It was a cold November day way back in 2011. Smoke rose from the braziers of chestnut sellers and mingled with the fine rain as I walked the stretch from Lal Chowk, Srinagar, seeking directions for the office of the “human rights walleh“.
Near Amira Kadal, the curved bridge that spans the Jhelum, I was directed to an old, rather precarious-looking building.
Gingerly, I walked up a steep staircase that over the years I would keep negotiating, seeking, like so many journalists, to bolster my reporting with statistics and meticulous, painstaking docu-mentation that the office provided.
The Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil So-ciety (JKCCS), as it is known, is a non-profit federation of human rights’ organisations and helmed by lawyer Parvez Imroz (hereafter Imroz) and programme director Khurram Parvez (hereafter Parvez).
Parvez was arrested on November 22 under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
The JKCCS’s sterling record in monitoring, in-vestigating and reporting human rights violations has been recognised globally by many human rights bodies and activists.
Acclaim for its seminal report and fieldwork on torture has come from Juan E. Mendez, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Jostein Hole Kob-beltvedt, director of the Rafto Foundation for Hu-man Rights in Oslo, which honoured Imroze and noted activist Parveena Ahangar in 2017, has ap-pealed to India “to immediately release Mr. Parvez”.
The statement says,“We observe with regret that the Indian gov-ernment intimidates citizens working to secure the values and norms enshrined in the Constitution of India and in international treaties ratified by the government itself.
”The arrest of Parvez has also drawn sharp criticism from several human right activists and bodies including Mary Lawlor UN Special Rapporteur of Human Rights Defenders who tweeted, “He’s not a terrorist, he’s a human rights defender.”
The All India Lawyers Association for Justice and People’s Union for Civil Liberties has also con-demned Parvez’s arrest.
‘Enforced disappearances’ My first visit to the JKCCS office in 2011 came about after reading a report that said there were at least 2,000 corpses in dozens of unmarked and unknown graves in north Kashmir.
This report by an 11-member team of the Human Rights Commission under the senior super-intendent of police, Bashir Ahmed Ittoo, had admit-ted that those corpses could be the remains of civil-ians who had gone “missing”.
Ittoo, whom I also met later, had said it was cru-cial to maintain proper identification of anyone killed, whether it was a militant or an innocent killed during cross-firing. But, he also candidly admitted, “Local police did not keep any identifica-tion profiles.”
No photographs of those killed in encounters were kept or circulated. The complete absence of standard operating procedures and con-sequent lawlessness meant that security forces could simply hand over bodies to police for burial without identification and without entry of the dead in the public domain.
“There is every possibility that these unidenti-fied dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves at 38 places in North Kashmir may contain the bod-ies of enforced disappearances,” the report stated.
The term “enforced disappearance”, I learnt, was used for those people who had been picked up by security forces ostensibly for interrogation and who never returned.
Men who thus left their homes were never seen again. There were an estimated 8,000 people who had disappeared in Kashmir in the 1990s during the height of the armed conflict. The government, for its part, had dismissed the missing complaints as those of youths who had crossed the border or joined militancy.
Now here was the official validation of enforced disappearances, concerns which Parvez and Imroz had been raising for years, as founders and members of the Association for Parents of Disappeared Per-sons (APDP).
A report by APDP, “Buried Evidence and Facts Under Ground”, had meticulously tabulated the presence of unknown, unmarked and mass graves in North Kashmir.
It observed how the creation of such graves and the often mutilated bodies that the gravediggers and caregivers handled were “a chronicle of violence and violations”. They told a chilling story of extrajudicial killings and torture.
Bodies of the nameless dead would be handed over by security forces, some with faces badly burnt or others with visible signs of torture to villagers or grave diggers.
Impunity and lack of culpability were the ques-tions that both Imroz and Parvez and other human rights defenders were raising.
This, they said, was the reason for the creation of unknown graves and clandestine graveyards that kept springing up. Many of them were in open spaces or public parks adjoin-ing police stations or adjoining army/paramilitary camps.
The report dealt with findings in North Kashmir, but Parvez urged me and another colleague to do our own fieldwork and gather accounts from people in other parts of Kashmir as well.
Our trips in South Kashmir and interactions with villagers confirmed how graveyards sprang up almost overnight.
People in a village near Harwan told us how they were kept confined to their homes during a cordon-and-search operation. When the cordon was lifted, they found three fresh graves in the local graveyard.
Others spoke of seeing dead bodies with no known identity, flung in the streets or fields – eyes gouged out and visible signs of tor-ture. It was my introduction to the grave human rights abuses perpetrated in Kashmir.
For the families of the disappeared, the uncer-tainty of not knowing what had happened to their loved ones and the inability to mourn or bring about closure created a special agony. This was especially so for the women whose husbands had disappeared.
Known as ‘half widows’ in Kashmir’s lexicon, they spent their lives in limbo since their husbands had not been officially declared dead.
They were not sure if they could return to their maternal home with the children, or be dependent on in-laws, or could legally re-marry, or then struggle to take on the role of bread earners.
APDP, which was set up by Imroz and Parvez, pressed not just for resolving socio-economic issues and survival in a patriarchal society but also to seek political accountability.
“Where are you?” That poignant question hangs as a poster in a room of the JKCCS office; it dem-onstrates the respect of the right not to be disap-peared.
It is the keystone in seeking justice from the state and the JKCCS campaign. The families filed habeas corpus cases and through the cases and other forms of litigation they fought back against the state’s denial and bids at erasure of collective mem-ory.
Litigation, however, did not bring prosecution of a single person because the Armed Forces Spe-cial Powers Act (AFSPA) stipulates sanctions must be sought from the Union home ministry or defence ministry. In all these decades, no sanction has been given to prosecute even a single person.
Khurram Parvez’s approach to human rights In his articulation of what human rights are all about, Parvez has stressed that it is not about securing jus-tice for one individual or family but of a collective struggle for families of enforced disappearances everywhere. He has demonstrated such solidarity by taking up work in international campaigns as well.
As the chairman of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), he raised concerns about disappearances in the Philip-pines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Paki-stan.
In recognition of this work, he received the Rebok Human Rights Award in 2006, given to any-one who fights for human rights through nonviolent means.
Parvez has also worked closely on campaigns for landmine removal: he himself sustained serious injuries in a landmine in 2004 while travelling in a car during a fact-finding visit to monitor elections.
His leg had to be amputated and his co-passengers Aasiya Jeelani, a young woman working with JKCCS, and the driver of the car Ghulam Nabi Sheikh died in the incident.
Imroz described the ordeal of that day as the “longest” one he had undergone. Shuttling between the Shri Maharaj Harisingh Hospital and the Sher-e-Kashmir Hospital where Parvez and some of the other injured were admitted, the day ended with Aasiya being lowered into a grave.
Parvez spoke to me of the utter devastation at the death of their young colleague. “We lost a col-league. A close friend and someone with whom we had plans to make a non-violent resistance move-ment for the youth.”
In my conversations with Parvez, I have been struck by the manner in which he is able to reflect and offer a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of human rights and yet be so rooted to the ground that he recalls particular details of every case, of the suffering.
