Repression persists, rights restricted in IIOJK: Human Rights Watch
New York: Human Rights Watch has said that five years after the Indian government revoked the special autonomous status of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) on August 5, 2019, the territory still suffers from severe restrictions on freedom of speech and association.
According to Kashmir Media Service, Indian forces’ personnel continue to enforce repressive policies, including arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, and other serious human rights abuses.
“Indian authorities insist that violence has been contained in Jammu and Kashmir, but in five years they have done little to end the government assault on fundamental freedoms,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Kashmiris are unable to exercise their right to free expression, association, and peaceful assembly because they fear they will be arrested, thrown in prison without trial for months, even years.”
In March 2024, demonstrators in the Ladakh region demanded a greater role in governance. Since 2019, religious minorities and migrant workers have faced targeted attacks, while hundreds of Kashmiris, including journalists and human rights activists, remain in custody under severe detention and counterterrorism laws.
“It might seem calm with all the tourists, late-night shopping, and other overt signs of normalcy, but we are festering inside,” said a 27-year-old Kashmiri businessman. “It is like a soda bottle waiting to burst.”
The authorities have continued to prosecute prominent civil society activists on apparently politically motivated charges. On July 10, authorities arrested Adv Nazir Ahmad Ronga, the chairman of Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association under the black law, Public Safety Act. In June, they arrested Adv Mian Abdul Qayoom, former president of the Association and a vocal critic of BJP government rights abuses, falsely accusing him of murder. Within days, the BJP administration banned the bar association elections, fearing a “breach of peace.”
Kashmiri human rights defender Khurram Parvez has been jailed since November 2021 under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention of Atrocities Act (UAPA). United Nations experts have called on Indian authorities to stop targeting Parvez, and in 2023 the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, called for his release. In March 2024, UN experts reported on the “harassment and prolonged detention of human rights defenders and journalists” in India.
Since August 2019, at least 35 journalists in Kashmir have faced police interrogation, raids, threats, physical assault, restrictions on freedom of movement, or fabricated criminal cases because of their reporting. A new media policy introduced by the Modi government in June 2020 made it easier for the authorities to censor news in the region. In June 2024, authorities introduced a policy to protect public officials in the region from alleged false complaints and recommended punishing media publications complicit in spreading misinformation, which raised concerns over government accountability and threats to press freedom.
Authorities have used various means to keep individuals in custody, including filing new allegations after courts granted bail or quashed detention orders.
In March, authorities rearrested Aasif Sultan, a Kashmiri journalist who had just been released after spending more than five years in prison, filing another case under the UAPA. In May, police arrested the lawyer Zahid Ali (Jamaat-e-Islami) under the black law UAPA, having kept him detained since 2019 by repeatedly filing new cases.
The High Court of Jammu and Kashmir has rebuked the authorities for misusing the Public Safety Act for repeated preventive detentions, even after courts have ordered release. In one case the judge noted: “It appears as if the preventive detention jurisdiction is answerable to no one.”
The authorities have also used the counterterrorism law in an arbitrary manner to crack down on peaceful critics, journalists, and human rights defenders to silence dissent. In recent years, the number of UAPA cases in Jammu and Kashmir has increased significantly. In 2022, the region recorded the highest number of such cases in India with 371 cases out of the total 1,005, according to data from the India’s National Crime Records Bureau.
Between 2019 and 2021, the BJP government shut down the internet in occupied Jammu and Kashmir for an unprecedented period of over 500 days, claiming restrictions were necessary to prevent the spread of false or incendiary information that could cause violent protests. But the shutdowns caused disproportionate harm to the population, by exacerbating an information blackout, stopping families from communicating, preventing people from accessing essential activities and services – including medical services – and disrupting the local economy.
Despite calls from UN experts in 2019 to end the communications blockade, denying internet access remains a default policing tactic in IIOJK and other parts of India.
Since 2019, the Indian forces personnel have been implicated in numerous abuses including harassment and ill-treatment at checkpoints, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial killings. There has been no accountability for these recent extrajudicial killings or past killings and abuses by Indian forces, in part because of the black law Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), which provides members of the Indian armed forces effective immunity from prosecution. Since the law came into force in occupied Jammu and Kashmir in 1990, the Indian government has not granted permission to prosecute any Indian force personnel in civilian courts.
“Indian authorities need to rethink their approach to Jammu and Kashmir, and prioritize justice for victims of abuses,” Ganguly said. “The government should provide remedies for those whose rights were violated and bring abusive forces to account.”
