1989 onward | 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.
Why the young took up arms
The people of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir had been promised in 1947 and 1948, by India and by the United Nations, a vote on their future. It was never held. In its place came decades of governments chosen or broken in New Delhi: Sheikh Abdullah’s detention in 1953, the toppling of his son Farooq Abdullah in 1984, and in 1986 an accord between Farooq and the Congress that Human Rights Watch says “many in Kashmir saw as a betrayal”.
The last door closed in March 1987. A new opposition alliance, the Muslim United Front, drew mass support in the Valley, and Human Rights Watch recorded that “blatant rigging assured a National Conference victory, which was followed by the arrests of hundreds of MUF leaders and supporters”. Yasin Malik, one of its young polling agents, was taken from the counting station to the RED-16 interrogation centre and tortured, he later wrote, and spent the rest of the year in jail. The police raided the homes of student activists and tortured those they caught. “The rigged election was the beginning of the end,” the journalist Tavleen Singh wrote; most of the youths who had worked as the Front’s agents “were now determined to fight for their rights differently. They had no choice but to pick up the gun, was the message I was given.” They crossed to the Pakistani side for arms and training.
The first armed actions
On 31 July 1988 bombs went off at the telegraph office and the golf course in Srinagar. Kashmir Life attributes them to four young Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front men who had worked in the Front’s campaign: Ashfaq Majeed Wani, Abdul Hamid Sheikh, Yasin Malik and Javed Mir. “These bombs were planted with an intention to give loud and clear message to government of India that Kashmiri youth are ready to face them,” Mir said. The Liberation Front’s slogan was “Kashmir banega khudmukhtar”, Kashmir will be sovereign: it sought a state independent of both India and Pakistan.
In 1989 armed men, of the Liberation Front in most accounts, began to kill civilians, among them Tika Lal Taploo, a lawyer and member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, on 14 September, and the judge Neelkanth Ganjoo on 4 November. On 8 December the Front abducted Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of India’s new home minister, and freed her in exchange for five jailed fighters.
Direct rule and Gawkadal
On 19 January 1990 New Delhi sent back Jagmohan as governor. Farooq Abdullah resigned, the state was placed under Governor’s Rule, and no elected government sat again until 1996. The Committee for Initiative on Kashmir wrote in 1990 that Jagmohan’s return “signalled the unleashing of state repression on a massive scale”.
On 21 January India’s Central Reserve Police Force fired on unarmed demonstrators at the Gawkadal bridge in Srinagar. Indian officials counted between twenty-one and twenty-eight dead; rights organisations and scholars count at least fifty, and the journalist Tavleen Singh more than a hundred. No government investigation was ordered, and the police case was closed fifteen years later without anyone being held to account.
Marches to the United Nations
Human Rights Watch records that through the winter and spring “tens of thousands marched on the streets, calling for independence”. Processions went to the office of the United Nations Military Observer Group in Srinagar to hand in memoranda that demanded azadi and protested against the massacres at Gawkadal, Alamgiri Bazar and Handwara, and an alliance of thirteen organisations, the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat Kashmir, was formed. On 1 March 1990 tens of thousands of people from across Kashmir gathered at the Eidgah and marched through Lal Chowk to the observers’ office, where a few marchers in burial shrouds were allowed in.
As the crowds went home the Indian army fired on them. At the Zakura crossing, eyewitnesses said, soldiers opened fire from machine guns mounted on their vehicles; eleven people died on the spot and fifteen more on the way to hospital. At the Tengpora bypass soldiers fired on two buses and killed twenty-one, five of them women. The police file for Zakura records eleven dead and was closed because the accused could not be identified. For Tengpora a police officer told Kashmir Life that there was no file and that “no such incident has happened”. An army inquiry claimed that stones had been thrown at an army vehicle carrying schoolchildren, though schools had been ordered shut.
On 21 May 1990 the Mirwaiz, Muhammad Farooq, was assassinated by two men of Hizbul Mujahideen, a killing of a civilian. When his funeral procession reached Hawal the Central Reserve Police Force fired on the mourners. Most accounts put the dead at sixty to seventy. In 2017 the State Human Rights Commission’s investigators found that the force had itself identified fifteen of its men for the “indiscriminate firing” that killed thirty-five civilians, but could not establish that any action had been taken against them.
Special powers and crackdowns
India gave its soldiers in Kashmir a law of their own. The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, passed in September 1990 and made effective from 5 July, allowed them to arrest without warrant, to enter and search any premises and to use force, and it barred any prosecution without the prior sanction of the central government. That sanction is in practice never given: by 2018 the state had asked New Delhi fifty times for permission to prosecute soldiers, and the Indian government refused in every case. Since August 2019, Outlook reported in 2024, no request has been sent at all.
Human Rights Watch found that India’s campaign was marked from the start by “the shooting of unarmed demonstrators”, and many former fighters said they had joined the armed groups “because they were furious at the violations and wanted revenge”. By June 1999 some 400,000 Indian soldiers and federal forces were deployed in the Valley, by the estimate of observers it interviewed (other estimates it cited: 210,000 to 600,000), making Kashmir one of the most heavily militarised places in the world.
Torture centres
“Torture has been used routinely by all the security forces operating in Kashmir,” Human Rights Watch reported in 1999, naming among the places it was done Papa II, the Hari Niwas interrogation centre, the Badami Bagh camp and the Karan Nagar camp. The commonest methods were severe beatings and electric shock; others included suspension, leg-stretching and the roller. At the Soura medical institute more than 180 patients with torture-induced kidney damage had been registered since 1994, and six of them had died of kidney failure.
Papa II had been the Fairview guesthouse above the Dal Lake. India’s Border Security Force took it over, nailed black blankets to the windows and brought in field rollers, iron hooks, strapping benches, pipes for water-boarding, electric wires and needles. Abdul Qadeer, held there for twenty-five days in 1995, recalled: “Everything smelled of stale flesh, and I thought I had been brought into a butcher’s shop.” In 2019 the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society published 432 case studies of torture since 1990: seventy per cent of the victims were civilians and twenty-seven were minors, twelve of the twenty-four women had been raped by Indian armed personnel, and more than half the victims were left with lasting health problems. At least eighty were tortured during crackdowns.
Disappearances and fake encounters
Thousands of men taken by Indian forces never came back. The rights group led by the lawyer Parvez Imroz counts between eight and ten thousand people who disappeared in custody, and in 2011 the state government acknowledged for the first time that thousands of bodies lie in unmarked graves.
Killings were dressed up as battles. On 25 March 2000, five days after unidentified gunmen massacred thirty-six Sikh villagers at Chittisinghpora, the army announced that it had killed the five “foreign militants” responsible at Pathribal. India’s own Central Bureau of Investigation found that the five were local civilians “picked up by the personnel of 7RR” and “eliminated in a fake encounter”, and charged five soldiers with murder. The army took the case into its own hands and in January 2014 dismissed the charges. In April 2010 the army claimed to have killed three Pakistani “militants” at Machil; they were civilians from the Rafiabad area who had been lured to an army camp with the promise of jobs as porters and shot for a cash reward. A court martial gave soldiers life sentences in 2014; in July 2017 the Armed Forces Tribunal suspended the sentences of five of them.
Human Rights Watch reported in 1999 that it 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”. The state’s chief secretary, Ashok Jaitley, told it: “it is disciplinary action only; it’s impossible to prosecute in a court of law, as no witness will step forward.”
The Ikhwan
Human Rights Watch found that “since at least early 1995” Indian forces had made systematic use of captured and surrendered fighters, turned into state-sponsored militias against their former comrades and the population, and that these militias, the best known of which was the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, were responsible for summary executions, disappearances, torture and illegal detention. Members and supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami were driven from their villages. When the local police arrested militia men, the army or the Border Security Force had them released. In October 1998 the army commander, General Krishna Pal, called the Ikhwan “the eyes and the ears of the security forces”.
The Ikhwan had begun as an armed group and switched to the army’s side in 1993 under Mohammad Yousuf Parray, known as Kuka Parray, a folk singer who later won the assembly seat of Sumbal in 1996. From its base at Hajin it extorted, kidnapped and killed. On 5 October 1996, after a villager voted against Parray, its men, led by Rashid Billa, killed seven people in Saderkot, among them Hajra, aged 37, and her daughter Jawa, aged 18. “He wiped out my entire family in front of my eyes and I could do nothing,” Hajra’s husband, Ghulam Qadir Dar, told Kashmir Life. “They could have killed anyone at will,” said Mohammad Akbar Lone, Parray’s opponent in that election. “They had full backing from the system.”
Independence or Pakistan
Human Rights Watch reported that all the armed groups received arms and training in Pakistan and that the Pakistani army helped arrange their crossings of the Line of Control, and noted that Pakistan’s denials were generally not considered credible. Pakistan did not back the independence the Liberation Front stood for. Hizbul Mujahideen, founded in September 1989, came under the control of the Jamaat-e-Islami, was backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and fought for merger with Pakistan. The scholar Sumantra Bose writes that from 1991 the Inter-Services Intelligence cut off aid to the Liberation Front and engineered splits in the pro-independence camp, and that Hizbul “then embarked on a campaign of killing pro-independence fighters and assassinating prominent pro-independence political and religious figures”. In his judgement pro-independence feeling remained dominant in the Valley, and the pro-Pakistan view the preserve of a small minority.
In May 1994 Yasin Malik, released from jail, declared an indefinite ceasefire for his Liberation Front. By his count Indian forces killed a hundred of its activists afterwards; journalists put the figure near three hundred. By the mid-1990s the fighting had passed largely to foreign fighters from the Afghan war. Harkat-ul-Ansar, calling itself Al Faran, kidnapped six Western tourists in July 1995 and beheaded one of them, and Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed were blamed for attacks in which civilians were executed; all three operated out of Pakistan. These were not Kashmir’s freedom struggle.
Civilians killed by armed groups
Armed men killed civilians of every community, and the dead were Kashmiris too. Lassa Kaul, director of the Srinagar station of India’s state television, was shot dead on 13 February 1990. Scholars estimate that between thirty and eighty Kashmiri Pandits were killed by mid-1990; the state government later counted 219 killed between 1989 and 2004, and a Pandit organisation in the Valley counted 399 from 1990 to 2011, three-quarters of them in the first year. Many of the attacks, Human Rights Watch wrote, were “clearly intended to drive Hindu Kashmiris out of the state”. By the spring of 1990 some ninety to a hundred thousand Pandits, most of the community, had left the Valley. Many Kashmiri Muslims believe that Jagmohan encouraged their departure; Human Rights Watch called the government’s role, and his in particular, “a matter of considerable controversy”.
Human Rights Watch recorded the murder of hundreds of civilians, Muslim and Hindu, for suspected support of the government or for opposing one armed group or another. Seven Hindus were killed at Sangrampora in Budgam on 21 March 1997, and on 26 January 1998 gunmen massacred twenty-three Hindu villagers, women and children among them, at Wandhama. These were killings of unarmed people, and nothing in the cause of freedom excuses them.
The human cost
No agreed count of the dead exists. On 21 November 2008 the state’s chief secretary, S. S. Kapur, gave 47,000, among them more than 20,000 civilians, a figure that left out the disappeared. Indian government data to March 2017 give about 41,000. The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, on the basis of a survey, puts the toll above 70,000; the Hurriyat Conference gives 80,000 and Kashmiri political leaders nearly 100,000. Kashmiris mourn the civilians and the fighters killed by Indian forces as martyrs.
From the gun to the street
In November 2003 India and Pakistan agreed a ceasefire on the Line of Control, crossings of fighters fell sharply and armed attacks declined steeply. The demand did not. In 2008, after land was allotted to the Amarnath shrine board, the Valley saw its largest demonstrations since 1994, with more than half a million people at a single rally; on 11 August alone Indian police and paramilitary forces killed fifteen people when they fired on a march towards the Line of Control. In 2010 the Machil fake encounter and the killing of a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Tufail Mattoo, by a tear-gas shell set off months of protest, in which police and paramilitary forces killed some 110 to 117 people. In July 2016 the killing of the young commander Burhan Wani by Indian police and soldiers brought an estimated 200,000 mourners to his funeral (the journalist Praveen Swami estimated 15,000), and in the protests that followed police and paramilitary forces killed more than ninety civilians and injured more than 15,000, many of them with pellets, under fifty-three days of curfew.
The armed struggle was contained by force, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. The demand it carried in 1990 has since been carried by unarmed crowds, and the Indian state has met them with gunfire too. Human Rights Watch found no prosecution for torture or summary execution in the first ten years; the Indian government refused every one of the fifty requests to prosecute soldiers that the state sent it up to 2018; and the law of 1990 that gives it that power was still in force in 2024.
About the evidence
The sequence is documented by Human Rights Watch and the Kashmiri press. The totals are disputed: the state government gave 47,000 dead in 2008 and Indian government data about 41,000 to March 2017, while the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society puts the toll above 70,000 and Kashmiri leaders speak of nearly 100,000; the tolls of the 1990 massacres also differ by source. India describes the armed rebellion as Pakistan’s proxy war and, Human Rights Watch found, routinely denied responsibility for the militias its forces armed; Human Rights Watch noted that Pakistan’s denial that it armed the fighters was generally not considered credible, and was not aware of a single prosecution of an Indian soldier or policeman for torture or summary execution in the conflict’s first ten years.