Killings

The two counts

2018 is the cleanest year to examine, because the United Nations printed both counts in the same paragraph of the same report.^[1]

Conflict deaths in Jammu & Kashmir, 2018
Counted by	Civilians	Militants	Security forces	Total
JKCCS Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society	~160	267	159	586
Ministry of Home Affairs Government of India, figures to 2 December 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

On militants and security forces the two counts are close. On civilians they differ by more than fourfold. That is not a methodological quibble at the margins — it is a disagreement about whether roughly a hundred and twenty people were civilians at all.

OHCHR recorded 586 as the highest number of conflict-related casualties since 2008, and the ~160 civilian deaths as believed to be the highest in over a decade.

Who killed the civilians

JKCCS’s breakdown of the 160, as reported by OHCHR:^[2]

Attributed to	Deaths
Indian security forces	71
Armed group members or unidentified gunmen	43
Shelling and firing by Pakistani troops along the Line of Control	29
Of the total, occurring in the Kashmir Valley	122

The third row belongs on this site as much as the first. Twenty-nine civilians killed by Pakistani shelling is in the same UN paragraph as the seventy-one killed by Indian forces, and a site that printed one and hid the other would deserve to be disbelieved about both.

The decade figure

1,081

civilians killed by security forces in extrajudicial killings between 2008 and 2018

JKCCS figure, reported in UN OHCHR, 8 July 2019, para. 8

civilians killed in the first three months of 2019 — by armed groups, unknown gunmen, Indian security forces and cross-border shelling

UN OHCHR, 8 July 2019, para. 8

What happens after a civilian is killed

This is the part that turns a death toll into a pattern. OHCHR recorded in July 2019 that:^[3]

despite the high number of civilians killed near encounter sites in 2018, there was no information about any new investigation into excessive use of force leading to casualties;
there was no information on the status of the five investigations launched into extrajudicial executions in 2016;
Jammu and Kashmir established no investigations at all into civilian killings in 2017;
no prosecutions were reported;
it did not appear that Indian security forces had been asked to re-evaluate or change their crowd-control techniques or rules of engagement.

A hundred and sixty people die, seventy-one of them at the hands of the state, and the documented institutional response is nothing. Why that is structural rather than accidental →

A painted memorial board at the Mazar-e-Shuhada martyrs' graveyard in Bijbehara, listing in columns the names, parentage and addresses of those killed in the town on 22 October 1993. — Primary documentThe memorial board at the Mazar-e-Shuhada in Bijbehara, listing by name those killed in the town on **22 October 1993**, when security forces fired on a protest march. Thirty-three years later, no accused has been punished. This site does not publish photographs of the dead. It publishes their names, because the state has never counted them.TamirNazir · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The massacres

Six incidents, spread across a decade, in which security forces killed unarmed civilians in numbers. Not one has produced a conviction.

Documented mass killings by Indian forces
Incident	Force	Recorded dead	Outcome
Gawkadal bridge, Srinagar 21 January 1990	CRPF	contested; ~50 upwards	No prosecution. Commonly described as the largest single killing of protesters in the conflict.
Zakoora & Tengpora, Srinagar 1 March 1990	Security forces	contested	No prosecution.
Funeral procession, Srinagar 21 May 1990	CRPF	at least 47	Documented by Amnesty International. Fired on mourners at the funeral of Maulvi Mohammed Farooq. No prosecution.
Sopore 13 April 1992	BSF	13	Documented by Amnesty International. Entered houses and shot inhabitants. No prosecution.
Sopore 6 January 1993	BSF	at least 53	Amnesty published a dedicated case study. Houses burned, shops looted. No conviction.
Bijbehara 22 October 1993	Security forces	contested; 37–51	Fired on a protest march; a large proportion of the dead were students. No accused punished.

The Sopore killings of January 1993 are the best documented, because Amnesty International published a case study three months later. Its opening description is worth reading exactly as written:^[4]

This paper describes the extrajudicial killing of at least 53 men and women in the town of Sopore, Jammu and Kashmir, by members of the paramilitary Border Security Forces (BSF), who went on a rampage on 6 January 1993, setting fire to houses and looting shops.
Amnesty International, ASA 20/17/93, April 1993

In the same document Amnesty set out the pattern the individual incidents belong to: “persistent reports of thousands of arbitrary arrests and prolonged arbitrary detentions under special laws curbing important legal safeguards”, and “routine torture of detainees so brutal that it frequently results in death, rape of women during search operations, and extrajudicial executions of unarmed civilians, often falsely labelled as having been the result of ‘encounters’ or as having occurred in ‘cross-fire’.”

That was written in 1993. The 2019 UN report describes the same pattern.

The staged encounters

Two cases show the mechanism by which a killing becomes a legitimate one on paper.

Pathribal, March 2000. Days after thirty-five Sikh villagers were massacred at Chittisinghpura, security forces killed five men and presented them as the perpetrators. A Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry later concluded the killings were staged. Proceedings against the accused soldiers were closed after the Army declined to grant sanction to prosecute — the Section 7 mechanism, working exactly as written.

Machil, April 2010. Soldiers killed three labourers and presented them as infiltrators killed while crossing the Line of Control. The exposure of the staging triggered the protests of summer 2010, in which more than a hundred people, many of them teenagers, were killed. OHCHR noted in 2019 that the Indian Army had been resisting efforts to release details of military court trials in which soldiers were initially found guilty and later acquitted by a higher military tribunal.^[5]

A wide photograph of the Pahalgam valley in Kashmir: green meadows and forested slopes rising to bare mountains under cloud. — The Pahalgam valley. On 22 April 2025, gunmen killed twenty-six people here, most of them Hindu tourists. Fourteen UN special-procedure mandate holders condemned that attack without qualification — and then documented what the state did afterwards.Wikimedia contributors · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Killings by armed groups

The record includes these, and they are not a footnote. OHCHR devotes a full section of its 2019 report to abuses by armed groups.^[6] On this site’s own accounting:

43 of the 160 civilians killed in 2018 were killed by armed group members or unidentified gunmen — JKCCS’s own figure.
Pulwama, 14 February 2019 — 40 CRPF personnel killed by a vehicle-borne IED.^[7]
Pahalgam, 22 April 2025 — 26 people killed, most of them Hindu tourists, reportedly identified by religion before being shot.^[8]
Spring 1990 onward — the targeted killings and intimidation that drove the Kashmiri Pandit community from the valley. Addressed in full here.

The argument this site makes is not that only one side kills civilians. It is that only one side has a statute granting its personnel immunity from prosecution in advance, and only one side administers the territory and owes its inhabitants the protections of the ICCPR.