Do you remember Kunan Poshpara?

 It was the cold dark night of 23 Feb 1991 in Kunan and Poshpara, the twin villages in Kashmir, when barbarians from 4 Rajputana Rifles 68 Brigade of Indian army committed atrocities which find no parallel in the history. 

Hundreds of women were raped. Minor girls, those dumb and deaf, the physically handicapped, and the pregnant women were not spared either. Mothers were raped in front of their daughters. Grandmothers and their granddaughters were raped in the same room. 

 The survivors said that they had bite marks on their chests, everywhere on their body, even on their hips. Many of them described bleeding from the mouth, from their private parts and from other injuries.

The book "Do you remember Kunan Poshpora?" published in 2016 and authored by Essar, Ifrah, Samreena, Munaza and Natasha has revealed horrific accounts of the victims.

In the book, amongst many gory accounts, one of the survivors shares her story: 

 “Three army men caught hold of me and 8-10 army men raped me in turns. They had huge battery torches with them and they used them to see my naked body, while making lewd remarks”.

There are heart-rending accounts of a deaf-and-dumb girl and pregnant women being raped. Tamana was in an advanced state of pregnancy, nine months pregnant, when she was raped. Due to the rape she delivered a baby with a fractured arm, a few days after the incident. 

Another toddler was snatched from her mother when she tried to hug the baby to her chest. The baby was thrown out of the ground floor window. 

Tamana's father shares the story of Kunan and Poshpara massacre: 

“My family consisted of my old father, an eldest son working in the police department and his wife aged 20 years, my second son, aged 15 years, my third son, aged 12 years, three daughters, my wife, Ufaq and my stepmother. We lived in a two and a half storey house. Both the storeys consisted of four rooms each. Tamana my eldest daughter was pregnant at that point and was at our place i.e. her parental home when she was raped”

Tamana’s mother, Ufaq is a survivor herself. She (Ufaq) had a clearer idea of what happened:

“I heard an unusual sort of noise and thought it was a cat. After sometime I went out of my room and saw three army men through the windows of my father-in-law’s room. I was able to see their uniforms in the moonlight. They were wearing helmets and jackets as well. My aged father-in-law was paralyzed and bedridden. He was unable to do anything. I lit a lantern, opened the door and ran upstairs with my daughter to the second floor. I opened the door to the porch, and was planning to jump out as I realized there was no other option. I told my daughter that we should leave. My daughter, who was nine months pregnant, was terrified. She gripped my hair tight, and started screaming, “don’t leave me alone at their (the army’s) mercy”. When the army men entered, I saw they had zips of their pants already opened”.

In his book, "Collective memory and narrative: Ethnography of Social Trauma in Jammu and Kashmir", TM Shah details a tragic account by a 60-year-old widow, Fauzia:

"Soldiers enter the house, put the gun at the temple of my father and tie up the younger men. They demand food and after consuming it, they hold the hand of the most beautiful daughter in front of the parents and brothers and take her to another room and rape her throughout the night. They separate men folk outside and molest and rape women inside…. We have to obey; otherwise they either kill our men on flimsy grounds or beat them to pulp or do something like that".

Kulsuma Banoo (name changed) who is 63 now was allegedly raped by 4 soldiers along with two other women in her room. Her brother Ghulam Ahmed Dar fails to control his emotions and he weeps bitterly. 

“We are being compensated. We are being asked to shut our mouth and accept large chunk of money but I want to tell these people who are at the helm of affairs, could an amount return the lost chastity of my sister who was 38 when ‘vandals’ stained her chastity. Little did we know that our mother’s sisters and daughters will become the prey of ‘Vandals’? Nobody in the Village can forget that fateful night. I was just 22 then and I still remember we are forcibly dragged from our houses by the soldiers of 4th Rajputana Rifles. 

“Soldiers, not soldiers but these Vandals flocked us like cattle. There is rivulet called Kamil and they threw us into that and beat us ruthlessly. Our women were locked up in their rooms and they gang raped a large number of village women overnight till9:00 in the morning.These men in uniform raped our sisters, mothers and daughters without any consideration of their age, married, unmarried, pregnant etc. The victims ranged in age from 13 to 80”

 Dar's 63 year old sister said that she along with other women were ruthlessly beaten and then raped.  

“Whole night we were not allowed to put on our clothes. We were dying with cold but they were hitting us with gun butts and tarnishing our chastity. We were crying and no one was around to help us, “ She said.

Abdul Samad Dar, a resident of the village said that he was too young then but can never forget the massacre. 

"So many of our mothers, sisters and daughters were raped by Indian soldiers and still those culprits are roaming free. Justice has not been delivered yet".

A researcher, who met the survivors of Kunan-Poshpora, pondered after one of her visits to the twin villages: 

"What was it like, I found myself imagining, to be squatting in your own snowy barn yard, drowning in your tin bucket, broken and blubbering on your hard granary floor, blinded by chillies from your own store? Or most unimaginably of all, to be Abdul Wani. To return from an overnight business trip to Srinagar and find your front door broken, your two sons in bed electrocuted, your wife and three daughters raped, and your family’s barn turned into the village torture chamber?" 

Every year since 2014, this day is commemorated as Kashmiri Women's Resistance Day, inspired by the struggles of the survivors of mass rape and torture in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Occupied Kashmir.

I conclude this article with tears coursing down and with prayers that may God destroy the culprits of these heinous crimes.