For decades now civilians in Kashmir have been victims of mass violence at the hands of Indian security forces as well as from armed militants. From 1990 to 2011, the Jammu and Kashmir state government reportedly recorded a total of over 43,000 people killed. According to many human rights groups, this number goes above 110,000 for people who are missing or have been killed in the armed conflict.
 

Shocking as the government statistics are, human rights activists and lawyers say that the figure of civilian deaths caused by the security forces fails to reflect the true scale of violations by security forces. Over the past couple of decades, stories of these human rights violations have been either erased from the records of various state departments or never correctly noted. The dearth of public information on many thousands of people who have lost their lives in Kashmir remains glaring.
 

A large part of these civilians killed have been at the hands of the Indian security forces. Officially the Indian Armed Forces are supposed to be there as protectors against violence by armed rebel groups and an invasion from Pakistan, but their human rights violations against the populace have continued with impunity.

 

This digital archive is an attempt to preserve the public memory of lives lost in the most militarized region in the world. It is an attempt to place their stories at the center of the narrative. It is an attempt to preserve information to unearth the scale of human tragedy in the Kashmir Valley.