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ASSEMBLING THE FRAGMENTS:
WOMEN’S COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND RESILIENT RESISTANCE
AGAINST ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN INDIAN OCCUPIED
KASHMIR
By
Ain ul Khair
Submitted to
Central European University
Department of Gender Studies
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MA Gender Studies
Supervisor: Sarah Smith
Second Reader: Nadia Jones-Gailani
Budapest, Hungary
2018-19
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Dedicated to bad times.
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Abstract
The state organized systemic crime of enforced disappearances in Kashmir, from 1989 to 2018,
has directly and indirectly impacted the lives of women related to the victims. The present thesis
articulates the gendered experiences of loss and suffering experienced by these women. Through
my work, I trace the historicity of enforced disappearances as a phenomenon, elaborating on how
these are a tool to both crush dissent, and to create a state of paranoia and insecurity in Kashmir;
strengthening India’s military occupation. In doing so, I examine the resilient nature of the forms
of resistance present in Kashmir, and I present how women in Indian occupied Kashmir have
adopted various nonconventional and unique resistance methods to assert their agency against
militarized occupation. The use of a postcolonial theoretical framework allows me to situate my
research within the existing literature on the topic and to investigate my positionality as a Kashmiri
woman and a researcher. Through the use of semi-structured oral histories as a methodology, I
further highlight the tradition of preserving and relaying oral histories in Kashmir and enunciate
the importance of unearthing the voices of the ignored, the marginalized, and the oppressed.
Through the use of oral histories, I also assert the importance of recorded oral testimonies in
strengthening a counter-narrative to the state-imposed hegemonic narrative of the fate of the
disappeared person in Indian occupied Kashmir. Finally, I exemplify how the lives of the women
related to the victims of enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir have become
intertwined through strong and endurable relationships based on their collective suffering and
shared the pain. Further, I argue that the identities of these women are politically injured because
of the expectations that the Kashmiri conservative society levies on them. Finally, I examine the
intricate relationship between memories and dreams, and how these become a strong tool of
resistance against the (military) occupation in Indian occupied Kashmir. While this thesis is a
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fragment of a vast area of the knowledge on the subject that remains unexplored and that must be
dealt with in more detail, my main objective is to highlight the agency of the women fighting
against enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir.
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Declaration
I hereby declare that this thesis is the result of original research; it contains no material accepted
for any other degree in any other institution and no material previously written accepted and/or
published by another person, except where an appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of
bibliographical reference.
I further declare that the following word count for the thesis is accurate:
Body of the thesis (all chapters excluding notes, references, appendices, etc.): 20333
Entire Manuscript: 23484
Signed:___________________________
Ain ul Khair || MA Gender Studies
Department of Gender Studies
Central European University
Class of 2019
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Acknowledgments
I am forever indebted to the women of Kashmir who provided me space in their homes and in their
hearts, and made me an intricate part of their memory.
I am forever grateful to my Supervisor- Sarah Smith- for being there to read, discuss and encourage
me further to be able to write this thesis. Thank you for listening to me, my reading my multiple
drafts, and for providing me with the emotional support in difficult times.
My gratitude to my Second Supervisor- Nadia Jones-Gailani- for being a rock, strong emotional
support, and a critic during my thesis writing. Thank you for engaging me with and for providing
me with so much insight on my work and beyond.
I have to thank Lore Espinoza for being patient with me, going through my drafts, revising it
multiple time, and for pampering me throughout my journey.
I also must thank my friends- Marcela Dodi, Shivangi Sharma, Melody Baron, Jaesica Chandan,
Lora Tomas- for reading my drafts, for giving me ideas, for feeding me, and especially for
providing me with the much-needed strength to go through each day.
I also would like to thank the Gender Studies Department, faculty, and staff for their guidance and
support.
Last but not in the very least, I thank my family- my father (Mushtaq Ahmad), my mother (Masrat),
my brothers (Hashim, Ehtisham, Tamim, Burhan), my sisters (Sabbat and Durdana)- for pushing
me to work harder, for believing in me, for comforting me, and for taking care of me.
Without each one of you, this work would not have been possible. Thank you.
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Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................................... i
Declaration ................................................................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................................ iv
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................................... v
List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................... vii
1. “Khoon diy Baarav”- Blood Leaves its Trail ........................................................................................ 1
1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Historical Context ............................................................................................................................... 4
1.3 Resilience as Resistance ..................................................................................................................... 7
1.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 12
2. Positionality and Methodology ........................................................................................................... 14
2.1 The Self- Explaining of Positionality ................................................................................................ 14
2.2 Mapping the events: Research Methodology .................................................................................... 17
3.Literature Review and Theoretical Framework. ...................................................................................... 21
3.1 Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................................................... 21
3.2 Literature Review .............................................................................................................................. 24
3.2.1 Women and War ......................................................................................................................... 24
3.2.2 Gender, Militarization, and Resistance ..................................................................................... 27
3.2.3 Enforced Disappearances in Indian Occupied Kashmir............................................................ 30
4. “Hum hain ki hum nahin”- Do we exist or not? ...................................................................................... 34
4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 34
4.2 Phenomenon of Enforced Disappearances ........................................................................................ 35
4.3 ICPPED and ICC Statute .................................................................................................................. 39
4.4 Crucial case of Enforced Disappearances in Indian Occupied Kashmir ........................................... 42
4.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 48
5. “Noor-e-Nazar Gaye Laapata”- The light of the Eyes are Disappeared .................................................. 49
5.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 49
5.2 Madno- Narrating tales of suffering .................................................................................................. 50
5.3 Enforced Widowhood: Questioning the term “Half-Widow” ........................................................... 55
5.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 59
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6. Dopnam, “moshraevzamne kenh.” - He said, “Don’t forget me.” .......................................................... 61
6.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 61
6.2 Dream, Memory, and Resistance ...................................................................................................... 62
6.3 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 69
7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 71
Appendix 1: List of Interviews ..................................................................................................................... 76
Appendix 2: Consent Form.......................................................................................................................... 77
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 78
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List of Abbreviations
APDP: Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons
AFSPA: Armed Forces Special Powers Act
BSF: Border Security Forces
DAA: Disturbed Areas Act
ED: Enforced Disappearances
FIR: First Information Report
ICPPED: International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance
ICC: International Criminal Court
IoK: Indian Occupied Kashmir
LoC: Line of Control
LTTE: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
PSA: Public Safety Act
RR: Rashtriye Rifles
WGEID: Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances
UN: United Nations
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1. “Khoon diy Baarav”- Blood Leaves its
Trail
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
~Maya Angelou
1.1 Introduction
In times of devastation, insecurity, and violence we are in the constant action of
picking fragments of ourselves, our mutilated memories, and inconsolable nightmares. Veena Das
asks “what is it to pick up the pieces and to live in this very place of devastation?”1 When I touch
down at the airport of the most heavily militarized conflict zone of the world, the devastation is
visible in its most violent form. A step outside the airplane and the men in camouflaged uniforms
and guns in their hands welcome you. While Kashmir is known for its pictographic beauty, it is
‘strictly prohibited’ to click pictures at the airport of Indian occupied Kashmir.
I reached Indian occupied Kashmir, my homeplace, on 29 March 2019 to carry out my
fieldwork for the current thesis project. An abominable lull has embraced the air of Indian occupied
Kashmir, a gloomy silence mark its streets. Kashmir has shifted its image finally. It is no more the
paradise on earth, but rather has become a large collective story of people who have been deeply
1 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Univ of California Press, 2007), 6.
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embedded in the events that have shaped the seven decades-long struggle for the right to self-
determination.
Militarization in a colonial setting becomes a weapon of occupation that keeps the
colonized subject under control. It is through the armed forces, who become the physical
manifestation of violence, that the hegemonic state disciplines the colonized and maintains power
over them. Fanon argues that a colonized society is inherently segregated, vis-à-vis between the
occupier and the occupied, and it is through violence the occupier maintains its domination over
the occupied. In simple terms, Fanon asserts, the occupier and the occupied cannot coexist, and
therefore, the occupied must resist.2 In the introduction to Resisting Occupation in Kashmir3, the
authors have used Mbembe’s term of “late-modern colonial occupation”4 to describe the political
situation of Kashmir. Justifying the term, they argue that the state violence in Indian occupied
Kashmir is obscured which is further legitimized in the name of development, democracy, and rule
of law.5 However, the argument when analyzed in the context of the turns that the protracted
conflict of Indian occupied Kashmir has taken over the last seven decades, one could argue that
before the outbreak of armed rebellion in 1989, the violence inflicted by the occupying forces was
somewhat obscure given the consistent efforts of the Kashmiri population to solve the long-
standing disputed nature of the conflict zone through peaceful negotiations.6
In the initial stages of the fieldwork, I engaged with various on-the-ground activists
discussing the changes in the methods of resistance in Indian occupied Kashmir over the years.
2 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2002), 35. 3 Haley Duschinski et al., Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 4 Mona Bhan et al., “‘Rebels of the Streets’: Violence, Protest, and Freedom in Kashmir,” Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press,2018), 2. 5 Bhan et al., Resisting Occupation, 2. 6 Miraj-U-Din Munshi, “A Kashmiri Perspective I” ( Asian Affairs, 1995), 23.
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While talking to an activist, Ashfaq Wani7, who has worked for years mobilizing people against
the human rights violations in Kashmir, Ashfaq quoted a historical book Jalaiwattan (written in
Urdu by a local historian) to me to highlight the violent tactics practiced by the Indian officials in
Kashmir even before the outbreak of the armed movement in 1989. He recollects a fact from the
book about a policeman in Ganderbal:
“His name was Qadir, notoriously known as Qadir Ganderbael, who would force
feed hot potatoes to political prisoners.”8
Famous in every household, the cruelty of Qadir Ganderbael has become a story of
oppression. This case, although not a single isolated incident, clearly demonstrates that even
though the movement in Indian occupied Kashmir was peaceful prior to 1989, the Indian State did
exercise violent but obscure methods against the politically motivated people to suppress the
peaceful resistance movement.
In the chapters that follow, I investigate the state organized systemic crime of Enforced
Disappearances (ED) in Kashmir from 1989 to 2018. Having subjected more than 8,0009 people
in Indian Occupied Kashmir to the systemic and organized crime of enforced disappearances, the
phenomenon has directly, as well as indirectly, impacted on thousands of lives, wrecking the
civilian population emotionally and disrupting their day-to-day lives. It has not only stripped the
victims of their right to life but has also impacted their families, affecting them emotionally,
psychologically, economically, and socio-politically. This chapter traces the historical background
of the protracted conflict in Indian occupied Kashmir while analyzing the resistance methods
adopted by the people in Kashmir, especially women, during the last seven decades of struggle for
7 The name of the activist has been changed to protect their identity. 8 Interview with the author on 3 April 2019. 9 “Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons,” "About Us," http://apdpkashmir.com/.
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the right to self-determination. It is important to understand the historical context in relation with
the methods of resistance adopted by Kashmiri people, especially by the women, to better
understand the unconventional forms of resistance that women have specially conceived to resist
enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir. In the chapters that follow, I engage with
these women by recording their oral histories to highlight how they have become sites of agency,
memories, and resistance. The focus of the thesis is to understand how through their shared pain
and suffering, and by keeping their disappeared alive through their dreams and through the
preservation of their memories, do these women acquire their agency and become active agents of
resistance in Indian occupied Kashmir.
1.2 Historical Context
In October 1948, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru in the Indian Parliament promised a
plebiscite to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, which is the right to determine their future with
India or with Pakistan.10 The right to self-determination of the people of Kashmir came after the
partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 which divided it into the current day India, Pakistan,
and Bangladesh (formerly known as East Pakistan).
Relying on the round-table negotiations and various dialogue processes, between Indian
and Pakistan, such as the Simla Agreement of 1972,11 the Kashmiri population hoped for a
resolution to the conflict of Kashmir even though Kashmiris were not allowed to be a party to these
confidence building processes. From 1947 till 1989, Kashmiris kept the movement of resistance
10 Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches: Sept. 1946-May 1949, vol. 1 (Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government, 1949). 11 Simla Agreement, “Simla Agreement (July 2, 1972),” accessed April 25, 2019, https://mea.gov.in/in-focus-article.htm?19005/Simla+Agreement+July+2+1972.
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alive through their hope for a peaceful resolution and through their faith in democracy and the rule
of law. At the same time, the people refused to assimilate into the Indian Union and rejected the
imposed identity of being an Indian even when India made conscious erosion in Article 370.12 The
article was supposedly was enacted to protect the identity of the Kashmiri population until the
plebiscite was to be held.
The failure of the peace processes between India and Pakistan and the botched election
process of 1987 led to the disillusionment of people’s faith in a peaceful resolution to the Kashmir
conflict. Consequently, in the year 1989, the armed rebellion launched by Kashmiris established
the rejection of forceful assimilation of Kashmir into the Indian Union. This violent revolt against
the illegitimate rule of Indian State was met with brute force. The deployment of military and
paramilitary forces in Indian occupied Kashmir in 1989 led to the intense militarization of the
region of Kashmir, making it currently the “world’s largest militarized zone.”13
Further, the implementation of repressive laws such as Armed Forces Special
Powers Act (AFSPA)14, Disturbed Areas Act (DAA)15, and Public Safety Act (PSA)16 strategically
laid the foundation of structural violence in Kashmir. These legal acts provide the Indian armed
forces absolute impunity to carry out gross human rights violations in the form of extra-judicial
12 A. G. Noorani, Kashmir–Union Negotiations on Article 370: May–October 1949 (Oxford University Press, 2011), 370. 13 Bhan et al. “‘Rebels of the Streets,'" 2. 14 Armed Forces Special Powers Act, "Wayback Machine,” ( 2015), https://web.archive.org/web/20150904052546/http://mha.nic.in/sites/upload_files/mha/files/pdf/Armedforces%20_J%26K_%20Splpowersact1990.pdf. 15 Disturber Areas Act, "Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act 1992 Complete Act," (Ministry of External Affairs, 1992), https://www.legalcrystal.com/act/133796/jammu-and-kashmir-disturbed-areas-act-1992-complete-act. 16 Public Safety Act, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Refworld | India: Act No. Act No. 6 of 1978, Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978,” https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b52014.html.
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killings, enforced disappearances (ED), rape, mass-rapes, torture, custodial killings, mass blinding
using pellet guns, arbitrary detentions, and sexual assaults.17
Throughout the 1990s, the Kashmiri society was shaken to its core due to the
unprecedented violence against the civilian population. The incessant crackdowns, curfews, and
hartals along with unwarranted search operations, harassment through unsolicited gaze on women,
and the routine frisking of men were changing the trajectory of the conflict of Kashmir,
transforming it into a war-zone. The discourse had changed from the demand for the plebiscite to
the referendum in Kashmir. It was during this time that people recognized the remarkable
segregation that was imposed in Kashmir, between the occupiers and the occupied. While Azadi
(Freedom) became the ultimate objective of the majority of Kashmiri population living under the
rule of the gun, Indian armed forces in jackboots and camouflaged uniforms filled the streets of
Kashmir. The presence of the alien occupying forces united the people of Kashmir irrespective of
their class and gender differences. The popular support to armed rebellion was made visible
through rallies and large-scale protests in the streets in which both men and women from all classes
participated in large numbers.18
The turn of the century witnessed the crushing of the armed rebellion by the Indian State.
The aggressive counter-insurgency operation was in full action in Kashmir during the nineties
which was finally able to eliminate the armed rebellion. An abominable lull lurks in the air of
Kashmir which is testimonial of the loss of life and property of the decade gone by. Although the
militancy had been removed at the time only to be resurfaced later, the Indian State ensured to
maintain its military occupation in Kashmir to suppress any form of anti-India sentiment. Colonial
17 Bhan et al., “‘Rebels of the Streets,'" 2. 18 Sumona DasGupta, “Borderlands and Borderlines: Re-Negotiating Boundaries in Jammu and Kashmir,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 27, no. 1 (2012), 84.
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militaristic practices, where the military might be used to discipline the people and crush any form
of dissent, being used on the Kashmiri people dominates the historical narrative of Indian occupied
Kashmir. Incidents of violence have become an important part of their memory which has further
shaped their relationships with each other and with the colonial state.
The reemergence of militancy—the armed rebellion—since 2013, along with the
rebels on the streets who fight with stones in their hands, has restructured the entire Kashmiri
political landscape. The attempts of the Indian State to quell the armed resistance this time is being
met with the resistance from the local population who have taken to the streets of Kashmir. The
paranoia that the Indian State had successfully created in Kashmir during the nineties, thereby
controlling not only the socio-political spaces but invading the psycho-emotional ones as well, has
gradually been eliminated by the continued resilience of the people of Kashmir over the last two
decades.
The people of Kashmir have given their “referendum in blood”19 and have rejected
every discourse that the Indian state has attempted to impose on them. The sentiment in Kashmir
remains clear and manifests itself in the everyday vocabulary of the majority of its people as well
as through their actions in the form of protests and activism against the colonial State. The women
in Kashmir have displayed their active agency against the Indian occupation while simultaneously
rejecting to be boxed in a particular category or performance of victimhood.
1.3 Resilience as Resistance
19 “Azadi Resurrected: A Referendum In Blood," HuffPost India,” 31 August 2016, 1.
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The approach to the concept of resilience has been debated in academia, especially in its
context to resistance.20 While in International Relations (IR) and Security Studies the association
of resilience with resistance is contested, within feminist critical studies the association is
encouraged from a methodological perspective.21 The need to examine resilience from a bottom-
up approach as a strategy employed by people living in conflict and/or war zones becomes a
practice through which people resist against the injustices and violence. Therefore, Caitlin Ryan
argues that it no longer remains just a mechanism of “coping” as has been advanced within IR and
Security Studies.22 Further, she states that the focus on resilience as a neoliberal tactic imposed by
the intervening bodies in post-conflict areas “dislocate it from the everyday practices of
communities… [further overlooking] the ways in which resilience can represent an infrapolitics of
resistance.”23 Analyzing the politics of dissent in Indian occupied Kashmir, I argue that the
everyday resilience of Kashmiris against the enforced disruption which manifests through violent
militaristic practices is a strategic practice of resistance. This resilient resistance has acquired
various forms over the years as a reaction to oppressive tactics imposed on the Kashmiri people.
Ryan’s definition of resilience is “as [it] being composed of three complementary traits:
it is adaptive, flexible, and fosters enduring relationships.”24 When located in the conflict-torn
20 Philippe Bourbeau and Caitlin Ryan, “Resilience, Resistance, Infrapolitics and Enmeshment,” European Journal of International Relations 24, no. 1 (2018), 221–239; J. Ann Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives on International Relations,” Handbook of International Relations (2002), 275; Caitlin Ryan, “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015), 299–315; Chris Zebrowski, “The Nature of Resilience,” Resilience 1, no. 3 (2013), 159–173; Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011), 143–160; Philippe Bourbeau, “A Genealogy of Resilience,” International Political Sociology 12, no. 1 (2018), 19–35. 21 Caitlin Ryan, “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015), 300; David Chandler, “From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond,” Human Rights and International Intervention, 2006, 3. 22 Caitlin Ryan, “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015): 300. 23 Ryan, "Everyday Resilience," 300. 24 Ibid., 302.
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Indian occupied Kashmir, resilience understood this way manifests itself through the agency
adopted by the women of Kashmir. Demonstrating utmost flexibility in response to the violent
military assault on themselves and their family, Kashmiri women defied the traditional roles and
formed unconditional solidarities with their male counterparts to collectively resist against the
military occupation.
The women’s support to armed rebellion was demonstrated through their every-day
resilience against the intrusion by the Indian armed forces into their private lives. Ryan argues that
within the Feminist Security Studies literature, understanding security and insecurity demands the
investigation of the every-day experiences of the women who live in close proximity to violence
and are subjected to it directly as well as indirectly.25 Further, documenting the oral histories of
the women who experience and witness war and/or conflict can form important “empirical material
that is otherwise silenced or excluded from the authorized subjects of research.”26 The experiences
of the majority of Kashmiri women with respect to their active involvement in the resistance
movement and their political awareness is made visible through their extraordinary resilience
which takes multiple ordinary as well as peculiar forms.
The women in Kashmir have always been active agents in Tehreek-e-Azadi, the
resistance movement of Kashmir.27 As Milliken calls resilience as a “self-help technique”28, I argue
Kashmiri women further expand this definition and have displayed resilience by assuming the role
of protectors and preservers. With the attack on the daily routine of Kashmiri lives as well as
25 Ibid., 305. 26 Maria Stern, “‘We’the Subject: The Power and Failure of (in) Security,” Security Dialogue 37, no. 2 (2006), 189. 27 Athar Zia, "Kashmiri Women- Concerns, Milestone and Solutions", Kashmir Affairs: London (2007), 2. 28 Jennifer Milliken, “Resilience: From Metaphor to an Action Plan for Use in the Peacebuilding Field,” Geneva: Geneva Peacebuilding Platform. Paper 7 (2013), 1.
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escalating onslaught on dissent which has ultimately killed more than 70,00029 people in Kashmir
since the beginning of the armed rebellion, the women of Kashmir have simultaneously kept
adopting various techniques against the militarized occupation to register their protest as well as
mark their political presence. Challenging the definition of honor and dignity as associated with
women, resisting the colonial gaze, innovating localized means to negotiate and fight with the
Indian armed forces, and rejecting to be identified as the victims took precedence over any
conventional roles and expectations. Further subverting the “myth of protection”30, Kashmiri
women actively protected the men who were the direct targets during the armed rebellion of the
nineties. During the crackdowns, which were a recurring event during the nineties and have made
a return since 2007, the men are forced out of their houses and harassed. The women eventually
would confront the Indian armed forces and resist them from taking their men. However, in most
cases, these women would defy these crackdowns by accompanying their men out of the house in
order to protect them from being harassed. Moreover, these women would take lead during
“crackdowns, cordon and search operations, area sanitation, etc., where they become responsible
for getting their houses searched, talking to belligerent armed forces, while the menfolk are
rounded up for identification.”31
While speaking with Jiger Maase, very well-known for her pro-resistance politics and
open support to armed rebellion against the belligerent Indian military occupation, she narrates to
me her active role in organizing rallies and mobilizing people against the zulm (tyranny) of the
Indian state on masoom (innocent) Kashmiri people. She says:
29 “International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir," Kashmirprocess, 20-21 February 2010, 16-25. 30 J. Ann Tickner, “Feminist Perspectives on International Relations,” Handbook of International Relations (2002), 283. 31 Zia, “Kashmiri Women,” 2.
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“In this house, I have served food to more than 500 militants. They are all my children. I would keep them
safe here, feed them, give them warm clothes. Why not?... they are my children. They are fighting for a
noble cause and if I weren’t this old, I would have fought with them.”32
Jigar Maase, 93, Srinagar
Apart from regular sit-ins, participation in rallies, and contributing to the counter-narrative
against the hegemonic narrative of the Indian State, Kashmiri women actively supported the armed
rebellion of the nineties by carrying out various important roles. Using Pateet’s distinction between
a “female consciousness and feminine consciousness”33 to understand the political culture of
resistance in Kashmir employed by both men and women, the resistance is centered against the
military occupation. The assault on the Kashmiri female body has been in the form of rapes (Asiya
and Nelofar Rape Case, 2010), mass rapes (KunanPoshpora, 1993), molestations, harassment, etc.
as well as the direct assault on their everyday reality with their husbands, sons, and fathers being
subjected to extreme violence in the form of torture, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances,
custodial killings, extra-judicial killings, fake encounters, mass blinding, etc. Imperative to
mention the assault on the private sphere and the material life of these women in which the Indian
armed forces would barge into the private spaces such as their rooms, restricting their mobility, as
well as deliberately damage their property and livelihood have pushed women to protest publicly
in sit-ins and engage in direct clashes with the police to demand justice for their killed and for their
disappeared. Frequent visits to judicial courts, police stations, torture camps, hospitals, etc., as well
as daily interactions with the state officials, policemen, informants, military and paramilitary
forces, were added to the everyday routine of a Kashmiri woman.
Identifying and empathizing with each other, the people in Kashmir have fostered
enduring relationships with each other that have further contributed to a “form of resilience [which]
32 Interview with the author on 6 April 2019. 33 Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Columbia University Press, 1992), 29-36.
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is compatible with resistance.”34 A classic example of such an enduring relationship in Kashmir is
shown by the families of the victims of enforced disappearances. These families have been resilient
in their search for the disappeared by going to every police station, torture camp, detention center,
and even military bunkers. After the establishment of the Association of Parents of Disappeared
Persons (APDP) in 1994 by Parveena Ahangar, who also lost her 17-year-old son to enforced
disappearance, these families have participated in sit-in protests every month throughout the year
against the Indian State. The members of APDP have become one large family who has shown
resilience through their continuous resistance to Indian State’s appropriation of the narrative on
the victims of enforced disappearance. While the Indian State rejects the phenomenon of enforced
disappearance in Kashmir and claims that the people in question have actually left their homes
willingly, the members of APDP have maintained their strong resistance to this narrative and assert
that their loved one has, in fact, been abducted by the state-backed forces.
1.4 Conclusion While the people of Kashmir still carry their forms of resistance which were a
response to the violent practices of the Indian State during the 1990s such as the monthly sit-ins
of the families of the victims of enforced disappearances in Partap Park, Srinagar, we are currently
witnessing a transformed form of resistance in Kashmir. Calling it the “New Intifada in
Kashmir”35, the streets of Kashmir are filled with angry Kashmiri youth who use stones as their
weapon against the occupying forces. These young men and women are continuing “a long-
standing struggle against what they viewed as the illegitimacy of India's evil empire through new
modes of protest and resistance, marshaling strategies of artistic and literary representation,
documentary film production, music, sit-ins, candlelight vigils, street marches, and stone pelting,
34 Ryan, “Everyday Resilience," 302. 35 Sanjay Kak, Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (Haymarket Books, 2013), 1.
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in an effort to secure their aspiration for a free (Azad) Kashmir.”36 In the same article, the authors
argue that these new forms of resistance in Kashmir are not detached from the armed struggle of
the l990s, however, I argue that they feed into each other, complement each other, and have
become a part of the longer anti-occupational struggle in Indian occupied Kashmir. The seven
decades of protracted conflict in Indian occupied Kashmir has formed a slippery relationship
between the people and the violence inflicted on them- shaping their every day realities while
knotting together the fragments of the stories of their realities congealed through memories and
dreams. The continued effort to live in this very place of devastation is an act of resistance for the
people in Indian occupied Kashmir. In the next chapter, I elaborate on my positionality as a
researcher as well as the methodology that has shaped this research
.
36 Bhan et al., “‘Rebels of the Streets,’" 3.
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2. Positionality and Methodology
2.1 The Self- Explaining of Positionality
The Trojans would have expressed a different narrative than that of Homer,
but their voices are forever lost.
I am in search of those voices.
~ Mahmoud Darwish
In the previous chapter, I discussed the forms of resistance in Kashmir and laid out the
historical background for the purpose of this project. In this chapter, I explain my positionality as
a researcher and explore the insider-outsider dilemma as a native based outside in connection with
my methodology for the research project.
Moustafa Bayoumi in his essay “Our Work Is of This World”37 uses Said’s argument on
representation to argue that knowledge production is intimately connected to the “application of
colonial power”38 and therefore manifests itself through literary texts, art, and anthropology.
Therefore, it is the responsibility of the intellectuals to participate and be “involved in the urgent
political issues of our time”39 and reclaim the spaces within academia and various art spaces that
have been denied to the oppressed in order to maintain the hegemonic discourse of the colonial
State. Arguing that Orientalism is not just the “political subject matter”40 but rather a “distribution
of geopolitical awareness”41 into various scholarly fields which doesn’t only create a geographical
distinction, but it also produces an uneven power relation between the investigator and the
37 Moustafa Bayoumi, “Our Work Is of This World,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 1 (2005), 6. 38 Bayoumi, "Our Work," 7. 39 Ibid., 7. 40 Said, Orientalism, 12. 41 Ibid., 12.
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investigated. Consequently, this uneven power relation asserts the will to maintain power over the
“other” that is being produced in the process.
The long relationship with grief…
As a native, born and raised in Kashmir, I have experienced the violent protracted conflict
all my life. There hasn’t been any other way of living for me, other than to live in a place where
you fear that “death is just a bullet away”.42 Witnessing the gruesome human rights violations
while growing up led to an anxious life living in fear and paranoia, and it gave me a sense of
direction, a goal to provide a platform for these unheard voices where they can be heard, where
their pain is acknowledged, and the injustices done to their war-bodies are recognized.
At the age of thirteen, I read in the newspaper that a fifteen-year-old girl was raped by an
Army Major in Handwara town of district Kupwara in Kashmir. I remember feeling paranoid for
days, fearing that I might be next. Years after this incident, I felt angry for feeling so insecure and
paranoid in my own house, fearing that I might be raped anytime by the Indian armed forces. The
feeling of being safe in one’s own home was snatched away from me and from fellow Kashmiris.
This was an injustice to me, and to every other Kashmiri.
As a researcher, I find it difficult to separate myself from my identity as a Kashmiri brought
up in a militarily occupied territory. Kashmir, more than a geographical space, carries a feeling of
home for me, a space I would like to return to every time. The justification to personalize the
research while remaining objective about it and eliminating any source of bias formally shaped the
postcolonial theoretical framework for my research. My positionality as a Kashmiri academician,
as I have experienced while applying for Ph.D. as well as in various debates and conversations, is
42 Quoted: Farah Bashir in the year 2016. Source: Facebook
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scrutinized for its potential bias in the name of “nationalistic” projects and “credibility”, therefore,
questioning my authority for self-representation.
Analyzing Said’s argument, “there is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is
formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes
canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true…
authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.”43 I examine my own “personal investment in this
study.”44 I relate to Said’s sentiment of being an Orient upon whom the domination of the powerful
has left a deep impact and, therefore, has become a part of our lives. I am acutely aware of my
identity as a Kashmiri Muslim woman, whose identity is reduced to an “exotic but agency-less
Other” as constructed by the colonial Indian State, which is further surveilled within academia.
However, I have managed to retain hold of my cultural and historical reality and consequently am
in pursuit of producing work which questions the legitimacy of the imperial powers as well as the
authenticity of the Orientalists (particularly the Indian academicians) when producing knowledge
over the crushed bodies while simultaneously manufacturing the identity of “the Other”.
Developing further the question of positionality, Kirin Narayan in “How Native is a Native
Anthropologist”45 argues that instead of viewing a researcher as an outsider or an insider, it is
crucial to inquire if the research is done on the generalized “Other” for academic fulfillment or
whether the subjects under study are treated as people with voices, needs, views, and dilemmas
that need to be brought forward and recognized. While I position myself as an insider working on
the people with whom I share my identity and history, I also recognize the privileges I enjoy as an
academic based in the West, as a scholar based in a European country, which can potentially
43 Ibid., 19. 44 Ibid., 25. 45 Kirin Narayan, “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?,” American Anthropologist 95, no. 3 (1993), 671–86.
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jeopardize my position as an insider and situate me outside the subjects of my research as someone
who isn’t physically present on ground and representing a European University. I argue that while
the subject that I am engaging with is of crucial importance, sensitivity associated with the ethics
involved during this research, especially while recording oral histories, must be keenly attended
to. It is imperative for me to remain acutely aware of the power relations that could potentially
become a hindrance to my research, and find methods to mitigate both visible and invisible powers.
Through this project, I highlight the agency of women who have kept the disappeared alive
through their memories and dreams and have become active political actors who have formed an
enduring relationship with each other through their shared suffering and pain. The importance of
the project lies in amplifying the voices of the people who experience violent conflict and are
directly affected by its intensity. Therefore, in this project, I have uncovered the silenced voices of
the women who have deeply felt loss and grief and have forged agency through their injured
political identity.
2.2 Mapping the events: Research Methodology
I argue that the Kashmiri woman’s consciousness can only be realized when they produce
their own knowledge based on their distinct experiences under military occupation and through
the preservation of their memories. Recording oral histories, more than a methodology is a
traditional source through which knowledge and memories are preserved. Kashmir for centuries
has had a rich history of preserving their experiences and memories and relaying them to the
following generations. Bringing forth the voices of women who experienced war during World
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War 2, Svetlana Alexievich46 conducted oral histories over a span of four years, featuring two-
hundred detailed experiences of women who actively participated in the war in multiple roles.
Inspired by the works of Alexievich, I uncover the everyday realities of the gendered war-bodies
of women who have lost their loved ones to the systemic crime of enforced disappearances in
Kashmir. The project is about “history and spoken memory”47 whose essence is best captured
through oral histories. In this thesis I seek to invoke a conversation between the present and the
past, weaving an intricate narrative between the personal, the private and the public, between
memory, dreams, and suffering.
I am a Kashmiri woman born and raised during the 1990s in Kashmir. I have experienced
first-hand the impunity of the AFSPA, and have witnessed the Indian armed forces carry out
gruesome human rights violations in Kashmir. For this reason, I situate myself as an intricate part
of the memory and the experiences of a Kashmiri woman. Through the recording of the oral
histories of women who have resisted the military occupation of Kashmir by generating their own
language of resistance, I examine the implications of the systemic crime of enforced
disappearances and question the legitimacy of the Indian State in Kashmir. Through semi-
structured oral histories, the silenced voices of women who have been denied their part in his(s)tory
are woven back into it directing its gaze on to their everyday experience of war and/or conflict.
This project employs qualitative methods using semi-structured oral histories that provide
the scope for the researcher to carry out the research in a descriptive manner, giving both the
researcher and the subject of the research enough space to understand each other as well as
46 Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (Random House, 2017), 1-2. 47 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 1998), 1.
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formulate a reliable relationship. It signifies the fundamental value of non-hierarchy, which is
emphasized also in feminist research.48 This approach allows the study to be subjective, responsive
and nonlinear. The design of the qualitative research would be purposeful which focuses on the
study of the culture, communities, events, and people. In the project, special importance is given
to memory as a subject of study in which it is critical to contextualize the interviews, as argued by
Sangster, “with attention [given] to who is speaking, what their personal and social agenda is, and
what kind of event they are describing.”49
My research focuses on analyzing closely the war-bodies of women in Kashmir who have
been fighting against enforced disappearances while continuing their resistance against the Indian
military occupation. This thesis is informed through the semi-structured oral histories of women
by recording their first-hand direct experiences of conflict which has further influenced their role
in the resistance movement. I use semi-structured oral histories to capture how these women have
successfully constructed their own language of pain, resistance, and acquired a new form of
agency. I interviewed nine participants who were selected using a snowball sampling through the
list of informants provided by the Association of Parents of Enforced Disappearances (APDP).
APDP has worked extensively on the issue of ED since 1994.
I was on my fieldwork for thirty days of April, starting from 1 April 2019 to 30 April 2019.
The fieldwork was heavily disrupted due to incessant curfews and restriction on mobility through
April. It was the month of the election, a democratic farce in the war-torn Indian occupied Kashmir,
due to which curfews were imposed on the civilian population on 11th, 18th, 23rd, and 29th of April.
Also, since the Indian occupied Kashmir is currently under Governor’s rule after the fall of the so-
48 Sharlene Janice Hesse-Biber, and Patricia Leavy, Emergent Methods in Social Research (Sage, 2006), 2. 49 Joan Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 1 (1994), 7.
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called elected government in June 2018, the Central Government of India has been able to directly
intervene in the current situation of conflict. On 1st April 2019, the governor of Indian occupied
Kashmir, Satya Pal Malik, gave the orders to actively restrict any kind of civilian mobility on the
National Highway on Sundays and Wednesdays for the smooth movement of military and
paramilitary convoys. This further created obstacles in conducting the interviews, since I wasn’t
allowed to travel on 3rd, 7th, 10th, 14th, 17th, 21st,24th, and 28th of April. In addition, after the Friday
Namaaz (prayer) every week my mobility was further restricted due to protests of the local
population against the Indian rule in Indian occupied Kashmir. Although the seventeen days of
house arrest made it extremely difficult for me to carry out my research on the field, it also further
motivated me to accomplish the task given the severity of the issue, especially after being witness
to the frustrating crackdown on the everyday routine of the Kashmiri people.
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3.Literature Review and Theoretical
Framework.
3.1 Theoretical Framework
Every project which questions the illegal political and militaristic occupation must examine
postcolonial literature especially if the investigator justifies their positionality from a postcolonial
perspective. In exoticizing the “Other” and the imperialistic and colonizing nature of the western
philosophy and literature, Edward Said’s Orientalism50 argues that the structuring of the Orient
“other” paved the way for the cultural appropriation and political occupation of the non-Western
countries by the West. Situating Orientalism’s importance in the present day occupied territories,
Said provides a strong theoretical framework and rationale for challenging the colonial
indoctrination of presenting the colonized woman as unsafe and oppressed and, therefore, in need
of rescue. I argue that the term “orient” is no more restricted to the East-West divide geographically
but must be analyzed in terms of hierarchal power relations that have been created in postcolonial
states and their present-day colonies. Putting Veena Das in direct conversation with Edward Said’s
Orientalism, Das aims to reorient anthropological studies toward the “critical events” where the
voices of pain from both the personal and the collective perspective are represented. Das
investigates how during critical situations the communities affected construct themselves as
‘political actors’, how the disruption of the mundane lead to the creation of new discourses, how
these discourses lay the foundations for social texts, and how further these discourses are
appropriated by the state through the appropriation of the sufferings of the victims. Extending
further, and utilizing both the texts to theorize my work, I argue that the military occupied “other”
50 Edward Said, “Orientalism," 1979.
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is exoticized and denied political agency; further reducing their gendered war body as a
battleground on which the wars are being played.
Exploring the dilemma of representation, I use the seminal text of Gayatri Chakravarty
Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?”51 to argue that while those that are subjected to oppression in
a conflict zone are capable of forming their own agency there always is a need for representation
of those struggle by an investigator who has a local understanding of the social and political
situation. In order to highlight the agency of the oppressed, I also investigate my position as a
researcher and examine my logical understanding of the “ground level value coding”52, that is to
have the understanding of the cultural context within which women in Indian occupied Kashmir
become active agents of resistance against militarization and engage in activism against enforced
disappearances particularly. Mohanty, taking a rather contradictory stand, argues that there always
exist traces of agency within the subaltern groups.53 Taking this argument further, Benita Perry in
her book Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique54 argues that by rejecting the agency of the
subaltern groups Spivak actively denies the colonized to reclaim their space in history. This helps
me to examine the women in Indian occupied Kashmir and their activism against enforced
disappearances and investigate if they are able to negotiate with those in the position of power,
that is the Indian military state, and make their voices heard. Further investigating if their agency
is recognized by the occupying state, I argue that the women in Indian occupied Kashmir have
indeed an agency of their own which they constantly use to negotiate with those in the position of
power, but their voices are being deliberately suppressed.
51 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (1988), 21–78. 52 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," 279. 53 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Zubaan, 2005). 54 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004).
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Through their everyday resilient resistance in the face of adverse militarized condition, the
women in Kashmir use language and memories of their loved ones, to construct their political
identities and create a strong discourse against the colonial practices of the Indian state. In her
compassionate project, Life, and Words: Violence and Descent into the Ordinary55, Veena Das
takes the important task of understanding how violence enters the “recesses of the ordinary”
instead of viewing it as a disruption of a body witnessing it. Das’s focus on the voices of the
ordinary, while weaving the language of pain manifested through the bodies of people that
experience violence, attempts to analyze how these violent events affect the every day of people.
These bodies that experience violence, I argue, are most suitable for producing knowledge based
on their experiences. Relating to this argument, Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought:
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment56 provides the framework of how
every knowledge that is produced is situated in the experiences of the people based on their class,
race, gender, region, and age, I argue that the women in Indian occupied Kashmir reject to be
perceived as passive victims who are incapable of forming their own self-defined standpoint
knowledge which is situated in their experiences of militarization, loss, violence, and occupation.
Women in Indian occupied Kashmir bargain with nonhegemonic patriarchy in their
everyday life while acquiring the agency and resisting the unfamiliar patriarchy imposed on the
people of Indian occupied Kashmir through the militarization of the Indian State. In “Under
Western Eyes”57, Mohanty gives a postcolonial critique to the monolith understanding of
complexities that women in the third world countries experience, and of patriarchy as explained in
55 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of California Press, 2007). 56 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge, 2002). 57 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 2 (2003), 499–535.
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the western feminist literature. Mohanty argues that the approach adopted by Western feminist
scholars while addressing the women in the Global South is “reductive, homogenous, and colonial”
and therefore requires to be critiqued from a postcolonial perspective. In a similar vein, Deniz
Kandiyoti in her work “Bargaining with Patriarchy”58 introduces the concept of ‘patriarchal
bargain’ while arguing that women in the African and Asian postcolonial nations make bargains
with patriarchy in subversive ways, to be able to maintain their autonomy within the household.
The distrust between the state and the citizens in the Global South falls apart when associated with
the masculinist protection narrative between the State and its citizens in the Global North. The
distrust between the citizens and the State is more nuanced in countries that are still reeling from
the aftereffects of colonialism. Further, the creation of new colonies under postcolonial states has
led to the creation of new conflicts as well as civil hostilities that have created ambiguous
conditions where the bargain between the state and the citizens are not clear and therefore require
investigation.
3.2 Literature Review
3.2.1 Women and War
Arguing that war and women are two categories that must be defined in relation to the
discourses explicit to the concerned area of study, Elshtain in her book Women and War defines
war as a “structure of experience, a form of conflict, a pervasive presence.”59 Taking it further and
situating it with respect to the women of Kashmir, not only because I personally identify as a
58 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988), 274–90. 59 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Preface, i.
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woman who was born and raised in thick of the armed conflict in Indian occupied Kashmir, but
because of the imperative need to relay the stories (recorded oral histories) of Kashmiri women
whose lives were affected deeply and reshaped by the intense militarization. Further to understand
that “any attempt to generalize about war is bound to demean the experiences of individuals caught
up in it”60 as expressed by Judy El-Bushra and Celine Mukarubuga, I argue that wars in the colonies
of postcolonial states have disrupted the identities of women who have been forced to experience
life-altering misfortunes, such as the enforced disappearances of the male members of their
families and, therefore, the theories and stories that form the basis of this thesis project brings to
attention the intermittent and incessant attack on the gendered bodies of women in Indian occupied
Kashmir and their active resistance to it.
It is critical to examine through a feminist perspective using a bottom-up approach on how
the conflict has affected the Kashmiri people, particularly the women in Indian occupied Kashmir,
and how they have actively engaged with the protracted conflict. Mama and Okazawa-Rey define
militarism as “an extreme variant of patriarchy a gendered regime characterized by discourses and
practices that subordinate and oppress women as well as non-dominant men, reinforcing
hierarchies of class, gender, race and ethnicity, and in some contexts, caste, religion, and
location.”61 Further, arguing that the women’s lives are affected in complex ways because of
militarism and its illegitimate relationship with capitalism, I argue that in Indian occupied
Kashmir, the women who have lived in close proximity to violence have negotiated with their
everyday realities. These women have juggernauted through the patriarchal and conservative
60 Judy El-Bushra and Cecile Mukarubuga, “Women, War and Transition,” Gender & Development 3, no. 3 (October 1, 1995), 16. 61 Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey, “Militarism, Conflict and Women’s Activism in the Global Era: Challenges and Prospects for Women in Three West African Contexts,” Feminist Review 101, no. 1 (2012), 97.
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expectations of the society and are constantly creating a space for themselves through which they
are not only resisting the violent assault of the militaristic occupation but at the same time are
extending their unconditional solidarity to the non-hegemonic male counterparts.
In conflict zones such as Indian occupied Kashmir, where war is an everyday reality,
conventional patriarchy becomes nonhegemonic and is replaced by a more powerful patriarch,
performed by the State. Therefore, patriarchy as a system takes various shapes and forms; and is
not limited to just men as oppressors and women as slaves. To envince, this Julie Peteet in “Gender
in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement”62 argues that the need for women’s
participation in resistance movements must be analyzed by distinguishing between female
consciousness and feminine consciousness. She argues that feminine consciousness is developed
to encounter any barriers to the agency of feminists with its prime target being patriarchy. Female
consciousness, on the contrary, is community-oriented political resistance which enables women
to participate in resistance by bargaining with the patriarchy within the society. Feminine
consciousness, because of its target-based policy, tends to lose the popular support which can
damage the agency of women in the long run. Peteet has discussed the case study of Palestine’s
political culture of resistance and its everyday forms of resistance where men and women, both,
are expected to actively participate. Using Peteet’s argument I situate the same analysis in Indian
occupied Kashmir and further extend my argument on how the half-widows and the mothers of
victims of enforced disappearances form their agency under undesirable enforced circumstances
forcing them to adopt activism and resist against the colonizing state. Caitlin Ryan in her essay
62 Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Columbia University Press, 1992), 88.
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Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud63 provides a framework
of women who reclaim their agency in occupied territories through subtle forms of resistance. She
makes a case for the connection between resilience and resistance from a bottom-up approach,
arguing that resilience and resistance are not binary concepts but rather are interconnected and
strengthen each other in conflict-torn areas. Using Pateet and Ryan, I argue that the women whose
everyday lives are marred with the experiences of violence and conflict form enduring
relationships with each other based on their shared suffering and pain. These women subsequently
become political actors who actively choose their battle against the incessant erosion of their
memories as enforced by the State.
3.2.2 Gender, Militarization, and Resistance
Violence enacted in a militarized state is gendered and consequently transforms the
everyday life of the local population. The term ‘gendered body’ is linked with the ‘sexed body’
because of the crucial need to focus on the experiences of the women in conservative societies in
which they are expected to perform feminine roles while subscribing to gender binaries. In
societies entrenched in conflict, a woman is made because she was born as one and not as someone
who represents to be one through their performance as argued by Judith Butler. Cynthia Enloe
argues that the ordinary gendered bodies under militarization become militarized when “they start
to think that the world is so dangerous that the necessarily slow processes of legislative hearings,
compromise, and open voting do not match the sense of speed and urgency and maybe secrecy-
that they have come to think are needed to address those alleged dangers.”64 Hannah Loney’s book
63 Caitlin Ryan, “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015), 299–315. 64 Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 63.
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In Women’s Words65 provides a framework of the complexity and diversity of women who
experience the military occupation, and how these experiences are deeply interwoven with their
everyday life, their memories, and their familial relationships. Catering to my own curiosity, I
situate the two contexts of how a militarized body is created and further how these complicated
yet diverse experiences of militarization lead to the formation of women’s resisting war body in
the context of enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir, where the women have taken
the responsibility of the search for their disappeared family members, being disillusioned with the
Indian judicial system and, therefore, have adopted peculiar resistance methods while at the same
time have integrated themselves within the larger resistance to military occupation in Indian
occupied Kashmir.
Cynthia Cockburn has argued that the nature of war is gendered and results in the “sexual
division of war.” 66 She argues that many women who live in war and/or conflict zones are certain
that under violent situation as such there are strong “gender-specific experiences”67 such as forced
pregnancies, widowhood, and half-widowhood in case of Indian occupied Kashmir. Speaking
directly with Cockburn’s argument of the gendered and disruptive nature of war, Swati Parashar’s
article “What wars and ‘war bodies’ know about international relations”68 introduces the concept
of war bodies. Taking Cockburn’s argument further, Parashar argues that war is actually captured
in the daily experiences of the people situated within the war. It is their war bodies that shape and
create political and cultural narratives “performing the international” in multiple ways. She argues
65 Hannah Jane Loney, “In Women’s Words: A New History of Violence and Everyday Life during the Indonesian Occupation of East Timor (1975–1999)” (PhD Thesis, 2016). 66 Cynthia Cockburn, “Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2010), 145. 67 Cockburn, “Gender Relations,” 145. 68 Swati Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know about International Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (December 2013), 615–30.
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that wars and militarization, on the contrary, do not disrupt the everyday life of the people with a
distinct start and end, but rather becomes a mundane but gruesome reality of the population which
they continue to live with. I use Parashar’s concept of ‘war bodies’ and Cockburn’s argument of
‘gendered war’, and position the Kashmiri women as war bodies in the conflict zone of Indian
occupied Kashmir. Their gendered bodies experience war every day while performing as a site of
agency, resistance, and memories simultaneously. I further argue that the women do not only
become passive agents of war and militarization who experience it but rather are active agents who
resist and negotiate with their everyday militarized reality. Focusing specifically on Indian
occupied Kashmir, I argue that these gendered war bodies are not only women but nonhegemonic
men as well, who collectively construct their political identities against the hegemonic patriarchal
occupying state. These political actors’ structure and reshape their discourse; which allows them
to unify and form their political agency of resistance against the military occupation.
Further, arguing that the women in Indian occupied Kashmir have formulated resilient
forms of resistance against the colonial militaristic practices used on the people of Indian occupied
Kashmir which dominates the historical narrative of Kashmir, I argue, that Ryan’s definition of
resilience “as being composed of three complementary traits: it is adaptive, flexible, and fosters
enduring relationships”69 when located in the conflict-torn Indian occupied Kashmir, manifests
itself through the forms of an agency adopted by the women of Indian occupied Kashmir.
Identifying and empathizing with each other, the people in Indian occupied Kashmir have fostered
enduring relationships with each other that have further contributed to a “form of resilience [which]
is compatible with resistance.”70 An example of such an enduring relationship in Indian occupied
69 Ryan, “Everyday Resilience," 302. 70 Ibid., 302.
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Kashmir is shown by the families of the victims of enforced disappearances. These families have
been resilient in their search for the disappeared by going to every police station, torture camp,
detention center, and even military bunkers, as well as, registering their protests through monthly
sit-ins and taking out peaceful rallies once every month since 1994.
3.2.3 Enforced Disappearances in Indian Occupied Kashmir
In order to understand the language of resistance and critically examine the gendered
terminologies imposed on the women’s war-bodies in Indian occupied Kashmir, I will explore the
works of Ather Zia such as “The Spectacle of a Good Half-Widow: Women in Search of their
Disappeared Men in the Kashmir Valley.”71 In the paper, she argues that in order to be socially
acceptable in the non-hegemonic patriarchal society of Indian occupied Kashmir, women who
have lost their husbands to enforced disappearances must conform to the norms and values of the
society. She argues that the agency of women in Indian occupied Kashmir is different and deeply
contextual than the general understanding of the gendered agency of women as being openly
subversive and confrontational. These women, Zia argues, opt for passive forms of performative
resistance such as mourning in order to uphold the image of an “asal zanaan” which translates to
a “good woman”. I explore this dilemma further to problematize Zia’s argument of the non-
confrontational agency of Kashmiri women fighting against enforced disappearances in Indian
occupied Kashmir. I argue that these women are the direct victims of conflict who are trying to
reclaim their agency and are fighting for the return of their disappeared husbands. They become
an indispensable part of the protracted conflict, which has been going on for decades. They are
involved intimately with the intricacies of the everyday war, shaping it and being shaped by it
71 Ather Zia, “The Spectacle of a Good Half-Widow: Women in Search of Their Disappeared Men in the Kashmir Valley,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39, no. 2 (2016), 164–175.
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simultaneously. Further, I dispute the non-confrontational resistance of Kashmiri women against
enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir and argue that instead these women have
opted for more active forms of resistance without caring too much about the societal norms, and
upholding the image of being a so-called “good woman”.
The abstruse term of “half-widow”, I argue, not only complicates the daily life of a woman
but erodes her agency as survivors and dissidents. Due to the term “widow” associated with the
women whose husbands are disappeared, these women are expected to perform certain gender
roles within the socio-political, cultural, and historical boundaries. The enforced widowhood of
these women limits their daily way of living; for fear of being looked at as unprincipled or even
as immoral women. Therefore, these women are expected to behave within the gendered
heterosexual norms to be accepted by society. I argue that these gendered stereotypes associated
with the war-bodies in a war-zone become a part of the daily performances of the women upon
whom the concept of victimhood is enforced, and which they have been actively rejecting and
resisting against.
Due to the limited literature available on women’s resistance to occupational forces in
Kashmir and particularly on enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir, I will draw
references from works on similar subjects situated on different geographical locations such as
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Argentina72, Mexico73, Syria74, Algeria75, and Sri Lanka76. In all the cases, the similarity found with
the phenomenon of enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir is the rule of oppressive
regimes that have subjected the people to state terrorism, military occupation, as well as the
resistance methods opted by the people living in these war-torn places, especially the persistent
and determined struggle of the women to search for their disappeared family members. The
collective resistance through memories of the lost ones and against enforced amnesia by the state
is crucial to the formulation of thesis while further analyzing the impact of the dreams of the
disappeared on the struggle of these women and their relationship with those they have lost to
enforced disappearances.
The use of humanitarian treatises and conventions on the protection of all persons from
enforced disappearances77 is crucial to investigate the actors involved in the phenomenon of
enforced disappearances and analyzing the role of the State. Vermeulen’s dissertation titled
Enforced disappearance: determining state responsibility under the International Convention for
the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance78 provides a detailed framework of
the norms laid down in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from
Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED) and identifies room for interpretation while also exploring the
72 Barbara Sutton, Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (NYU Press, 2018). 73 Sylvia Karl, “Rehumanizing the Disappeared: Spaces of Memory in Mexico and the Liminality of Transitional Justice,” American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014), 727–748. 74 Ole Solvang and Anna Neistat, Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture, and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons Since March 2011 (Human Rights Watch, 2012). 75 Jennifer Howell, “Investigating the Enforced Disappearances of Algeria’s ‘Dark Decade’: Omar D’s and Kamel Khélif’s Commemorative Art Projects,” The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 2 (2016), 213–234. 76 Wasana Punyasena, “The Façade of Accountability: Disappearances in Sri Lanka,” BC Third World LJ 23 (2003), 115. 77 Susan McCrory, “The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,” Human Rights Law Review 7, no. 3 (2007), 545–566. 78 Marthe Lot Vermeulen, Enforced Disappearance: Determining State Responsibility under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (Intersentia, 2012).
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impact of enforced disappearances on the affected families. It is important to understand the
conventions and statutes against enforced disappearances in order to be able to figure out the role
of the State in perpetuating as well as preventing the phenomenon despite the strict rules laid out
against it in various treaties, conventions, etc., by many international human rights organizations.
Further, I analyze various reports that focus on the mothers and the half-widows of the victims
of enforced disappearances to lay a grounded framework on its impact on the affected families.
Deya Bhattacharya’s report “The plight of Kashmiri Half-Widow”79 examines the transitional
justice mechanisms that cater to the needs of the women who have lost their husbands to enforced
disappearances. The report attempts to create a case for a policy that will attend to the economic,
social, psychological, and financial welfare of the half-widows.
79 Deya Bhattacharya, "The Plight of Kashmiri Half-Widows," The Hindu Centre, 5 January 2016.
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4. “Hum hain ki hum nahin”- Do we exist or
not?
If you leave who will prove that my cry existed?
Tell me what was I like before I existed.
Agha Shahid Ali
4.1 Introduction
This chapter introduces the phenomenon of enforced disappearances, its use as a
mechanism of state terror across contexts, development of legal instruments to prevent and punish
for enforced disappearances in global governance, and then moves to the particularities of enforced
disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir. It details the important information on the statutes
and conventions related to the systemic crime, especially the International Convention for the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances and Statute of the International Criminal
Court on enforced disappearances. The chapter further gives a detailed analysis of the enforced
disappearances in Indian Occupied Kashmir since 1989, the year the armed rebellion broke out
and marked the change in the struggle for self-determination with the help of excerpts from
interviews carried out for the purpose of the research.
The chapter while laying out the detailed context and analysis of the phenomenon of
enforced disappearances, also focuses on the voices of the women who have been the witness of
the crime. The chapter attempts to establish their testimonies as a counter-narrative to the state-
imposed narrative of the victims of enforced disappearances being either dead of having crossed
the Line of Control (LoC). According to the Indian state, the people who cross the LoC are trained
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as armed guerrillas to fight against the Indian military and paramilitary forces stationed in Indian
occupied Kashmir.
4.2 Phenomenon of Enforced Disappearances
The phenomenon of enforced disappearance was first recorded during the World War 2 in
Nazi Germany. After issuing the “Nacht und Nebel Erlass” (the Night and Fog Decree) on
December 7, 1941, Adolf Hitler gave open orders to “seize” persons who would potentially put
German Security in danger.80 Since the fall of The Third Reich, the practice of enforced
disappearances has been widely studied and can be attributed to more than sixty-three81 countries
over time. A complex issue to deal with, enforced disappearances have been declared as a crime
against humanity by the International Criminal Court in Article 7(1)(i) of the 1998 Rome Statute.82
It does not only jeopardize the security of the targeted person but also generates a domino effect
that impacts the entire community. It is a crime that violates multiple human rights such as:
“the right to security and human dignity; the right not to be subjected to torture or other
cruel, inhuman, and/or degrading treatment or punishment; the right to humane conditions of
detention; the right to legal representation; the right to a free trial; the right to a family life; and
even the right to life, when the abducted person is killed.”83
The history of how enforced disappearances have become an increasingly common form of
repression and torture at the level of the state is a fairly recent one. In 1980 the UN’s Human Rights
Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights set up a “Working Group on
80 Dalia Vitkauskaitė-Meurice and Justinas Žilinskas, “THE CONCEPT OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW” (2010), 198. 81 Brian Finucane, “Enforce Disappearance as a Crime under International Law: A Neglected Origin in the Laws of War Note,” Yale Journal of International Law 35 (2010), 172. 82 ICRC, "Customary IHL - Practice Relating to Rule 98. Enforced Disappearance,” Customary IHL Database, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule98. 83 M. Boot and C. K. Hall, “Crimes against Humanity. In Commentary on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: Observer’s Notes, Article by Article. Triffterer, O.(Ed.). C. H” (2008), 221.
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Disappearances”84 as its first thematic human rights mechanism with a universal mandate. In 1992
the UN General Assembly approved a “declaration on enforced disappearances”85 and in 2006
finalized the “International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearances.”86 Enforced disappearance in Article 1 of the convention is defined as:
“arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents
of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or
acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of
liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which
place such a person outside the protection of the law.”87
The treaty entered into force in 2010 and its implementation is monitored by the
Committee on Enforced Disappearances88 (a treaty body). The rapid detentions and abductions of
common masses based on mere speculation or a slight threat to the hegemonic status quo imposed
by the state consequently gave rise to the phenomenon of systematic violence of enforced
disappearances first in Nazi Germany, followed by Latin American countries in the late seventies
and early eighties. José (Pepé) Zalaquett, who served as chair of Amnesty International from 1979
to 1982, argues that the term ‘enforced disappearance first surfaced in Latin America, especially
in Chile and Argentina during the 1970s.89 He claims that the term “disappearance” was
specifically coined in Chile while working for the Peace Committee set in Chile after the
84 “OHCHR | Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances,” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Disappearances/Pages/DisappearancesIndex.aspx. 85 “A/RES/47/133. Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,” United Nations Treaties, https://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/47/a47r133.htm. 86 “OHCHR | Convention CED,” https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/ced/pages/conventionced.aspx. 87 “OHCHR | International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,” Article 2, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/IntConventionEnforcedDisappearance.aspx. 88 “OHCHR | Committee on Enforced Disappearances,” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CED/Pages/CEDIndex.aspx. 89 Carrie Booth Walling and Susan Waltz, “Human Rights: From Practice to Policy,” José (Pepe) Zalaquett, "The
Emergence of "Disappearance" as a Normative Issue," Ann Arbor: Univ. Mich. Http://Deepblue. Lib. Umich. Edu/Handle/2027.42/89426 (2011), 9.
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overthrowing of the Soviet rule when they realized that they were no longer receiving any
information about one hundred and thirty-one prisoners that they were representing.90
Further, Zalaquett argues that during the period of the socialist government in Chile
between 1973 and 1977, more than 1300 people were subjected to enforced disappearances.91 In
Argentina, enforced disappearances were carried out at an unprecedented scale, with around
30,000 persons believed to have disappeared between 1976 and 1983, during its so-called “Dirty
War.”92 During the seven years of the military dictatorship in Argentina, any person who spoke
against the military rule were labeled as dissidents, detained secretly and were never heard from
again.93
In Sri Lanka, there have been between 60,000 to 100,000 cases of enforced disappearances
as claimed by Amnesty International.94 In the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, there is hardly a
household which has not been affected by enforced disappearance. The victims included Sinhalese
young people who had leftist political leanings, LTTE supporters which mostly belonged to Tamil
ethnicity, journalists, human rights activists, etc. The report further argues that the perpetrators
have mostly been state-backed militias, military, and paramilitary operatives during the conflict
between 1983 and 2009.95
Chechnya is another important place which has been marked by the crime of enforced
disappearances. Since the second Chechnyan War in 1999, there have been between 3,000 and
90 Zalaquett, "The Emergence," 9. 91 Ibid., 9. 92 “ICMP Argentina’s Rule-of-Law Approach to Addressing a Legacy of Enforced Disappearances,” https://www.icmp.int/news/argentinas-rule-of-law-approach-to-addressing-a-legacy-of-enforced-disappearances/. 93 “ICMP Argentina’s Rule-of-Law Approach to Addressing a Legacy of Enforced Disappearances.” 94 “Sri Lanka - Victims of Disappearance Cannot Wait Any Longer for Justice,” Amnesty International, 3 April 2017. 95 “Sri Lanka - Victims," 3 April 2017.
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5,000 cases of enforced disappearances as reported by the Amnesty International.96 Similarly,
trapped in an armed conflict between 1996 and 2006, Nepal also has witnessed the systemic crime
of enforced disappearances. As per the Human Rights Report published by United Nations
Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), 1,300 persons have been
subjected to this crime of which 532 have been transferred to the Government of Nepal.97
Recurring global examples from the twentieth-century have been used as an effective tool
to systematically create insecurity and paranoia amongst those fighting against oppressive regimes.
The crime of enforced disappearances, based on the examples discussed above, have largely been
used as a tool by ruling governments, state-backed militias, and occasionally by insurgents, such
as those in Colombia98, to suppress any form of dissent or rebellion against the existing ruling
regime. While enforced disappearances have occasionally been used by insurgent groups to
eliminate any source of threat to them or their mission, it remains primarily a form of violence
associated with state terror and state power as has been seen in the majority of the cases all over
the world. In order for enforced disappearances to be recognized as a crime against humanity, it
must adhere to the conditions that are necessary to qualify the criminal offense as a crime against
humanity. These general elements are: “being part of state policy, attacks being directed against a
civilian population, being of a widespread or systematic nature.”99 These elements further
strengthen the argument of enforced disappearance being a tool for the state to crush the voice of
96 Joseph Barrett, “Chechnya’s Last Hope-Enforced Disappearances and the European Court of Human Rights,” Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 22 (2009), 133. 97 Salina Kafle, “Enforced Disappearance Aftermath of a Decade Long Armed Conflict in Nepal: Prospects and Challenges,” NJA Law Journal 9 (2015), 95. 98 Jocelyn Courtney, “Enforced Disappearances in Colombia: A Plea for Synergy Between the Courts,” International Criminal Law Review 10, no. 5 (2010), 679–711. 99 Vitkauskaitė-Meurice and Žilinskas, “THE CONCEPT OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW," 205.
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dissent, opposition, or even slight disagreement in cases of fascist countries such as under Nazi
Germany and various dictatorial rulers in Latin America.
Also known as an “octopus crime”100 due to the prolonged effect of the crime not only on
the disappeared but on their family members as well as on the community as a whole, the effect of
a single case of enforced disappearance is permanent. For the perpetrator to be held accountable,
it is essential to affirm that the crime meets the criteria of two types of conduct—deprivation of
liberty and withholding information.101
The analysis of enforced disappearances as a global phenomenon, which has unfortunately
not been given enough attention by academics and activists, paints a grim picture of the
extraordinary power that a nation-state has to execute its will in order to maintain its sovereignty.
In Indian occupied Kashmir, the phenomenon was introduced precisely for creating a sense of
paranoia and fear among the people who rejected to be assimilated within the concept of Indian
Union.
4.3 ICPPED and ICC Statute
The crime of enforced disappearances was recognized by the UN Treaty: International
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED) on 23rd
December 2006 and was opened for signatures in Paris on 6th February 2007.102 The Convention
has since been signed by ninety-eight countries, and sixty countries have ratified it.103 The issue of
100 Dalia Vitkauskaitė-Meurice and Justinas Žilinskas, “THE CONCEPT OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW,” (2010), 205. 101 Vitkauskaitė-Meurice and Žilinskas, "The Concept," 205. 102 Susan McCrory, “The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,” Human Rights Law Review 7, no. 3 (2007), 547. 103 “United Nations Treaty Collection,” https://treaties.un.org/pages/viewdetails.aspx?src=treaty&mtdsg_no=iv-16&chapter=4&lang=en.
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rampant disappearances started to make appearances as a serious issue that required attention at
the Commission on Human Rights’ meetings, especially after the groundbreaking work done by
WGEID during the 1980s. After Jose Zalaquette’s report on 131 disappeared persons in Chile in
the late seventies, the attention to the phenomenon of enforced disappearances started to gain
momentum. The international watchdogs, Human Rights Organizations had begun to understand
the intensity of the situation.
At its 47th meeting in 1992, the Commission submitted the draft of ICPPED to the UN
General Assembly where it was adopted.104 The gaps in the draft led to several debates over the
fate of the Convention, which finally led to the appointment of Professor Manfred Nowak.
Professor Nowak through his compelling report finally convinced the Commission to “convene an
open-ended working group.”105 Subsequently, the first meeting of the open-ended working group
in January 2003 led to the appointment of Ambassador Bernard Kessedjian as its
Chairman/Rapporteur. Within the next three years, a draft was developed for the Convention which
was presented at the Human Rights Council in 2006. After it was adopted by the Council, it was
transferred to the General Assembly and unanimously adopted by the United Nations.106
The Convention is divided into three parts: “Part I sets out the main requirements that must
be addressed in the national law of acceding States; Part II deals with the establishment of a
Committee on Enforced Disappearances; and Part III contains the formal requirements for
ratification or accession and entry into force, in addition to clarifying the relationship between the
Convention and international humanitarian law.”107 The convention asserts that enforced
104 McCrory, “The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance”, 547. 105 McCrory, "The International," 548. 106 Ibid., 548. 107 “OHCHR | Convention CED”, Article 43.
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disappearance is one of the very few crimes that has been considered to be “continuous,” ending
only when “the State acknowledges the detention or releases information pertaining to the fate or
whereabouts of the individual.”108 However, most states do not recognize their involvement in the
practice of enforced disappearances of the people who they see as a threat of their power and
control. The outright refusal of being involved in enforced disappearances is because these states
are aware of their power as sovereign nations and recognize that no international body has the
power to interfere in their domestic issues, even when these states are carrying out human rights
violations in the name of their nation, as has been the case in Indian occupied Kashmir. The recent
Human Rights Report published in June 2018 by the United Nations acknowledged its failure to
intervene in the gross human rights violations carried out by the Indian State in the occupied
territory of Kashmir.109
Included in the Convention (ICPPED) is a stipulation that allows for the family member of
the disappeared, being directly affected by the crime, to have the legal right according to the
international law to inquire about their loved ones and to know the details of their supposed
violation. The ICPPED refers to the right to truth in its preamble, noting that the Convention covers
“the right of any victim to know the truth about the circumstances of enforced disappearance and
the fate of the disappeared person, and the right to freedom to seek, receive and impart information
to this end.”110
The United Nations General Assembly’s Declaration of December 18th, 1992 made the crime
of enforced disappearance an offense to human dignity. In its preamble, the Declaration further
108 “OHCHR | Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.” 109 “OHCHR | First-Ever UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir Calls for International Inquiry into Multiple Violations,” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23198%20. 110 “OHCHR | Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances”, 4.
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states that “enforced disappearance undermines the deepest values of any society committed to
respect for the rule of law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.”111 The Declaration also
stresses the role of the State in its Article 2 to protect its citizens, while ensuring that the State does
not practice, permit, and tolerate the crime of enforced disappearances.
Declaring enforced disappearance as a “crime against humanity” 112 the Rome Statute of the
ICC further defines enforced disappearances in Article 2(i) as “arrest, detention or abduction of
persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization,
followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the
fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of
the law for a prolonged period of time.” 113 It is worthwhile to note that the difference between the
ICPPED and ICC Statute is that while the Statute identifies ED as a crime only when it is
systematic and is carried out against a targeted community, the Convention takes into account each
case of disappearances, even when the target is isolated from the rest of the community.114
4.4 Crucial case of Enforced Disappearances in Indian Occupied Kashmir
India has signed the ICPPED on 7th February 2007115 it hasn’t ratified it to this date.116 The
Indian State has confirmed with the Human Rights Council and assured that it intended to ratify
the Convention but the Human Rights Commission of India in 2012 argued that the Indian
111 “A/RES/47/133. Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.” 112 “OHCHR | Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” Article 7(1)(i), https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/InternationalCriminalCourt.aspx. 113 “OHCHR | Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”, Article (2)(i). 114 McCrory, “The International,"551. 115 “United Nations Treaty Collection.” 116 As per the United Nations Treaty Collection Website, a representative signing the treaty is only considered definitive when the state confirms the signature which is subject to ratification. Ratification defines the international act whereby a state indicates its consent to remain bound to a treaty. The institution of ratification grants the state the necessary time-frame to seek the required approval for the treaty on the domestic level and to enact the necessary legislation to give domestic effect to that treaty.
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government had not shown any interest in actually ratifying the Convention.117 The Commission
further added that the crime of enforced disappearance was in fact “not codified as a criminal
offense in domestic law, nor were extant provisions of law used to deter the practice.”118 Although
the state government of India claims to be in cooperation with the WGEID “it has never allowed
a visit by this mechanism despite having issued a standing invitation to all thematic special
procedures in 2011.”119 The implications of the refusal to ratify the convention against enforced
disappearances are evident when looked at the events that have unfolded in Punjab120 and in its
occupied territory of Kashmir.
Enforced disappearances started in the valley of Indian Occupied Kashmir in the year 1989121
when the valley was gripped in armed conflict. The State of India adopted vicious methods to
contain and consequently eliminate the armed rebellion against India’s military rule in Kashmir.
Gutted in violent conflict for the past seventy years under Indian occupation, Kashmir is a place
of mourning, heartbreaks, death, torture and unending longing for the lost ones. With more than
8,000122 people disappeared at the hands of the Indian military and paramilitary forces who are
being protected by despotic acts such as AFSPA, DAA, and PSA giving complete impunity to the
forces to carry out human rights violations in Indian occupied Kashmir.
117 “OHCHR | First-Ever UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir Calls for International Inquiry into Multiple Violations,” Part I (100), https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23198%20. 118 “NHRC-India Submission to the UN Human Rights Council for India’s Second Universal Periodic Review| National Human Rights Commission India,” Part 20, http://nhrc.nic.in/press-release/nhrc-india-submission-un-human-rights-council-indias-second-universal-periodic-review. 119 “OHCHR | First-Ever UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir Calls for International Inquiry into Multiple Violations,” Part I (100), 28. 120 Romesh Silva et al., Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India: A Preliminary Quantitative Analysis (Ensaaf, 2009). 121 “OHCHR | First-Ever UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir Calls for International Inquiry into Multiple Violations,” Part I (97), 27. 122 “ Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons,” About APDP, http://apdpkashmir.com/about/.
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The loss of loved ones affects the families of the victims in multiple and layered ways. The
first impact is the loss of income on the family. On a much deeper and personal level, the agony
of waiting for the return is a form of emotional and psychological torture. This crime has left at
least 1,500123 women without any information about their husbands, who become half-widows.
The judiciary of India has failed in Indian occupied Kashmir, unable to apprehend a single
perpetrator involved in these enforced disappearances. There are cases as documented by the
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) where the families have identified and
testified against the perpetrators in the court. However, the Indian courts in Kashmir have been
unsuccessful in bringing the perpetrators involved in the abduction and illegal detention of the
disappeared to justice.124 The Indian State has used the armed struggle of the 1990s to legitimize
the systematic practice of enforced disappearances in Kashmir. The legal authorities of India have
often claimed that those who have lost their loved ones to enforced disappearances have actually
crossed the border over to Pakistan to join the militancy.125 However, the argument is punctured
when the families and other eye-witnesses testify to the witnessing the abduction of the victims
and identify the perpetrators involved in the abductions.
One such example is that of Zoona Begum who is nearly sixty-five years of age from District
Islamabad in Indian occupied Kashmir. Zoona narrates how she lost her husband to enforced
disappearances:
“I searched for him for ten years. There was a rumor that there would be a crackdown in
our locality… and in order to escape the humiliation of frisking, he left with his friend to another
colony which is a few kilometers away from here. As fate had it, the army decided to cordon that
area… the next day we were informed that the army took him away.”126
123 “About | Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons.” 124 “Enforced Disappearances in Jammu and Kashmir” (2004), 9. 125 “OHCHR | First-Ever UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir Calls for International Inquiry into Multiple Violations”, Part I (97), 27. 126 Interview with the author on 13 April 2019.
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Zoona Begum, 65, Islamabad
In another incident, Khateeja Begum of Srinagar also approximately sixty-five years of age
recalls how her oldest son was taken away from their home in front of their eyes:
“At around 11:40 in the night the army barged into our house, searching every room for
something… I kept asking them what they were looking for, but they did not reply… finally, they
picked my son, Manzoor, barely 25 years old, and left. The locked us from outside while we kept
banging the doors. Nobody from the neighborhood dared to open our gate till morning. Since
then I have been searching for him.”127
Khateeja Begum, 65, Srinagar
Both Zoona and Khateeja have legitimate proof to justify the role of the state in the
enforced disappearance of their husband and son respectively. These women are not afraid to
narrate these incidents of crime as much painful as the act of remembering every detail can be. In
a more detailed interview with Safiya Azaad whose story has remained with me because of her
defiance in the face of adversity, she narrates the events of the day her husband was taken away
by the Indian army:
“It must have been around 2 pm, one of my brothers-in-law and a helper in the family came to Jawahar
Nagar, where my maternal house is. Upon reaching they inform me that Himayun has been picked by
BSF [Border Security Forces] at Mahjoor Pull. I left at that very moment… to Mahjoor Pull. Upon
reaching there we saw his car, but he wasn’t there… they (BSF) had taken him away…”128
Safiya Azaad, 43, Srinagar
Safiya’s narration signifies the deep impact that the incident has left on her memory of her
husband. Her active role in searching for her husband from the very moment he was illegally
detained129 by the Indian military speaks of her courage to fight against the injustice. Even though
127 Interview with the author on 24 April 2019. 128 Interview with the author on 4 April 2019. 129 As per the guideline of Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the military forces of India are not allowed to detain or arrest any civilian except in cases of terrorism.
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at the time she was still recovering from labor having given birth to her now 24-year-old son,
Dawood, Safiya embarked on her new journey in search of her disappeared husband.
“…I immediately went to the Rajbagh Police Station, where they told me that the case didn’t come under
their jurisdiction and that I should register the FIR [First Information report] at Thaan-e-Saddar, Baghat
because he was arrested from the other side of the pull. I went to Thaan-e-Saddar and filed an FIR. I
returned home. It must have been around 4 pm or 4:30 pm when I reached back here, here it was another
world altogether. So Many Soldiers! There was so much of army here, I don’t think I can even describe it
to you in words. The entire house was surrounded by army/soldiers, on all four sides. At least four
battalions must have gathered outside our house. They had covered the entire area. We weren’t even
allowed to enter inside our own house. After a while, one of the soldiers went inside the house, our house,
and informed his officer that Himayun’s wife, mother, and son were outside. After a while, another
soldier came out and asked me, my mother and my mother-in-law to come inside the house. Everyone else
was asked to stay outside only.
A few minutes passed by and four to five army vehicles, gypsies, entered from our gate and stopped in our
lawn. From one of the gypsies, the soldiers dragged out Himayun. After that, only my mother-in-law was
given permission to go down and meet him… (a tear trickles down her right eye, she doesn’t pay attention
to it)
When Himayun had met my mother-in-law, he had said, and I quote, “Please save me from them. They
will kill me. Whatever you have here, please give it to them but please save me from them.” (her voice
quivering at this moment)
When my mother-in-law begged the Officer for mercy and offered her everything, he declined gold but
took cash of one hundred thousand Indian rupees (1,000,000 INR) that we had in the house at the time.
He picked it up in a bag and left… (pauses)... before leaving Himayun had asked my mother-in-law for
Dawood. He had asked her to let her see Dawood one last time. As soon as my mother-in-law entered the
room that we were locked in to take Dawood to see his father, they had taken Himayun away in the
meantime. They didn’t let him see Dawood. *pauses… has tears in her eyes) … (quivering)… Since then
we haven’t seen him.”130
Safiya Azaad, 43, Srinagar
The testimonies of these women who have taken the responsibility of the search for the
disappeared haven’t left a single stone unturned to know about their whereabouts. Just the act of
repeating the incidents when the crime was committed, and remaining committed to being
testimonies of the crime have become a part of resistance for the people of Kashmir, especially
these women who have been denied closure to their loss.
130 Interview with the author on 4 April 2019.
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The international response to the Kashmir conflict in general and the subsequent killings
of Kashmiris has been almost insignificant. Although Kashmir remains the oldest unresolved
dispute in the United Nations since January 1, 1948, the conflict received little support from the
international community. United Nations131, Human Rights Watch132, and Amnesty International133
have incessantly requested the Indian State to allow access to the militarized zone of Indian
occupied Kashmir, as well as asked it to probe the Human Rights violations carried out by the
Indian military and paramilitary forces.
Human Rights Watch in 2007, asked the Indian government to launch a credible and
independent investigation into all “disappearances” and fake “encounter killings” in Jammu and
Kashmir and argued that the “recent revelations have confirmed what families in Kashmir have
been alleging all along.”134 Amnesty International in its published report on Indian atrocities in
Kashmir and have persistently asked India to probe the enforced disappearances and urgently
investigate “hundreds of unidentified graves discovered since 2006 in Jammu and Kashmir. The
investigation [further] must be independent, impartial and follow international standards.”135
The phenomenon has directly as well as indirectly impacted thousands of lives, wrecking
the civilian population emotionally and disrupting their day-to-day lives. It has not only stripped
the victims of their right to life but has also impacted their families, affecting them emotionally,
131 “OHCHR | First-Ever UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir Calls for International Inquiry into Multiple Violations”, Part I (2), 4. 132 Human Rights Watch | 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor | New York, and NY 10118-3299 USA | t 1.212.290.4700, “India: Investigate All ‘Disappearances’ in Kashmir,” Human Rights Watch, February 15, 2007, https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/02/15/india-investigate-all-disappearances-kashmir. 133 “Access to Justice in Jammu & Kashmir | Human Rights Abuses | Abuses by Security Force Personnel," Amnesty International India, https://amnesty.org.in/projects/justice-jammu-kashmir/. 134 Avenue, York, and t 1.212.290.4700, “India.” 135 “Access to Justice in Jammu & Kashmir | Human Rights Abuses | Abuses by Security Force Personnel" Amnesty International India.
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psychologically, economically, and socio-politically. The Conventions, treaties, and agreements
remain mere words on the paper without any significant consequences in the occupied Kashmir.
4.5 Conclusion The chapter provides a close examination of the phenomenon of enforced disappearances
globally and in particular in Indian Occupied Kashmir, while also providing a detailed
understanding of the implications of the conventions, treaties, and statutes on enforced
disappearances. One could argue that the systematic crime of enforced disappearances has been in
practice since World War 2, although the seriousness of the issue has only grasped the attention of
scholars and activists in the last four decades. The crime does not only affect the disappeared
victim but its impact spreads far beyond that, affecting the lives of anyone who has been associated
with the victim in whichever capacity. In the case of Kashmir, where the crime of enforced
disappearance is systematic, it has come to affect the community as a whole which has further led
to the creation of anxiety and terror among the local population. In order to fight against the
imposed state terror, the next few chapters will discuss how such circumstances lead to the
formation of various forms of micro-resistances where pain and suffering become a thread through
which solidarities are forged and how collective memory creates new spaces of agency for women
who have lost their loved ones to enforced disappearances.
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5. “Noor-e-Nazar Gaye Laapata”- The light of
the Eyes are Disappeared
So, I’ll regret it. But lead my heart to pain.
Return, if it is just to leave me again.
~ Ahmad Faraaz
Translation: Agha Shahid Ali
5.1 Introduction
The previous chapter discussed the definition of the phenomenon of enforced
disappearances as per various human rights organizations, the United Nations, and the ICC Statute;
further elaborating on these definitions, the chapter also looked at the Convention on enforced
disappearance, the ICC Statute, as well as the difference between them before finally engaging
with the emergence of and the rampant execution of enforced disappearance in Indian occupied
Kashmir. The chapter implies the failure of the Indian state to acknowledge the widespread
phenomenon in Indian occupied Kashmir as well as focuses on its reluctance to apprehend the
perpetrators of the crime. The chapter highlights the oral testimonies of the women who have been
witness to the crime that acts as a counter-narrative to the state-imposed narrative of declaring the
disappeared as run-away militants (terrorists) or as dead.
To enunciate the impact of the crime on the families of the victims of enforced
disappearance, this chapter presents the oral histories of the women related to the disappeared
victims from the postcolonial theoretical framework to examine their agency through their share
suffering and how they have become sites of agency, activism, memories, and resistance. It further
examines the journey of one woman, Parveena Ahangar, who mobilized the families of the victims
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of enforced disappearance to resist against the systemic crime in Indian Occupied Kashmir,
demanding information about the whereabouts of the disappeared which consequently led to the
formation of “endured relationship”136 between the families of these victims. Finally, the chapter
analyzes the etymology of the word “half-widow” and its impact on the women who have lost their
husbands to enforced disappearances in Indian Occupied Kashmir which limits their activist
agency and therefore, I introduce the concept of Enforced Widowhood.
The chapter establishes the agency of the women fighting against enforced disappearances
in Indian occupied Kashmir and charts the terrain of how the injured political identities of these
women become active political actors resisting injustices through their shared pain and suffering
as well as form strong reliable relationship with each other.
5.2 Madno- Narrating tales of suffering
Das argues that suffering is caused due to the injustices of life which at first seem
meaningless but is soon converted into an accusation against life which further makes it imperative
to make life in itself justifiable.137 While it may be a method to coerce the sufferer into accepting
the responsibility of suffering, as argued by Das who calls it “internal orientation”138, I engage with
the external factors that cause this suffering and how this suffering is used as a weapon of
resistance to acquire agency in war-torn areas. In the militarily occupied Kashmir, I argue the pain
136 Caitlin Ryan, “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015), 301. 137 Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, vol. 7 (Oxford University Press Delhi, 1995), 139. 138 Das, Critical Events, 139.
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caused to the families due to the crime of enforced disappearances is the common thread through
which they not only identify themselves with each other but also has given meaning to their
collective voice against it.
Having become the sites of resistance and agency, the mothers and the wives of the victims
of enforced disappearances, have taken the responsibility of not letting their disappeared die into
oblivion. During the fieldwork for this project, the women interviewed reiterated their will to keep
the struggle for the search of the disappeared alive. A 91-year-old woman, Hajra Appa, casually
tells me about her most beloved son who was abducted from his home 28 years ago in 1990:
“He was beautiful, looked like Tamim… do you know Tamim? He had curly hair…like him. Now,
his hair must have also turned grey [pointing towards my hair], maybe his beard as well. Who knows! If
only I could see him again. I will though, that’s why Allah has kept me alive… to see him before I close my
eyes. His eyes would twinkle, like yours. I saw him once after they took him away from me. He could barely
walk towards me, that’s how much they had beaten him. May God punish them for torturing my son!
Ameen”139
Hajra Appa, 91, Bandipora
The families of the victims of enforced disappearances have found their strength and hope
in one woman from Kashmir, who is also famous as the Iron Lady of Kashmir, Parveen Ahangar.140
I interviewed Parveena Ahangar, the Chairperson of Association of Parents of Disappeared
Persons (APDP) to substantiate my argument of how women in Kashmir have formed a strong
relationship with each other whose roots lie in their shared suffering and their struggle for their
disappeared loved ones. During her interview, Ahangar narrated the story of her disappeared son,
Javaid, who on 18th August 1990 was abducted by the Indian armed forces. Javaid had just joined
High School, and according to Ahangar, was the smartest among all her children. During a search
operation carried out by the army in Batamaloo area of Srinagar, where Ahangar lived with her
139 Interview with the author on 27 April 2019. 140 Interview with the author on 2 April 2019.
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family at the time, the army detained Javaid while looking for a local militant who shared his name
with Ahangar’s son. Ahangar narrates her journey of pain and suffering and how she found the
meaning of her life through her experience:
“I couldn’t sleep that night. He had a sleepover at her cousin’s house, who also lived nearby, in
the same locality. I knew something bad was going to happen… intuition maybe, I don’t know. At 3 in the
morning, someone knocked at our door. It was our neighbor. She screeched when my husband opened the
door and cried out Javaid’s name. I thought they had killed him. I shook her, asked her to tell me what it
was… and then in-between her sons, she told us that they had taken him away.”141
Parveena Ahangar, 63, Srinagar.
This marked the beginning of a new journey in Ahangar’s life, a life of longing, waiting,
searching, and resistance. A woman who had barely finished her middle-school began her
continued search for her disappeared son. During her search, Ahangar had to face humiliation at
the hands of local authorities, harassment and unsolicited harassment by army men at torture
centers, camps, as well as by the local police at police stations. During her search, Ahangar met
many others who were also looking for their disappeared family members. This is when, according
to Ahangar, she realized that she was not alone in her fight. Hafsa Kanjwal argues that “moments
of intensified nationalisms, resistance, or war position women as ‘mothers of the nation’ [are not]
solely signs of oppression [but in fact] this representation can be liberating for the women”142 while
giving Ahangar’s story of resistance and endurance as evidence. Even though Ahangar, as she tells
me during the interview, kept fighting legally till 1997, she was already disillusioned with the legal
system by this time and had started to slowly mobilize people who also had lost their family
members to enforced disappearances. She further tells me:
“I knew they (the government and its authorities) wouldn’t help me but I didn’t want to leave any
stone unturned. I was lucky to have a good lawyer though, he helped me in the journey. He told me, “listen
Parveena, you must fight.” I knew I had to fight, and I was ready to face whatever life would throw at me
now… I had already lost my son (voice quivering, eyes moist), what worse could possibly happen to me
now? Death? I won’t die till I find him. He is alive, you know that? My heart knows. My heart is never
141 Ibid. 142 Hafsa Kanjwal, “Women in Kashmir: A Feminist Autoethnography,” SAGAR: South Asia Graduate Research Journal 20 (2011), 57.
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wrong. I started to talk to people at the camps, torture centers, hospitals, courts, police stations… you
name it… I realized people from everywhere in Kashmir, every district, every village were affected by this
calamity. I asked them to help me and I promised to help them. We have joined our hands, and we are a
family now. This is my family now, dearer to me than my own…. after all, we share the bond of pain”143
Parveena Ahangar, 63, Srinagar.
This led to the informal formation of an association of parents of victims of enforced
disappearances in 1994.144 Ahangar initially decided to organize a sit-in protest assembling the
families of the disappeared. Parveena would leave her house every morning in search of the
families of the victims of enforced disappearances.145 Choosing to be active in her struggle, she
says she would collect the cuttings of newspaper reports of disappearance cases and find their
families. Her active struggle reveals the empowered agency of women in Kashmir who choose to
be active political agents rather than be passive bearers of injustice. She mobilized the families of
the victims of enforced disappearances from many villages in Kashmir and would gather them at
one place to discuss their plans. After holding a few meetings at her own residence, Parveena
Ahangar decided to protest in Sher e Kashmir Park for the next few years where the families of
the victims would gather on 25th of every month asking for the whereabouts of their loved ones.146
She would bear the expenses of these families, provide the food, their transportation charges, and
sometimes would let them stay at her house for the night in case it would get late.147 On asking her
if any of the mainstream politicians ever offered her any help, she denied saying:
“None of them ever offered any help… why should they? They all are here to fill their own pockets
and for power…. They are busy playing their blood politics. They don’t care about the common people.
They don’t care about us.”148
Parveena Ahangar, 63, Srinagar
143 Interview with the author on 2 April 2019. 144 Shubh Mathur, "Parveena Ahangar and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP)," 2016. 145 Shubh Mathur, “Parveena’s Story,” in The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict (Springer, 2016), 40. 146 Mathur, “Parveena’s Story,” 42-44. 147 Ibid, 43. 148 Interview with the author on 2 April 2019.
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The majority of those who are willing to keep the search alive are either mother or wives
of the victims of enforced disappearances as was observed during the fieldwork and also confirmed
by Ahangar during her interview. Invoking Anwar Mhajne and Crystal Whetstone’s argument of
“political motherhood” 149 in which the authors argue that the political motherhood is the women’s
maternal instinct that pushes them to engage with political issues, I argue that the women in
Kashmir who are fighting against enforced disappearances become political actors due to the
impulse to preserve, protect, and pursue the search for their lost family members. These women,
both mothers, and wives, find it particularly difficult to disassociate themselves from the memory
of the disappeared as well as from the societal consequences of the disappearance. Safiya in her
interviews mentions:
“As time went by, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and I had to commit two years of
my life to take care of her. She passed away eventually in 1999 (may her soul rest in peace), because of
this, our search for Himayun slowed down. Also, because his brothers decided to live separately which also
became one of the reasons for their lack of interest in pursuing the case further. Till that point, they were
all together in their search for their brother because of their mother, my mother-in-law. His mother would
go out in search of him till her last breath. She would do this because she felt her pain for her son. Because
she was a mother. How can a mother forget her son? That’s not possible. I would also accompany her in
search of Himayun. I felt alone after my mother-in-law’s death and therefore even I couldn’t do justice to
our search for Himayun.”150
Safiya Azaad, 43, Srinagar
The wives particularly have become a site of an “injured identity”151 who not only have to
suffer the persistent pain of living in the absence of their significant other but have to bear the
responsibility of meeting the social expectations of being the half-widow of their disappeared
husbands. In the next section, I problematize the term half-widow and argue how it disrupts the
site of resistance and activism that the wives of the disappeared have come to be.
149 Anwar Mhajne and Crystal Whetstone, “The Use of Political Motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring Uprising and Aftermath,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20, no. 1 (2018), 55. 150 Interview with the author on 4 April 2019 151 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, vol. 6 (Princeton University Press Princeton, NJ, 1995), 1.
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5.3 Enforced Widowhood: Questioning the term “Half-Widow”
As argued by Cynthia Cockburn, war is always gendered which results in the sexual
division of war where the experiences of women are gender specific which alters their realities,
such as the creation of a new gendered entity- ‘half-widow’. The wars lead to a reshaping of gender
relations in conflict-torn areas.152 Situating the argument in a conservative society of Kashmir,
women are expected to perform certain roles. These women who have lost their husbands to
enforced disappearance continue to wait for them and are expected to live as widows while
performing their roles as waiters. The term half-widow evidently is an enigma in itself.
The term was used by the Kashmiri media first which was accepted by the academicians
and scholars without ever problematizing the term.153 These women who have experienced conflict
while living through it become what Swati Parashar calls “war bodies.”154 Although Parashar’s
work does not necessarily focus on women and her concept of war-bodies applies to people in war
irrespective of their gender, I use the term to specifically refer to the gendered bodies of women
in Kashmir who experience violence and war in their everyday life. Half-Widows “live in wars,
with wars, and war lives with them”155 and will continue to live with them long after the war ends.
These women, as Parashar argues, are trapped in a state which has no clear entry or exit against
their will. The women entrapped in political issues such as the systemic crime of enforced
disappearances get involved emotionally, psychologically, politically, and are affected socially
152 Cynthia Cockburn, “Militarism and War,” Gender Matters in Global Politics. A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010), 105. 153 Ather Zia, “The Spectacle of a Good Half-Widow: Women in Search of Their Disappeared Men in the Kashmir Valley,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39, no. 2 (2016), 164. 154 Swati Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know about International Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (December 2013), 615–30. 155 Swati Parashar, “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’,” 618.
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which several feminist IR theorists have recognized and are pursuing further.156 They are not only
waiting for the return of their disappeared husbands but have actively been participating against
enforced disappearances in Kashmir as well as against the illegal military occupation of Kashmir.
Zia argues that the site of a half-widow has “dramaturgical elements of agency, resistance, and
memory” 157 through which her body performs activism against oppression.
The dominant narrative looks at women as passive actors in wars who are perceived as
victims of war whether as mourners grieving for their dead and missing or as widows living in dire
conditions.158However, several feminist IR theorists argue that women, in fact, have their own
agency which they cannot be denied to them through their traditional roles.159 In the case of
Kashmir, the women who lost their husbands to enforced disappearances have reaffirmed
themselves as “wives” of their disappeared husbands who will return and not as widows, thereby,
rejecting the possibility of their husbands’ death. The identity of these women is complicated as
their injured political self is forced to make negotiations with the society while regaining the
legitimacy to be active political actors. These women are not half-widows but question the state as
well as the society for associating widowhood to their political identity.
They took him (Bashir, her husband) away in June 1992, since then I have been waiting for him. I
have suffered in his absence- emotionally, physically, and financially. I survived a hemorrhage once and
they would still call me “aadhi bewah”- “half-widow.” Do I look “half” to you in any way? [Smiles]
I have lived in extreme poverty. I have lost a son to an accident. I take 10 tablets a day. Do I look
“half” to you? I am not half, I am just in a wait. If I don’t meet him (Bashir) here, I will meet him there
[referring to life after death], but I am his wife, not his half-widow.”160
156 Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (Routledge, 2013); Christine Sylvester, “Experiencing War: An Introduction,” in Experiencing War (Routledge, 2010), 13–19; J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (Columbia University Press, 1992); Peteet, Gender in Crisis. 157 Zia, “The Spectacle of a Good Half-Widow”, 165. 158 Sandra I. Cheldelin and Maneshka Eliatamby, Women Waging War and Peace: International Perspectives of Women’s Roles in Conflict and Post-Conflict Reconstruction (A&C Black, 2011), 1. 159 Swati Parashar, "What Wars and ‘War Bodies’," 629; Cynthia Cockburn, "Militarism and War," 106; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6-7. 160 Interview with the author on 27th February 2018
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Late Dilshada Begum, Ganderbal.
I interviewed Dilshada Begum last year in February 2018 while recording oral testimonies
of women who have been affected by the militarization in Kashmir. Her case is particularly
important for me because I was a witness to her final days that she spent waiting for her husband’s
return. Dilshada passed away in April 2018.
While these women have made the ‘wait’ as a part of their resistance and their identity,
they refuse to use the term ‘half-widow’ as a part of their identity. Focusing on the etymology of
the word “Half-Widow”, the ambiguity is self-evident where a woman is neither a wife nor a
widow, but half of each. The disappearance of their husbands makes these women hyper-visible
because of the absence of the husband who is neither dead nor physically present, thereby denying
them the luxury to neither grieve their husbands nor move on with their lives completely.161 The
abstruse term of half-widow, therefore, not only complicates the daily life of a woman but denies
her the agency to be identified as a survivor and dissident.
The enforced widowhood of these women puts certain limitations on their daily way of
living, due to the fear of being looked at as unprincipled or even as immoral women, therefore
expecting them to behave within the gendered heterosexual norms to be accepted by the society.
These gendered stereotypes associated with the war-bodies in a war-zone become a part of the
daily performances of these “willing and unwilling participants”.162 The culturally induced
practices in which culture, religion, class, and gender form layers of expectation from the women
who have lost their husbands to enforced disappearances further suppress their injured political
identity. The unhealthy fusion of patriarchal social structure with state-imposed violence proves
161 Zia, “The Spectacle of a Good Half-Widow”, 165. 162 Parashar, "What Wars and ‘War Bodies’," 618.
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to be detrimental to their agency yet these women have found unusual methods to form their own
constituencies.
These women are directly affected by the violent militarization in Indian occupied
Kashmir, who have become an indispensable part of the protracted conflict, which has been going
on for decades, and are involved intimately with the intricacies of everyday war, shaping it and
being shaped by it simultaneously. Having to bear the responsibility of a good loyal wife waiting
for her disappeared husband, these women are expected by the conservative society to be good
widows, obedient of the societal rules, modest, caring, while strategically and carefully modifying
their behavior for being accepted by the Islamic society of Kashmir. The heavy militarization in
the valley, which has very effectively created fear and anxiety among the civilian population of
Kashmir, the women “experience war in the most sickening, excruciating, profound”163 ways
informing them of their day-to-day performances within social and cultural expectations.
Among the many challenges that the women of Kashmir are being forced to negotiate, the
half-widows of Kashmir are forced to comply to certain state and religious (Islamic) laws due to
the uncertainty surrounding their husbands’ death. These women must wait like widows, for a
minimum of four years and four lunar months for the return of their disappeared husbands before
they decide to remarry as per the Islamic Shariah Law.164 As per the Indian State, only after waiting
for their disappeared husbands for seven years and accepting them as dead legally can these women
marry again.165 While the discussions around the claim to the property of their husbands are being
debated within the Kashmiri society, mostly by the male Islamic clerics and by the local Kashmiri
163 Christine Sylvester, “Experiencing War: An Introduction,” in Experiencing War (Routledge, 2010), 14. 164 Ezabir Ali, "Breakthrough Ruling on Kashmir ‘Half-Widows’” (Conciliation Resources, January 30, 2014). 165 Alisha Mehta, "Economic Rights of Half-Widows in Kashmir - TheLeaflet | An Imprint of Lawyers Collective," The Leaflet, 25 May 2018.
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authorities, these women are often left without any financial support forcing them to take menial
jobs to support their families.166
Living under intensive militarization and in a nonhegemonic patriarchal society, gendered
bodies of women have become a battleground in Kashmir where multiple wars are fought
simultaneously. These women, while negotiating multiple challenges of living under military
occupation, in their daily life are pushed to comply and conform to the rules and regulations formed
and shaped by the nonhegemonic patriarchal society. Failing to analyze the impact of the sudden
disappearance of the husbands of these women, the society thrusts certain expectations on them,
enforcing on them a new form of widowhood.
Introducing the concept of “enforced widowhood”, I argue that the women who have lost
their husbands to enforced disappearances have been forced to live a life of ambiguity. These
women are coerced into performing multiple social roles such that of a widow to be accepted by
the conservative and patriarchal society of Kashmir as well as that of an activist, in a socially
acceptable way, against the militarized occupation.
The analysis of the question of a half-widow, therefore, helps us to further understand how
the gendered bodies of women in war and/or conflicts are restructured and rewritten and how their
relationship with their everyday life is being reshaped constantly.
5.4 Conclusion
Waiting for someone is a task that requires patience. The life-long wait for the disappeared
requires courage and persistence. Kashmiri women who have lost their loved ones to the crime of
166 Bhattacharya, "The Plight of Kashmiri Half-Widows," 5 January 2016.
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enforced disappearances have made this wait a part of their everyday life and a weapon of
resistance. The pain of longing which they have suffered has given these women the agency to
become political actors who are capable of raising their voice against the injustices done to them
and their family members. It is this suffering that has made every single voice profound and unique,
while also giving them the legitimacy to question the social responsibilities that are forced upon
them. These women have indeed become the sites of agency, activism, resistance, and memory
who have made it their life-task to not only bargain with the patriarchal and conservative societal
expectations but at the same time register their collective struggle against the militarization in
Indian Occupied Kashmir.
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6. Dopnam, “moshraevzamne kenh.” - He
said, “Don’t forget me.”
When the body perishes,
all perishes;
but the threads of memory
are woven with enduring specks.
I will pick these particles,
weave the threads,
and I will meet you yet again.
~Amrita Pritam
Translated by Nirupama Dutt
6.1 Introduction
It was June 2017 and I woke up rather early, gasping for breath, finding my steps while I
rushed to my mother, who I knew would be reciting Qur’an downstairs. I did not register anything
in my brain, running to her was a reflex I still cannot comprehend. For the next three hours, I was
inconsolable as I beat my chest mourning what I had just witnessed in my nightmare.
In one of his findings, Joseph Conigliaro argues that “the meaning of the dream is in the
dreamer, in the bodily registered experiences that have not yet been imbued with the linguistic
meaning.”167 In a place like Kashmir that has been ridden with violent realities of separation
through death and disappearances, those left behind give meaning to their dreams because of which
they experience emotions that are hard to give meaning through words, which eventually become
an important part of their memory.
167 Vincenzo Conigliaro, Dreams as a Tool in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Traveling the Royal Road to the Unconscious (International Universities Press Madison, CT, 1997), 30.
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In the previous chapters, I have attempted to nuance how we approach an understanding of
the agency of women who lost their loved one because of enforced disappearances. By examining
women’s resilient resistance, I argue that they inform activism by registering their protest in the
streets. I also analyze how these women who have formed enduring relationships because of their
collective suffering and their shared pain become political actors resisting enforced disappearances
in Indian Occupied Kashmir. The focus of this last chapter on how resilience functions to preserve
the memories of the disappeared which in itself becomes a political act of resistance and how
dreams and/or nightmares can sometimes become a catalytic medium for making memories as a
weapon for resistance.
6.2 Dream, Memory, and Resistance
It was the twenty-ninth day of Ramadhan, we had just opened our fast of nineteen and half
hours when I anxiously checked my phone for messages. A famous journalist, Shujaat Bukhari,
was assassinated by unknown gunmen a few minutes before iftaar168, and my phone was flooded
with messages and missed calls from my friends and colleagues. His death was a shock for all of
Kashmir and beyond because of his social presence and his notable work. I ate my dinner afterward
and talked to a few friends inquiring about the incident before going to bed.
That night, one of the biggest fears of my life manifested itself in the form of a dream, or in
this case, a nightmare. I saw my brother smiling asking me to let him go because something hurt
him too much. He points to the side to his stomach, saying he had to go because it was painful for
him to put up with it. I beg him in my dream, asking him to come back. I assure him that I would
trade anything just to have him back because I could not conceive of a life without him. He smiles
168 Islamic term for the time at dusk when Muslims open their fast during Ramadhan
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and asks me to let go. Etched in my memory forever, I cannot seem to let go of it. The traumatic
impact of the dream manifests itself in my every day. Dreams and/or nightmares shape our lives
subconsciously. It is in our subconscious that our realities encounter our suppressed insecurities
and desires. It is here, in our dreams and/or nightmares, that a sense of danger or an immense joy
is experienced which gives our memories a new meaning and, thus, forming an invisible strategy
to use memory as a weapon of resistance.
While recording the testimonies of women the discussion on memories, dreams, and
nightmares would often come up. The importance of dreams within the Kashmiri society is in fact
underrepresented within academia, and it was during my field-work I realized how my work as a
researcher has been shaped by my memories of violence while growing up which would manifest
in dreams and/or nightmares. Memories of the disappeared keep them alive in the everyday
realities of their loved ones, and thereby arguably act as a counter-narrative to the Indian State’s
imposition of them being dead or having crossed over the Line of Control (LoC).169 It is through
memory and giving it a voice that these women have created new forms of “micro résistance”170
to retaliate against the Statist narratives.
As Lacan has claimed “all dreams are nightmares,”171 the process of conducting oral history
interviews with my participants helped me to realize how I was interpreting my own dreams.
During my interviews, I would find a way to ask my interviewees to share with me about their
dreams and/or nightmares about their lost loved ones if they were comfortable. Almost every time
169 Haley Duschinski, “Reproducing Regimes of Impunity: Fake Encounters and the Informalization of Everyday Violence in Kashmir Valley,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010), 120. 170 Barbara Sutton, Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (NYU Press, 2018), 134. 171 Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytical Goal:" Le Sinthome" or the Feminine Way,” in Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-Inventing the Symptom (The Other Press, 2003), 59–83.
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I could find a peculiar correlation of their happy memories with a violent incident invoking a series
of bad events. This further
In one of my interviews with Safiya Azaad, she recalls a dream in which she sees her husband
wearing a black jacket that he loved and the way he looked on the day of their marriage. At the
same time, she tells me how she can feel in her dream the constant fear of losing him again and
the threat that he would be detained by the army. She was happy she could see her husband, feel
him, click a picture with him; but at the same time, she dreaded to lose him again. She was confused
in her dream because her mixed emotions contradict how she expects to feel when she is reunited
with her husband in the future. Her dream keeps shifting back and forth between her worst
nightmare and her happy memory. While at the same time, it is important to note that this memory
of her dream itself gives her strength to keep fighting for her husband’s return, it is also chipping
away a part of her reality every single day.
“We were in some village somewhere, there is so much chaos around us, people come rushing towards
me and tell me that there were gunmen, police, journalists, and reporters in the village and they are about
to release Himayun… they will let go of your husband soon. But they will take him away after. I get really
worried and I am confused. I get confused because they tell me that they would release my husband but
then take him away. How could that possibly be, I wonder in my dream…
…they keep telling me that they would soon release him, we were as if among the ruins, there were debris
of old buildings around us… in the meantime a reporter approaches me and asks me takes his picture
with his family… but instead, he takes my picture with Himayun and Dawood. Himayun reaches to his
pocket and takes out something from it, and while looking at it he says, “I only miss my family…. I miss
my family the most… a lot.” 172
Safiya Azaad, 43, Srinagar.
Her face is soft with lines of sadness all over, she speaks in a low soft voice, narrating her
story like verses from the Quran, sacred, holy, true, close to her heart. She sits in the same room,
at the exact same spot, during our interview, where she was made to sit on her day of marriage.
172 Interview with the author on 4 April 2019.
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While describing the day her husband was taken away from her, she explains to me every small
detail of that day, taking me through every moment with small nods, hand gestures, and her eyes.
She knows her house too well, she remembers every detail of it because the memory of her
husband’s disappearance has become the map of her house. In her dream, the desire to be
photographed with her husband is essentially a ghost resurrected by her deep desire to be reunited
with him again. The fact that she sees him in his favorite black jacket signifies the impact of his
absence has had on her which she tries to compensate by keeping his memories fresh through her
dreams.
Throughout the process of the interview, I was aware of being someone who couldn’t
possibly feel her pain, empathize with her in the truest form, her experience of being a half-widow
was inconceivable, yet she saw me as someone she could trust, speak to openly, and identify with
at an intimate level. Reflecting back, I realize the home she and I share together, which has shaped
our lives, is also an imagined map for our future. Our identity as Kashmiris, as women who belong
to the same faith, who have experienced the conflict, witnessed it first-hand. This memory that we
shared, although experienced differently, helped her confide in me, remain open to me, and
develop a relationship beyond that of an interviewer and interviewee.
A certain calm covered Safiya’s face while she narrated her ordeal with moist eyes. She
talks about her struggle, and the importance to honor her husband’s memory.
“I have a lot of memories. If I pay attention to the memories that I have of him, I will never return from
them. I have lots of his memories. What would be a better way to honor his memories that to acknowledge
my wait for him?! I wait for him. I will wait for him. I wait for him with the hope that he will return to me.
What would be a better way to honor his memory? If the Almighty wishes, I am sure he will return.”173
Safiya Azad, 43, Srinagar.
173 Ibid.
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While addressing her husband, she discusses him in the present. I, unfortunately, realized
this after I finished recording the interview. I assume that using present tense while talking about
her husband, Safiya registered her protest to accept that her husband is dead. She honors her
husband’s memories through her resilient wait for his return, as she later mentions in the interview.
However, I argue that she also honors his memories by giving voice to them, by registering her
protest both verbally and in action.
Safiya constructs herself as a political actor whose gendered body has been a battleground
for war. Her reason for getting married at such a young age was because of the atmosphere of
terror that the Indian armed forces had successfully created in Kashmir. Himayun, her then would-
be-husband, was inclined towards joining the indigenous armed rebellion against the atrocities
committed on the people of Kashmir by the Indian armed forces. Since both their families were
related to each other their families decided to get them married as it would give them both a sense
of responsibility towards each other and help them protect each other.
The embodied memories “extend the temporality not only of suffering but of resistance as
well.”174 The memories are not only an important source of reconstructing the crime scenes as well
as for identifying the perpetrators and other information but also for giving life to the everyday
resistance of these women against enforced disappearances who otherwise are caught up in the
mundane routines. While reliving these memories are painful for these women – Parveena
describes it as “scratching the wound”175 in her interview – it also is a witness to human rights
violations through which state terrorism is documented. Sutton argues that “trauma and open
174 Sutton, Surviving State Terror, 170. 175 Parveena Ahangar’s interview with the author on 2 April 2019.
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wounds associated with state terrorism point to the connection between collective memory and
human rights.”176 The encouragement within the feminist IR studies to work on issues that include
women testimonies and their body narratives of their experiences of violence, conflict, and war
could potentially open a gateway to a social change that can revolutionize the approach to human
rights. The new approach, I argue, will take into consideration the gendered experiences of women
as well as men due to their close proximity to violence which further can prove to be useful to
better understand the political activism of these people. The connection between collective
memory and human rights can be crucial to change the political discourses around the role of
women during conflicts and wars. It is, therefore, of crucial importance to preserve these memories
of loss which transform these women into carriers of the voice of resistance.
While interviewing Mahmooda, who lost her son to enforced disappearance in 1994, she
mentions how she would still serve her disappeared son food just to feel his presence. She says,
“How can I not serve him food still? If I don’t, I feel guilty… I feel I have given up on him. I haven’t yet.
That’s why I still serve him food… just to feel his presence. I know he is alive, somewhere… [looks at me
hopefully]… and if I am serving myself and my husband and my other children food, how can I not serve
him?” 177
Mahmooda, 57, Bijbehara
There is a strange weariness on Mahmooda’s face. While interviewing her she was mostly
calm, expressing very few emotions, and towards the end of the interview a tear trickled down her
cheek. Her husband sat next to her during the interview, sobbing inconsolably throughout, to the
point that he left the room. While he was outside, Mahmooda spoke to me in a hushed voice and
said while referring to her husband,
176 Sutton, Surviving State Terror, 11. 177 Interview with the author on 20th April 2019.
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“I don’t cry in front of him anymore. He underwent heart surgery recently, I don’t want to give him
another heart attack. I am keeping strong for him. He goes in search of him every day and I am keeping
strong to keep him alive.”178
Mahmooda, 57, Bijbehara
It is crucial to note here the multiple roles that Mahmooda performs here such as the vessel
of memories of her disappeared son, carrier of the voice of resistance, shield to protect her husband,
and a comrade to thousand others who share her struggle against enforced disappearance.
Thousands of these women who share their struggles with Mahmooda and perform similar roles
are political actors who collectively resist enforced disappearances in Kashmir. Through their
testimonies, it is evident that these women share their experiences which have led to the formation
of collective memory.
Sutton argues that “collective memory is an ongoing process” which is being shaped
continuously and is “essentially dynamic.”179 The collective memory of these women in Kashmir
become a strong tool of counter-narrative challenging the hegemonic statist narrative of denying
the right of existence to the disappeared. The Indian state has strengthened its narrative of the
disappeared to have crossed the border to Pakistan or at least been killed while crossing the LoC
to receive guerrilla training in Pakistan.180 This narrative is strengthened especially during election
campaigns via public speeches and with the use of media such as through newspapers, news
channels, etc., especially through the use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
However, the collective memory of the wives and mothers of the victims of enforced
disappearances takes the shape of a collective voice which resists this narrative by becoming the
living proof of the atrocities carried out in the name of a nation-state on the local population in
178 Ibid. 179 Sutton, Surviving State Terror, 9-10. 180 Haley Duschinski, “Reproducing Regimes of Impunity,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2010), 11.
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Indian Occupied Kashmir. These women are not only the witness of the crime in the past but
strengthen the political struggle in the present while also striving to establish the strong basis for
justice, human rights, and the hopeful return of the disappeared in future.
6.3 Conclusion
As argued by Burke it is critical to take into account the impact of recounting painful
memories and sharing intimate stories and dreams, while also ensuring whose stories need to be
told, what memories need to be preserved, and who wants to remember in order to be able to carry
out the research ethically181. However, the activist legacies of these women participants suggest
that they are willing to relive their painful memories to give shape to the collective memory which
provides the basis for their collective struggle against enforced disappearances. The resistance
against disappearances is perhaps ignited by the recurring dreams and/or nightmares of meeting or
even reliving the pain of losing their loved ones again respectively. Such dreams, one can argue,
are the manifestation of the everyday experiences of the families of those who have lost their loved
ones to war and conflict.
Pontalis emphasizes that every dream in itself is an experience which even words cannot do
justice to, further arguing that it is through dreams that the dreamer is anticipating reaching a
state.182 However, I argue that in a dream the dreamer strives to reach the fulfillment of an
unfulfilled state or desire. In case of a person who has experienced trauma such as in the form of
losing someone or witnessing a violent incident, dreams and/or nightmares effectively become a
medium of reliving those memories, or sometimes, creatively making changes to the actual
181 Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” Memory: History, Culture and the Mind 100 (1989), 100. 182 B. Pontalis, “Dream as an Object,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 1 (1974): 131.
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incidents in order to fulfill an unfulfilled desire. In the testimonies, evidently, the dreams have
been a crucial instrument of not only preserving the memory but also acts as a catalyst to keep the
passion for the search of the disappeared alive. In other words, resistance, dreams, and memory
form an intricate bond that feeds on each other in order to keep the energy for the collective
struggle against violence, injustices, crime, and state terrorism thriving.
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7. Conclusion
The act of formulating concrete arguments, based on the disturbing realities experienced by
people living in conflict zones, is a difficult task.
As highlighted by Spivak’s argument on representation, it is paramount to highlight certain
lived experiences through academia. Kashmiri women, the soul of this project, in fighting against
enforced disappearances have reclaimed their own agency. While this is highlighted through
their various innovative and nonconventional methods of resistance, it is eminent to give
visibility to their resilience through academia. It is here that I find the justification for my
involvement in this research project, especially as a Kashmiri woman with a deep political,
social, and historical understanding of the situation in the Indian occupied territory of Kashmir.
This research project has been an emotional roller coaster, given my deep involvement
with both the subject and with my participants, who have become my family over the last few
years. Subjected to an eternal wait for their disappeared sons and/or husbands, these women have
indeed become sites of agency, memory, dreams, activism, and resistance. I approached this
research through a postcolonial theoretical framework; as a way to justify my positionality and to
emphasize the need to give visibility to the voices of those who are often oppressed. By reason of
a postcolonial framework, I was able to avoid academia’s reductive discrepancies which
essentialize the lived realities of third world women. On the contrary, it allowed me to present
the unique and exceptional experiences of women living in war-torn Indian occupied Kashmir
within an academic setting.
My first chapter provided the historical context of the political dispute between India and
Pakistan over the occupied territory of Kashmir. It further explored the trajectory of the
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resistance against the Indian occupation during the last seven decades. In doing so, I examined
the resilient nature of the forms of resistance present in Kashmir, in the fight for the right to self-
determination. In relationship to this, I presented how women in Indian occupied Kashmir have
adopted various nonconventional and unique resistance methods to assert their agency against
militarized occupation. This is especially evident in their fight against the phenomenon of
enforced disappearances. In the second chapter, I discussed the postcolonial theoretical
framework, which has been essential to formulate my core arguments and to situate my research
within the existing literature on the topic. I investigated my positionality as a Kashmiri woman
and a researcher in my third chapter. The later also provided justification for the use of semi-
structured oral histories as a methodology that sought to emphasize on the tradition of preserving
and relaying oral histories in Kashmir. Moreover, this choice of methodology enunciates the
importance within feminist scholarship to unearth the voices of the ignored, the marginalized,
and the oppressed.
While keeping a focus on the rampant execution of enforced disappearances as an
octopus crime in Indian occupied Kashmir, the fourth chapter traces the origin of the
phenomenon back to World War II; in order to depict the gravity of the systemic crime of
enforced disappearances at a global scale. This chapter also examines the nature of the
occurrence in different geographical contexts and surveys various treaties and conventions
dealing with it. Additionally, the fourth chapter introduces the discussion on the agency held by
women resisting enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir. Here, I assert the
importance of recorded oral testimonies in strengthening a counter-narrative to the state-imposed
hegemonic narrative of the fate of the disappeared person in Indian occupied Kashmir. In
chapters five and six I have knotted together different testimonies to arrive at the core argument
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of my thesis. In the fifth chapter, I argued that the lives of the women related to the victims of
enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir have become intertwined. These women
have come to form a strong and endurable relationship with each other through their collective
suffering and shared the pain. Further, I argue that the identities of these women are politically
injured because of the expectations that the Kashmiri conservative society levies on them.
However, these women, especially the half-widows of Kashmir, have responded to such
expectations over the years by rejecting any label that could potentially limit their activism. In
the last chapter, I examine the intricate relationship between memories and dreams, and how
these become a strong tool of resistance against the (military) occupation in Indian occupied
Kashmir. Based on my examination of the recorded oral histories, I found that dreams play an
instrumental role in the preservation of memories, and act as a medium to keep alive the passion
to search for the disappeared. Finally, I advance the argument that dreams, and memory form an
intricate bond morphing the bodies of the women related to the disappeared into sites of
resistance against injustice, violence, and state terrorism.
My main objective is to highlight the agency of the women fighting against enforced
disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir. These women, whose gendered bodies have
experienced and are directly affected by violence and conflict, have found a myriad of resilient
and nonconventional methods of resistance against the illegal military occupation. These women
are deeply embedded in the conflict. The conflict has become their reality; ultimately attaching
itself to their everyday life. These women map their existence through the events that have taken
place since the incident of disappearance. Every occurrence in their lives becomes associated to
the disappearance of their loved one. In the event of a disappearance, the lives and trajectories of
the women that are left behind are drastically altered. The disappeared becomes the pivot of their
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existence, shaping their memories and their perspectives of the historical and socio-political
fabric. The uncertainty of the fate of the disappeared leaves the lives of these women in an
unexpected gravitas, from which escape is not only impossible but socially unacceptable.
The women whose husbands and/or sons have disappeared have turned their injured political
identity into active political actors with agency. Through the preservation of their memories and
dreams, they have kept their fight alive and have fueled their resolve to resist against the military
occupation. These women have formed an enduring relationship with each other through their
shared pain and collective suffering; which has consequently shaped a collective memory that
acts as a vehicle for the voice of resistance against enforced disappearances in Indian occupied
Kashmir.
This thesis is a fragment of a vast area of the knowledge on the subject that remains
unexplored and that must be dealt with in more detail. Throughout my thesis I faced many
limitations, from the incessant crackdown on mobility in Indian occupied Kashmir during my
fieldwork in April 2019, to the lack of literature available on the systemic crime of enforced
disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir; on memory and resistance; and on the relationship
between memories, dreams, and resistance. The burden of proof is an additional limitation that I
constantly faced while writing this thesis. While I have experienced the violent protracted
conflict and possess information that I know intimately (because of my origin and experience), I
was faced with the need to prove my experiences to be true for these to be considered
academically acceptable. This is part of the reason why I was moreover limited by the need to
engage with difficult substantiations that exhausted me emotionally. Still, in my future in
academia I intend to expand this project, in the hope of doing justice to the women who have
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opened up to me for the purpose of this thesis project. Every oral history that I have recorded
deserves more time and space.
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Appendix 1: List of Interviews
List as per the appearance in the body of work:
Name Date of Interview Location/Place
Ashfaq Wani 3 April 2019 Srinagar
Jiger Masse 6 April 2019 Srinagar
Zoona Begum 13 April 2019 Islamabad
Khateeja Begum 24 April 2019 Srinagar
Safiya Azaad 4 April 2019 Srinagar
Hajra Appa 27 April 2019 Bandipora
Parveena Ahangar 2 April 2019 Srinagar
Dilshada Begum 27 February 2018 Ganderbal
Mahmooda 20 April 2019 Bijbehara
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Appendix 2: Consent Form
The purpose of the study being conducted is to learn about the experiences of women who
have lost their husbands and sons to the crime of enforced disappearances in Kashmir. I am
interested in learning about the memories of these women and how they have carries out their
search for their lost ones. While there are no direct benefits to the participants, it is intended that
the voices of these women are uncovered, and the research would contribute to the strengthening
of the narrative on their agency. There are no risks involved in participating in this study.
Participation consists of one interview, lasting approximately two hours. This interview will be
audiotaped unless otherwise requested by the participant. Privacy will be ensured through
confidentiality if requested by the participant. If a participant wishes for the use of her full name
in the study, this request will be adhered to as well. Participation is voluntary, and the interviewee
has the right to terminate the interview at any time. A summary of the results will be available to
participants upon request. Please contact interviewer Ain ul Khair, with any questions or concerns.
Signature of Interviewee
Signature of Interviewer
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