On the night of 3 – 4 August 1998, 19 people, including 11 children ranging in age from about 4 years to 15 years, and 5 women (including one woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy) were shot to death at point blank range in their homes in Sailan, in the Surankote Tehsil, of the ‘border district’ of Poonch in Jammu Region of Jammu and Kashmir. A total of thirteen females and six male members of three closely related families were killed. Their bodies were thereafter horribly dismembered and in one case almost decapitated with axes and sharp instruments.

The military occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, by the Indian state is not enacted in abstraction. It is sustained by its ability to insinuate itself into the social fabric, economic life and cultures of violence in a particular community. It works not only through the armed control over physical territory, but through the terrorising of minds and bodies by enacting spectacular displays of necrophilic power and violence. The events leading up to, and following from the Sailan Massacre allow us to see, in vivid detail the intricate and overwhelming ways in which the military ‘counter insurgency’ apparatus penetrates the lives of people who live at its mercy, especially at the margins of the state.They expose the nitty-gritty realities of how the violent and total militarisation of lives and livelihoods renders the lines between civilian and military operatives and institutions (army, police, and Indian funded and armed ‘counter insurgency’ operatives, informers and ‘sources’) simultaneously non-existent, and rigidly impermeable, and the mechanisms by which war crimes by the Indian state against unarmed women, children and other civilians can be officially constructed as ‘intra militant’ rivalries, or blamed on ‘foreign militants’, for which the Indian state bears no responsibility, even in the face of tremendous public, local knowledge and irrefutable legal evidence to the contrary. The continuing and courageous struggle for truth and justice, by the surviving members of the three families effectively wiped out by the Sailan massacre exposes how impunity and silence is effectuated, as active state policy within specific contexts and situations.