Kashmir is under siege and women are in the crossfire

In early August, the Indian government mounted an unprecedented illegal occupation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir (hereafter referred to as J&K or Kashmir) on the northern tip of the subcontinent. Abrogating Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which gave J&K a special status and laid out conditions contingent on which they had joined the Indian Union during independence from British rule, Parliament announced communication blackouts and curfews. An information blockade, along with curbs on the media, house arrests of leaders and activists, and other human rights abuses followed. As it now stands, more than 7 million people are under siege, with more than 3,000 arrested and detained. Communications channels (including telephone services and the internet) remain severely restricted despite government propaganda that they have been restored. One million Indian security forces are deployed in the region—already the world’s most militarized zone—and have been using pellet guns at protestors, resulting in blindings and other injuries. Tourists, students, pilgrims, and non-residents have been asked to evacuate, and the local police have been disarmed.

The civil liberties of Kashmiris are in tatters: they are running out of essentials, including medical supplies, and there is a genocide alert out for Kashmir. This recent aggression follows a checkered history that pre-dates the independence of India and Pakistan from British rule in 1947. The tug of war between India and Pakistan over the region, as well as the Kashmiri people’s demand for self-determination, has endured since then, creating a humanitarian nightmare caused by militarization and militancy. Enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings (otherwise known as "fake encounters"), mass rapes, and torture, among other abuses, have dogged life in Kashmir, particularly in the wake of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (in force in Kashmir since 1990), which has been used to give the military impunity for various violent crimes on the civilian population.

And—as in any conflict—there is a gendered aspect to this, with women bearing a disproportionate burden in Kashmir.

Women Under Siege spoke with Kashmir scholars Ather Zia, founder of Kashmir Lit and co-founder of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective (as well as an author, poet, and assistant professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado), and Nitasha Kaul, herself a poet, novelist, artist, and associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Westminster. Zia and Kaul have also co-edited a special issue of the Economic and Political Weekly on “Women and Kashmir” in which they write, “Feminist scholarship has shown us that the interlocking nature of militarism and masculinity means that competing patriarchies of oppression and resistance become mutually constitutive, and women are at the sharp end of both. Understanding and analyzing the life experiences and agential potential of women in disputed zones like Kashmir becomes difficult as well as crucial.”

Women Under Siege: Broadly speaking, what is the history of Kashmiri women in political movements in the state, and how have they responded in the current crisis?

Zia: Women have always been part and parcel to the larger struggle, in armed and unarmed resistance both, and to civilian resistance. Women have played a role in Kashmir’s resistance since 1931, even before India and Pakistan came into being, [and] this role [of active participation in the Tehreek, the freedom movement] has continued. In 2014, a group of fifty young Kashmiri women came together to file public interest litigation under the banner of the Support Group for Kunan Poshpora, demanding a judicial inquiry into allegations of a mass rape committed in 1991 by personnel of the Rajputana Rifles (of the Indian Army) in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora. There has been no justice so far. Five activists from the group co-authored the book Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora (Zubaan Books, 2016) on the case, which has become symbolic of the systematic use of sexual violence by the Indian forces—and what Human Rights Watch has called a crime of war against the people of Kashmir. 

In the current resistance movement, women have become a vital—if not a pivotal—aspect of the movement as human rights activists and opinion leaders. It is true that their voices are not a big part of the main resistance leadership, but they are there, and they are growing. There is a burgeoning group of scholars, many of whom are Kashmiri women who, for the past decade, have worked persistently to lay the foundation of a critical and applied scholarship on the issue of Kashmir.

What are their immediate concerns right now?

Kaul: In any zone of militarized occupation, [women’s bodies] become the terrain on which the politics of left and right are enacted. [Even] the landscape is feminized, and the people’s bodies themselves—their vulnerabilities—are in line with their identity markers.

This move [of annexation] exposes the fact that the impact of the restrictions adds up to traumatizing the people as a whole, and then traumatizing a specific subsection of those people, which is women. In any kind of context where there are competing patriarchies, it is already tough, but then this move makes that worse.

Zia: Women have always inhabited a terribly precarious space in the heavily militarized structure of Kashmiri life. In this environment, their lives have become doubly vulnerable with the hegemony of the military and the brutal tactics used to counter the insurrection weighing upon them. Mass rapes, harassments, and attacks on their men, home and hearth—a fact of Kashmiri women’s lives even before now—have only been exacerbated. The revocation has been celebrated in India with a conqueror’s mentality. The misogynistic cries of Indian men baying for Kashmiri women to marry them, harassing them for their “beauty,” has only made them seem like spoils of war, and under a military occupation, has further deepened the fears for the safety of Kashmiri women.

You have written extensively about the exoticization of Kashmiri women and the gendered aspects of the Kashmir’s history. Recently, there have been misogynistic comments by the general public as well as by public officials. Why is there this obsession about women in the context of “possessing” Kashmir?

Kaul: Sexual violence is a key part of how men are humiliated and women are sought to be possessed. If you have a quick look at my Twitter it should be very obvious that I am subject to a barrage of misogynist trolling [in response to her comments on the political crisis], often intensely vicious and sexual and violent in nature. So I am not surprised [that this is happening]. But I think, if you look at the leadership, you look at the entire way in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s Hindutva project [of building a nation predominantly of and for Hindus] rests strongly on masculine social conservatism; then, regardless of [any] surface rhetoric around empowering women and all that, it’s quite clear that these authoritarians are pretending to be democrats. Look at their own personal backgrounds, at the way in which the possession of women and property—and of women as property—is very central to their projects.

Can you tell us about the progressive Islam practiced in Kashmir and the implications of the Indian government’s Hindu-first agenda?

Zia: I do not mean to say gender injustice does not exist or social violence against women is non-existent, but I would call Kashmir a benign patriarchy (benign in a relative sense): most women, historically and traditionally, had enjoyed complementary vocations vis-a-vis men, which had given rise to a society where women, even when bound by the social norms of patriarchy, contributed economically and were visible in public. Except for the elite and the clergy, who were a minority in Kashmir, most ordinary Kashmiri women did not observe strict purdah, even though there was gender segregation, and modes of gendered behavior were otherwise observed.

Kashmir practiced a cultural Islam that was more reminiscent of how it prevailed in its early days than what is stereotyped in the current moment, which gave women considerable freedom. Since the increasing militarization of Kashmir, the rise of the BJP in India, and now its annexation of Kashmir, rather than calling it a push towards radicalization [of Islam], I would say  that there has been]more of a reclaiming of Kashmiri and Islamic identity. Women are more educated in religious texts; they don hijabs in larger numbers not because they are “radicalized” but because they want to adhere to religion and the identity it provides them in the face of this onslaught on their community militarily.

How are women in Kashmir currently resisting and mobilizing?

Zia: Loose groups of women often mobilize starting from local neighborhoods, because they are often protesting in the aftermath of an atrocity (such as extra-judicial killings, rape, and torture, etc.), and the demonstrations grow [from there]. This is a very organic type of protest. There are several women’s political and religious organizations that have been persistent in their goals (e.g., support for families of deceased and disappeared, justice for human rights abuses, awareness and advocacy) for over four decades: one is the Muslim Khwateen Markaz [providing contemporary, Islamic education for girls], headed by Zamrooda Habib, who also is a patron of the Association of the Families of Political Prisoners. Then there is Dukhtaran-e-Millat (a feminist separatist organization branded as a soft-terrorist group by India), founded by Asiya Andrabi, who is currently imprisoned on charges of sedition. [Another is] the Jammu Kashmir Mass Movement, headed by Farida Behanji and other women leaders.

Movements that involve women in any part of the world infuse them with a confidence and a vision for the future. Men in Kashmir have faced much security discrimination: many have been killed or disappeared. Losing men who were the main breadwinners would bring the family to destitution, affecting the women left behind more than anyone else. But a vast majority of them have remained committed to searching for their husbands and educating their children. Many of them are activists with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, whom I have seen become well versed with legal knowledge around their cases, making them more outgoing, resourceful, and comfortable in public activism. This is not to glorify the terrible political tragedy that has dismantled their lives but to emphasize their incessant resistance and activism, which they have brought into public as well as international consciousness.

These women are growing voices, and their examples will echo with younger generations looking for inspiration.