A humanitarian record

Kashmir is occupied, and the people who live there are paying for other people’s ambitions.

Two states have contested this territory for seventy-eight years. Neither has ever asked its inhabitants what they want. When somebody finally did, in the only serious survey ever taken on both sides of the Line of Control, between 74% and 95% of people in the Kashmir Valley said they wanted to belong to neither of them.^[1]

This site exists to inform. It documents what has been done in Jammu and Kashmir, by whoever did it, from sources you can check yourself. It does not argue that any of it was justified — not by either side, not by anything. No political objective is worth a single one of these deaths.

Read the record What Kashmiris want 1846–2026

An original composite artwork in the shape of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Inside the outline the territory is split between two futures: on the right, snow peaks at sunrise, blossoming orchards, a turquoise lake with houseboats and shikaras, and chinar-shaded villages. On the left and along the bottom, the same land under occupation — armoured vehicles, a watchtower flying the Indian flag, soldiers advancing, helicopters overhead, a burning vehicle, ruined buildings, a crowd of masked protesters, a man holding a placard reading AZADI FREEDOM, and in the foreground a mother crying out while holding a crying child. Red runs down the left edge of the outline like blood, and barbed wire crosses the corners. Set into the corners are the lines OCCUPATION IS A CRIME, BORDERS DIVIDE HUMANITY, AZADI — OUR RIGHT OUR CRY, OCCUPIED BUT NOT OWNED — RESISTANCE IS OUR EXISTENCE, and SILENCED VOICES, BROKEN LIVES, ENDLESS TEARS. Across the centre, in large letters, KASHMIR, and beneath it HEAVEN ON EARTH, PRISON IN REALITY. — **“Heaven on Earth, Prison in Reality.”** An original composite artwork, not a photograph: the two futures of the same valley held inside one outline. Everything the site documents in figures is in here as a single image — the orchards and the lake that made this one of the most beautiful places in Asia, and the watchtower, the armour and the grief that were put on top of them. The land is the same. Only the occupation is new.Original artwork by Muzzammil Eddie Sajjad · © 2026 · All rights reserved · usage terms

Where this site stands

The land is occupied. That is the word the scholarship uses — Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation (Stanford, 2023), Duschinski and others’ Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Pennsylvania, 2018), Ather Zia’s Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (Washington, 2019). The International People’s Tribunal analyses its case files “within the context of an occupation”. The library.

Both states have committed grave acts, and documenting them is not the same as balancing them. This site records killings by armed groups, the Pahalgam attack of April 2025, Pulwama in 2019, the expulsion of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, and what the United Nations has said about the part of Kashmir administered by Pakistan. It records them because a record with holes is not a record. It records them without accepting that any of it licenses an occupation, or excuses what has been done under one. The hard questions.

Nothing here justifies war. Not on either side. Measured against the loss of life in this region, no reasoning offered by anyone — strategic, legal, historical, religious — comes close to sufficing. A single death is not worth a political ambition.

And this is a plea, not only a file. Kashmir would be one of the most beautiful places on earth to live in and to visit. Instead it has been a battleground for three generations, set back decades, its people unemployed, surveilled, bereaved and unasked. The request this site makes of a reader is simply that they not look away from a region the world has found it convenient to ignore.

70,000+

people killed in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989, on the count kept by Kashmiri civil society. Most of them civilians. Every one of them somebody’s.

The figure of “more than 70,000 deaths” is stated by the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir with APDP, Alleged Perpetrators, December 2012, and is the count used by Kashmiri civil society. Lower totals — commonly around 40,000–47,000 — circulate in Indian official and media accounts. No independent count has ever been permitted. Both counts, and why the gap exists

Zero

prosecutions of armed forces personnel that the Government of India has sanctioned under AFSPA in Jammu and Kashmir — in thirty-six years of the law

UN OHCHR, Update on the situation of human rights in Kashmir, 8 July 2019, para. 13, covering “nearly three decades” to that date. How Section 7 does this

1,253

people blinded by metal pellets fired by Indian security forces, mid-2016 to the end of 2018

Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, Srinagar, reported in UN OHCHR, 8 July 2019, para. 10. The weapon

8,000–10,000

men estimated to have been subjected to enforced disappearance since 1990

The estimate of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons — an organisation of victims’ families. Attributed as theirs; not a UN or judicial finding. The graves

A map of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir drawn to the United Nations convention for disputed territory, showing the Indian-administered, Pakistan-administered and Chinese-administered portions separated by the Line of Control and the Line of Actual Control. — Primary documentThe former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, drawn to the United Nations convention for a disputed territory — the only depiction that does not assume the answer. India’s official maps show the whole of it as Indian; Pakistan’s show the whole of it as Pakistani. It is in fact divided between three states, and administered in parts that **none of its inhabitants voted for**. Security Council Resolution 47 said in 1948 that its future should be settled by a free and impartial plebiscite. That vote has never been held.Wikimedia contributors · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

What Kashmiris said when somebody finally asked

“If you were given the choice in a vote tomorrow…” In the Kashmir Valley, between 74% and 95% chose independence. Across Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir as a whole, 2% chose to join Pakistan and 28% to join India — and that 28% sits almost entirely in the districts at the bottom of this chart.Robert W. Bradnock, Kashmir: Paths to Peace, Chatham House, May 2010, Table 6. 3,774 face-to-face interviews, 17 September–28 October 2009. Quota sampling; fifteen years old; no comparable survey has been permitted since. The full findings and their limitations

A satellite image of the Kashmir Valley, showing the valley floor enclosed by snow-covered mountain ranges, with Wular Lake visible as a dark shape. — The Kashmir Valley from orbit. The enclosing ranges are why this is a distinct place with a distinct people, and the reason two states have spent seventy-eight years contesting it.NASA / MODIS, 17 November 2016 · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Why this site prints two sets of numbers

Almost everything written about Kashmir online asks you to take a number on faith. This site does not. Where the Government of India and Kashmiri civil society count differently, both counts appear, side by side, attributed.

Here is 2018, the year the United Nations described as having the highest number of conflict-related casualties since 2008. These two rows come from the same paragraph of the same UN report:^[2]

Conflict deaths in Jammu & Kashmir, 2018 — as counted by two parties
Counted by	Civilians	Militants	Security forces	Total
JKCCS Kashmiri civil society	~160	267	159	586
Ministry of Home Affairs Government of India, to 2 Dec 2018	37	238	86	not stated

The same year, counted twice. On militants and security forces the two counts nearly agree. On civilians they differ more than fourfold — a disagreement about whether roughly a hundred and twenty people were civilians at all.Both series appear in the same paragraph of the same UN report: OHCHR, Update on the situation of human rights in Kashmir, 8 July 2019, para. 7. Government figures run to 2 December 2018. Every figure on this site, with its source

The gap is not a rounding error. On civilian deaths the two figures differ by more than four times. That gap is the story: a state that administers a territory under emergency powers, counting the dead very differently from the people who live there, with no independent body permitted to settle the question. The United Nations has asked to be let in to do exactly that. Neither India nor Pakistan has agreed.^[3]

So this site takes the only defensible position available: publish both, name both, and let the reader see the distance between them.

What the United Nations said, most recently

On 24 November 2025, fourteen United Nations special-procedure mandate holders — independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council, including the Special Rapporteurs on torture, on extrajudicial executions, on human rights defenders, and the entire Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances — issued a joint statement on Jammu and Kashmir.^[4]

They began by condemning the killing of twenty-six people at Pahalgam in April 2025:

We unequivocally condemn the brutal terrorist attack on a tourist area and extend our condolences to the victims, their families, and the Government of India. However, all governments must respect international human rights law while combating terrorism.
UN Special Procedures, 24 November 2025

Then they set out what followed. Around 2,800 people arrested and detained, among them journalists and human rights defenders. Around 8,000 social media accounts blocked. Punitive house demolitions carried out without court orders, which the experts said “constitute collective punishment” and defy India’s own Supreme Court. And this:

We condemn reports of arbitrary arrests and detentions, suspicious deaths in custody, torture and other ill-treatment, lynchings, and discriminatory treatment of Kashmiri and Muslim communities.
UN Special Procedures, 24 November 2025

That is not a pamphlet. That is fourteen UN mandate holders, named, on the record, ten months ago.

Read the full international record →

The dossier

The library

Reading

Books, reports and film

An annotated bibliography — from Alastair Lamb and Sumantra Bose to the 550-page torture report and the films India has tried to suppress.

Read →

Reference directory

Every organisation, archive, tracker and primary document this site relies on, linked and checked.

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Contribute

Send us your work

Essays, reportage, poetry, art, photography, testimony, translation. Reviewed by a human before anything goes live.

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Read the page we would rather not have written

An advocacy site that only prints what helps its case is not a reference. It is a leaflet, and it will be dismissed in a week. So this site keeps a page for the strongest arguments against its own position: the flight of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, killings by armed groups, and what the United Nations has said about the part of Kashmir administered by Pakistan.

The hard questions →

Sources & notes

Robert W. Bradnock, Kashmir: Paths to Peace, Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), May 2010, Table 6. 3,774 face-to-face interviews conducted 17 September – 28 October 2009 on both sides of the Line of Control — 2,374 in 11 districts of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and 1,400 in 7 districts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Support for independence for the whole of Kashmir: Baramula 95%, Srinagar 82%, Badgam 75%, Anantnag 74%. Support for joining Pakistan across Indian-administered J&K: 2%. Support for joining India: 28%, concentrated outside the Kashmir Valley. Stated honestly: independence is the most popular single option but not a territory-wide majority — it exceeds 50% in only four districts, all in the Valley, and runs at 1% or less in five others. The survey is fifteen years old and used quota sampling; no government has permitted a comparable one since. The full findings, limitations included.
OHCHR, 8 July 2019, para. 7. The JKCCS figures and the Ministry of Home Affairs figures appear in the same paragraph of the report. JKCCS is the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a Srinagar-based human rights organisation; its figures are its own and are attributed as such.
OHCHR, 8 July 2019, para. 3: neither India nor Pakistan had taken concrete steps towards providing OHCHR with unconditional access to their respective sides of the Line of Control. The 2018 report had urged the Human Rights Council to consider establishing an international commission of inquiry.
UN OHCHR, UN experts alarmed by Indian counter-terrorism operations violating human rights in Jammu and Kashmir, press release of the Special Procedures, 24 November 2025. ohchr.org. Special Rapporteurs and Working Group members are independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council; they are not UN staff and their views are their own.