When does the state get the power to rape and kill people with impunity? When is someone treated as a threat by the state? In the history of the development of state forces we have seen the power being used to uphold the interests of the ruling class. The Indian state from its birth has been nothing but a violent patriarch in different parts of the country. Kashmir, Manipur, Bastar, and other regions have been at the receiving end of this violence for decades now.
Everyone in Kashmir has a story to tell. Each story is unique, yet similar. The stories will be inevitably different because the Kashmiri identity does not stand in isolation, it also interacts with their class, religion, and the political stances that they take, to shape the entire identity. But through almost all these stories is the common theme of the Indian state that has reduced the people to expendable and irrelevant obstacles in the grand dream of making maximum use of the resource-rich region and the militarily strategic positioning. To ensure that the interests of the powerful is protected, the state steps in as the saviour, ensures forceful disappearances of people, hides the graves of the martyrs, rapes, tortures, and kills anyone who even dares to question the violent system.
Since 1947, Kashmir has remained a war zone, with its people caught in cycles of violence. After Partition, Maharaja Hari Singh, ruler of Muslim-majority Kashmir, hesitated before signing an accession agreement with India following threats of invasion. A plebiscite was promised but never held. Decades later, Hindutva fascists abrogated Article 370 and 35A, stripping Kashmir of its autonomy. Combined with AFSPA, this move enabled demographic changes and silenced dissent. The Indian state has always prioritised Kashmiri land over its people.
Men and women experience war differently. There are layers of trauma that are forced onto women through rampant sexual assault and rape. The Indian state refuses to accept the fact that they use rape as a political tool to firstly, ‘defile’ the women from the ‘other side’, in the case of Kashmir it will be the militants; and secondly, to take the honour from the Kashmiris because supposedly the honour of a community lies in the chastity of their women. The practical implications of this has been seen in riots and conflict zones in India.
February 23rd marked 34 years of the mass rape and torture of Kashmiri women by the Indian Army, commonly known as the Kunan-Poshpora incident. On February 23rd, 1991, in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora, in Jammu and Kashmir, soldiers from the 4th Rajputana Rifles conducted a cordon and search operation, forcing men out of their homes for interrogation while subjecting the women to brutal sexual violence. More than 35 women, of ages 13-80 years, were brutally gang-raped by the army till 9 AM the following day. Justice is yet to be served. This is just one of the many such incidents that have scarred villages after villages in Kashmir.
These goons of the state are called ‘the sons and protectors of the mother nation’ for being in the military. The crimes that they commit during their duty time are deliberately forgotten as they are doing it to ‘protect the sovereignty of the nation’. Even when the women come out of their come out of their trauma and file cases against the officers, the trial will happen through a court martial inside an army camp. Justice for the victims is always a faraway dream and the moment they file a case, they go through the most isolating and repeated reliving of the horrible incident. The torture that Kashmiri men go through is, in a way, the state forces stripping them off their sense of strength and making them weak and vulnerable by showing that they cannot protect their own land or even women.
These state-sponsored violence against all genders happens in these conflict zones through AFSPA and other “counter-insurgency” operations by the military. Rest of India also conveniently overlooks the crimes committed by the army as the media houses portray them as sons protecting their mother nation. Islamophobia that reigns in these media houses feeds into the hatred with which Indians grow up.
It is certain that the state would not take responsibility for the horrific acts that they continue to do, but the people are desperately trying to expose the monstrous nature of the settler state as it usually gets masked by the discourse of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘counter-insurgency’. The truth is that as the repression from the state increases, it will only nurture and strengthen people’s quest for liberation from oppressors.
