Surankot is a small dusty frontier town of Poonch district in Jammu & Kashmir. A row of decrepit concrete constructions – the town's marketplace – stand face to face on the both sides of a narrow, potholed road. At the end of this line of shops, a bend in the road leads to the police station and an Indian Army cantonment. A stone's throw further is a graveyard containing unmarked graves, with bodies unknown to the residents.
Unmarked graves in J & K made international headlines in September, after the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) asked the government to initiate investigations to identify over 2100 unidentified bodies at 38 sites in Baramulla, Bandipora and Kupwara districts of the Kashmir Valley. Poonch came into news after another complaint was filed with the Commission, asking the SHRC to extend its investigation to Jammu. The complainants submitted that they have credible information about the existence of 2717 and 1127 unmarked graves in Poonch and Rajouri districts of Jammu, respectively.
Sofi Aziz Joo is the nonagenarian caretaker of the Surankot graveyard. Locals say Joo is the man 'who has seen it all'. He sits cross-legged outside the compound's gate, busily attending to visitors, most of them young women. Adjacent to the graveyard is a small roofless walled shrine containing the grave of a saint, Syed Haider Shah, revered by locals. Five women are also squatting on the concrete pavement facing the shrine's wall, rolling the cotton to be dipped into earthen oil lamps. 'The lamps will be lit during the evening,' says one of them, Maimoona Jan. 'I have faith that the saint buried here will intercede with god to end our miseries.' A middle-aged woman interrupts Jan to offer us some dried dates. 'Her wish might have been answered,' Jan tells the visiting journalist, 'and in satisfaction she is distributing dates.'
I ask Jan about the unmarked graves, and she tells me to talk to Joo. The old man's wrinkled face sports an untrimmed white beard at the chin. Thinking I am a pilgrim to the shrine, he rises up to greet me, his hands noticeably frail as we shake. When I tell him why I have come, it takes a few minutes of persuasion before he agrees to show me the unmarked graves. Anonymous bodies began to be delivered to Joo's graveyard soon after insurgency broke out in J & K, in 1989. So far, Joo reports, he has buried more than 2500 unidentified bodies on these grounds. 'Police and Indian Army soldiers would bring those bodies and direct me to bury them,' he says. 'The bodies were usually bullet-ridden, mutilated, faces disfigured and sometimes without limbs.' Today, just seven graves in Joo's graveyard bear plaques – said to hold the bodies of policemen, killed while fighting militants. The others have no identification.