Kashmir's Unidentified Dead

The debate over the unidentified victims now threatens to turn into an unproductive polemical exchange between human rights groups and the government. But name-calling will do little service to those at the centre of the debate: the hundreds of families whose loved ones have been missing for years. There are concrete things that should be done to give these families a sense of closure and justice. DNA samples could be taken from the bodies of the dead and matched against results from the families of missing persons. Forensic pathologists could re-examine the bodies where there is reason to suspect extrajudicial execution. Such a project would demand considerable resources and also take time: for homicide investigation, police forces face routine waits of over six months for DNA results from the country's overburdened laboratories. But going about this task honestly and thoroughly is important. Models exist for such a project. The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, maintains a database that can match DNA from unidentified bodies with the profiles of the relatives of missing persons. In New Delhi and Srinagar, governments and rights activists need to stop scoring debating points, and focus instead on concrete solutions based on humanity and justice. More than two decades after the first shots of the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir were fired, the bodies of the men whom the fighting claimed could help build the foundations for the restoration of the rule of law. Earlier this month, investigators working for the State's Human Rights Commission reported that 2,730 unidentified people lie in unmarked graves strung along the Line of Control — people the Indian Army and State police claim were terrorists infiltrating across the LoC. That unidentified people alleged to be terrorists lie buried in makeshift graveyards across the State isn't a revelation: indeed, this newspaper has reported the existence of sites that have not so far been documented by investigators. The Army says it has no means of knowing who a terrorist crossing the LoC might be; Pakistan-based jihadist groups, in their own literature, admit to having sent hundreds of Kashmiri jihadists to their deaths. Nor is there evidence that the bodies were buried in a clandestine manner. The J&K Police have already established the identities of 574 of those buried, and another 17 bodies have been exhumed and laid to rest by next-of-kin. Each killing appears to have been recorded in a First Information Report, as required by law. Damningly, however, the post-mortems carried out on those killed were slapdash in the extreme, which means a number of the dead might have been victims of extrajudicial execution.