New data shows IOK death toll tops 300 in 2019

Indian force launched 177 cordon and search operations in which troops seal off an area, conduct security sweep

SRINAGAR/ AWANTIPORA: More than 300 people died in Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK), according to previously unreported data in the first half of the current year, making the six-months period one of the deadliest in the region in recent memory.

The impact of that surge on the Kashmiris is clear, according to interviews with rights groups and the families of two victims mentioned in a United Nations report this month – a school principal who died in police custody and a 12-year-old boy.

Indian force launched 177 cordon and search operations – in which troops seal off an area and conduct a security sweep – in the first half of the year, according to the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCSS), up from 116 in the same period last year.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global database of violent incidents in conflict zones, the 301 deaths would be the worst six-month period since it began publishing data from both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) in 2016.

An overlapping data set from JKCSS, which does not include those that died in Azad Kashmir in cross-border shelling, puts the death toll in the first half of 2019 at 271, on a par with last year, which it says was the deadliest in a decade.

Death in custody

One of those killed during the period was Rizwan Pandit, the school principal who died in police custody. Police arrived to search the south Kashmir home of Pandit, a 29-year-old chemistry graduate, before midnight on March 17, according to interviews with family members who were present at the time.

"They found nothing: we are common people," his brother, Mubashir Assad Pandit, told Reuters. Pandit was taken to Awantipora police station, a high-walled compound ringed by barbed wire yards from the family home, before being moved to an interrogation unit in Srinagar.

It was there that he died the next evening, according to the family and an official in Kashmir who is privy to the investigation into the death. Police told the family they filed a report accusing him of trying to escape from custody, but did not say how he died and refused to let them see the report or his autopsy records.

Mubashir showed Reuters photos of what he said was his brother's body after it was released by the police. The photos showed repeated deep laceration marks on his legs and bruising on his face. Pandit "appears to have been tortured while in custody", the July 8 report from the UN's human rights agency said.

Indian security forces and the armed groups resisting their occupation are both showing increasing aggression, according to the report from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as the struggle of the Kashmiris enters its fourth decade.

Days after Pandit's death in March, 12-year old Atif Mir was taken hostage allegedly by militants in Bandipora, , along with six other relatives. The two hostage-takers were unwilling to release Mir, despite repeated pleas from the family and troops that surrounded the house, relatives said.

"They beat us and we were kept bound in a room," said Abdul Hamid Mir, the boy's uncle and one of those also taken hostage. Abdul Hamid said that several members of his family had previously joined militant groups but that Asif attended an army-run school.

The family said they had never seen the men before, who did not explain why they had taken hostages. Mir was eventually killed in crossfire between the hostage-takers and the troops, which also burnt the family's home to the ground, witnesses said – an increasingly common end to gun battles in recent years.

At 43, the number of civilians killed is down on last year but 120 young fighters and 108 troops were killed in the first half of the year, according to JKCSS data – the worst tolls since it began tracking deaths a decade ago.

A second Indian security official familiar with operations in Kashmir said troops were suffering heavy casualties due to increasing fearlessness from the youth. "Previously they used to run, but in the last year or two they now fight and die inside the house, or come out firing when the cordon is being set," said the official.