DO YOU REMEMBER KUNAN POSHPORA?

Samreen Mushtaq, Essar Batool, Natasha Rather, Ifrah Butt and Munaza Rashid

In February 1991, a group of soldiers and officers of the Indian Army stormed into the two villages of Kunan and Poshpora, in Kashmir. By many villagers’ accounts, in the process of searching for militants the soldiers brutally raped 31 women. More than 20 years later, protests following a gang-rape of a woman in Delhi inspired a group of Kashmiri students and lawyers—all women in their twenties—to revisit those cases. The writers document the facts of the 1991 atrocities and the lives of their survivors, opening up broad questions of trauma, stigma and state responsibility.

 Zubaan, 180 pages, Rs 395