To avoid crowding,J&K authorities bury militants' bodies in far unmarked graves

In a new development, authorities are quietly burying the bodies of local militants at faraway places in unmarked graves to avoid crowding of people for funerals.

This is for the first time in the three-decade-old armed-insurgency in Kashmir that bodies of local militants are not being handed over to their families for the last rites.

On April 22, four local militants were killed in an encounter with the security forces in south Kashmir’s Shopian district. The slain militants were locals and identified as Basharat Shah, Wakeel Dar, Tariq Bhat, and Uzair Bhat. They were reportedly affiliated with Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba outfits, but had of late joined Ansar Gazwat-ul-Hind (AuGH), an affiliate of Al-Qaeda in Kashmir.

However, the police didn’t reveal their identity, and according to sources, they were buried somewhere in Sonamarg area in Ganderbal district.

Inspector General Police (IGP), Kashmir, Vijay Kumar confirmed that the slain militants were not buried at their native places. “Families identified three out of four militants and participated in a burial in presence of a magistrate,” he said without revealing the identity of the slain ultras.

On April 17, despite two families reportedly claiming that the militants killed in another Shopian gunfight were their kin, the authorities quietly buried the two in a Baramulla hamlet of north Kashmir. JK Police has been maintaining that the two slain militants are unidentified.

Earlier, this month Police had registered an FIR and later arrested over a dozen persons in Sopore area of Baramulla for allegedly attending the funeral of local Jaish-e-Mohammad militant commander, in violation of lockdown protocol in wake of coronavirus outbreak.

Till now, the procedure had been to hand over bodies of local militants to their families, while those of unidentified and non-local militants were buried in few graveyards in remote areas of Baramulla and Kupwara districts.

However, according to intelligence reports, in the recent few years, ‘glamorized funerals’ of militants had acted as fertile ground for militants to mobilise opinion in their favour and asking youths to join the militancy.

As per a 2018 confidential CID report, post the 2016 unrest in Kashmir, people swarm in large numbers to the funerals of militants, providing a boost of sorts to militancy through the glorification of the killed ultras. It further cited many instances of youths joining a militant group after attending the funeral of a slain militant.