US and Human Rights violations in Kashmir

Even as the excitement level is tapering and the sheer volume of scintillating leaks has begun to induce a news-fatigue among the readers, the impact of WikiLeaks concerning human rights violations in the Indian Held Kashmir is bound to have a profound impact. No secret though, well documented and widely known, it is for the first time that the leaks have confirmed US awareness of the widespread torture meted out to the Kashmiri population by the Indian security apparatus.

An important source for the American diplomats was the briefings by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which had been provided only a limited and selective access to the sections of detainees in Indian captivity. A case in point; the ICRC never got the permission to visit the notorious “Cargo Building” in Sri Nagar which is associated with the worst of brutalities committed by the Indian security forces.

The details of the ICRC briefings regarding the widespread use of torture to obtain confessions from detainees and the Indian Government’s callousness to check the runaway and well ingrained institutionalized malpractices are chilling. According to the Guardian, the most highly charged dispatch is likely to be an April 2005 cable from the US Embassy in Delhi which reports that the ICRC had become frustrated with the Indian Government which, they said, had not acted to halt the “continued ill treatment of the detainees”.

The Embassy reported that the ICRC concluded that India [as a state] “condones” torture and that the torture victims were primarily civilians as militants were routinely killed [in extrajudicial killings].

According to the Embassy cables the ICRC had gathered the information through its private interviews of 1296 detainees during the period 2002 to 2004. In 852 cases the detainees reported ill treatment, the ICRC said. While 171 described being beaten, 681 said that they had been subjected to various forms of torture.

These included 498 on which electricity had been used, 381 who had been suspended from the ceiling , 294 who had their muscles crushed by the prison personnel sitting on a bar placed across their thighs, 181 whose legs had been stretched by being “split 180 degrees”, 234 tortured with water and 302 “sexual” cases. “Numbers add to more than 681 as many detainees were subjected to more than one form of ill treatment,” the cable said. The torture was applied not on the hard core militants or terrorists but on common folks thrown up by the frequent dragnets routinely cast by a wide spectrum of security personnel to obtain day to day intelligence.

Another message that comes across strongly is of the corrupted discipline and soiled honor code of the Indian officers who regularly stoop low to inflict torture while interrogating detainees.

The ICRC, as quoted by the cables from Delhi, said that all branches of the Indian security forces used these forms of ill treatment and torture; adding : “The abuse always takes place in the presence of officers and … detainees were rarely militants, but persons connected to or believed to have information about the insurgency”. The wide spread and abundantly documented practice of “fake encounters”; the knocking off of innocent people dubbed as terrorists and routinely killed to embellish personal records for rapid advancement in the Army, also got obliquely reflected by the cables from Delhi.

The abuses continued because “security forces need promotions”; one cable cryptically comments.

But there seem to be large gaps in the US diplomats’ reading of the ground situation and the public pulse in the IHK. For instance there is no reference to the anguish caused in the society by the large scale disappearance of innocent people, as opposed to arrested militants, who are routinely picked up by the security apparatus and then killed and disposed off surreptitiously. The relatives of the disappeared have been knocking at every door since 1990, including the judiciary; but to no avail. According to Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP,) over 10000 people have disappeared in the last two decades.

The relatives of disappeared persons have also pinpointed mass graves holding one thousand bodies in border villages near Uri alone , where , reportedly, the Indian security forces have dumped bodies of a large number of disappeared persons, dubbed as terrorists from across the border and killed in fake encounters.

The cables also make no mention about the Indian thesis of cross border terrorism, which was fabricated with the blood spilled in hundreds of fake encounters. Nor is there any mention of the Taliban prisoners airlifted by India from the Northern Alliance jails in 2001 and used as cannon fodder in fake encounters to justify India’s conduct of coercive diplomacy in the aftermath of US sweep in Afghanistan and the occurrence of the Parliament Attack in Dec 2000.

The inputs made by the US diplomats, as exposed by WikiLeaks, concerning the grave human rights situation in Kashmir and the US Government’s response has exposed, to a great extent, the double standards that govern the global power politics.

It is manifest that US – the custodian of democratic values and ethos - is in the know of large scale human rights violations in Kashmir, committed under the full and institutionalized backing of the Indian Government that boasts of being the largest democracy in the world.

The diplomatic cables reflecting the rotten state of affairs in Kashmir must have passed through official US scrutiny but manifestly were tossed aside without translating into any positive response that could have lessened the pain of Kashmiris chafing under the gridlock of Indian repression. While the façade of Indian democracy is well known in the Region, the WikiLeaks , at a higher level, have certainly served to rub the sheen off the US rhetoric of human rights and moral strength being attributes for global leadership.


(2010-12-19/The News International)