Pakistan, July 18 -- The death certificate ordered for Abdul Rashid Wani after almost three decades in Indian-occupied Kashmir opens a record of what New Delhi has tried to leave buried. Wani disappeared in July 1997 after being taken into military custody. Twenty-nine years later, a court has directed that his death be recorded as having occurred on the very day he vanished.

If Wani died the day he entered custody, then the issue is not a missing-person file lost in the fog of conflict. It is a custodial killing, followed by the disappearance of the body, the erasure of evidence and the forced waiting of a family that kept searching for a man whose fate was already known to the machinery that held him.

Still, it cannot answer the quest...