i.The Alchemy of Categorization: From Enforced Disappearance to
Administrative Absence
The Indian state’s strategic shift from documenting “enforced
disappearances” (a crime against humanity under international law) to
“missing persons” (an administrative category implying voluntary absence or
criminal victimhood) represents a masterclass in bureaucratic violence.
The Rajya Sabha data—7,151 “missing” in 2023 alone, with 4,190 remaining
untraced—obscures a deliberate epistemic operation. By reframing the
8,000+ documented enforced disappearances since the 1990s (per Jammu
Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society) within the anodyne language of “missing
persons,” New Delhi accomplishes three objectives:

The Semantic Trap
7,151 “missing” in Kashmir 2023. But these aren’t missing persons—they’re enforced disappearances rebranded. By using administrative language, India evades UN Working Group jurisdiction & ICC scrutiny. it’s statecraft of erasure. #enforceddisapperanceInKashmir pic.twitter.com/ev8joLtdcX

— Altaf Hussain (@sultan1913) February 24, 2026

• Individualization of State Crime: Enforced disappearance
  requires state agency; “missing” suggests random criminality, family
  disputes, or militant affiliation—transferring culpability from
  occupation forces to shadowy “unknown persons” or the victims
  themselves.
• Evading International Jurisdiction: The UN Working Group on
  Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) maintains that
  enforced disappearance is a continuing crime until the fate of the
  victim is clarified. By categorizing these as “missing,” India denies
  the international legal framework that would trigger UN mechanisms
  and potential ICC scrutiny.
  
• Temporal Cleansing: The 1990s enforced disappearances (largely
  attributed to Task Forces, Ikhwani militias, and direct army
  operations) are statistically amalgamated with 2020s “missing
  persons,” creating a false continuum that suggests social
  breakdown rather than systematic state terror.
  ii. The 2019-2020 Gendered Lockdown: Trafficking Under Cover of
  “Normalcy”
  The spike in “missing” statistics correlates grotesquely with the August 2019
  constitutional coup and subsequent lockdown. The reported 8,000+ women
  disappearing during the communications blackout and curfew (2019-2020)
  exposes the gendered architecture of occupation.
  When the internet was severed and movement restricted, the disappearance
  of women—allegedly trafficked into sexual slavery with state-condoned
  networks—cannot be separated from the military’s strategic use of sexual
  violence as a counterinsurgency tool. The absence of digital trails during the
  shutdown (no FIRs could be filed online, no videos could be shared) created
  a juridical black hole where female bodies became disposable logistics for
  occupying forces and allied paramilitaries.
  This represents not collateral damage, but structural extraction: the
  conversion of Kashmiri women’s bodies into resources for the occupying
  military apparatus, their erasure from statistics mirroring their physical
  erasure from families.
  iii.The Mathematics of Impunity: Statistical Laundering
  The progression—5,824 (2020) to 7,151 (2023)—reveals not deteriorating
  law and order, but intensifying disappearance-as-policy. The 4,190
  “untraced” represent a deliberate maintenance of ambiguity. In
  counterinsurgency doctrine, untraceability serves as deterrence: families
  remain paralyzed by uncertainty, unable to mourn, unable to mobilize,
  forever suspended in the “neither dead nor alive” limbo that destroys
  collective resistance.
  The “untraced” category functions as a statistical mass grave. Unlike the
  1990s, when bodies were occasionally dumped in mass graves
  (documented by the State Human Rights Commission), the current regime
  prefers digital erasure—entries in police logs that lead nowhere, cases
  closed without investigation, bodies that never surface. This is
  “disappearance 2.0”: cleaner, untraceable, and compatible with the
  “development” narrative.
  iv.The “Normalcy” Narrative as Weapon
  The Modi regime’s “Naya Kashmir” project requires the statistical
  neutralization of Kashmiri suffering. The G20 meetings in Srinagar, the
  promotion of “tourism,” and the influx of non-local settlers depend on the
  disappearance of the disappeared—both physically and statistically.
  By flooding Rajya Sabha with “missing persons” data (implying criminality,
  elopement, or militancy) rather than “enforced disappearances” (implicating
  the state), India exports a narrative of Kashmiri dysfunction rather than
  occupation. The international media, when it covers these statistics, often
  replicates the frame: “Kashmir’s missing persons problem” rather than
  “India’s disappearance machinery.”
  v.The Continuity of Erasure: From Mass Graves to Data Clouds
  The 8,000+ enforced disappearances of the 1990s (Boulevard mass graves,
  Papa-II torture center, the “half-widows” of Kupwara) and the 7,151 “missing”
  of 2023 constitute a single continuum of demographic warfare. The earlier
  phase required physical burial sites; the current phase requires only
  database entries marked “untraced.”
  The 2019-2020 women’s disappearances mark an evolution toward
  extractive disappearance—where the missing are not merely eliminated but
  commodified (trafficking networks, sexual slavery), turning occupation into a
  political economy of predation.
  Conclusion: The Counter-Forensics of Resistance
  The Indian state’s reliance on “missing persons” statistics is an admission of
  failure: it can no longer hide the bodies as it did in the 1990s, so it hides them
  in bureaucratic limbo. For Kashmiri civil society, the task is semantic
  reclamation—insisting that every “untraced” entry in the Rajya Sabha ledger
  be read as evidence of enforced disappearance, that every “missing woman”
  of 2019 be investigated as potential trafficking by occupation forces, and that
  “normalcy” be exposed as the management of atrocity through statistical
  obfuscation.
  The 4,190 untraced persons of 2023 are not administrative anomalies; they
  are the unacknowledged foundation upon which the bridge of “development”
  is being built—a bridge that leads over the bodies of the disappeared into
  the Hindu Rashtra’s Akhand Bharat.