23 Years After Kunan-Poshpora: We Remember, We Resist!
On 23 February, 1991, an entire village was
raped. And truth and justice have been throttled. The rapists haven’t been tried or punished. Instead the complaint of rape was never even investigated! Kunan Poshpora is a festering wound – and it is no aberration. Kunan Poshpora reminds us of the reality of Kashmir, where India’s Army systematically terrorises the people in the name of protecting ‘the rest of India’ and the ‘country’s integrity’.
On 23rd February, the 68th Brigade of the Fourth Rajputana Rifles surrounded Kunan Poshpora for a ‘cordon and search operation’. As Abhijit Dutta writes, “Such operations – also known as ‘crackdowns’ – were a common enough occurrence in the first decade of the conflict in Kashmir. They were also, without exception, an utterly dehumanising experience for the Kashmiri, who was literally and figuratively kicked around by the jackboots of the Indian army. The purpose of inflicting such a terrorising experience on the local population was not only the discovery of arms and militants, but also to make it clear that the Indian army was in complete control and the Kashmiri lived his or her life at its mercy. The standard procedure for these operations involved yanking men, including teenage boys, out into a gathering space (usually a nearby field) where they were generally made to wait in the freezing cold while the Army searched their homes. Women and very young children would cower into corners as these men stomped around the frail wooden houses, turning everything upside down with brutish callousness. Most operations took place in the night, beginning around 10 or 11 pm and lasting till 4 or 5 am in the morning; the idea was to maximise discomfort.”
The men who had been separated from the women, were also subjected to brutal torture including torture and mutilation of the genitals.
The 2011 judgment by the J&K State Human Rights Commission (JKSHRC) on ‘Complaints regarding Kunan Poshpora atrocities lodged by victims and inhabitants of the Village V/s J&K State and Others,’ described the testimonies of rape of “at least 36women” including girls as young as 8 years old, during the night of 23rd and 24th February 1991. It was noted that a policeman who tried to sound the alarm was killed. And that subsequently, the police failed to conduct an identification parade to allow the women to identify the rapists.
In March 1991, a confidential letter sent by the District Magistrate of Kupwara was leaked to the press, in which the DM, having visited Kunan a week after the mass rape, wrote that “the armed forces had turned violent and behaved like beasts”. The Ministry of Defence denied the whole thing.
The then Divisional Commissioner, Wajahat Habibullah led a team comprising of a colonel from Army HQ, a commandant of the Border Security Force, the Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara district and the Superintendent of Police, Kupwara. After gathering statements from 41 women, he decided that there was sufficient cause for a more detailed enquiry and recommended this in his report to the Governor. When the state government published his report, they deleted this recommendation. A former Chief Justice of the J&K High Court, Mufti Bahauddin Farooqi, who also led an independent fact finding mission to Kunan Poshpora in March, concluded that “he had never seen a case in which normal investigative procedures were ignored as they were in this one”.
The normal investigations never took place! But the Army ‘requested’ an ‘investigation’ by two Press Council representatives, who obligingly declared the mass rape story to be a “massive hoax, orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathizers and mentors in Kashmir.”
However, the truth refused to be buried and the survivors continued their struggle to have the truth acknowledged. The 2011 JKSHRC judgment, which was primarily dealing with specific petitions made to it by a few victims, reported that the then Director General of Police (DGP) of J&K, the ‘top cop’ of the State who had initially “tried to brush aside this serious matter with just a casual approach”, later came forward “with a little bit of truth and tried to open the closed doors of investigation”.
The DGP had in fact, in a report dated 22-05-2010, “affirmed that during the intervening night of 23/24 of Feb-1991 Army personnel cordoned village Kunan Poshpora,” and that men were dragged out of their houses, women interrogated. Crucially, the DGP’s report also acknowledges that the petitioner’s medical report “has proved the allegations of torture and ‘rape’ to be correct”. However, the report also took the standard stonewalling line of defence, arguing that “as no identification parade of the army personnel was made, the investigation of the case was finally closed as ‘untraced’.” The judgment asks, “…can for God’s sake the police chief of the state answer a simple question as to why in such a serious and heinous case the identification parade was not held? Who was responsible for this intentional dereliction of duty and what action the DGP J&K has taken against the erring officials?”
The JKSHRC further accuses that “it prima facie appears that all the officers from top to bottom were in a hurry and wanted to scuttle the investigation of the case and they have succeeded in their evil design but in a very bad and crude way. The main complainant in the lead case has clearly and unequivocally mentioned that she is and was in a position to identify the offenders, but investigating officer(s) and their high-ups were not in a mood to proceed with the investigation of the case in a fair and impartial manner.” It similarly chastises the Director Prosecution responsible for the case for scuttling the investigation of the case and for playing “a pivotal role in this whole incident where by due to his intentional omissions/commissions and negligent approach he has deterred the investigating agency from taking due action as warranted under law and thereby has been responsible for violation of human rights.”
In its conclusion, the JKSHRC bench recommended that proceedings for prosecution be initiated against the Director Prosecution under section 19 (1) of the J&K Prevention of Human Rights Act 1997; that a minimum Rs. 2 lakhs each be paid to all victims; and that, most importantly, the FIR lodged at the time of the incident be re-opened and re-investigated through a special investigative team not below the rank of an SSP and that “the investigation must be taken to its logical end without any further delay and hiccups within a specific time bound period.”
In June 2013, the Chief Judicial Magistrate Kupwara dismissed the closure report of Jammu and Kashmir police in the Kunan Poshpora case, and asked the police to “further investigate to unravel the identity of those who happen to be perpetrators.”
Kunan Poshpora was no aberration, nor the last rape. From Kunan Poshpora to Shopiyan, rape is a recurring reality in Kashmir under Army jackboots.
23 years after the Kunan Poshpora mass rape, we support the call for Kashmiri Women’s Resistance Day. Justice for Kunan Poshpora and for Kashmir’s women is inextricably linked with the struggle of the Kashmiri people to be free from Army suppression, to have control over their own lives and their own future.
