"YOU can never understand our pain," shouted a young woman, head swathed in a black scarf. This outburst came at the end of an hour talking to students, men and women, at the SSM engineering college in Srinagar about the current situation in Kashmir. The young men dominated the discussion; the women, dressed in pastels, sat quietly in the first rows. Until this woman from the back burst forth.
What she said cannot be disputed. No matter how much you read about Kashmir, how many of its people you meet elsewhere, you can never fully understand their pain, frustration, tension, grief, loss and the longing for peace and normalcy. Yet, once there, you sense it in every conversation, in homes, in the market place and even in places unconnected with the troubles.
At the Ziayarat Makhdoom Sahib Shrine, which nestles below the imposing Mughal Fort on Srinagar's Hari Parbat, hundreds of women arrive at an early hour on Mondays and Thursdays to meditate, pray, ask for a . You don't need to speak to anyone. Just sit there, listen to the haunting tones of the intonations on the loudspeaker, watch the pigeons in the courtyard take flight when someone passes by, and look at the faces. They speak of the grief, of the loss that must be a part of every life. There are old and young women, some are crying, some are talking to themselves, some just sit quietly. What are their stories?
Far away, in the village of Kunan Poshpora near Kupwara, separated by a range of high mountains from Pakistan, you sense the same sorrow, although no one speaks of it voluntarily. In this medium-sized picturesque village, with about 300 families, the women seem to live in idyllic conditions. Unlike villages in India, there is no harijan or social exclusion. There are poor families, but all of them have roofs over their heads and some land. The village grows paddy, corn, vegetables, walnuts, almonds, some fruit and has a river running past it. There is plenty of water and low voltage electricity. Firewood is available as long as there are women around to collect it. And all the children go to school.
But the sadness in the eyes of the women of Kunan Poshpora is not the consequence of the eternal burden that women must carry, of fetching, carrying and caring, tasks that remain unalterable regardless of location. Their eyes tell a different story; even today they can barely hide the terror and shame of a day in 1991, when Indian Army personnel raped over 30 women from this village. These women were young then. Today, 11 years later, some of them remain unmarried, others have come back to their maternal homes, and all of them are scarred for life.
Young Posha was just five when the incident took place. Today she is an worker earning Rs. 800 a month (paid infrequently and hardly ever the entire amount). Yet, she is proud that she earns and says she is luckier than the other girls in the village.
"People come here and promise all kinds of things," she says. "One lady came and said we should get all the women raped in 1991 married off. But nothing happened."
Young women like her continue to carry the memory of what happened to their mothers. "Girls here face a lot of problems," says Posha. "We have to tolerate the taunts of people from other villages when they hear that we are from Kunan. Also whenever anyone from the army comes to the village, all the young girls have to hide in their houses. There are no men around most of the year. Most of them go off to Punjab or Kolkata to sell shawls. They only return in March to help in the fields."
Yet, despite this, the grit and determination in these women stand out. They do not just stand about and wail. The "victims" of the 1991 incident merge with the other women; no one tries to pull them out to tell their story. All the women are getting on with their lives. The younger ones are learning to do the typical Kashmiri embroidery on so that they can find some means to earn. Shamima, just 15 and not yet a matriculate, is teaching pre-school children how to read and write. She is determined to get through although she admits that girls have a harder time than boys do, "because they have to do so much housework".
There is a whole generation of young women like Posha and Shamima in Kashmir who have known nothing else than "guns pointed at them from both sides". What will so-called "normal" life mean for them given their extreme vulnerability? Being a village close to the border, the army keeps an eye on them. So do the militants. And the villagers, particularly the women, have to walk with care.
What you sense in all of them is a hunger to learn and to earn, to be economically independent. After a week in the valley, I came away with a feeling of hope after talking to women like Posha and Shamima. And Dilafroze, a woman in Srinagar who could have lived a comfortable, cushioned life. Instead, after her experience of being targetted by militants, she decided to do whatever she could to help other women. So she arrived in the Kunan Poshpora earlier this year on a mission that failed. Far from being defeated by it, she returned a few weeks later with ideas and funds to help the women help themselves. Single-handedly, she has set up a pre-school for girls, and embroidery classes for young women.
You will see plenty of Kashmir in the valley. But most of them are not "wilting lilies", women who throw up their hands in the face of the constant violence and terror around them. Young or old, these women are a Kashmiri version of "steel magnolias".
Kunan-Poshpora Kupwara, Feb 23: From a distance Shah Begum (name changed) looks like any other inconsolable survivor of Kashmir turmoil. But when one approaches her and tries to talk to her, the pain within her simply erupts. The pain of a trauma that was unleashed by the drunken troopers of Rajput Rifles exactly 19 years ago on village Kunan-Poshpora, 114 km north of Srinagar and some 10 km from Kupwara district headquarters. Shah is seated on the verandah of her house, combing the hairs of her handicapped daughter, who is said to have lost her limb after she jumped from the first floor of the old house to save her chastity from the clenches of drunken troopers on that fateful night, the night intervening February 23-24, 1991. When approached, she unfolds the trauma to yet another woman, this time round a social worker accompanying this reporter. “First it was Nas…, then Jan… and finally it was the turn of Sha…,” Shah begins but stops shifts to hysterical screams. Already in the autumn of her life, Shah (70) would easily qualify as one of the worst-hit survivors of the ghastly incident that has shaken the psyche of not just Kunan-Poshpora but all Kashmiris for almost two decades now. Dozens of women reported that they were gang raped by the troops that night. “The government has shelved the case after ordering an inquiry, which rather bruised the character of the victims,” says Ishaq, a local. Nineteen years after the gory incident, no one seems willing to reopen the old wounds, this elderly survivor being the only exception. Shah, then 52, told the lady social worker that she resisted "them" till her worn-out muscles gave way. “I resisted them for nearly 15 minutes,” she told the visitor. Shah, according to her relatives, isolated herself for a long time after the incident. She preferred to stay away from hordes of visiting journalists during her self-imposed confinement in a dingy room of her shabby house. She is now in her 70s but still eager to see "the rapists behind the bars". Another victim, who is scared of looking into the mirror ever since the incident, remained mum. According to villagers, she loses her nerves the moment a mirror comes in sight. Apart from the trauma, the people of the area face problems on all fronts, including social, economic, development and also on educational front. This, the villagers say, mocks at the tall claims of government and the NGOs of raising lots of funds for the "overall upliftment" of the tragedy survivors here, thereby misleading the international community. Most of the people are still residing here in ordinary houses, with most of the local youth working as labourers or doing other menial jobs. Kunan-Poshpora village is flood-prone and each year the whole area is inundated by the swollen Nallah Kahmil, flowing alongside the village. Villagers accuse that no measures have been taken by the government or any other agency to help the affected.
The only Middle school here has not been upgraded since and local children have to tread miles to attend their high and higher secondary classes. This is said to be the main factor responsible for the educational backwardness of the people here. People are still reluctant to send their wards outside the village, fearing social stigma and a scare of another 1991-like tragedy. Nineteen years hence, whenever journalists and social activists frequent the Kunan-Poshpora hamlet to assess the present situation, an eerie silence greets them. People are out on their usual assignments, not uttering a word and afraid of speaking openly. Perhaps disappointed by one and all, they now feel it better to bury the scars of the tragedy deep in their hearts. But Farooq Ahmad, a senior citizen, expresses surprise over the "silence" maintained by the human rights agencies in India. He terms the silence of these agencies as "biased and criminal" and urges immediate reopening of the case. Says a local youth, "I was thrice interrogated by troops for raising voice against the incident." According to Bashir A Chogly, a local social worker, “Some usual hue and cry was made but no serious efforts were made to gauge the severity of the insulting incident.”
Salt To Injury
The mass rape had evoked strong resentment, sparking massive protests and condemnations for weeks together from different corners of the world and Kashmir, in particular. Public anger forced the government to register a case and order a probe. But the case was hushed up. On the request of Indian army, the probe held by then Chairman Press Council of India bailed out the troops and sprinkled "salt on the wounds" of Kashmiris by instead castigating the character of the victims. The report, said to have been compiled in some army camp in Pattan area of Kashmir, threw to winds the final report of then Deputy Commissioner Kupwara S M Yasin, who visited the village on March 7, 1991 to investigate. In his report, Yasin stated that the soldiers "behaved like wild beasts ... gang raped 23 ladies, without any consideration of age, married, unmarried, pregnancy etc…."
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