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About
What this site is, and how it is sourced
An independent documentation project. It takes a side. It does not invent evidence to support it.
The position this site takes
Jammu and Kashmir is occupied territory, and its people are paying for ambitions that are not theirs. That is the position, stated plainly.
Four things follow from it, and the site holds all four at once:
- The conduct of the Indian state in the territory it administers amounts to serious, systematic and continuing violations of international human rights law — and those violations are enabled by statutes that grant effective immunity in advance to the people who commit them. File 04.
- The people of the territory have never been given the choice about their own future that the Security Council said they should have, and when they were finally asked something close to the question, most of the Kashmir Valley said it wanted to belong to neither India nor Pakistan. The survey.
- Both states have committed grave acts, and this site documents them. It 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 Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Documenting a crime is not the same as balancing it against another, and none of it licenses an occupation. The hard questions.
- No war here was justified, by anyone. Not by strategy, not by law, not by history, not by religion, not by provocation. Measured against what has been lost in this region, no reasoning offered by any party comes close to sufficing. A single death is not worth a political ambition.
The word occupation is not rhetoric here; it is the term the field uses. See Hafsa Kanjwal, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation (Stanford, 2023); Duschinski, Bhan, Zia and Mahmood, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Pennsylvania, 2018); Ather Zia, Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (Washington, 2019). The library.
What this site is for
It is a humanitarian appeal, built as a reference. The purpose is to inform — to put the record somewhere a journalist, a researcher, a parliamentary staffer or a stranger can check it, and to make it harder for the world to go on finding this region convenient to ignore.
Kashmir would be one of the most beautiful places on earth to live in and to visit. Instead three generations have grown up in a militarised zone, with 96% of people in Srinagar telling an international survey that their main problem was that there was no work. That is the loss this site is about. The life they don’t get to have.
It is an advocacy site and does not pretend to be neutral about any of that. What it refuses to do is manufacture the evidence.
Editorial standards
These are the rules the site is built under. They are not decoration; they decided what appears on every page.
- No number without a named source. Every figure carries who counted it, in what document, on what date. “Studies show” and “it is estimated” do not appear here.
- Where the counts conflict, print both. The Government of India’s figures appear alongside those of Kashmiri civil society, attributed to each. Readers are trusted to see the gap and draw from it.
- Advocacy organisations are named as advocacy organisations. JKCCS, APDP, IPTK and others produced most of the primary documentation that exists. Their work is indispensable and it is cited by name — never laundered into neutral phrasing.
- Attacks on Indian civilians and forces are reported. Pahalgam in April 2025, Pulwama in February 2019, killings by armed groups, the flight of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990. A record that omits them is not a record.
- Charges are described as charges. Bail is not acquittal. Allegation is not finding. Live legal cases are dated, because their status changes.
- Contested claims are labelled contested. Including where the contest is inconvenient for the argument this site makes.
Source tiers
| Tier | What it covers | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | UN OHCHR reports and Special Procedures; UN treaty bodies and working group opinions; judgments of courts of record; India’s own official figures (Home Ministry, RTI responses, the State Human Rights Commission); Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; Médecins Sans Frontières; FIDH; peer-reviewed research. | Leads. Load-bearing claims rest here. |
| Tier 2 | Kashmiri civil society documentation — JKCCS, APDP, IPTK, the Kashmir Law & Justice Project. | Used heavily, always named. Often the only record that exists. |
| Tier 3 | Partisan outlets and state information services on either side, Indian and Pakistani alike. | Narrative context only. Never the source of a figure. |
What this project has done before
In September 2019, six weeks after Article 370 was removed and while the territory was still under a total communications blackout, this project paid for a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. It is reproduced here as a historical exhibit — and then held to the same sourcing standard as everything else on this site, which it does not pass. Two of its headline figures would be struck today.
The 2019 advertisement, and the site fact-checking itself →
What this site is not
It is not a news service; it does not chase daily developments. It is not a Pakistani government publication and has no affiliation with any government, party or armed group. It does not publish material that incites violence against anyone, and it will not publish work that attacks Kashmiri Pandits, Hindus, or any other community as a community. The case against a state’s conduct is not a case against a people.
How we count visitors, and what we refuse to collect
This site publishes a visitor count because donations to it pay for reach, and a claim about reach should be checkable like everything else here. So here is precisely what happens when you open a page.
| What is recorded | A tally of page views per day, and a tally of distinct visitors per day. That is all. |
|---|---|
| How visitors are told apart | By a salted hash of the IP address — where the salt is regenerated every day. The same reader on two different days produces two unrelated hashes. This site therefore cannot recognise you across days, by design, and no stored value can be turned back into an address. |
| How long it is kept | Visitor-level rows are deleted after 45 days. Only the daily totals remain. |
| What is never recorded | Your IP address. Cookies — none are set. Your browser or device. The page you were on. Where you came from. Anything that could build a profile of you or link your visits. |
| Who else sees it | Nobody. There is no third party. This site loads no scripts, fonts, images or stylesheets from any other server — a release gate fails the build if one is ever introduced. |
The reason for this is not fastidiousness. Some readers of this site are inside a surveilled region, or have family there. An analytics decision is a safety decision for them. Sending a record of “this device read a page about Kashmiri torture” to a large advertising company would be a thing done to our readers, and no reporting convenience justifies it. File 13 explains why we take that seriously.
Corrections
If a figure, date, attribution or citation on this site is wrong, it will be corrected and the correction noted. Send the page, the specific claim, and what the correct information is, with a source. Use the contribute form and choose “Correction” as the type. Corrections are read before submissions.
The site would rather be corrected than be wrong. Being checkable is the entire strategy.
Reuse
Text written for this site may be quoted, translated and republished freely with attribution and a link. Photographs, artwork and contributed writing remain the property of their creators and are published here by permission — ask them, not us. Primary documents are linked to their publishers wherever possible so that you never have to take this site’s word for what they say.