Delhi: In the terrorism case registered against Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) has cited two human rights reports as evidence that his non-profit was promoting secessionism and tarnishing India’s image under the garb of human rights work in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
Parvez, 47, was the programme coordinator of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a nonprofit coalition of human rights, advocacy, and research groups started by a Kashmiri lawyer, Parvez Imroz, in 2000.
Over two decades, the JKCCS published 18 reports on human rights violations and the impunity enjoyed by security forces and the police in the erstwhile Muslim majority state, now a union territory, ravaged by a Pakistan-backed insurgency since the 1990s.
Lawyers said the NIA appeared to criminalise human rights reports by citing the Structures of Violence Report (published in 2015) and the Torture Report (published in 2019) as evidence in a case registered under India’s counterterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), 1967.
This sets a dangerous precedent, they said, that could have a chilling effect on other groups investigating human rights violations and producing critical reports.
Mihir Desai, a senior advocate who practises in the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court and has collaborated with the JKCCS on human rights reports, said the NIA cited the reports to prevent any critical voices from coming out of Kashmir.
“The present establishment is criminalising any narrative that is different from their own narrative,” said Desai. “Anything written about human rights violations is going to be frowned upon. If it is Kashmir, it will be frowned upon even more.”
“They are saying there is no reality except what we tell you," he said.
Criminalising Fact-Finding & Human Rights Work
Before the Supreme Court stayed the amendment to India’s information technology rules in March, a union government fact-checking unit was supposed to identify “fake,” “false,” or “misleading” online content related to the government's “business” to stop the creation of fake news or misinformation.
The government would rescind the legal immunity of online intermediaries and Internet service providers against the content shared by users if they did not remove or block content identified by the fact-checking unit.
A recent example of criminalising a fact-finding report was a September 2023 Manipur police case under the Indian Penal Code for “promoting enmity between different groups” after a media body published its findings on the media coverage of the conflict in the northeastern state.
Finding the Editors Guild of India report to be “one-sided”, chief minister N. Biren Singh said, “They are anti-State, anti-national and anti-establishment, who came to pour venom…”
Stopping the Manipur police from arresting guild members, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court questioned whether a report could lead to a criminal case. “It is a report after all,” they said. “Can that be the subject matter of a criminal case?”
Kartik Murukutla, a Delhi-based lawyer who worked with the JKCSS for seven years, said the case against Parvez and the JKCSS’ reports were “significant because it was the first time a charge sheet under terror laws had been filed against a human rights group with the public work of the organisation under attack”.
“The State seeks to use the procedure of the law to shut down human rights work,” said Murukutla. “Human rights documentation—where the State has refused to investigate, and the local judicial remedies have been exhausted—is crucial.”
“Under the garb of terror and a regressive interpretation and application of the terror laws, the State is criminalising what is internationally recognised work, including the use and application of international law by human rights groups operating in conflict zones,” said Murukutla.
The Case Against Parvez
The NIA case in which Parvez was arrested on 22 March 2023 alleged that the JKCCS was not registered as a non-governmental organisation or under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), 2010, which allows an organisation to get foreign funding.
The federal agency alleged the JKCCS was getting money and working on behalf of the intelligence agency of Pakistan, commanders of the Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist group and separatists based in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and Kashmir to foster unrest, organise stone pelting, strikes and protests, promote secessionism, instigate young men to Pakistan to join the insurgency, give monetary support to the families of active, arrested, and dead militants, and fuel the violence.
The first information report (FIR), registered on 18 October 2020, did not mention Parvez, JKCCS or any other organisation but read like a vague and open indictment of “NGOs, Trusts and Societies”, which the NIA said were “part of a larger criminal conspiracy” that was “prejudicial to the unity, integrity, sovereignty and security of India”.
Parvez was arrested in this case nearly two-and-a-half years after it was registered. He was, however, already jailed since 22 November 2021, when he was arrested in a case registered on 6 November under the UAPA, where he was accused of being part of a “larger conspiracy” of recruiting overground workers for Lashkar-e-Taiba, another terrorist group based in Pakistan.
‘The Next Frontier Of War’
Parvez’s arrest came, as Article 14 reported in November 2021, 10 days after India’s national security adviser Ajit Doval said civil society was ‘the next frontier of war’.
Indeed, “waging war” was one of the eight charges Parvez faced at the time.
"The new frontiers of war, what you call the fourth generation warfare, is the civil society,” said Doval, addressing police probationers at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy Academy in Hyderabad on 13 November 2021.
“Wars have ceased to become an effective instrument for achieving political or military objectives,” said Doval. “They are too expensive or unaffordable, and, at the same time, there is uncertainty about their outcome. But it is the civil society that can be subverted, suborned, divided, and manipulated to hurt the interests of a nation. You are there to see they stand fully protected.”
Doval’s remarks appeared to be translated into policy, as a crackdown against Parvez and others indicated.
Others accused in the 18 October 2020 case are Kashmiri journalist Irfan Mehraj, Ghulam Hassan Ganai (Ghulam Hassan Bana), the alleged commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen and the convenor of the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, Parvez Imroz, president of the JKCCS, and Natasha Rather, a member of the JKCCS.
Mehraj, 32, was arrested on 20 March 2023, and the NIA has filed a charge sheet or a document formally accusing him of a criminal offence. The NIA has chargesheeted Bana, too, but he is absconding. Imroz and Rather have not been chargesheeted.
Parvez and Mehraj are accused of raising funds for a terrorist act, conspiracy to commit a terrorist act, recruiting a person for a terrorist act, and supporting and raising funds for a terrorist organisation.
Parvez has been incarcerated in Delhi’s Rohini jail for over 1,000 days.
While their work would be defended if a trial ensued, Murukutla said it was important that those arrested be released on bail pending trial.
Imroz, a lawyer, said he founded JKCCS to fight fundamentalism and promote democracy, transparency and accountability.
“We started the civil society initiative because we never trusted politicians here. We thought the best way to fight extremism was to strengthen civil society and a culture of reason,” said Imroz. “We were doing things within a legal framework. We have not thwarted any law because we believe it gives us security.”
“The criminalisation of this initiative has resulted in it being completely aborted. As a result, there is a void. We don't know what is happening,” he said. “Without a vibrant civil society, democracy is only a word.”
First Report In The Chargesheet
The report on the structure of violence, published in 2015, said it sought to analyse the role of the state in Jammu and Kashmir, which had resulted in more than 8,000 disappearances, 70,000 deaths, 6,000 unmarked mass graves and countless cases of torture and sexual violence.
The chargesheet said the report gave away “intricate details of deployment”, details of police and army officers posted in sensitive areas and their alleged crimes, and that it was “false and fabricated” and published to “tarnish the image of India at international level…”
The NIA said that a draft of the report was “shared from time to time with Pakistan-based handlers and terrorists,” and Parvez released it in Pakistan on the invitation of Shah Ghulam Qadir and Altaf Hussain Wani, who are associated with the Kashmir Institute of International Relations, an NGO based in Pakistan.
They said that Qadir was a member of the Pakistan Muslim League and a member of the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir Legislative Assembly, and Wani was a “separatist leader and a key man of the ISI” who was working on the “secessionist agenda” and associated with commanders of the Hizbul Mujahideen. They said that “terrorist commanders” facilitated the release of the report in various forums in Pakistan.
This JKCCS report, which the NIA said was fabricated and gave away details of deployment and officer names, has been available online since it was published in September 2015.
If there was material the authorities wanted to contest or sensitive military information in the report, the government could have communicated with the authors at the time instead of including it in a terrorism case nine years later said lawyers.
Documenting 333 cases of human rights violations—198 case studies on extrajudicial killings (415 persons killed) and 73 cases of enforced disappearances (89 disappeared persons)—the report said the layout of the Indian army structure allowed tracing “the theoretical line that connects individual victim and perpetrator in any neighbourhood in Kashmir all the way to the army and BSF (Border Security Force) in New Delhi”.
“The case studies reiterate the lack of any will to provide justice. Despite overwhelming evidence, the Indian judiciary and executive (supported by the legislature through laws such as AFSPA) do not allow for fair and independent processes of investigation or prosecution,” the report said.
“The list of alleged perpetrators, their ranks, units and areas of operations strongly suggests that the crimes listed within this report occurred across Jammu and Kashmir by various armed forces and the police and at various levels of hierarchy for each of these armed forces and police. The Indian state narrative of human rights violations being mere aberrations is not substantiated on consideration of these cases.”
Lawyers said the Jammu and Kashmir Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), 1990, and the Public Safety Act (PSA), 1978, which give sweeping powers to the army and the administration, respectively, are responsible for the existing impunity.
Under the AFSPA, security forces can open fire and even kill a person found in contravention of the law or carrying arms and ammunition in an area the centre determined to be “disturbed”. It allows for arresting people based on “reasonable suspicion” and searching their homes.
“Whether any particular incident in the report is wrong, I don’t know. If you don’t agree with a particular incident, you give your alternate argument. But you can’t criminalise fact-finding as a whole,” said Mihir Desai, who was legal counsel for the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK), which produced the report on strictures of violence.
“The fact of the matter is that human rights violations at the hands of security forces have been rampant in Kashmir for the past 30 years. That’s a fact. AFSPA and PSA have been used in a very discriminatory manner,” said Desai. “People have been tortured. People have been encountered.”
In a rare instance of justice, a military court in March 2023 convicted an army captain for the “staged encounter” of three people in the northern district of Shopian in Kashmir in July 2020 and recommended life imprisonment.
Nine months later, in response to the captain's appeal, the armed forces tribunal found “defects and perversity” in the case against him, suspended his sentence, and said that acquittal could not be ruled out.
Human Rights In Kashmir
The JKCCS was not alone in documenting extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and the failure of the Indian state to respond to human rights violations in Kashmir. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations, the National Human Rights Commission, and the now defunct State Human Rights Commission have called attention to these violations and urged the government of India and authorities of the erstwhile state to address them.
In 2003, while seeking information from the state on enforced disappearances, the National Human Rights Commission said, “…the Government of J&K sent a reply which was singularly silent about the establishment of a system to record allegations of enforced or involuntary disappearances or the nature of that system. It has also not informed the Commission about the number of allegations, the details of the system established to investigate the allegations and the results of those investigations.”
India signed the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance 2006 in 2007 but did not ratify it.
In 2008, the European Parliament, a legislative body of the European Union, passed a resolution calling on “the government of India to urgently ensure independent and impartial investigations into all suspected sites of mass graves in Jammu and Kashmir” and “to investigate all enforced disappearances…”
In 2015, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Srinagar, which estimates that 8,000 to 10,000 Kashmiri civilians have disappeared since 1989, asked the Jammu and Kashmir government at the time to form an independent commission, co-chaired by two retired Supreme Court justices and comprising international experts, to probe “enforced disappearances and unknown, unmarked and mass graves, within a time frame”.
This was four years before the Modi government rescinded Jammu and Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in August 2019 and made the country’s only Muslim-majority state a union territory, bringing it under the direct control of the central government.
The abrogation in August 2019 was followed by the closure of the state human rights commission, formed in 2007, which was investigating hundreds of cases of human rights violations, including mass graves, enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings and rape.
The commission, a four-member panel with a recommendatory, supervisory, and advisory role, was a toothless tiger, but it gave people hope.
In 2019, Abdul Rashid Khan, a resident of Kupwara district, told HuffPost India, “My son had disappeared 14 years ago. My case was at its final stage, and suddenly, the commission was shut. I feel shattered today.”
Bad To Worse
Successive governments have failed to address human rights violations and hold the security forces in Kashmir accountable for enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings and torture.
But the past 10 years since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power have witnessed a crackdown on the limited freedom the media and civil society groups had to report such cases, prosecuting journalists and activists for grave crimes like being part of a terrorist conspiracy and terrorist funding.
Several similarly crafted cases had spun a narrative where media outlets and civil society groups critical of the government are said to be using foreign funding to promote secessionism and militancy under the garb of human rights and journalism.
Given the abdication of the mainstream media to the government in the past decade, the disappearance of these smaller, more independent outlets has meant there is almost no one left to report on the human rights violations in the conflict-ridden region where the insurgency appears to be worsening and spreading to previously peaceful areas.
In February 2023, Article 14 reported how the NIA’s terrorism case against journalist Fahad Shah, who ran one of the last independent news websites in Kashmir, was based on assumptions and an exercise in retribution.
The NIA alleged that Shah was working with Pakistan handlers and conspirators to produce journalism that led to an “increase in terrorism” and “motivated” young men to join the militancy.
While granting bail to Shah in November 2023, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed the charges of terror conspiracy and waging war against the nation while retaining the ones on unlawful activities and receiving foreign funding illegally.
How It Started
As the insurgency became more and more entrenched in the nineties, Kashmir, home to eight million people, became one of the most militarised zones in the world.
As the number of locals being picked up by the army and police rose, Parvez Imroz, a lawyer, co-founded the APDP (Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons) with Parveen Ahangar, a Kashmiri woman whose son had disappeared after security forces picked him on 18 August 1990.
“I want every single mother in Kashmir and other places whose sons have been forcibly disappeared to get answers to the questions that haunt them: where is my child? Where did you take them? Bring the dead body if you killed them – but for God’s sake, bring them back,” she wrote in 2019.
Khurram Parvez, who hold a Masters degree in mass communication and journalism from Kashmir University, joined the APDP in 1997. He received the 2006 Reebok Human Rights Award and the 2023 Martin Ennals Award.
In 2000, Imroz, Khurram and other human rights activists started the JKCCS, a coalition of human rights, research and advocacy groups.
The JKCCS started filing cases related to disappearances and extended them to other human rights violations. They also published reports.
In 2004, JKCCS monitored the Assembly and Parliament elections.
While gathering information in Kupwara district, the jeep carrying Khurram hit a landmine. He survived, but his leg had to be amputated. The driver, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh, was injured. Aasia Jeelani, a journalist, died.
The JKCCS was instrumental in forming the Asian Federation Against Disappearances (AFAD) based in the Philippines, which brought together civil society groups from different countries that started lobbying the United Nations to take a stronger stand against the problem.
In 2014, Khurram became the chair of the AFAD, which the NIA has identified as one of the alleged conduits of funding foreign funds into India without an FCRA license.
Imroz said that the JKCSS wanted to be part of civil society on the mainland and the global civil society.
“Long ago, civil society was said to be the second superpower,” said Imroz.
“The young generation in Kashmir was very much for this initiative. This gave the people a vent,” he said. “But after the cases and the arrests, the process has been arrested. There is a big vacuum.”
In 2016, there was violent unrest in Kashmir after the security forces killed a young Hizbul Mujahideen commander named Burhan Wani.
Khurram was accused in four cases of rioting, unlawful assembly, hurting a public servant, and endangering human life and the personal safety of others.
A preventive detention order was slapped on him.
Second Report In The Chargesheet
The second report that the chargesheet cited, Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir, published in 2019, documented 432 cases.
“Due to legal, political and moral impunity extended to armed forces, not a single prosecution has taken place in any case of human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir,” the JKCCS said at the time.
“The widespread use of torture continues unabatedly in Jammu and Kashmir,” it said, citing the 2019 example of Rizwan Pandith, a 29-year-old school principal, who died in police custody in March 2019.
The chargesheet said “a number of individuals” had given statements that “clearly establish that the said report was just another tool in spreading concocted stories about human rights violations in Kashmir”.
Imroz said JKCCS reported what the victims stated.
Torture in Kashmir has been widely documented.
In a 2019 report, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said, “No security forces personnel accused of torture or other forms of degrading and inhuman treatment have been prosecuted in a civilian court since these allegations started emerging in the early 1990s.”
The UN report relied heavily on the work done by the JKCCS.
Rejecting the report, the Indian government said it was “fallacious, tendentious and motivated”.
India signed the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in October 1997 but has not ratified it.
In May 2020, four UN special rapporteurs listed 14 Kashmiri Muslims and said, “...we express grave concern at the alleged excessive use of force, torture and other forms of ill-treatment reportedly committed during the arrest and detention” and urged the government “to conduct a prompt and impartial investigation into the allegations of arbitrary killings, torture and ill-treatment and to prosecute suspected perpetrators…”
In March 2021, the five UN rapporteurs wrote to the government about an “act of reprisal” against a politician and grassroots activist, Waheed Para, after he spoke with members of the UN Security Council about the treatment of Muslim minorities in India.
Para “was held in a dark underground cell at subzero temperature, was deprived of sleep, kicked, slapped, beaten with rods, stripped naked and hung upside down”, the rapporteurs said.
Para, who contested the 2024 general election from Kashmir, was arrested twice between November 2020 and January 2021; the first time was under India’s counterterrorism law.
While granting him bail in the terror case, a special court of the NIA said the offences under the UAPA were not prima facie made out. While granting him bail in the second case alleging links to militant groups and financing terrorist activities, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court said the evidence against him was “too sketchy”.
Calling for Khurram’s release in March 2023, the then UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, said, “The Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society carries out essential work monitoring human rights. Their research and analysis of human rights violations are of huge value, including to international organisations seeking to ensure accountability and non-repetition of abuses.”
(Betwa Sharma is the managing editor of Article 14.)
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