Brutality in Poonch

The alleged custodial killing of three men from the Gujjar tribal community in a remote village in Poonch district raises many questions. The most direct questions are: Who killed them and why? The chilling videos in circulation, though still unverified, narrate the harrowing tale of Indian army soldiers humiliating, stripping, and thrashing them mercilessly after they were picked up and taken to a fortified army camp. More than a dozen men who were detained at the same camp were also ruthlessly thrashed and at least half a dozen of them are recuperating at the hospital. There is enough evidence to suggest the use of disproportionate torture by the soldiers after they were unlawfully detained. The three did not die a natural death and the obvious needle of suspicion is on the armed forces personnel. Why did they do it? The civilians were picked up in the aftermath of the gruesome killings of four Indian soldiers in an ambush laid by the militants in the area. The torture marks on the bodies of all the victims and the mutilation of the bodies of the slain show tell-tale signs of retaliation and vendetta. Such brutality cannot be justified or defended as counter-insurgency measures. It took widespread outrage in Rajouri-Poonch and Kashmir Valley for the authorities to break their final silence and announce ex-gratia relief to the kin of the deceased civilians, register a First Information Report in a police station, and announce an Army court of inquiry after shifting some officers including a Brigadier. The entire sequence of events follows the all-too-familiar ingredients of the egregious scale of abuse, shirking of responsibility followed by cosmetic probes which together form the hubris of impunity granted to the security forces for serious omissions like homicides. Though it is hoped that this probe turns out to be more than just a tool to temporarily mollify the anger in Jammu and Kashmir, it is wishful to expect this given a long and chequered track record of lack of accountability and denial of justice.

The fresh killings come a month after the Army Tribunal bailed out army personnel held guilty in the Amshipora fake encounter case in a rare case of conviction in a court-martial proceeding. The Poonch killings, thus, raise pertinent questions about the impunity accorded to armed forces personnel under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) that enables the security forces to evade accountability and the due process of law in a civil court. They also call into question the continuation of human rights violations despite the government’s claims of normalcy and progress in Kashmir. The theatre of militancy shifting from the Valley to the border districts of Rajouri and Poonch in recent years is reflected by the glaring statistics of a spike in militancy-related incidents in this region and over 50 casualties including those of soldiers and civilians in 2023 alone. The government will need to answer why it has been lying about the actual state of insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. It will need to explain why the civilians were killed. Neither is mere announcement of compensation and probes the substitute to justice, nor is media management and projection of so-called normalcy a substitute for peace. Jammu and Kashmir is a region where conflict and its wounds are deeply embedded in the psyche of the people. The twin districts of Rajouri and Poonch, with a more layered and complex troubled past, are the most sensitive. The rising insurgency in these districts and the army’s bid to stamp out insurgency by treating every civilian as an enemy are warning signals that cannot be brushed aside. They bear testimony to the flawed policies adopted by the state in Jammu and Kashmir. Continuation of the same would amount to playing with fire.

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