MT Desk: In Kashmir, not only people are killed, truth and justice are slaughtered. The dead must first be declared guilty and with every passing “encounter,” what dies alongside the body is the very possibility of believing the system meant to protect life. Another night. Another killing. Another official statement.

In Ganderbal, district 28-year-old Rashid Ahmad Mughal is now a statistic filed away as a “militant neutralized” in an encounter. The script is painfully familiar, weapons recovered, operation successful, threat eliminated. Case closed.

Except it isn’t. Because on the other side of that statement is a family shocked, grieving, and adamant that their son was not a militant but a struggling, educated young man trying to survive. And between these two competing narratives lies a vacuum where truth is supposed to be but rarely is.

Kashmir has seen this before in hundreds of Pathribal or Machil-like fake encounters, where “successful operations” later unraveled into cold-blooded killings of civilians. In each case, the sequence was eerily similar, label first, kill next, justify later. By the time the truth emerged, the damage was irreversible and accountability, elusive.

So what has changed?

Very little—except that the distance between power and accountability has grown wider. Laws like the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act institutionalize this imbalance. They grant sweeping authority to Indian forces while placing formidable barriers in the way of prosecution. In effect, they create a system where suspicion is enough to kill, but proof is never quite enough to convict.

And so, a dangerous inversion takes hold. In most legal systems, the burden of proof lies with the accuser. In Kashmir, it often falls on the dead and their families. A young man must prove his innocence posthumously. A mother must argue against a state narrative already cemented in headlines. A brother is summoned not to seek justice, but to identify a body that has already been judged. This is not justice. It is narrative management.

The Ganderbal case is not just about one man. It is about a credibility crisis. Because when investigations lack transparency, when identities are withheld, and when official accounts are accepted without scrutiny, even legitimate operations become suspect. The absence of trust poisons everything.

And that may be the most dangerous consequence of all.

A state that cannot convince people of the truth of its actions does not just lose credibility, it loses legitimacy. Each disputed killing deepens the fracture, turning grief into anger and doubt into permanent distrust.

If there is to be any path forward, it begins with accountability not as a slogan, but as a process.

That means:

Independent, time-bound judicial inquiries

Full forensic transparency

Public identification and verification of the deceased

And real consequences where wrongdoing is established

Without these, every “encounter” will remain contested, every death politicized, and every claim of justice hollow.

The question, then, is no longer whether such incidents will continue. The question is whether the truth will ever be allowed to catch up with them.

Until that happens, Kashmir will remain a place where the dead are not just buried they are rewritten. In the end, the same question continues to haunt every Kashmiri heart. Will this cycle ever end? Or will every new morning bring yet another “encounter,” where truth once again is the ultimate casualty.