CPA facilitated a team of senior civil society activists to visit Kunan-Poshpura between June 14-16, 2013 to assess the progress of the justice process and thegrievances of the village more than 22 years after the incident.
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The team consisted of Ms Seema Mustafa, Director, Centre for Policy Analysis,journalist, Ms Sehba Farooqui, Asst. Secretary, All India Democratic Women’s Association, Mr Mohammad Salim, former Member of Parliament of the CPI-M MrBhalchandra Kango, Secretary, Communist party of India, Maharashtra Mr E NRammohan, Former Director General, Border Security Force, Mr Harsh Mander,former IAS, Convener, Aman Biradri, and Human Rights activist Dr John Dayal,Member, National Integration Council, Journalist and Human Rights activist
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The team travelled to the villages from Kupwara along a single lane road that had been ravaged in the winter rains. At various stretches along the river, the road wasjust a stretch of rubble and pebbles as we entered the village set amidst walnuttrees with a mountain range all but encircling the hamlets.The twin villagesKunan- Poshpura are home to about a thousand people. There are few, if any, civic facilities. A board announced a medical centre, but no medical or paramedical staff ever comes there. All institutional facilities are either at Kupwara, or in thestate capital Srinagar, and so it has been for ever, villagers say. The CPA teaminterviewed around 35 men and 35 women of the village, ranging in age from 18 to 70 years. They were farmers, students and unemployed youth. Among themwere the two Sarpanches, or Panchayat heads, of Kunan and Poshpura.

CPA team’s experience and findings:

It is difficult to accept the argument that the Kunan-Poshpura incident is a case of a mass conspiracy involving militants and the entire population of the twin villages.

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We found that both men and women vividly remembered the violence and torture as if it had taken place just a day before. Both women and men broke down when narrating their trauma, the women crying inconsolably before the women members of the of the CPA team. Team members were struck by the intensity of their anguish.

It is clear that there has been no closure, especially for the women. Their wounds remain fresh. Many of them continue to suffer various ailments consequent to the violence. It is surprising that no one in authority has noted that more than a dozen of the women of just these two villages have had hysterectomies performed within a short period of their ordeal. This must be the only village in India With such a large incidence of this surgical procedure. 

The psychological trauma is even more than the physical one. Almost every woman we spoke to carries emotional scars and psychological stress which requires expert and sympathetic medical attention as soon as possible. While Some of the women are now in their Sixties, many of them are still not 40, and have many years ahead of them. They need to be healed in body and mind...The women face an additional and aggravated social crisis. While we have no information of the post-1991 incidence of divorce of such women by their husbands,their narratives hint at considerable tension within the families, and in their society. There is evidence of they being ostracized. For the young women, the situation is far more grim. The unmarried rape victims were quietly married off to relatives or in distant villages as no one was willing to wed them in the area.

The two villages continue to suffer this ostracisation and the stigma. Young men repeatedly told us how they had to change schools and colleges because they were taunted by teachers, classmates and others as coming from “that village where your mothers and sisters were raped by the soldiers.” Even today, such taunts face people of Kunan and Poshpora when they go to Kupwara or beyond and are asked where they come from. Many young men and women have given up their studies entirely, while a few brave ones now study in institutions far away.

There is hardly any employment for the youth, other than as labour or working in their family farms, which are small holdings of paddy fields in the shadow of the surrounding mountains.

The village seems to have been ignored by officialdom. There is little to show by way of development. A room with a board of a health centre remains closed, with no medical personnel coming to work in the village.

Other than the cash once distributed almost clandestinely by a State Minister,people say there has been no government compensation paid either to the women victims of gang rape, or the men who were tortured.

A copy of this report is made available courtesy of KashmirLife.