A FEW weeks ago, Amnesty International released a report on human rights abuses carried out by Indian troops in Indian-held Kashmir. According to the report, which looked at 100 cases of human rights violations between 1999 and 2013, the Indian government’s response failed to deliver justice to the victims of the violations.

Central to the problem of impunity for human rights violations is Section 7 of the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act of 1990. Based on this provision, security forces are protected from prosecution without prior permission from state and central authorities. In reality, it has meant that since 1990, only 44 applications of abuse have been brought against security forces personnel. When the families of those with pending cases were interviewed, it was found that not one of them had any information about the status of the cases.

Such details provide insight into just how helpless individuals are when picked up by the security forces on suspicions of being involved in insurgent activity. In 2013, 13 such people were reportedly picked up. Local media reported that they had no connections to militancy. Twelve men are said to have died at the hands of security forces but no investigation seems to have been done, nor has any information been released to the public regarding whether it is taking place. For all intents and purposes, it appears that these cases are considered closed.

India-held Kashmir, like other contested areas of the subcontinent, seems today a place without hope.

One of the dead of 2013 was Irfan Ganai who simply went outside his house and was gunned down. His mother rushed out and found her son’s body. In interviews, she said she had stayed with the body because often security forces place a gun on the chest of the deceased to substantiate their claims that the deceased was in fact a militant. In Irfan’s case, the family stayed with the body all night. His mother insisted that if Irfan had known that the military was deployed near the house, he would not have gone outside.

On that fateful day, however, she says that “Irfan would not have gone into the yard if he had seen the army vehicles, but we didn’t know.”

She added: “After the army fired, they turned on the headlights from their vehicles and we could see more than 10 army men in our yard.”

The family filed a First Information Report that night at a police station, naming “unidentified men” as the shooters. Since then, the local police have tried again and again to get further information in the case, but while full cooperation has often been promised, it has not ensued.

The Indian constitution guarantees due process, and on its basis those who have been victimised by security forces should be able to get some justice. In the context of conflict, whether they are in Pakistan or India, constitutions and their hopeful provisions seem to hold little sway. In their stead comes the passion-fuelled fervour of patriotism and the always supreme needs of national security, both of which effectively annihilate the values of compassion and justice. The case of Kashmir, the beleaguered valley whose beauty has long become its curse, is just one example where the very land and people being fought being destroyed by the war that seeks to claim them.

Infected by the terminal illness of war, India-held Kashmir, like other contested areas of the subcontinent, seems today a place without hope. In the near 70 years since Partition, its ownership has been elevated to an existential height; whoever gives it up, Pakistan or India, imagines it the equivalent of the death of the nation itself. Of all the post-colonial burdens that the British have left on the subcontinent, this curse of perpetual war, uttered in the last moments of the British Empire, seems eternal. It ensures that while Pakistan and India may be independent they will be forever embroiled in the destruction of each other, destroying the most beautiful of what Empire left behind.

Those are the historical and existential dimensions of the conflict. On the global level, the report raises questions of the efficacy of human rights discourse to raise issues as tendentious as Kashmir. In this case, research-based reports put the focus on families who continue to live the terror of dead fathers and sons. In putting together such reports, those documenting the violation of international human rights face scrutiny from the Indian government and security forces. An example is that of Amnesty International researcher, Christine Mehta, who was actually deported from India for her work. Before Pakistanis nod their heads at the intransigence of the Indian government and security forces, they must remember that an identical system of silencing and suppression exists in Pakistan. In every corner of the country, the forgotten and forlorn, mourning disappeared family members and killed relatives, wait in vain for justice. The mechanics of oppression in either case are the same: the elevation of the abstract concerns of national survival, the sanctity of borders raised above the petty lives and losses of the people who inhabit this country.

Reports by human rights watchdogs on disputed areas in the throes of conflict represent an effort to lift the discourse out of the divisive territorial rhetoric that holds that land is always more valuable than life and draw it into the realm of universal rights and human dignity. The stipulations of human rights defenders — individuals or organisations — represent an increasingly elusive dream: that the rhetoric of equality and justice is more than just words, that the ordinary deserve justice and that suspicion does not equal guilt. In the case of Pakistan and India, they are lessons and hopes that apply on both sides of the still bloody border whose British-borne curse continues to impose a reign of terror and hate.

The writer is an attorney and a director at Amnesty International. The views expressed are her own.

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2015

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