Women and Violence in Kashmir (Part-One)

Bearing in mind the risks of generalizations, women’s experiences of and roles in the long-standing conflict in Kashmir are broadly defined by the conditions outlined in this section. It should be noted that the real names of all half widows (unless referring to specific legal cases), their spouses and children, and most other women quoted in this report, have been changed to protect privacy and safety.

1. Gendered Violence. With the heavy militarization in the Kashmir Valley, women have often been the targets and survivors of violence suffering from trauma, injury, and disease. Like most conflict situations, gendered violence is systemic but typically overshadowed by attention to ‘harder’ security matters. Statistics of violence against women are thus especially lacking: while taboos around sexual violence result in under-reporting, the narrow definition—outside the overall context—of violence against women, has prevented accurate assessments of the actual harms perceived by women, for example, due to widowhood.

Within the South Asian context, and due to the universal taboos around sexual violence, women often do not report such crimes, even to receive crucial medical care. Thus, the actual extent of sexual violence is unknown though various independent observers have reported its prevalence in women’s everyday lives.   Certain particularly violent ‘events’ that have gained notoriety provide a window into the violence faced by Kashmiri women. For example, in 1991, more than forty women, aged between 13 and 80 years, were allegedly raped at gunpoint by the 4th Rajputana Rifles Unit in village Kunan Poshpora, Kupwara.A subsequent one-man inquiry team stated that the allegations by the village were “a massive hoax.” In 2009, the bodies of sisters-in-law Neelofar Jan and Asiya Jan were found in a shallow rivulet after an overnight search by their family and local villagers in Shopian. Though a postmortem declared both women had been raped and murdered, subsequent government commissions and a Central Bureau of Investigation report declared no rape or murder had been committed.

Besides violence inflicted directly on women’s bodies, women also bear the ramifications of the general—typically male on male—violence in the Valley. Such effects on women also constitute gendered violence. Although the direct violence is disproportionately inflicted on males because they are perceived or imagined as threatening, females suffer indirectly, as reflected in the experiences of half widows. Women are also affected psychologically; women have been reported as the worst affected by mental health problems in Kashmir. And women suffer severe socioeconomic hardship, given their conventional financial dependence on men in most cases.