Monday, February 24, 2014

23 years since mass gang-rapes by the Indian Army at Kunan & Poshpora: The Horrors of the Indian occupation of Kashmir



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.
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