On the hazy morning of December 2, when scores of men and women came out to cast their votes in Kunan Village of Kupwara District of Kashmir, their steps came to a halt at the rusted gate of Government High School, Kunan, which served as the polling station that day. Between the people and the voting machine stood Janti Begum with more than a dozen other women, barring entrance to the school. A stick in one hand and a black rag-tag flag in the other, 45-year-old Begum was angry and hurt.
While most of her fellow villagers wanted to vote for development, employment and better amenities, Begum wanted justice. Unlike them, Begum said, she could not think of a tomorrow without justice, and, if the state was not ready to give them justice; at least their neighbours could be just by boycotting the polls.
Her life, she said, was still trapped in the dark of the night when soldiers barged into their house, extinguished the lamps and pounced on her and other women. The cries and shrieks of dozens of women that rang out through the night still resonate in her ears. The images of torn clothes and bleeding women could never fade. “I was 22 then; today I am 45, but the girl I was died that night. Since then I am barely living,” said Janti Begum. “And I don’t believe in this democracy, which is based on injustice. We just want to remind our neighbours of why we should boycott.”
Kunan, a village in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district, was almost unknown outside of Kupwara till a tragic night ripped it — and its adjacent village Poshpora — out of their ordinary anonymity and slowly turned them into a household name. Kunan and Poshpora became known as the villages where women were allegedly mass raped by soldiers.
By the sun-less noon, thousands of men and women had already come out to cast their vote in Kupwara district except for a handful of women who had gathered to protest for justice in Kunan. Most of them middle-aged and elderly, the women shouted slogans against the army, the Abdullahs, the Muftis, against India and against its legal system.
In view of the protest, the police had opened the back entrance of the school, and a steady stream of voters — boys, girls, men and women — poured in and cast their votes. The voters refused to speak about the protesting women saying they had nothing to do with them.
“They have only brought shame to our village and nothing else,” said Showkat Ahmad, a young man standing in the school yard after casting his vote, reluctantly. “We have nothing to do with these shameless people.”
Many of these women live in the neighbourhood behind the school. On the night of February 23-24, 1991, in one of the early night-long cordon and search operations by the Indian Army, while the men were taken to one side of the village for interrogation, the women were allegedly mass raped throughout the night by the soldiers.
The then Deputy Commissioner of the district, S.M. Yasin, was the first to visit the spot and wrote to his higher-ups that the soldiers ‘had behaved like violent beasts’. “I feel ashamed to put in black and white what kind of atrocities and their magnitude was brought to my notice on the spot,” he wrote in his report. The Army and the government refuted the allegations and a Press Council of India delegation called the allegation of mass rape ‘a massive hoax orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathisers’. But, the villagers claim that the team never visited them or spoke to them.
While the women wanted to fight for justice, their allegations of rape only stigmatised them. Soon no one wanted to marry into Kunan and Poshpora. Their children dropped out of school because of the sneers they had to face, and the women of Kunan and Poshpora, while becoming tragic figures, simultaneously became a staple joke too.
Around the protesters, young boys and men stood in small groups, talking and smiling among themselves, cracking jokes. “Everyone has his reasons for voting and not voting. These women should just shut up; they are only looking for money,” said an old neighbour. “What is the use of making this noise now?”
The survivors have been battling this mindset of the men for over two decades now. There is also bitterness. “Those Kashmiri men who were killed by the soldiers were called martyrs. How are we not martyrs then? Why was everyone ashamed of us and disrespectful to us for what we lost in our struggle?” asks Jawahira Begum, one of the survivors.
A group of 50 women professionals and students from Srinagar reached out to the survivors of Kunan-Poshpora and filed a PIL in the J-K High Court in 2012. The PIL was not admitted but the court issued directions to the litigants to litigate the matter before the CJM in Kupwara. These young women mobilised the women in Kunan and Poshpora to come to Srinagar and speak for the first time, and fight with renewed vigour for justice and to expose the structures of oppression.
“When a woman of your grandmother’s age cries in front of you and gives you every detail of how she was raped, you can’t help but fight until justice is done,” said Ifra Butt, an activist and one of the founding members of the women group. “Elections come and go; politicians make and break their promises. It is nothing new. The victims know what they want and they will continue to fight for it.”
On the evening of December 2, when Butt was sad about the brisk poling and dispirited victim families, her phone rang. A young man, introducing himself as the son of a victim close to Butt, told her, “The protests don’t go waste. They help us to remember what has happened. They remind those who have forgotten.” He told her that he could live without roads, electricity and job but not with the shame of choosing them over his mother’s honour.
