Qaisar Mansoor
On International Women’s Day, a Kashmiri human rights defender asked international community to notice Kashmiri women who “have been carrying the heaviest burden” in the ongoing three-decades-long conflict.
In a letter addressed to the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, UN Commission on Human Rights and the EU, Ahsan Untoo, chairman of the International Forum for Justice Human Rights JK, exemplified the plight of Kashmiri women through the stories of four women whose sons or husbands have either been killed or jailed.
Untoo said Rafiqa Begum, wife of jailed pro-freedom leader Ayaz Akbar, has been suffering from stage four cancer. At her home in Maloora, in the outskirts of Srinagar, Rafiqa told Untoo:
“I can die any time. I want to see my husband before that. We have seen a lot of hardships. My daughter got divorced. My sons are struggling for livelihood. My husband was jailed on fake charges by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) for his political beliefs. I often see (Indian prime minister Narendra) Modi posting pictures of his meeting with his mother. Can’t my husband see what is happening to his family?”
While Rafiqa pines for a meeting with her husband, Rafia Begum, a resident of the restive Pulwama district, has asked the Indian government to return the body of her son, Athar Wani, who the Indian forces claim was a militant killed in a gunfight last December in Srinagar along with two other youngsters from southern Kashmir. The families of the deceased have said the three were killed in a staged gunfight, and they had no links with militants.
“The pain of losing a son is unbearable. I do not want to live anymore. They also snatched his body. Let them return his body at least. He was innocent,” Untoo has quoted Rafia in his letter to the world bodies.
International Women’s Day is being observed worldwide to acknowledge the outstanding contributions by women in different fields across the globe. The day aims to raise awareness about women’s equality. Whereas, New Delhi, one of the most unsafe cities for women in India, is often dubbed as the “rape capital”. Gandhi tweeted, “The bitter truth is that many Indians don’t consider women to be human”. Between 2018 and 2019, India reported 4,05,861 cases of crimes against women out of which 59,583 incidents were reported in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) as per the National Crime Record Bureau’s 2019 “Crimes in India”.
In 2020, more than 28,000 cases of rape were reported across India, an average of 77 in a day, according to a report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
The NCRB data from September 2021 also showed that more than 370,000 cases of crimes against women were reported in the country in the previous year. Experts believe the real figures are much higher as many women do not report such cases due to fear or shame or both. The women of IIOJK have been facing with an unending ordeal of terror and trauma due to frequent abductions, sexual violence, illegal detentions and molestations at the hands of Indian security forces on the pretext of ‘Cordon and Search Operations’.
Modi’s Hindutva supremacist government continues to use rape and molestation as a ‘weapon of war’ and ‘collective punishment’ in the occupied territory to suppress the legitimate right to freedom of the innocent Kashmiri people. It is a sheer violation of the international humanitarian and human rights law and UN Security Council’s resolutions. The horrific acts of violence, mental torture, aggressions and ruthless brutalities against women had turned life into a worse nightmare in the valley. According to the Human Rights Watch, Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) shields the Indian security forces from prosecution from their crimes of sexual violence.
The draconian nature of the act has been described as breach of the international human rights law by members of the international community. Since 1989, 22,942 women widowed and 11,250 are molested by brutal Indian forces. The world must wake up from deep slumber to contain sexual violence being used as war tactics in the occupied territory.
