IN ZOHAND village, perched on a mountaintop of Doda district in Jammu & Kashmir, Nilkant Kumar, 65, snakes his way through corn and walnut fields to reach his son’s grave. With a pensive look, the frail man rests besides the marble tombstone that has an epitaph etched in black: “Shaheed Kuldeep Kumar al Maroof Kamraan Fareedi” (Martyr Kuldeep Kumar alias Kamraan Fareedi).

Nilkant’s memory of his son is an awkward one. He is bitter at his son’s decision to join Muslim rebels that...

Farhat Farooq speaks like a lawyer. Petition, trial, apex court, BSF court, writ, stay – at 19, she knows everything about a trial. Everything except what the outcome would be. Farhat is not a law student. It is a mission that has made her to learn these terms – a mission to seek justice for her brother.

Two years ago, Farhat’s brother, Zahid Farooq, was shot dead by the personnel of Border Security Force (BSF) at Nishat. On a rainy day, Zahid had gone out with his friends to inspect...

British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark specialise in investigative journalism and have worked for UK’s The Sunday Times and The Guardian for nearly 18 years. Honoured with ‘Foreign Correspondents of the Year’ award in 2004 and ‘British Journalists of the Year’ award in 2009, they've co-authored three books including the much-admired Deception, exposing America's covert abetting of Pakistan's nuclear programme. Their latest book on Kashmir The Meadow—that aims to...

Ali Mohammad Bhat, 70, walks gently alongside neat rows of epitaphs connected to each other by piles of freshly fallen snow at the 'Martyrs graveyard' in Batmaloo in uptown Srinagar. He stops at the fifth grave in the second row.

With the end of his pheran (A closed cloak Kashmiris wear) he wipes the epitaph of this two-decade-old grave, and reads aloud: “Shaheed (Martyred) Mohd Irfan Bhat, son of Ali Mohd Bhat, who attained martyrdom on 21 January 1991 at Gaw Kadal.”

“He was the...