The dark side of India’s brutal rule
Lawyer Parvez Imroz has never filed a divorce or defended a thief. Instead, this veteran advocate has spent his entire legal career, dressed in a grey morning suit and working pro-bono in the higgledy-piggledy Indian mountain state of Kashmir, pressed up against the towering Himalayas. Penniless but determined, Imroz has sacrificed everything to keep the Indian authorities accountable in a place where, unseen by most of the world, an insurgency has rumbled on for 23 years, claiming an estimated 70,000 lives. In 2010, workaholic Imroz - with his marriage in tatters, and his children fearing for their lives, uncovered a network of mass graves strewn across the forests and rice paddies. Over 4,000 bodies have been found to date, which might well be some of the 10,000 Kashmiris who have vanished and been taken into custody. Last year - as new uprisings by Kashmiri youth saw pitched battles fought between stone throwing teenagers and the Indian security forces, firing live rounds and tear-gas - multi-British Academy and Emmy award-winning director, Jezza Neumann, began to follow Imroz as he turned his attention to an even more incendiary project, torture perpetrated by the Indian security forces themselves, in this, the most militarised region in the world.
