Sangramaraja’s death and Hariraja’s brief rule, Ananta became king. Stein’s table places both successions in 1028.
Dachhan, Kishtwar
A Sharada inscription records a local construction project under Nantadeva, with disputed readings and competing calendar conversions.
Kashmir Valley
Kshemendra’s satires examine pretence, money, administrative power and social status through stories and exaggerated characters.
Kashmir Valley
Suryamati supported temples and learning, intervened in royal finances and succession, and provided relief after destruction at Vijayeshvara.
Kashmir Valley
Kalasha’s reign combined disputed authority, financial management, building projects and regional diplomacy with coercion and repeated succession struggles.
Kashmir Valley
Somadeva’s Sanskrit collection connects Kashmiri literary culture with a vast world of nested stories, royal patronage and later translation.
Kashmir Valley and Lohara
Utkarsa’s brief reign ended amid disputes over allowances, Harsha’s imprisonment, armed rebellion and shifting ministerial loyalties.
Kashmir Valley
Harsha’s reign combined court patronage and new coin types with confiscation, taxation, famine, military failure and a rebellion that ended his rule.
Kashmir Valley
Recorded fasts sought judicial redress, labour exemptions, military pay and changes in government, with outcomes ranging from concessions to repression.
Kashmir Valley and connected regions
Coins, royal names and monetary texts illuminate authority and exchange, while metal tests and hoards expose the limits of simple chronological reconstructions.
Kashmir Valley
Local landholders, armed followers and shifting alliances shaped relations between Kashmir’s rulers and countryside.
Kashmir Valley
Uchchala rebuilt royal authority after Harsha, with grain relief, judicial intervention and religious restorations alongside coercion, court violence and a fatal conspiracy.
Srinagar, Kashmir Valley and Lohara
Uchchala’s assassination led to Radda’s brief rule, Gargachandra’s counterattack and Salhana’s accession, while queens, an infant heir and rival claimants faced the consequences.
Kashmir Valley and Lohara
Radda’s brief seizure of the throne gave way to Salhana, whose dependence on Gargachandra ended in conflict, defections and capture by Sussala.
Kashmir Valley
Sussala’s first reign combined fiscal and military consolidation with changing alliances, royal repression and a rebellion that drove him from Srinagar.
Kashmir Valley
Bhikshachara’s short reign brought rival chiefs and former royal officers into an unstable government. Monetary disruption, protests, defections and military defeat enabled Sussala’s return.
Kashmir Valley
Sussala’s restoration was followed by renewed warfare, the Chakradhara tragedy, a bridge collapse, the burning of Srinagar and famine. His second reign ended in assassination in 1128.
Vijayeshvara and Chakradhara
Families and retreating soldiers sought refuge at Chakradhara during renewed warfare. Kalhana describes a deliberate fire, killings of people escaping and devastating losses among surrounding households.
Gambhira, lower Vishoka
A bridge failed during the royal retreat towards Srinagar, drowning soldiers and dividing the army. Silla led troops left behind before Prithvihara attacked them.
Vijayeshvara and Devasarasa
Silla led royal troops left behind after the Gambhira bridge disaster. Prithvihara attacked and killed her, and Tikka took her seat in Devasarasa.
Lahara, Kashmir Valley
Chudda negotiated royal marriage alliances, survived the destruction of part of her family, and guided Panchachandra’s rise in Lahara. She fought with her own and royal troops before Tikka killed her.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana composed the Sanskrit Rajatarangini in the twelfth century. It became an important source for the study of Kashmir’s rulers and earlier traditions.
Kashmir Valley
Lal Ded, also known as Lalla or Lalleshwari, was a Kashmiri mystic poet. Her remembered life and verse form part of the region’s literary and spiritual heritage.
Kashmir Valley
Akbar’s conquests brought Kashmir into the Mughal Empire. Encyclopaedia Iranica dates the conquest to 1586–1587.
Former princely state
On 16 March 1846 the British sold the Kashmir Valley and the lands east of the Indus to Gulab Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jammu, for 75 lakh rupees. The people of Kashmir were sold with the land and never consulted; a century later the Quit Kashmir movement called the treaty a sale deed.
Srinagar
On 13 July 1931 the police of the Dogra maharaja Hari Singh fired 180 rounds into a crowd of Kashmiri Muslims at the Srinagar Central Jail and killed twenty-two of them, some, in the account handed down in Kashmir, as they stood one after another to complete the call to prayer. The Muslims of the state rejected the maharaja’s inquiry, and no official is known to have been punished. Since 2019 the administration appointed by New Delhi has abolished the Martyrs’ Day holiday and sealed the martyrs’ graves every July.
Former princely state
After the maharaja’s police killed twenty-two people at the Srinagar Central Jail in July 1931 and months of shootings and public floggings followed, Hari Singh, under British pressure, appointed a commission under B. J. Glancy to examine the grievances of his Muslim subjects. Its report of 1932 admitted that the Muslim majority had been discriminated against and led to the return of shrines, promises on schools, jobs and land, and in 1934 an assembly in which most members were not elected and the ruler kept every power. No official is known to have been held to account for the killings, and the demand for a government answerable to the people grew out of what the inquiries refused.
Kashmir Valley
In May 1946 Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference told the Dogra dynasty to quit Kashmir, declaring that the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846 was a sale deed that gave the maharaja no right to rule and that sovereignty belonged to the people. The maharaja’s government handed the Valley to the army, jailed Abdullah for sedition and fired on demonstrators, killing almost twenty people on a single day and a woman leading a procession in Anantnag. No one is known to have been held to account for the killings, and the vote on Kashmir’s future that Abdullah demanded in 1946 has never been held.
Jammu
In October and November 1947 the troops of the Dogra maharaja, Hari Singh, together with armed bands of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Akali Sikhs and refugees from Punjab, massacred Muslims across the eastern districts of Jammu and drove most of the survivors into Pakistan. Estimates of the dead run from 20,000 to more than 200,000. No FIR was lodged, no inquiry was held and no one was tried, and the Muslim population of Jammu district fell to about a third of what it had been.
Former princely state
In 1947 the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who had been rising against Dogra rule since 1931, were divided without being asked. A revolt in Poonch, a raid by tribesmen organised from Pakistan and the massacre of Muslims in Jammu ended with the maharaja acceding to India on three subjects, and India accepted with a pledge that the people would decide. That reference to the people never came: the ceasefire of 1 January 1949 left the state split between India and Pakistan, and the plebiscite promised by India and the United Nations has never been held.
Former princely state
In 1947 and for years afterwards India promised, in letters, broadcasts, parliament and the Security Council, that the people of Jammu and Kashmir would decide their own future by a free vote, and the United Nations made that promise its own in Resolution 47 of 21 April 1948 and the resolutions that followed. India then withdrew from the pledge, and the vote has never been held. The resolutions have never been rescinded, United Nations observers are still in Srinagar, and no one has been held to account for denying Kashmiris the vote they were promised.
Former princely state
The UN-brokered ceasefire of 1 January 1949 ended the first war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and left the former state divided along a ceasefire line. The plebiscite that was meant to follow was never held, and the people of Kashmir had no say in the division.
Former princely state
Security Council Resolution 91 of 30 March 1951 declared that any decision by the constituent assembly convened in Indian-occupied Kashmir would not settle the future of the state, which was to be decided by a free and impartial plebiscite under UN auspices.
Kashmir Valley
On the night of 8 to 9 August 1953 Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the elected prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who had begun to speak of a free choice for Kashmiris, was dismissed without a vote in the assembly, arrested at Gulmarg and replaced by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, under a plan that the American ambassador reported Jawaharlal Nehru had approved. Police fired on the protests that followed across the Valley, and counts of the dead run from three to two thousand. The inquiry never reported and no one is known to have been held to account; Abdullah was held for most of the next eleven years and was never convicted of anything.
Former princely state
Security Council Resolution 122 of 24 January 1957 repeated that the constitution adopted by the assembly in Indian-occupied Kashmir could not decide the future of the state, which belonged to its people in a free and impartial plebiscite.
Across the LoC
In August and September 1965 India and Pakistan fought a second war over Kashmir. It began with Pakistan sending armed men across the ceasefire line and spread to the international border before a ceasefire called by the UN. The Tashkent Declaration of January 1966 returned both armies to their earlier positions and left the Kashmir question unresolved.
Across the LoC
After the war of 1971 India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement on 2 July 1972. The ceasefire line became the Line of Control, and the two states agreed to settle their differences between themselves. India has used the agreement ever since to argue that Kashmir is no longer a matter for the United Nations.
Jammu and Kashmir
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.
New Delhi and Kashmir
Maqbool Bhat, who founded the movement for a Jammu and Kashmir independent of both India and Pakistan, was imprisoned by both states and hanged by India in Tihar Jail on 11 February 1984, on a death sentence passed sixteen years earlier. Days after a group linked to his movement kidnapped and killed an Indian diplomat in Britain, his mercy petition, pending since 1977, was rejected, two of his brothers were arrested and he was buried inside the prison against his wish. His remains have never been returned, and the Indian government has never answered his family’s requests for them.
Jammu and Kashmir
In March 1987 a new opposition alliance, the Muslim United Front, contested the assembly election in Indian-occupied Kashmir with mass support in the Valley, and the count was falsified to hand victory to the National Conference and the Congress, the parties allied with New Delhi. The Front’s candidates and polling agents were beaten, jailed and tortured, and within two years several of the young men who had worked in its campaign were leading the armed uprising. No inquiry is known to have been held and no official has been charged.
Jammu and Kashmir
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
After the rigged election of 1987 young Kashmiris took up arms for independence, and in the winter of 1990 the Valley rose in mass unarmed marches for azadi, carrying their demands to the United Nations observers in Srinagar. India answered with direct rule, the shooting of marchers, a law that shields its soldiers from prosecution, torture centres, disappearances and renegade militias, while Pakistan armed the fighters and steered the movement towards accession, and armed groups killed Kashmiri Pandits, political opponents and other civilians. Estimates of the dead run from about 41,000 to nearly 100,000, and the Indian government has refused every request to prosecute its soldiers under the special powers law.
Jammu and Kashmir
On 19 January 1990 New Delhi sent Jagmohan back to govern Kashmir, the elected chief minister resigned rather than serve under him, and the state passed under the direct rule of a governor answerable only to the Indian government. His four months brought night raids, curfews, the massacres of Gawkadal, Handwara, Zakura, Tengpora and Hawal, the expulsion of the foreign press and the departure of most Kashmiri Pandits. No official was ever called to account, and Kashmir stayed under direct rule until 1996.
Srinagar
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.
Handwara
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.
Srinagar
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.
Srinagar
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Bijbehara
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.
Kupwara
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.
Srinagar
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.
Ladakh / LoC
In May 1999 Pakistani soldiers and fighters occupied heights on the Indian side of the Line of Control near Kargil, and India fought to retake them until July. On 4 July 1999 a joint statement by President Clinton and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called for the Line of Control to be restored.
Anantnag
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Kupwara
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
New Delhi and Kashmir
Mohammad Afzal Guru, a former fighter from Sopore who had surrendered and lived under the eye of the police Special Task Force, was convicted of conspiracy in the attack on India’s parliament of 13 December 2001 on circumstantial evidence, after a trial in which he had no lawyer of his choosing, and was hanged in secret in Tihar Jail on 9 February 2013. His family learned of it from television, his body was buried inside the prison and has never been returned, and three young Kashmiris died in the protests that followed. The police officer he accused of sending him to Delhi with one of the attackers was arrested with armed men in 2020; no inquiry into his account is known to have been held.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Kashmir Valley
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.
Across the region
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.
Jammu and Kashmir / Ladakh
On 5 August 2019 the Indian government abolished the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, removed the law that reserved land and jobs for its permanent residents and split the state into two territories ruled from New Delhi. It did so with no elected Kashmiri body in place, under a military lockdown, with phones and internet cut and thousands detained, among them children and three former chief ministers. India’s Supreme Court upheld the decision in 2023, no official has been held to account for the detentions, and statehood had not been restored when this article was reviewed.
Jammu and Kashmir
In 2020, by orders issued from New Delhi while Jammu and Kashmir had no legislature, the Indian government replaced the permanent resident with a new domicile open to people from outside, let any Indian citizen buy non-agricultural land in the territory and repealed the state’s land reform laws. In April 2025 the government told the assembly that 83,742 of the domicile certificates issued in the previous two years had gone to people who were not state subjects. Kashmiris were never consulted, and India dismissed the warning of United Nations experts that demographic change appeared to be under way.
Shopian
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
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.
Kashmir Valley
Syed Ali Shah Geelani, for decades the most prominent leader of resistance to Indian rule in Kashmir, died on the night of 1 September 2021 in the Srinagar house where India had confined him for most of eleven years. Indian police forced their way into the room where his body lay, took it from his family at about 3.10 am and buried him before dawn in a grave they had prepared, with, his sons say, no member of his immediate family present and the Valley’s telephones and internet cut. The police then registered a case under an anti-terror law against his family for covering his body with the Pakistani flag; no one has been held to account for the seizure of the body.
Srinagar
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
Between 2020 and 2023, while Jammu and Kashmir had no legislature, New Delhi appointed a commission that gave six of seven new assembly seats to the less populous Jammu division, opened the voters’ list to Indians ordinarily living in the territory and gave its own appointee, the lieutenant governor, the power to nominate five members of the assembly. Of the parties in Jammu and Kashmir only the BJP welcomed the new map; Kashmiri parties condemned it as unfair, and their leaders called it gerrymandering. None of the changes was put to the people they govern, and the 2024 election was fought on the map the commission drew.
Poonch
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
In September and October 2024 Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir voted for an assembly for the first time since its autonomy was removed. The National Conference won 42 seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party 29, all of them in the Jammu region. The new government holds limited powers under a lieutenant governor appointed by New Delhi.
Kashmir Valley
On 22 April 2025 gunmen killed 26 civilians, most of them tourists from India, at Baisaran near Pahalgam. Kashmiris across the Valley condemned the killing, and a local pony rider, Syed Adil Hussain Shah, was killed trying to stop the gunmen. In the weeks that followed Indian authorities demolished the homes of suspected fighters’ families and carried out mass detentions, and India and Pakistan fought a four-day war in May.
Across the LoC
On 10 May 2025 India and Pakistan agreed a ceasefire after four days of missile and drone strikes and shelling that followed the Pahalgam attack. Civilians on both sides of the Line of Control, many of them in Poonch and in Azad Kashmir, were killed by the shelling.
AJK
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.
Kashmir / New Delhi
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.
Jammu and Kashmir
On 28 September 2026 the assembly of Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir passed a resolution demanding the immediate restoration of full statehood, taken away in 2019. Members of the Bharatiya Janata Party opposed it.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana credits Amritaprabha with founding Amritabhavana for visiting Buddhist monks. Later textual and topographical identifications connect its name with Antabhavan near Srinagar.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana’s account of Jalauka joins warfare, government, sacred geography and restitution after religious persecution. His identity and reign date cannot be securely reconstructed from the narrative.
Kashmir Valley
Kalhana’s Lahkhana-Narendraditya is associated with a temple and an office for records. His identity and date remain entangled with disputed interpretations of royal names on coins.
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