The death certificate ordered for Abdul Rashid Wani after almost three decades in Indian-occupied Kashmir opens a record of what New Delhi has tried to leave buried. Wani disappeared in July 1997 after being taken into military custody. Twenty-nine years later, a court has directed that his death be recorded as having occurred on the very day he vanished.
\nIf Wani died the day he entered custody, then the issue is not a missing-person file lost in the fog of conflict. It is a custodial killing, followed by the disappearance of the body, the erasure of evidence and the forced waiting of a family that kept searching for a man whose fate was already known to the machinery that held him.
\nStill, it cannot answer the questions that matter: who ordered the detention, who supervised the custody, who disposed of the body, and who protected the trail afterwards?
\nIn Indian-occupied Kashmir, the expression \u201chalf-widow\u201d emerged from this cruelty\u2013women left between marriage and widowhood, unable to bury the dead or fully resume life.
\nWani\u2019s case is not an exception. Rights groups estimate that nearly 10 thousand have disappeared in occupied Kashmir since 1989.
\nIndian State Human Rights Commission later found that only a fraction of bodies at identified grave sites had been identified and warned that some of the missing could be buried there.
\nSecurity personnel accused of abuses in Indian-held Kashmir have long benefited from prosecution-sanction requirements that place accountability at the mercy of the very institution whose forces stand accused. When investigations find prima facie evidence but permission to prosecute is withheld, exceptional powers cease to be temporary tools of security. They become a shield.
\nThe post-2019 order has made this silence heavier. New Delhi\u2019s claim of normalcy in occupied Kashmir rests increasingly on restricted public space, weakened institutions and managed dissent.
\nIndia signed the international convention against enforced disappearance in 2007 but has not ratified it. Ratification alone will not return the dead, but refusal to build a legal framework for truth tells families that even minimum recognition remains negotiable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The death certificate ordered for Abdul Rashid Wani after almost three decades in Indian-occupied Kashmir opens a record of what New Delhi has tried to leave buried. Wani disappeared in July 1997 after being taken into military custody. Twenty-nine years later, a court has directed that his death be recorded as having occurred on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-557055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\n