Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir is the first report, which focuses on torture, perpetrated systematically and indiscriminately by the Indian State since 1947, and intensified further since the armed struggle for self-determination began in the late 1980s. Torture is the most underreported human rights violation perpetrated by the State, carried out with complete impunity for the perpetrators, and without a single prosecution ever having taken place.

The Indian State’s response to the armed conflict in Kashmir shows the characteristics of classic counter-insurgency warfare, where military strategies are both ‘populationcentric’ and ‘enemy-centric’. The disproportionate presence of Indian armed forces and Police in Jammu and Kashmir (between 650,000 – 750,000) is mainly to exercise control over the population. The widespread human rights violations, including use of indiscriminate torture, is a tactic employed to break people’s will. This is reflected in the Indian Army’s Doctrine on Sub-Conventional Operations, which says, “The endeavour should be to bring about a realization that fighting a government is a ‘no win’ situation and that their anti-government stance will only delay the process of restoration of peace and normalcy.”

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After the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in July 2016, the present period has witnessed unprecedented cycles of State violence. In the last two years, Kashmiris have witnessed gross violations of human rights in the form of extra-judicial executions, injuries, illegal detentions, torture, sexual violence, disappearances, arson and vandalism of civilian properties, restriction on congregational and religious activities, media gags, and ban on communication and internet services. Unlike other forms of heinous human rights abuses like extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances or indiscriminate and excessive force exemplified by the use of pellet shotguns, torture is a state crime that often remains hidden even from the media, unless the victim dies as a result of his/her injuries. As many deaths due to torture-related injuries are not immediate but may occur after years or even decades, accurate figures of such fatalities and morbidity are extremely hard to estimate.
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This report builds on the body of human rights documentation on torture in Kashmir through an examination of 432 case studies of torture, focussing on the trends and patterns, targets, perpetrators, contexts and impact of torture in Kashmir. Moving between the present and the past what emerges is a vast archive of narratives of forms of torture perpetrated by various arms of the state forces. Through the cases, torture emerges as one of the ways of retaliation by the State against the Kashmiri ‘other’, seen as a challenge to its very legitimacy. But it also emerges as part of routine, intrinsic to the very existence of the Indian State in Kashmir.