On Human Rights Day, Kashmir rights groups decry India crackdown
Al Jazeera :
On the International Human Rights Day every year, 62-year-old Parveena Ahanger and the families of hundreds of victims of enforced disappearances in Indian-administered Kashmir would gather at a park to seek the whereabouts of their children or spouses who disappeared during decades of conflict.
For Ahanger and the family members of other victims, who would gather under the banner of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and hold pictures of their missing kin, it would be a day of protest and remembrance.
As the world marks Human Rights Day on Friday, those families say they are “silently mourning” their kin at home. The reason: a crackdown on rights groups and activists by Indian agencies in the Himalayan region, also claimed in its entirety by neighbouring Pakistan.
Last month, prominent rights activist Khurram Parvez was arrested under a stringent terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for “criminal conspiracy and waging war against the government”. He has been shifted to a jail in the capital New Delhi.
Parvez, 44, is programme coordinator at Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a leading group documenting and campaigning against rights abuses by the Indian forces in Indian-administered Kashmir for the last 20 years.
The JKCCS has published extensive reports on torture, civilian killings, rapes and illegal detentions, and detailing the impunity given to by the armed forces in the disputed region. In 2008, a shocking disclosure about the presence of more than 2,000 unmarked graves in the northern part of Indian-administered Kashmir shook the region.
It is Parvez’s second arrest in five years. He was arrested in 2016 under the controversial Public Safety Act (PSA), a law under which a person can be detained for a year or more without trial. He was released after 76 days of detention.
India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval last month described civil society groups in India as “new frontiers of war” and said they could be “manipulated to hurt the interests of a nation”.