Albums of Evidence

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              "text": "Mountains in Bandipora district, June 2017. (Inset) Clothes belonging to Manzoor Ahmad Khan, who was disappeared on 31 August 2017.",
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              "text": "(Left) Family photographs of Ghulam Mohiuddin Dar. Dar was taken from his house by unidentified men on 6 June 1994 as he was about to have lunch. His brother Ali Mohammad Dar believes the men were from the Indian military because they were not Kashmiri. (Right) A chinar tree in Srinagar’s Nishat Gardens casts a shadow on a shamiana erected beneath it.",
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              "text": "An eagle flying over a mountain in Baramulla district. Locals allege that there are unidentified graves in the area’s mountains. (Left inset) A photograph of Mohammad Ramzan Sheik hangs in his house. Sheik was detained by security forces on 13 April 1997 and is still missing. His family fought a legal battle for seven years to get a Srinagar district court to order the state administration to pay them compensation. (Right inset) Irfan Ahmad Khan disappeared in 1994, when he was only 14 years old. His family still keeps a box of his things in a cupboard in the attic of their home.",
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              "text": "On 31 August 2017, Manzoor Ahmad Khan took a shortcut through the woods near his house in Kupwara to go to a village in Bandipora. Khan and a friend were detained by an officer of the 27 Rashtriya Rifles. His friend was released. Army officials denied detaining anyone named Manzoor Ahmad Khan. At the time, Khan was engaged to be married the following month. His family album had many pictures of him in his late teens.",
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              "text": "Portraits of people who suffered pellet-gun injuries, torture and violence at the hands of security forces. Many of these people described sitting for long hours in various kinds of detention centres suffering indignities. Here, they sit dignified—in chairs instead of on the ground—to draw a contrast between the humiliations inflicted upon the bodies of Kashmiris and how they use their bodies as tools of resistance.",
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              "text": "(Clockwise) The first photo taken of Irfan Ahmad Khan as a baby; a photo of Irfan as a child with his father, Habibullah, and sister Rabeena; a photo of Irfan with them at Nishat Gardens; and a photo of Habibullah. Irfan disappeared in 1994. A peon at his school told his parents that he had been taken away by an unknown person. Officers at a police control room only told his parents that he had been taken away by the 7 Jat Battalion of the 20 Rashtriya Rifles. According to Rabeena, Habibullah tried to file a complaint with the police about Irfan’s disappearance but was charged with assisting kin with subversive activities. She said soldiers raided their house and tortured Habibullah while the rest of the family was locked in another room. They took him into custody, continued to torture him and released him a month later.",
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              "text": "(Left) A site that locals allege is an unidentified mass grave. (Right) Photographs of Ghulam Mohammed Bhat taken before his detention and after his death. Bhat was detained by officers of the Special Operations Group. His son Haneef later learnt that his father was constantly shifted between detention centres and finally to a prison in Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad. Haneef found his father dead in the Allahabad prison, his body barely clothed. He saw that his father’s arms were fractured and saw blue-black discolouration on his body. Haneef was asked to take his father’s body and leave.",
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              "text": "Schoolchildren playing in Nishat Garden in Srinagar in June 2017.",
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              "text": "(Left) Mushtaq Ahmad Dar was arrested by the 20 Grenadiers on 13 April 1997 after a midnight raid at his house. (Right) A photograph of Mushtaq Ahmad Dar’s father, Ghulam Mohammad, who died after Mushtaq disappeared; and a photo of his mother, Azrah, during a protest. The family filed a habeas corpus petition to find Mushtaq. The High Court of Jammu and Kashmir observed that he was taken into custody by the 20 Grenadiers, that the respondents were guilty of custodial disappearance and that this was a gross violation of Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. The court ordered compensation of Rs 10 lakh to be paid to the family. His mother said Dar was tortured during the raid while the rest of the family was locked in another room. She visited the regiment’s military camp the next morning and was told that Dar would be released soon. He remains missing. ",
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              "text": "Parts of a report of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir in Srinagar in the case of the disappearance of 32-year-old Abdul Rashid Wani on 7 July 1997. The court observed that Wani had allegedly been arrested and detained by an officer named Captain Yadav of the Gorkha Rifles. The court said the case needed to be treated as a custodial disappearance. When Wani’s wife, Shabnam, and other family members tried to find him, they were shown photographs at a control room in Rawalpora of people who had been killed. Shabnam identified her husband’s feet in one of a set of photos of a man whose face has been disfigured. The family refused a DNA test. (Inset) A photograph of Shabnam and her children submitted to the erstwhile State Human Rights Commission as part of documentation for compensation. ",
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              "text": "A photocopy of a CT scan belonging to a boy studying in the tenth standard, who was injured when the army fired pellets into his face during a protest in Sopore in 2016. The scan showed that his left optic nerve had been damaged. (Centre) Unused shikaras floating on Dal Lake in 2018. (Right) A file bag of a pellet-gun victim. File bags maintained by victims and their families contain important, carefully gathered pieces of evidence against security forces. Families often make multiple copies of these documents and store them in different places in case any one set is destroyed during a raid.",
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              "text": "“What heart is that which doesn’t pray to be with you? God forbid, shall I be away from you and alive? Never let that happen!”—Hajra Begum’s poem about missing her son Basheer Ahmad Sofi. Sofi was her last surviving son. He was picked up by the military from a baker’s shop in Onagam village in Bandipora district. He was last seen in an army camp in the Chitternar forest region. He was not involved with any militant organisations but most of his brothers were. They were all killed in instances of crossfire with the military. Hajra Begum recounted how she had been taken to the army camps many times and tortured, including being burnt with cigarettes.",
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In January 2020, I visited the house of Irfan Ahmad Khan in Srinagar. Khan had gone missing in 1994 when he was still a schoolboy. His family suspected that he had been picked up by the military. As I listened to his family narrate stories about him, I flipped through an album of their photographs. I saw a black-and-white photo of Khan as a baby and then a few more photos of him growing up. The last photo of him was taken on his fourteenth birthday, the year that he disappeared. At the same point that Khan disappeared, evidence of him disappeared from the family album. 

My visit to Khan’s family was part of the project I was working on along with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir. The APDP is a movement against the many enforced disappearances that have been rampant in the valley for decades. An enforced disappearance occurs when a person is detained or abducted and there is subsequently no information provided about the person’s whereabouts or fate. The association estimates that between eight thousand and ten thousand people have been disappeared since the start of the insurgency in Kashmir, which since 1989 has resulted in the massive militarisation of the valley. The APDP documents disappearances and provides support to families of the disappeared. As a photographer, I worked with them to preserve the memories of the disappeared by gathering visual evidence from their families. Khan was the youngest victim of enforced disappearance that I came across.