Mourners seek truth on 'disappeared'

On the 10th of every month, hundreds of dejected people gather at a central park in Srinagar, the summer capital of India's northern disputed Kashmir province, to protest against the enforced disappearance of their relatives after the armed Islamist insurgency erupted in the principality in 1989.

Wearing white head bands bearing the names of the missing persons in black, members from the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons or APDP sit solemnly in the park for a few hours before dispersing in abject hopelessness only to reconvene four weeks later for the same forlorn objective.

Many have been following this ritual since 1994 when the APDP was founded to prevail upon the authorities to provide conclusive information regarding 8000-10,000 of their relatives who had forcibly disappeared across Kashmir.

They believe many had been apprehended by the Army, paramilitary, police or varied security agencies over 21 years that the insurgency for an independent Muslim homeland has raged in Kashmir claiming more than 65,000 lives.

"We demand that the Government establish a commission to investigate these disappearances," said the APDP head Praveena Ahanger, 48, whose son Javed Ahmad was wrongfully picked up by the Army in Srinagar in August 1990 and thereafter, disappeared. Successive administrations have failed to do so, she stated.

"We come here to protest and to tell the authorities that we are fighting for our children. We don't need compensation but information. If they are alive, tell us; if not, show us their graves," the thickset, partially literate activist passionately said.

For years after her son was summarily marched off by the Army in the middle of the night, mistaken for someone in the neighbourhood with a similar name and militant connections, Praveena doggedly visited numerous military camps and jails across the Kashmir Valley looking for him.

She even badgered barbers, cooks and numerous others with access to the incarceration camps hoping for news of Javed, with no success.

"But I knew who had taken my child," she said and with the help of lawyers filed a case in the State High Court seeking his whereabouts.

In India's notoriously slow legal system it took the resolute mother of five 13 years to identify the soldier responsible for her son's arrest.

But her triumph was pyrrhic as the case was referred to the Federal Government for sanction to prosecute the guilty. It never came.

The draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act invoked in disturbed areas grants immunity to all Indian military personnel deployed on internal security duty in war-torn Kashmir for all acts performed in the course of duty, including shooting dead innocent and unarmed protesters for defying the curfew.

Almost all requests similar to Praveena's to prosecute soldiers and paramilitary personnel were routinely rejected by the federal administration fearful that it would lower morale among the security forces and hearten militants.

"It is no longer a fight for my son," Praveena said. "It's a fight for all the disappeared. They are all my sons."

India, which controls a third of Muslim-majority Kashmir and claims the rest seized by Pakistan after independence from colonial rule in 1947, denies all responsibility for these missing persons.

In Kashmir's illusionary world of smoke and mirrors that become more complex by the day, the Indian authorities claim that fewer than 1000 Kashmiris had disappeared and less than 150 of them were dead.

They maintain that the majority of the "disappeared" had fled to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to obtain arms training from army and security specialists before returning to fuel the insurgency.

Pakistan denies the existence of any such insurgent training camps but has on more than one occasion grudgingly accepted that its territory was used by Islamic insurgents to launch strikes on India's mainland and across Kashmir.

Meanwhile, another unfortunate corollary to the APDP disquiet were Kashmir's "half-widows", a term peculiar to the state.

They were the wives of the "disappeared" males, who cannot only not remarry, as they lack proof of being widowed, but under Islamic law were required to wait at least seven years before taking another husband. In Kashmir's increasingly conservative Islamic milieu this was proving problematical. And, since the majority of these "half-widows" - activists estimate their numbers were between 2000 and 2500 - belonged to poor families and were entirely dependent on their husbands for sustenance, their current "twilight" status had relegated them to indigent, wretched existences.

Many also were weighed down with "half-orphans", who, too, faced a grim future.

State policy, however, disallows the "half-widows" any relief for seven years after which they were entitled to either a one-time grant of between $1000-$2000 or a monthly pension of around $10 to receive which these women had to run the gauntlet of a callous bureaucracy.

So far, the Government had provided relief to some 400 "'half-widows", even though the husbands of many who turn up at the monthly APDP protest gatherings had been missing for over 15 years.

Attempting closure, some "half-widows" erected a collective memorial stone in a Srinagar graveyard in 2005.

Within hours the authorities had demolished it, depriving them even of this token solace.