Face of Nation : More than 300 people died in the Kashmir region claimed by India and Pakistan in the first half of the year, according to previously unreported data – one of the deadliest periods in the disputed territory’s recent history.
India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir and came close to a third in February, after a suicide attack by a Pakistan-based militant group killed at least 40 paramilitary police. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded by giving security forces “a free hand” to respond.
The impact of that surge on the Muslim-majority valley in the Himalayas is clear, according to interviews with Indian officials, rights groups and the families of two victims of the conflict mentioned in a United Nations report this month: a school principal who died in police custody and a 12-year-old boy killed after being taken hostage by militants. Such deaths show how the pick-up in violence is being felt at all levels of the community.
India launched 177 cordon and search operations – in which troops seal off an area and conduct a security sweep – in the first half of the year, according to the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCSS), the leading human rights group in the region, up from 116 in the same period last year.
One in three of those led to gun-battles between militants and troops in which at least one person was killed, according to previously unpublished data from JKCSS.
That has made the first half of 2019 one of the deadliest in recent memory, with 301 deaths on both sides of the contested border, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global database of violent incidents in conflict zones. That would be the worst six-month period since it began publishing data from both parts of Kashmir in 2016.
An overlapping data set from JKCSS, which does not include those that died in Pakistan’s portion of the region – mainly in cross-border shelling between the two nations after the February bombing – puts the death toll in the first half of 2019 at 271, on a par with last year, which it says was the deadliest in a decade. One of those killed during the period was Rizwan Pandit, the school principal who died in police custody.
Police arrived to search the south Kashmir home of Pandit, a 29-year-old chemistry graduate, before midnight on March 17, according to interviews with family members who were present at the time.
“They found nothing: we are common people,” his brother, Mubashir Assad Pandit, told Reuters. Pandit was taken to Awantipora police station, a high-walled compound ringed by barbed wire yards from the family home, before being moved to an interrogation unit in Srinagar, Kashmir’s main city. It was there that he died the next evening, according to the family and an official in Kashmir who is privy to the investigation into the death.
Police told the family they filed a report accusing him of trying to escape from custody, but did not say how he died and refused to let them see the report or his autopsy records.
Mubashir showed Reuters photos of what he said was his brother’s body after it was released by the police. The photos showed repeated deep laceration marks on his legs and bruising on his face. Pandit “appears to have been tortured while in custody”, the July 8 report from the U.N.’s human rights agency said.
