STRUCTURES OF VIOLENCE

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| Structures of Violence
three crimes together can lead to an understanding to
actually what happened over those 13 days. Until
then, the State stands indicted for all three crimes.
ENDNOTE: ON LITIGATING MASS VIOLENCE IN
KASHMIR
Why should we preserve documents that say our
father's were in the wrong? This is what the Summary
of Evidence [conducted by the Army in Pathribal]
concluded and the Court of the Chief Judicial
Magistrate nodded to. The Court document is not a
183
Taveez.
-Abdul Rashid Khan, son of Jumma Khan, killed in the
Pathribal 'fake encounter'
The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
[JKCCS] is litigating the cases of mass violence at
Kunan-Poshpora, Sopore, Saderkoot and Sailan. It is
also in the process of litigating the Pathribal and
Mohra-Bacchai massacres. So far, the survivors and
their families have been denied justice in the courts,
whether those in Jammu and Kashmir or in the case of
Pathribal, in the Supreme Court of India. This is in
violation of the International Law of Occupation as the
occupiers' are under obligation to respect the human
rights of the occupied until a return of sovereignty to
the occupied is arrived at. The judiciary in Jammu and
Kashmir is part of the Indian Judicial system though
Jammu and Kashmir has its own system of criminal
prosecution outlined in the Ranbir Penal Code [RPC].
However, as has been elaborated throughout this
chapter the Indian State and its agencies have sought
to subvert every demand for justice and use the courts
as a tool in creating and maintaining a culture of
impunity. A process of justice so envisioned is a
structure of violence in itself.
However, the legal process serves an important role
as a conveyor of the struggle of the survivors of mass
violence for justice and dignity in face of an
oppressive occupation enabled by militarism. The
court serves a memory bank, a repository of the
records of violencein the ght against forgetfulness in
future generations.In each of the cases of mass
violence, invaluable information regarding the
incidents is obtained from documentation such as the
statements, medical records, pictures, maps--
evidentiary materials necessitated by the
investigation process- in turn made public by virtue of
being produced before a court.
We see litigation as an act of resistance to expose the
state- part of a larger campaign of activism by lawyers
in Jammu and Kashmir. Even though there are few
indictments of the perpetrators of mass violence and
no punishments, a case is made for the moral
indictment of the Indian State in Jammu and Kashmir.
183 An amulet of some spiritual signicance.