A Human Rights Apocalypse in Kashmir

As the mainstream media wrote about India and Pakistan, they remained silent about the occupation of Kashmir. The Mughal Emperor Jehangir wrote in 1622 that the Kashmir valley was “a page that the painter of destiny had drawn with the pencil of creation.” The first Kashmir war between India and Pakistan occurred in 1947. It ended when the UN Security Council organized a cease-fire and a Line of Control. Kashmir, like India and Pakistan, was partitioned and divided. Since then, the Indian State has silenced Kashmiri independence. The Kashmir Law and Justice Project wrote, “Indian authorities have repressed the pro-self-determination, pro-democracy movement in [Jammu and Kashmir] since October 1947 through intensive militarization, authoritarian policies and extreme violence, resulting in widespread, grave human rights violations and atrocity crimes.” Pankaj Mishra wrote, Kashmir, “hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also most obscure military occupation in the world.” Kashmiri’s face an “everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by 700,000 Indian soldiers.”

The Kashmir Media Service reported that 96,432 Kashmiris were killed from 1989 to 2025. 175,936 civilians were arrested. Human Rights Watch reports, “There have been so many ‘disappearances’ in Kashmir that there is now a term for women with missing husbands: they are called ‘half widows.’” Children disappear too. Human Rights Watch continued, “torture is routine… in Jammu and Kashmir.” “There is perhaps no human rights abuse… that occurs with such great and unchallenged impunity as torture.” The Indian army also rounds up and tortures the relatives of their “detainees” too. The Public Safety Act (PSA) allows the Indian Army to arrest and detain Kashmiris randomly. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote, “This practice has been used to keep people arbitrarily in detention for several weeks, months, and, in some cases, years. The Supreme Court of India has described the system of administrative detention… as a ‘lawless law.’” There’s no charge or trial. Their crime is to be Kashmiri and muslim. At breakneck speed, Kashmiris are being ethnically cleansed from their land. The Indian government imposed the Domicile Rules to kick Kashmiri Muslims off their land and replace them with a Hindu majority.

Arundhati Roy wrote, “to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnourished population in India.” “What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend that money on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?” There needs to be an independent Jammu and Kashmir. A Kashmir free of Indian military rule that exercises self-determination. That was the position of Washington in 1948. The Kashmir Law and Justice Project wrote, “The US has been and is legally obligated to render assistance to the people of Jammu and Kashmir to end the human rights crisis.” Instead, Washington has given enormous sums of taxpayer money to India and to military dictatorships in Pakistan. The Times of India reported, “India has been identified as the largest recipient of US economic assistance over a 66-year period in inflation-adjusted dollars.” Between 1946-2012, India received $65.1 billion in taxpayer money. Pakistan “received $44.4 billion in economic aid [and] $12.9 billion in military assistance from the US.” If the two-nuclear-armed states go to war over Kashmir again, US taxpayers should know they paid for the destruction.

Anton Porcari

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