Three Decades Later, Court Declares Disappeared Kashmiri Dead, Reopening Old Wounds

Junaid Rashid was five when his father was taken into military custody and vanished, among thousands who disappeared during the armed uprising in Indian-administered Kashmir.

After years of searching and legal battles, a judge in the disputed Himalayan region declared in April — confirming what Rashid had long believed — that his father, Abdul Rashid Wani, had died.

This was the first such ruling among thousands of petitions concerning the disappeared, representing a rare acknowledgment that many families still lack regarding their loss.

The judgment ordered the issuance of a death certificate and also recognized a police investigation that identified the army officer who took Wani into custody in July 1997.

Army major ‘murdered Wani’

Wani, a timber trader, was stopped near his home in Srinagar while carrying a substantial sum of cash intended for supplier payments, according to his family and the police investigation.

On that evening, his wife and two children, dressed for a wedding celebration, waited for him to return.

‘He never came back,’ Rashid told AFP.

The judgment, citing the inquiry, stated that the accused — an army major — had murdered Abdul Rashid Wani while in custody and had disposed of his body.

It records Wani’s death as the same day he vanished but provides no information about the location of his remains.

‘The government has now, after 29 years, acknowledged in court that such an atrocity occurred,’ said Rashid, who is now 34.

In Kashmir, the wives of missing men are referred to as ‘half‑widows’ — unable to mourn fully until they know their husbands are dead.

‘If this had happened earlier, I think Kashmir would look different,’ Rashid added. ‘Our lives would look different, and my mother’s health would be something else.’

Muslim‑majority Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947. Both nations claim the entire Himalayan region, and the nuclear‑armed neighbours have engaged in multiple conflicts, the most recent occurring last year.

In 1989, after unsuccessful political campaigns for self‑determination, rebel groups launched an armed struggle, seeking either Kashmir’s independence or its merger with Pakistan.

New Delhi deployed its soldiers, accusing Pakistan of supporting the rebels — an allegation that Islamabad denies.

The scenic tourist destination was transformed into one of the most militarised regions in the world, where tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have been killed.

Today, the rebellion has been largely crushed, but at least 500,000 Indian soldiers remain stationed there.

Rights groups say 8,000 missing

The People’s Union for Democratic Rights, a New Delhi‑based civil liberties organization, said Wani’s judicial declaration of death encapsulates the human‑rights narrative in Kashmir since violence erupted in 1989.

It noted that Wani was just one case among many instances of enforced disappearance.

According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), as many as 8,000 people remain disappeared, some of whom were likely abducted by rebels.

In 2009, it identified 2,700 unmarked graves in remote mountainous zones along the de‑facto border with Pakistan, and cited residents who alleged they had buried mutilated bodies left by security forces.

One such site was Kupwara, where residents displayed rows of graves marked by rusted metal signs bearing numbers.

A man in his mid‑40s said that between 1990 and 2000, he and villagers buried an estimated 500 bodies left by police, which they considered humanitarian work; the police left the bodies without identifying them, he said.

‘Later, we opened graves for relatives of missing Kashmiris,’ he said, adding that some families were able to identify the bodies.

New Delhi and security authorities insisted that the bodies were those of fighters killed in clashes whom they could not identify, and said the missing men were likely to have crossed into Pakistan.

Kashmir’s State Human Rights Commission also examined the graves. In 2011, it found bodies buried at 38 locations identified by APDP and noted that the government had identified only 464 of the 2,730 bodies at those sites.

The commission said it was possible that many disappeared persons may be found in the unmarked graves.

DNA testing that it had called for has not been carried out, and the commission was shut down in 2019 after New Delhi’s central government assumed direct control of Kashmir.

‘Midnight knock’

Rashid said his family spared no effort to find Wani, including selling their family home to raise funds.

They faced pressure to cease their search, as army officers offered cash to abandon it, privately telling them that ‘what has happened has happened,’ Rashid said.

‘I remember my grandmother telling a colonel at our home, “Just give me my son back,”’ Rashid said.

They were also asked to pay for assistance in securing Wani’s release from a group of former rebels who had since surrendered and aligned with the government; instead, the family pursued the case in court.

Rashid, who visited an army camp with his mother searching for Wani, said he met the officer identified by the police investigation as having ordered Wani’s detention. ‘I was very young, but I still remember his face,’ Rashid said.

Wani’s case is just one among many.

In 2002, Jana Begum, her husband Manzoor Ahmed Dar, and their four children were awakened at midnight by soldiers pounding on their door; Dar was detained.

‘It felt like a bird of prey snatched him from us,’ Begum told AFP at her home in Srinagar.

His family never saw or heard from him again.

After protests and legal challenges, authorities organised an identification parade. Begum identified the officer she said had taken Dar away, but years of legal battles have yielded no clarification about his fate.

The family performed symbolic funeral rites in 2016 after police officers privately informed them that Dar had died ‘during interrogation,’ said his daughter Bilkees Manzoor.

She was 15 when her father vanished.

‘I know my father is not in this world,’ she told AFP. ‘The only justice possible is for them to tell us exactly what they did with my father and his body.’

Three other families of disappeared men told AFP of similar traumatic campaigns for answers, but they chose not to be identified due to fear of reprisals.

‘Generations of our children will have to silently endure this pain and injustice,’ one man said, mourning his missing son.

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