Enforced Disappearance: The Death That Took 29 Years to Confrm.


A CASE OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCE THAT LIVED
LONGER THAN JUSTICE ITSELF.

The judgment from a Srinagar court was brief. Formal and most administrative in tone. It declared Abdul Rashid Wani legally dead, nearly twenty-nine years after he disappeared into custody in 1997. A final line on paper. A conclusion written decade too late for a family that had never stopped living inside uncertainty. Wani was taken on 7 July 1997 from Rawalpora, Srinagar. He was picked up by personnel of the 2/8 Gorkha Rises of the Indian occupation forces along with another man. One returned. Wani never did. From that day, Madina Colony fell into a silence that no time could repair.

At first, his wife, Farida Shabnum, waited with belief. Every step outside the door carried possibility. Every knock carried hope. His sons, Junaid and Arsalan, grew up chasing a shadow of a father they barely knew. The  learned early that in enforced disappearances, waiting becomes inheritance.

There was no grave to visit. No final sight. No certainty to mourn. Only an absence that expanded with every passing year. It did not fade. It deepened. It became part of daily life. A chair that was never filled. A name that was never spoken without hesitation. The court later observed what the family had said for decades. That he was taken into custody. That he never returned. That no offfcial record confrmed his release.

That repeated searches led nowhere. Legally, a person missing beyond seven years can be presumed dead. But in cases like this, law arrives long after lived reality has already rewritten itself. Because enforced disappearance is not a single moment of loss. It is a continuing condition. It is uncertainty made permanent. It is grief without ritual. It is trauma without closure.

For families in Kashmir, this case is not isolated. It reflects a wider wound. Hundreds remain missing after arrests and detentions over decades. Each case carries the same pattern. A pickup. A silence. A lifetime of unanswered questions. And families suspended between hope and despair, unable to move forward or return.  


The judgment may now allow a death certificate to be issued. It may close a legal file. It may provide documentation for state records. But it cannot restore what was taken in 1997. It cannot answer what happened in those first hours, or in the years that followed. It cannot replace a father in the lives of sons who grew up without him.

His wife no longer waits at the gate. She has learned that enforced disappearance changes waiting into permanence. His children have learned that growing up in such absence means carrying a question that never ages. This is why enforced disappearances are described not only as individual tragedies, but as ongoing violations. 


Because even when the law finally speaks, it speaks only to confirm what families have already endured for decades. For the family of Abdul Rashid Wani, the court’s declaration did not mark the end of his story. It only marked the moment when silence was finally acknowledged as truth.
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