A bomb went off in New Delhi, houses were razed in Kashmir – normalisation of war crimes in India

After three days of the Red Fort car blast in India’s capital, New Delhi, the counterinsurgency forces in Jammu and Kashmir detonated the house of the elderly father of the alleged accused, Dr Umar Nabi, in South Kashmir – a region under prolonged military occupation.

Alongside Palestine, Kashmir represents one of the longest-standing cases of unlawful military occupation where the right to self-determination, enshrined in the UN Charter and affirmed by multiple Security Council resolutions, remains structurally denied.

The Gaza-pattern bombing of civilian properties in Kashmir is not a novel feature of Indian military operations. Instead, India is erasing the visibility of war crimes by reclassifying the international armed conflict over the disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir as a matter of internal security.

This strategic domesticisation facilitates India’s evasion of accountability under international criminal law for ‘atrocity crimes’ committed against a protected civilian population in Kashmir.

Escalating repression

Since India unilaterally revoked the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 and illegally annexed the territory in defiance of binding UN Security Council resolutions, the Kashmiri population has been subjected to escalating repression. Arbitrary detentions, communication blackouts, and a suffocating politics of fear have become instruments of governance.

Dissent now risks not only imprisonment but also the demolition of family homes and property confiscation under draconian laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which criminalises political expression.

Erasure of humanitarian laws

The systematic denial of international humanitarian law (IHL) protections in Indian-administered Kashmir has severely undermined the legitimacy and legal framing of its freedom struggle. IHL, unlike other domains of international law, offers precise, codified protections, especially in contexts of military occupation and civilian vulnerability.

Its selective suspension in Kashmir has enabled India to reframe an internationally recognised occupation into an internal law-and-order issue, allowing it to bypass the legal obligations arising under the Geneva Conventions.

Without an explicit international acknowledgement of Kashmir as a situation of occupation governed by IHL, India has constructed an alternative narrative rooted in national sovereignty, thereby shielding its conduct from international legal scrutiny.

Between 2020 and 2024, civil society investigations, including those from the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), headed by incarcerated Award-winning human rights activist Khuram Parvez and the Legal Forum for Kashmir (LFK), documented the partial or total destruction of at least 1,172 civilian houses.

These demolitions, conducted jointly by the Indian army and counterinsurgency police, were carried out under the pretext of military operations targeting residential and commercial properties of Kashmiri men accused of taking up arms against New Delhi.

Collective punishment and hyper legalism

In April 2025, following an attack on tourists in Pahalgam, Indian forces demolished at least 10-12 houses belonging to the relatives of suspected militants, either those detained as undertrial prisoners or residing across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, further institutionalising a policy of collective punishment in clear violation of international law.

In a brazen display of institutional complicity in collective punishment, members of the parliament (Lok Sabah) publicly defended the punitive demolition of civilian homes in Kashmir.

In response to MP Aga Ruhullah’s objection, a Rajya Sabha member declared: “There is no harm in bombing civilian homes in Kashmir.” Such statements reflect not only political impunity but also an attempt to legitimise grave breaches of international humanitarian law.

Despite a binding judgment of the Indian Supreme Court on November 13, 2024, mandating a 15-day notice prior to any demolition, the armed forces in Kashmir have continued to raze civilian homes without judicial oversight or procedural due process. These demolitions proceed without trial, conviction, or even a formal accusation, bypassing the most minimal safeguards enshrined in Indian law.

Crucially, neither the Indian Penal Code nor its successor, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, contains any substantive provision authorising the punitive destruction of civilian property. The weaponisation of demolition powers, absent any legal basis, demonstrates the deep architecture of hyper-legalism, a regime in which law is deployed not to restrain state violence but to rationalise enduring states of exception.

In Kashmir, this hyper‑legalism is undergirded by an apparatus of repressive legal instruments, principally the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA), Enemy Agents Ordinance Act and the Disturbed Areas Act. These frameworks do not merely fail to offer protection to the civilian population; they actively construct Kashmiris as persons stripped of protected civilian status under international humanitarian law.

They institutionalise impunity and enable Indian armed forces to operate beyond the reach of independent adjudicatory scrutiny. As repeatedly underscored by the UN OHCHR and leading rights organisations, these “created structures obstruct the normal course of law, impede accountability, and jeopardise the right to remedy for victims.”

War Lawyer David Kennedy observes that legality is often performative, less a constraint on power than a means to legitimise and manage violence while denying avenues for accountability. In Kashmir, this manifests as a legal architecture that does not fail but functions precisely to dominate.

Demolition as a war crime

International humanitarian law is unequivocal: civilian residences are protected objects. Customary IHL Rules 7 and 10 mandate distinction between civilian objects and military targets, prohibiting attacks unless strictly justified by military necessity, a threshold India has neither met nor credibly invoked in its demolition campaigns across Kashmir.

Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 52 of Additional Protocol I classify such unlawful destruction of civilian property as a grave breach, amounting to a war crime under IHL.

While India is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to ratify Additional Protocols I and II, thereby avoiding binding obligations that would subject its conduct to international scrutiny.

It also objected to the International Fact-Finding Commission under Article 90, which establishes a mechanism that states may voluntarily recognise for investigating serious violations. India’s refusal to do so underscores a deliberate resistance to independent scrutiny, reflecting its broader strategy of insulating its conduct in Kashmir from external legal oversight.

Domestically, the Geneva Conventions Act (1960) lacks enforcement mechanisms and offers no remedy for victims. The result is a regime of legal exceptionalism: rhetorical adherence abroad, impunity at home. In this context, demolitions become tools of collective punishment, violating both the Hague Regulations and the Geneva framework, and potentially triggering individual and command responsibility under international criminal law.

India’s refusal to recognise Kashmir as an occupied territory functions as a legal shield against the application of occupation law under international humanitarian law. In its place, a doctrine of occupational constitutionalism has emerged, where domestic law is weaponised to legitimise control, suppress resistance, and simulate constitutional normalcy. The demolition of civilian homes without trial is not merely a security tactic; it is the juridical performance of sovereignty.

This project is sustained by judicial abstention.

Indian courts have consistently declined to apply IHL in cases involving state violence. In Francisco Monteiro v. State of Goa, the Supreme Court held that the Geneva Convention Act does not create any enforceable rights. In PUCL v. State of Assam, the Court ignored arguments invoking Geneva protections altogether. This silence forecloses even symbolic legal recourse for victims of demolitions, torture, or displacement.

The framework of international humanitarian law offers no comparable ambiguity. As clarified by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Tadic, the obligations arising under IHL in international armed conflicts are not geographically confined to the zones of active hostilities; instead, they extend across the entire territory of the parties involved. The tribunal explicitly held (para. 68) that core protections, particularly those concerning civilians and prisoners of war, remain in effect until a general conclusion of peace is reached (para. 70).

India’s refusal to apply these norms in Kashmir, coupled with its domestic legal evasion, renders its exceptionalism not only a matter of national policy but a calculated repudiation of international law’s most foundational obligations.

UN silence as legal complicity

What is unfolding in Kashmir is not merely a domestic excess, but a failure of international legal architecture, where humanitarian law is not absent, but selectively invoked, indefinitely deferred, and strategically obstructed. The denial of redress to Kashmiri civilians reveals not the limits of legal frameworks, but their deployment as instruments to manage legitimacy rather than constrain state violence, as contemporary critical international lawyers have been arguing.

Humanitarian actors often speak of long-term institutional gains, strengthening treaty regimes, and expanding UN capacity, while remaining silent on the immediate civilian costs that are discounted in this calculus.

In Kashmir, this silence carries legal consequences.

The UN Security Council, which first internationalised the dispute and guaranteed a plebiscite under Resolution 47, now retreats into paralysis. By failing to act while India normalises demolition as deterrence, punishment as governance, and occupation as legality, it effectively licenses a model of war without accountability.

The UN Security Council holds the legal instruments, Articles 39 and 41, and ICC referral powers, but its inaction in Kashmir signals political wilful neglect, not legal ambiguity. It has acted in Darfur and Libya; its silence here marks a hierarchy of lives, not law. The normalisation of war crimes in Kashmir is not the law’s failure, but the success of its abandonment.