(This is an essay from our print quarterly 'The Southasian Military Complex'. See more from the issue here.)
"We were asked to recognise the soldiers who picked our family members. We couldn't… we hadn't seen them properly," said Abdul Rashid. "It was dark that night."
Rashid's father, Jumma Khan, was among the five 'foreign terrorists' killed in a March 2000 'encounter' in Pathribal, a small village in Kashmir Valley's southern district of Anantnag. Rashid was at the Indian Army's Victor Force headquarters at Awantipora, just outside Kashmir's summer capital, Srinagar, where he had been summoned by the army for cross examination in March 2013.
Apart from his difficulty recognising the soldiers, Rashid, one of the prime witnesses, would surely have battled another handicap: human memory. He was being asked to recognise the accused 13 years after they had abducted his father and killed him soon after. Yet, the families of the victims of the Pathribal encounter continued to seek legal remedy. "After all these years, we don't want our absence to be an excuse for them."