4,056 graves in Kashmir, 93 per cent Pakistani terrorists: New study shreds separatist myth of Indian Army ‘atrocities’, exposes Pakistan’s bloody proxy war

For over three decades, Kashmir’s graveyards have been used not just as sites of mourning but as weapons in an information war. Western NGOs, separatist lobbies, and Pakistan’s propaganda machine have pushed one carefully curated narrative: that unmarked graves in Kashmir are “evidence” of mass atrocities by Indian security forces.

Reports like Buried Evidence (2009) by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK) went so far as to claim that these graves contained victims of “enforced disappearances.”

Be it Community Human Rights and Advocacy Centre (CHRAC), Amnesty International, The London School of Economics and Political Science, or Human Rights Watch, all of which have demanded “international probes”, insinuating wrongdoing on the part of the Indian state, particularly the Indian Armed Forces, over “disappearances” of locals in Kashmir.

But the latest study by the Save Youth Save Future (SYSF) Foundation, “Unraveling the Truth: A Critical Study of Unmarked and Unidentified Graves in Kashmir Valley (2025)”, has put these myths to rest. After years of fieldwork across Baramulla, Kupwara, Bandipora, and Ganderbal, surveying over 373 graveyards, SYSF has documented 4,056 graves in total.

The results demolish decades of propaganda:

• 2,493 graves of foreign terrorists, mostly Pakistanis, Afghans, and others sent across the Line of Control.
• 1,208 graves of local terrorists, Kashmiris recruited into terrorism.
• 70 graves of tribal invaders from 1947.
• 276 unmarked graves.

That means 93.2% of all graves are identified and documented. Far from “mass graves of civilians,” they overwhelmingly belong to terrorists neutralised in counter-insurgency operations.

The numbers that end the myth

The SYSF report is categorical: “A significant number of the graves contain unidentified individuals, many of whom were foreign militants who infiltrated across the Line of Control and were killed in security operations”.

This single line dismantles the decades-long trope of “mass civilian killings.” These were not victims of a genocidal state policy, but terrorists killed in firefights, many of them unclaimed because their handlers in Rawalpindi denied they ever existed.

The study further notes: “Unidentified burials became a practical necessity rather than a deliberate policy of concealment”. In other words, terrorists carrying no IDs were buried quickly by villagers or mosque committees, hardly the stuff of war crimes.

When 93.2% of graves are accounted for as terrorists or invaders, the hysteria about “thousands of disappeared Kashmiris” collapses.

Pakistan’s hand behind the graves

SYSF places the graves firmly in the context of Pakistan’s proxy war. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the ISI redirected its jihadi infrastructure toward Kashmir. “Pakistan provided logistical support, funding, arms, and facilitated the movement of both Kashmiri militants and Pakistani militants across the Line of Control”.

Groups like Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammed transformed the Valley into a battlefield. Foreign fighters carried no documentation; many were buried as “unidentified terrorists.”

The report underlines that the shift from local political dissent to cross-border jihadist terrorism fundamentally altered the character of the conflict. The graveyards are, in fact, Pakistan’s signature on the soil of Kashmir.

How propaganda hijacked the discourse

The so-called “human rights” industry seized on these graves to spin a tale of Indian atrocity. The APDP, IPTK, and Amnesty claimed they contained “disappeared civilians.” But SYSF exposes their methodological dishonesty:

• “In the absence of forensic verification such as DNA testing, these reports treated different categories of the deceased as the same, without clearly distinguishing between local civilians, local militants, and foreign militants”.

That is the heart of the deception. By blurring terrorists and civilians, earlier advocacy reports inflated numbers and painted India as genocidal. SYSF explicitly criticises this: “These early investigations had notable limitations… shaped by ideological predispositions”.

Even the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), in its 2011 inquiry, concluded that many of these graves belonged to foreign terrorists killed in encounters. Yet the propaganda machine ignored this nuance, because the goal was not truth but demonisation.

The real victims ignored

The global reports obsessed with “unmarked graves” have little to say about the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989-90. They also downplay massacres of Muslims who defied terrorists: Wandhama (1998), Chittisinghpora (2000), Nadimarg (2003).

SYSF acknowledges that terrorists unleashed brutal violence: “Militant groups resorted to forced disappearances, targeted assassinations of political activists, intimidation of minority communities (notably Kashmiri Pandits and moderate Muslims), and the systematic suppression of dissenting voices”.

Those graves exist too, but they do not feature in Amnesty’s glossy reports. The selective outrage tells its own story.

Accountability: India vs Pakistan

Critics often cite Pathribal (2000), Machil (2010), and Amshipora (2020), cases where civilians were tragically killed in fake encounters. SYSF does not hide these. It notes the CBI called Pathribal a “cold-blooded murder,” that five Army men were sentenced in Machil, and that the officer in Amshipora was court-martialed.

This is accountability. India punished its own when wrong.

Now contrast with Pakistan. SYSF notes how “mass graves in Balochistan” have been discovered amid widespread allegations of enforced disappearances, but credible investigations are consistently blocked.

The difference is clear: India investigates mistakes, Pakistan institutionalises them.

The propaganda dividend

Why then has the narrative of “unmarked graves = Indian atrocities” persisted? Because it is propaganda gold.

SYSF bluntly observes: “Militant groups and separatist networks… actively exploited the imagery of unmarked graves to fuel propaganda, making sweeping allegations without credible substantiation”.

Western NGOs, chasing headlines, repeated these allegations. Pakistani diplomats waved these reports at the UN. Separatists fed them to angry Kashmiri youth. The graves became psychological weapons.

The truth, however, is now clear: the graves are overwhelmingly those of terrorists sent by Pakistan.

Global context: Not Bosnia, not Rwanda

One of the most insidious tricks has been to equate Kashmir’s graves with Bosnia’s genocide graves. But SYSF is clear: “Unlike mass grave situations in post-conflict societies like Iran, Bosnia or Rwanda where state-led repression was a defining cause, the Kashmir context is different”.

Here, graves arose from operational realities of counter-terrorism against cross-border terrorists, not from state-engineered ethnic cleansing. To continue equating the two is dishonest.

Why this report matters

The SYSF report does not whitewash. It admits there were excesses, it acknowledges families of the disappeared, and it calls for DNA verification where possible. But crucially, it places the graves in context: terrorism, Pakistan’s proxy war, and the operational realities of counter-insurgency.

It is a rare local effort to correct the distortion created by decades of advocacy-driven reports. By documenting 93.2% of graves, SYSF has provided data that undercuts the propaganda narrative at its root.

Graves that tell the real story

The facts now speak louder than the propaganda:

• 93.2% of Kashmir’s graves are documented.
• The vast majority are terrorists, foreign and local, killed in encounters.
• Only 276 graves remain unmarked, just 6.8% of the total.

As SYSF concludes, these graves are not proof of systematic Indian atrocities, but “complex artifacts of a live and evolving conflict, shaped by operational necessities as well as human tragedy”.

The carefully crafted lies of Amnesty, HRW, and separatist groups collapse under this weight of data. The graves are not monuments to Indian brutality; they are the unintended epitaphs of Pakistan’s jihadi terrorism.

Kashmiris deserve to know the truth: the men who filled these graveyards were not victims of India, but pawns of Rawalpindi. The Indian Army did not create this bloodbath; it contained it. It was terrorism exported from Pakistan that is responsible for their deaths of their kin and the general misery in the Valley. The Indian Armed Forces tried to control it. And for that, countless Kashmiris are alive today.

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