The families still waiting for bodies of loved ones

On a cold November evening, the families of two men in Indian-administered Kashmir waited for their corpses to arrive - so they could bury them for the second time. Altaf Bhat and Mudasir Gul had been buried once by security forces, who said the men were killed during a shootout with militants in Srinagar city. Gul, they said, was associated with militants, while Bhat was caught in the crossfire. But their families alleged they were used as "human shields".

After protests, authorities agreed to exhume their bodies and return them to the families - a rare move in the restive region. They also said they would investigate the allegations, but this brought little comfort to the relatives. "Nobody has got justice in the last 30 years. How can we expect it?" asked Abdul Majeed Bhat, Bhat's elder brother.

Security forces have long been accused of excesses towards locals in Kashmir, one of the world's most militarised zones. India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir in full, but control only parts of it. An armed revolt has been waged in the India-administered region for over three decades, claiming thousands of lives.

In this period, hundreds of families have accused Indian security forces of branding civilians as militants and staging extrajudicial killings, sometimes for promotions. Activists say the situation has become worse since August 2019, when Jammu and Kashmir state was divided into two federally administered territories.

"Since 2019, the security forces have been implicated in numerous abuses while enforcing restrictions on movement including routine harassment and ill-treatment at checkpoints, arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings," Human Rights Watch said in a recent statement. Security forces have almost always denied these allegations.

Kuldeep Khoda, a former director general of Jammu and Kashmir Police, told the BBC that families often claim encounter killings are fake with little evidence. This, he said, delegitimises the forces' work. But campaigners say families struggle even for basic information.

In 2017, activist Muhammad Ahsan Untoo filed a petition with Kashmir's Human Rights Commission, asking for details of all probes launched into extrajudicial killings since 1989 - around the time violent insurgency began against Indian rule. He got his answer a year later: of the 506 inquiries ordered between 1989 and 2018, only one was completed.