Trampling human rights in Kashmir

According to the CIA’s World Factbook, Jammu & Kashmir, commonly referred to as Kashmir, is occupied by India, China and Pakistan. It remains the site of world’s largest and most militarized territorial dispute. Kashmir, primarily seen as a point of fierce contestation amongst the nuclear armed India and Pakistan, encompasses complex internal political dimensions with a massive constituency vying for complete sovereignty. In the Indian-occupied part, the movement for national self-determination has taken multiple forms: the Plebiscite Movement of the 1950s and 60s, popular armed uprisings of the late 1980s, and massive street protests, also dubbed as intifadas, of 2008, 2010, and 2016. The thread that binds every phase of Kashmiri uprisings however is the scorched-earth response of the Indian state. With 700,000 Indian armed forces—one for every seventeen Kashmiris—deployed throughout the past 69 years of Indian rule, north of seventy thousand civilians have been killed, around ten thousand subject to enforced disappearance and thousands tortured. According to Human Rights Watch, Indian forces have consistently used rape as a weapon of war. Moreover, upwards of six thousand mass and unmarked graves have been discovered by various human rights groups.