RETURN OF THE GRAVES

In the foothills of a mountain is a desolate cemetery with sunken graves and mounds of rubble. And for the past one month, this cemetery has been in news for its hundreds of unmarked graves.

In Bimyar, a village more than 20 kilometers from Baramulla town, villagers know little about the identity of the people buried in this graveyard—they don’t belong to this village. The villagers haven’t documented the burials or photographed the dead bodies. In fact, they speak from their memory not even remembering the exact numbers or the dates.

The cemetery was established in 2003 and in past five years 150 graves have come-up here. The cemetery has hundreds of mounds and it is difficult to distinguish the graves. A village elder, Atta Mohammad Khan, says around 235 bodies are buried in the cemetery. “All graves aren’t visible now,” he says. “I don’t remember the exact count but it is approximately 235”.

The reason why these unmarked graves have generated so much curiosity here is clear. In the 17 years of conflict, thousands of youth have disappeared in Kashmir valley. APDP says more than 10,000 have disappeared in custody while the Government figures vary. Then an investigation by the J-K police into the missing case of a carpenter, Abdul Rehman Padroo, from south Kashmir exposed a vicious network of fake encounters involving senior police and army officials including a Senior Superintendent of Police and a Colonel. The investigations revealed how police and army men picked-up innocent civilians, killed them in fake encounters and labelled them as foreign militants to earn rewards and promotions. J-K Police, in fact, exhumed five bodies from Ganderbal and Sumbal later, each of them civilians.

The fake encounter expose further substantiated the demand of the kin of the missing people, who have been seeking probe into all the cases of disappearances. Now this...