SRINAGAR, July 07 (New York Times): Mohammad Ishaq Lone got a call from the Indian army one February night, ordering him to meet soldiers at an outpost near his house in Kashmir. It was only after he was hauled off to a brightly lit room, bound and beaten that he discovered why.
A soldier began by punching him in the face, drawing blood, Lone said. Another smacked him with a metal rod and began demanding that he disclose the whereabouts of his brother, who had left home months earlier to join militants waging a campaign to separate Kashmir from Indian rule.
Lone, a pharmacist with two young children, begged them to stop, saying he did not know where his brother had gone. He recalled screaming for help before losing consciousness.
"The world around me was collapsing," he said.
As tensions with the Indian authorities in Kashmir have sharply increased, Kashmiris are calling for an international investigation into accounts of abuse and torture by the security forces.
According to a lengthy new report from Kashmiri activists, thousands of civilians have been summarily arrested and then abused in Kashmir, the centre of a long and bitter territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.
Released in May by rights groups in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, the report profiles 432 victims of torture in detention since 1990.
It includes accounts alleging that Indian security forces had hung Kashmiris by their wrists, shocked them, forced them to stare at high-voltage lamps and dunked them in water mixed with chili powder. Most were civilians accused of having information about militants, the report said, and 49 of them died during or after being tortured.
In interviews with The New York Times, more than two dozen Kashmiris, including 15 whose cases are included in the report, shared similar accounts. The Times reviewed hospital documents and spoke with victims' relatives to help verify their stories.
Though some forms of torture are explicitly illegal in India, the report found that security personnel got away with their actions in every case because of laws that give them broad impunity.
India has emphatically denied accusations of abuses in Kashmir. In an interview, Dilbag Singh, director general of the police in the region, said the report was "generalising things based on data that is fake or fuzzed."
In a written response, Lt Col Mohit Vaishnava, a spokesman for the Indian army, said last month that allegations of abuse were "false and fabricated propaganda."
