Law as Apartheid: India’s Legal Colonialism in Occupied Kashmir

In the shadow of its self-proclaimed democratic identity, India has erected one of the most sophisticated legal regimes of suppression in modern times particularly in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). Through laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the Indian state has systemically institutionalized repression, criminalized dissent, and silenced every form of resistance. While these laws are presented as tools of counter-terrorism, they are in reality mechanisms of control tools of legal apartheid. When examined under international legal frameworks such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, India’s conduct in Kashmir amounts to nothing short of a crime of persecution.

Structural injustice is represented by the UAPA. It enables pre-trial detention, inversion of the burden of proof, and legal fiction in which individuals charged with voicing even the dissident opinions can be declared terrorists under law. The AFSPA, in turn, gives the Indian army extensive powers, in the form of a shoot-to-kill authority and legal impunity. The AFSPA, meanwhile, grants the Indian military sweeping powers, including shoot-to-kill authority and legal immunity. Under Section 7 of the AFSPA, no prosecution of Indian soldiers can take place without prior sanction from the central government a sanction that, over three decades, has never once been granted. The result is a shield of impunity, behind which documented cases of torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings continue to accumulate without consequence.

These laws blatantly violate several provisions of the ICCPR, to which India is a state party. Article 7 prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Article 9 forbids arbitrary detention and arrest. Article 14 also ensures that a person has the right to a fair trial and a presumption of innocence. According to the 2022 report compiled by Amnesty International, the UAPA has vague definitions and broad powers that are opposed to international law, i.e., the right to liberty and the right to a fair trial, specifically the ICCPR.  Worse still, when the case is put in the perspective of what Article 7 (2) (h) of the Rome Statute puts into perspective, that is, the definition of persecution as a crime against humanity, the reality is that India has been systematically targeting Kashmiris due to their political identity and their affiliation to a nation deserves the definition of prosecutable abuse. This is not a careless attitude; it is a very intentional legal colonialism.

The world community has not been quiet about these violations. The cases of uncontrolled use of pellet guns, extrajudicial killings, and incarceration of hundreds of people under draconian laws without trial were reported in 2018 and 2019 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Human Rights Watch, the Amnesty International, and the UN Special Rapporteurs have already denounced numerous times the use of law as a weapon against Kashmiris by India. Still there, India stays off the international observers, excludes rights organization, counts its repression as an internal sovereign issue. Pakistan has consistently called for transparency, plebiscite, and accountability, reminding the world that Kashmir is not an internal issue but a matter of international law and unfulfilled UN Security Council resolutions.

The military posture of Pakistan stands poles apart from the Indian model of repression and does not operate under anything similar to AFSPA, UAPA laws in its administered territories. The Pakistan Army operates under strict constitutional mandates and civil-military frameworks. Its internal deployment happens under Article 245 of the Constitution and that too only on a formal request by any provincial government purely in aid of civil power, not a replacement of it. Moreover, Pakistan’s Zarb-e-Azb and Radd-ul-Fasaad military operations were against terrorists, not civilians or political dissidents. Never has the military record of Pakistan evidenced a case whereby journalists, human rights defenders, or student leaders have been systematically criminalized for dissent or speech.

The Indian Army operates with complete legal impunity in IIOJK. This includes the victimization of human rights defenders such as Khurram Parvez, arbitrary detentions of journalists- Asif Sultan and Sajad Gul, and the extensive usage of PSA to silence young activists. It proves that India is not hunting any terrorists; it is hunting down Kashmiri identity itself. By branding pro-freedom sentiment sedition and journalism incitement, the Indian state tends public perception and international narratives. It is using law not for justice but to erase a people’s history, voice, and right to resist.

Pakistan has so far maintained strategic restraint, legal consistency, and diplomatic clarity. It has already forwarded the proof of Indian human rights violations to the UN, OIC, and all other concerned international forums. Through ISPR, timely news updates have been provided, foreign media access facilitated, and transparency promoted on all regional incidents regarding ceasefire violation as well as surgical strike claims against Pakistan. The Pakistani military does not operate under shadows; rather it operates under legality and in the national interest. As stated by the Pakistan Foreign Office before the UN Human Rights Council in 2024, “India’s legal apartheid in IIOJK is not a matter of domestic policy but a blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”

The difference is stark. As India hides behind black laws to prolong its occupation, Pakistan demands a peaceful lawful solution through UN-backed plebiscite and regional diplomacy. Whereas, India’s legal warfare tries to silence Kashmiris, Pakistan’s legal warfare tries to give them voice. This distinction is not only moral but also legal because under international humanitarian law, the occupier is bound not to persecute but to protect the occupied.

India’s abrogation of Article 370 and its weaponization of anti-terror statutes in Kashmir are not acts of national integration; they are acts of legal aggression. No domestic constitutional amendment can override the international status of Kashmir as a disputed territory. No court in New Delhi can rule away the obligation to hold a plebiscite. And no law however brutal can extinguish the Kashmiri right to self-determination.

Ultimately, India’s deployment of law as the invasion of repression occurs not against the population of Kashmir but against the very concept of law itself. Legal systems have protection for the dispossessed and not mechanisms on how to make them criminals, this is what represents India in Kashmir today. The international community should come forth not with statements of concern but with mechanisms of accountability because if apartheid was wrong in South Africa, it is wrong in Kashmir. And if walking free in South Asia is what the world wants, then it has to stand by those people who remain unbroken through bullets and prison bars and injustice.

Pakistan stands with them not with silence, but with strength, law, and the moral weight of justice.