Papa II
defunct military interrogation centre in Jammu and Kashmir, India
Papa II was an interrogation centre in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, operated by the Border Security Force (BSF) from the start of the Kashmir insurgency in 1989 until it was shut down in 1996.
Background
Every security force operating in Kashmir had its own interrogation centres in the state which included temporary detention centres at Border Security Force (BSF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and army camps. Detainees were first interrogated by the detaining security force for a period of time which ranged from several hours to several weeks. During this time no person was allowed to meet the detainee and the detainee was not produced before the court. Detainees suspected of being militants were handed over to Counter-Intelligence Kashmir (CIK) and are interrogated at Joint Interrogation Centres (JICs) where detention sometimes lasted for months. Papa II was one of several such centres in Kashmir.
Lawyers in Kashmir told Asia Watch in 1993 that they had filed approximately 15,000 petitions since 1990 calling the state authorities to reveal the situation of the detainees and the charges against them, but the authorities had not responded.
Operation of Papa II
The building, of colonial origin, was initially a government guest house to accommodate visiting bureaucrats, in "serene surroundings" - the exclusive Gupkar Road on the banks of the Dal Lake in Srinagar. On takeover by the paramilitary Border Security Force in 1989, it was named Papa II "in an attempt to keep the compound's new purpose nominally confidential".
A May 1996 report by Human Rights Watch detailed allegations of abuse and torture at Papa II. According to William Dalrymple, Papa II was a centre into which ...large numbers of local people, as well as the occasional captured foreign jihadi, would "disappear." Their bodies would later be found, if at all, floating down rivers, bruised, covered in cigarette burns, missing fingers or even whole limbs.
The public source identifies “Papa II” as defunct military interrogation centre in Jammu and Kashmir, India. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Papa, defunct and military.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7132336. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1996, 1993 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Papa II” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.