Kashmir Flashpoint

Rights group Human Rights Watch has urged India to hold an independent inquiry
into the unmarked graves found in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Earlier, the state human right commission said it had evidence that 2,156 bodies
had been buried in 40 graves over the last 20 years.
The commission is the first government body to confirm what others have
previously alleged.
Its report is yet to be submitted but it has been widely leaked in the media.
The commission's investigation focused on four northern, mountainous districts
and involved scrutinizing police, mosque and graveyard records, interviewing
police and local people and cross-referencing information.
"For years, Kashmiris have been lamenting their lost loved ones, their pleas
ignored or dismissed as the government and army claimed that they had gone to
Pakistan to become militants," Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human
Rights Watch, said.
"But these graves suggest the possibility of mass murder. The authorities should
immediately investigate each and every death."
Independent human rights groups have long insisted that thousands of people
have mysteriously disappeared over the last two decades and never been
accounted for.
Some have accused India's security forces of abducting local people, killing them
and covering up the crime by describing the dead as unknown militants when they
are given for burial.
The authorities deny such accusations.
The security forces say the unidentified dead are militants who may have
originally come from outside India.
They also say that many of the missing people have crossed into Pakistan-
administered Kashmir to engage in militancy.