Tarushi AswaniShopian, India-administered Kashmir: In July, three men accused by Indian authorities of being part of armed groups were killed in an encounter with Indian forces in Kashmir’s Lidwas area.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that they were responsible for the attack that happened in Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, killing 26 people.
But for Dilshada Begum, who is often found in a state of stupor, the news brought back memories of her son, who is buried far away from her home in Shopian.
For the last three years, she has often gazed into nothingness, thinking of her son, Arif Rashid Wani, whom authorities accused of joining Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group that is listed as a terror organisation by the United Nations.
After her son left home in April 2022, Begum was devastated. When news of his death arrived in October, his body was never returned to her.
Instead, under orders from authorities, he was buried far from home in an unmarked grave, denying Begum and her husband the chance to perform their son’s last rites—a trauma layered on top of his death.
But Begum is not alone in reciting prayers at unmarked graves.
Covid, coffins & conflict
In March 2020, India announced its first Covid lockdown. Large social gatherings, including funerals, were restricted to 50 people.
Funerals of young Kashmiris alleged to have taken up arms against Indian forces had historically drawn mass mourners. The bodies of the dead drew a sea of people, mourners, strangers, clambering to shoulder the coffin by strangers who admired their bravado. An act of defiance against state authority.
On April 8, 2020, Sajad Nawab Dar, whom authorities claimed was a commander in Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), was killed by Indian forces. Hundreds attended his funeral in north Kashmir’s Sopore, flouting Covid restrictions.
Following this, authorities began burying people alleged to be part of armed groups at distant, mass burial sites under police watch.
When Hizbul Mujahideen commander Riyaz Naikoo was killed in May 2020, his body was not handed over to his family; rather, he was discreetly buried in Sonmarg, Ganderbal, under police supervision.
Authorities feared the wave of wailers who would want to shoulder Naikoo’s coffin.
Naikoo, who joined the rebels in 2012 and was an aide to Burhan Wani, a famed Hizbul Mujahideen commander, whose funeral in July 2016 was thronged by thousands.
Similar restrictions were placed when other young men accused of affiliation with armed groups, such as Junaid Sehrai, were killed. Mourners not only walked with their funeral processions, but also felt blessed by shouldering their bodies and even touching their hair and faces to pledge their allegiance to them.
Even pro-freedom leader and Hurriyat patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who was buried in the dead of night in September 2021, after police forcibly entered his family home, and took over burial proceedings under police-imposed conditions.
Geelani was 91 when he passed away; neither was he accused of being an armed rebel nor was he in a gunbattle with the police, yet years of his legacy stirred fear of his funeral within the authorities, making the State steal his body, and monitor his grave even until now.
‘Borrowing money to visit burial’
Back in Shopian district’s Heff Shirmal village, Dilshada Begum’s anxieties do not fade with every passing day. Rather, the other graves in her village constantly remind her of her son Arif, who is buried under police watch in Handwara, which is almost 150 kilometres away from her home.
“He is gone forever, we can’t remember him even in prayers,” Begum tells TRT World, sobbing at the grim reality that her son’s grave sits a hundred miles from home.
Begum’s husband, who lives with physical disabilities and struggles to earn an income, is responsible for feeding her and their three children.
With mounting financial responsibilities, it is impossible for the family to offer prayers from time to time at Arif’s grave, as is customary.
“We have to borrow money from relatives to make one trip to his grave, which we can afford only once a year. Now money decides whether we mourn at a numbered grave or not,” Begum tells TRT World.
In the neighbouring village of Chitragam, Ghulam Hassan Bhat’s expressions are guarded by his thick white beard, which he frequently scratches while talking.
Bhat’s eyes don’t look beyond what is in front of him; for him, life has stood still ever since his son, Umer Bhat, was killed by security forces in May 2021, accused of affiliation with the Al Badr group.
“Umer was killed along with three of his companions on the same day. The police only allowed 8–10 of our family members to attend his funeral. They buried him in a cemetery far away in Handwara. The situation was very tense at the funeral site; there were many police officers present,” Bhat recalls.
Bhat adds that when Umer was killed, he identified his body and those of his companions to the police. “We offered a joint funeral prayer for all three boys. The army still visits our area, but they don’t say anything to us now,” he adds.
Bhat does not wish to desacralise his son’s grave now. But he believes that parents naturally wish for their children to be buried in the ancestral graveyard so they can visit and recite prayers for them.
“It would have been better if Umer had been buried here from the beginning, but we buried him with our own hands there. The only regret is that his grave is far away. As long as I live, I will keep visiting his grave to recite Fatiha,” he shares with TRT World.
Denied a dignified death
Authorities continue to bury those accused of rebelling against Indian rule in remote locations without family consent, long after Covid restrictions were lifted.
Families not only lose their children to conflict but must travel miles to visit their graves, their mourning constrained by surveillance and state orders.
In 2020, the orders first arrived to bury men described by Indian forces as members of armed groups far away under the aegis of Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) Vijay Kumar.
Kumar was appointed as Kashmir’s top police officer immediately after the Indian government ended Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional position in 2019. He is also the police officer whose tenure saw the killing of 552 young men.
But for families of the deceased, their trauma extends beyond death counts; it is laced with helplessness, anxiety, and loss, which keep the scabs of sorrow fresh in their hearts, and when they wish to visit the dead, those scabs are ripped open.
This practice of burying the fallen in clandestine locations violates international humanitarian law, erodes cultural and religious rites, and deepens Kashmir’s decades-long wounds.
According to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), all states are bound by obligations concerning the treatment of the dead in armed conflict, irrespective of the status or affiliation of the deceased.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which enjoy universal ratification, require parties to ensure that the dead are honourably interred, that graves are respected, marked and registered, and that records are transmitted to the relevant authorities (e.g., Geneva Convention I, Article 17).
These protections apply irrespective of whether the deceased were combatants, youth accused of militancy, or labelled “terrorists”.
Sheikh Showkat, a renowned Kashmiri human rights activist, tells TRT World that these obligations apply regardless of the label assigned to the person by the authorities.
For decades, Kashmir has remained a flashpoint where politics, identity, and violence collide. Anti-India groups rose up against Delhi in 1989, demanding freedom for the Himalayan valley or its accession to Pakistan.
The conflict has left deep scars: an estimated 70,000 lives lost, families displaced, and entire generations growing up amid checkpoints and crackdowns.
Families of those now dead bear an additional, invisible burden: even in death, their children are denied the dignity of prayers and ancestral graves.
