– Sherin B S

The Kunan Poshpora mass rape does not occupy a significant space in the narratives of struggle in mainstream Indian feminist discourse. The army enjoys the greatest level of impunity in India, a nation tinged with patriotic jingoism, which celebrates the army as the defenders of national pride and hides the brutalities that army men commit on women in militarized regions, both in the Northeast and in Kashmir.

History of army occupation and women’s protests

Army atrocities against women in occupied zones came to public discourse in India after the custodial rape and murder of the Manipuri woman Thangjam Manorama in 2004. Her family said that she was picked up from her home by the Indian paramilitary unit, 17th Assam Rifles on allegations of being associated with People’s Liberation Army. Her bullet-ridden corpse found in a field the next day had semen marks suggesting rape and murder with 18 bullets piercing her body including the genitals.

Inspite of the report of an Inquiry Commission, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958 (AFSPA) protected the Assam Rifles and the case was handed over to central jurisdiction. This led to widespread protests in Delhi and Manipur against AFSPA. Five days after the killing, a group of middle-aged women in Manipur marched naked to the Assam Rifles Head Quarters shouting, “Indian Army rape us too, we are all Manorama’s mothers.” This image later became the iconic face of Indian women’s fight against AFSPA.

The idea of nation as mata and the honour of women

The idea of nation as mother draws particularly on the patriarchal imagination of women’s vulnerability. There is a strange coagulation of cartographic and spatial conceptions with abstract notions of feminine virtues in the motherland imagery. The allegory of the violated woman that stands in for any violation on spatial/cartographic boundaries thus inflicts pain on the soldier/male/protector of this imagery. But this is a double bind. Any population that falls on the fringes of this mainstream imaginary of the nation thus becomes accessible to retributive violation. Further, to disgrace a community, a people or a territory, the territorial encroachment also extends to female bodies. The drastic violence on women’s bodies in Gujarat or Muzaffarnagar thus is not a momentary mob anger taken out on women but a logically pursued persecution from this historical imagination. On the contrary, as Mridu Rai points out, a large majority of Muslims find it difficult to identify with a nation imagined in a cartographic space as the Hindu Goddess (Rai, 254.)

When the nation is imagined as a woman, the army becomes ‘her’ protector. A virulent masculinity protecting the mother-nation becomes the national symbol. Defending one’s nation thus becomes the greatest virtue for a male. When popular culture perpetuates this image it is not just the foreign intruder but any identity that falls outside the frames of this imagination begins to occupy this hazardous position of alterity. Anyone who challenges the statist version of history, could be the state-labeled terrorist, the protestor, and the ‘anti-national’. Women in places of insurgency thus are turned into tools to silence a people who fight against the state. The archetype of Hindu women jumping into mass pyres to escape the violation is perpetuated to justify violence on minority women. Violation as a tool to punish and to avenge thus penetrates our cultural imagination.

The army in occupied zones, including Kashmir, uses sexual violence on women to crush a rebellion. ‘Rape as reprisal’ prevents men from joining armed struggle. Seema Kazi reports an ex- JKLF militant’s agony on seeing their women violated for vengeance. Often, they have to choose between freedom for Kashmir and the rape of relatives. She further argues powerfully that the sexual violation of women in Kashmir moves beyond being a mere political instrument to being a cultural weapon to inflict collective dishonor on Kashmiri Muslim men (Kazi,155.)

Kunan Poshpora, the night of February 23rd 1991 and the subsequent fight for justice.1

From 1989, stories of violation of human rights in Kashmir have been rampant, with impunity guaranteed to perpetrators. Women have been raped in front of their families “as spoils of war”, giving the army a confidence backed by the state with reports suggesting army, bureaucracy and judiciary coming together.

The twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora faced the crackdown around midnight on this day. Men were dragged out of their houses to the interrogation camps. In their chilling accounts men narrate various methods of interrogation including dipping their heads in buckets of water with chillies in them, electrocution on the private parts leading to permanent impotence, rolling heavy logs of wood on legs with soldiers sitting over them leading to permanent disability. Women were gangraped with six to seven army men attacking every woman including minors. Women report that rape as a term is not adequate to explain what happened to them that night. They were tortured, kept at gunpoint, pushed against walls and raped by drunken soldiers. The rape of a fully pregnant woman who gave birth to a disabled child two days later and the rape of a girl with hearing and speech impairment are among many other heart rending narratives. About sixty women got raped, ranging from the age group of thirteen to eighty. About thirty women gave testimony before the District Magistrate, which was recorded with great difficulty after several days of protests.There is a long history of battle fought by the survivors of this mass rape to make the culprits accountable for the crime, even though no evidence was legally missing in this case. From the District Prosecution that reported “indiscripancies” in the “stereotypical narratives of women” to the police who were ordered to close the case in 2013, there is a long history of negligence by authorities in attending to this crime.

Fight against obliteration by women of Kashmir

If memory is the weapon against oppression, women of Kashmir have fought this battle against forgetfulness for 25 years. In 2014, a group of young women from Srinagar filed a PIL before the High Court to reopen the investigations. They formed the Support Group for Justice for Survivors of Kunan Poshpora (SGKP) in 2014, launching a campaign along with the legal battle, commemorating the anniversary by naming it Kashmiri Women’s Resistance Day. In spite of the Indian army’s constant intervention in the reopening of the case and the repeated adjournments by the legal machinery these women engage in a longer and stronger battle, etching the history of Kunan Poshpora in collective memory.

Justice Verma Commission and the demand for repeal of AFSPA : The army enjoys impunity of the highest level, especially with AFSPA protecting them in Kashmir and the Northeast. The much-publicized case of the rape and murder of two women at Shopian in Kashmir has not so far, in spite of wide protests and repeated appeals from human rights agencies, met with any kind of legal redress. AFSPA protects the army personnel implicated in crimes from being tried in a civil court. In the wake of the Delhi rape in 2012 and the wide range of public debate on violence against women, the Justice Verma Commission recommended bringing sexual violence against women by members of the armed forces or uniformed personnel also under the purview of ordinary criminal law.

Women’s plight in militarized zones

Women in militarized zones, ranging from Kashmir to Palestine, fight to survive in a space occupied by cultural patriarchy, national exclusion and state violence.2 In cultures where the word ‘rape’ is taboo, they have risen in mass protests against rape and built up support groups and resources for the survivors.

Women’s histories entangled in military insurgencies have opened up a new terrain of responsibility for feminist scholarship.3 To culturally, socially and politically engage with the sexual violence by state personnel upon women who havea fraught relationship with the nation, feminist politics needs to undertake a severe re-assessment of the idea of individual rights, civil liberties and a revision of legal framework to take account of such actions. Today we lack the language, the tools and often the freedom to engage with such histories.

Sherin teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and can be reached at sherinbs@gmail.com

Notes
1. Most of the factual information on Kashmir and Kunan Poshpora are taken from Do you Remember Kunan Poshpora? The Journey Man Picture’s Video, Rape of Kunan Poshpora (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBAfN27MYmg ) and also reports of Human Rights Organisations, support the facts and figures presented in this book. The authors cite interviews by army and police officials in many journals including the Illustrated Weekly where sexual violence against civilians in Kupwara is justified as a strategy to curb militancy.

2. Women of Kashmir have shown immense strength in addressing this violence. Kashmir now has women’s organizations representing the mothers of lost children (Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) started by Parveena Ahangar is one of that) as much as there are organisations for “half widows” who struggle for justice against stigma, ostracism and loss. The term half-widow shows the strange and traumatic plight of women whose husbands have disappeared in the conflict, chiefly custodial disappearances. Clerics in Kashmir have recently ruled that women whose husbands go missing can remarry after waiting for 4 years.

3. Zubaan Series on sexual violence and impunity in South Asia is an attempt to historicize sexual violence as a weapon of war in South Asia. Ever since 1970s mutilated, tortured and raped bodies of women floating on water are symbolic of army/paramilitary tactics to suppress the LTTE uprising in Sri Lanka. The severely mutilated and sexually assaulted body of Isaipriya, the LTTE reporter and actress, during the final days of the elimination of LTTE by Sri Lankan army, evoked international attention.

References :
Batool, Essar et al Do You Remember KunanPoshpora? Zubaan Series on Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2016.
Kak, Sanjay.ed. Until My Freedom has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. New Delhi : Penguin, 2014.
Kazi, Seema Between Democracy and Nation: Gender and Militarisation in Kashmir. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2009.
Rai, Mridu. “ Making a part Inalienable: Folding Kashmir into India’s Imagination” in Until My Freedom has Come. 250-278.