More
than a lakh killed, thousands ‘disappeared’, millions tortured and maimed…however,
the history of Indian state’s war crimes in Kashmir will remain incomplete without
the history of the massive sexual violence unleashed by its armed forces on the
Kashmiri women. Ever since the Indian
state sent its armed forces to brutally crush the Kashmiri people’s struggle
for national self-determination, sexual violence has remained a weapon of war,
oft-used by the army and paramilitary to subjugate the people of Kashmir. Despite
the fact that many cases of sexual violence are forcibly buried under the
military jackboot, and are rarely brought to light, even the official number of
Kashmiri women raped by the Indian army and paramilitary runs into thousands in
this most militarized zone of the world. The mass gang rapes of several women
in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora in the Kupwara district of North
Kashmir is one case thathas returned to haunt the Indian state and its armed
forces repeatedly, despite its several overt and covert machinations to push it
under the carpet.
Exactly
23 years back, on the intervening night of the 23rd and 24th
February 1991, hundreds of soldiers belonging to the 4 Rajputana Rifles of the
Army’s 68 brigade entered the villages of Kunan and Poshpora. It was what they termed as ‘a search and cordon
operation’ – a term synonymous for the Kashmiri people with extreme state
terror, torture, cold blooded killings, harassment and as that night showed
massive violence on women. On that night, after confining the men of both these
villages into store houses, the inebriated soldiers forcibly entered several
houses, gagged the mouths of the women and took turns to repeatedly gang-rape
them at gun point. “There was darkness all around. At 9.30 pm in the
evening, the army entered the village. They took the men and children out and
they were taken to a nearby bus stand. Then they entered our homes at around
11:00 pm and started assaulting women”, an
old woman recalled that night in these words to a journalist.Another woman recounts “When
the Armymen entered the house, they dragged away my daughter. I tried to escape
but my daughter held me and asked, 'Moujimaikamistravakh (Mother, will you
leave me behind with them)?' The soldiers dragged me away too."One more woman had the following to say “One
by one, they raped me, while my five year old son was forced to watch, weeping
beside the bed.” The bestiality
of what transpired can be gauged from the fact that the youngest to be raped
was 8 years old and the oldest was 70 year old. The Indian army even did not spare pregnant women,
who were repeatedly kicked and beaten by the army while they took turns to
rape. As a result of this ordeal, the baby one of the women later gave birth to
was born with a broken arm. The brutality continued for hours and came to an
end just around the crack of the dawn the next day. A local policeman who tried
to raise alarm from the loudspeaker of the local mosque was also killed by the
army. As per the official accounts, 53 women were raped by the army that night,
whereas the locals of these two villages point out that the real number is over
100 for several woman have even till today not come forward to report. The
reasons are many – fear of another reprisal by the army, shame as well as the
fear of damaging their marriage prospects.
Developments
thereafter have shown that far from merely being the work of some ‘individual
crazed, drunken soldiers’, what happened that night enjoys the full support of
the entire state apparatus. The
very next day, in what was a move to further intimidate the people, the Deputy
Commander came to the villages to tell the woman that the army had not done
anything wrong. The entire village was cordoned off for several days, and the
first FIRs could be filed only on 8th March. There was never an
identification parade based on the depositions of the women, and the probe was
itselfclosed within 4 months with the prosecution saying that the incident
might have been ‘stage-managed’! The Divisional Commissioner of the Kupwara
at that time, Wajahat Habibullah brushed aside the reports of his own junior
officers - which confirmed the rapes - and called the incident “highly
doubtful.” Meanwhile as news started trickling out from the two villages and
was even reported in some newspapers, the Army directly got into the act. At
the behest of the Defence Ministry, a special ‘fact-finding team’ of the Press
Council of India comprising B.G. Verghese and K. Vikram Rao was dispatched to
Kashmir. Their aim was to ‘dispose of the ‘grave charges’ of rapes by the army
‘which were being leveled in the press’. Not many in India would know that
this so called fact-finding team spent more time in Srinagar talking to
government and army officials, when it did decide to go to the two villages it
flew in an Air Force chopper and stayed in the quarters of the very same
brigade that had committed the gang-rapes. And finally when this report came
out, it predictably did dispose of the charges calling the incident ‘a
massive hoax’, ‘Pakistani propaganda’, etc that was meant to make the ‘army
reluctant to go into such areas’! With this concocted report, the case was more
or less considered closed by the state.
After
several years of closure, Kunan and Poshpora have once again been in news
recently. Because of the protracted battle
of the survivors, the state was forced to re-open the case last year. However,what
the state was forced to give with one hand, it very shrewdly took it away with
another. The police first tried its best to ensure that the case is not
re-opened but since public pressure punctured that plan successfully last year,
the police has not started any fresh investigations. The army on its part has
continued to remain non-cooperative repeating the old arguments - calling it ‘a
politically motivated game against the army’; ‘re-opening this case is like
flogging a dead horse’, and even ridiculously saying that ‘the Indian army is
the best disciplined force in the world’! Several hearings have constantly
postponed for either the prosecution does not turn up, or the police did not submit
its report or at times even the judge remained absent. It would be anyways
be naive to expect even a semblance of justice from the courts that are stooges
of the army and the para-military.
The mass gang-rapes
of women in Kunan and Poshpora were not in any way isolated instances. Over the next two
decades the Indian army and paramilitary has raped thousands of Kashmiri women.These
constitute a means of the Indian state and its army to assert its dominance over
the people of Kashmir who had dared to rebel against its authority. In some
cases, the Indian soldiers would slash the breasts of the Kashmiri women with
knives telling them that their breasts will never give milk again to a new-born
militant.It is this political context of military occupation and popular resistance
against it that explains the impunity given by the state to the perpetrators of
these crimes. But as history of the last two decades has shown, such bestiality and
state terror has not been able to subdue the aspirationsor
the movement of the Kashmiri people. All progressive and democratic forces should
unequivocally condemn and oppose the Indian state’s war crimes and continued
military occupation of Kashmir, and stand in solidarity with the Kashmiri people’s
fight for their inalienable right for self-determination including the
right to secede from the Indian union.
L
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