Srinagar-based journalist Afsana Rashid's book "Widows And Half Widows" deals with cases of torture

Bodies of evidence

Srinagar-based journalist Afsana Rashid's book Widows And Half Widows deals with cases of torture, extra-judicial arrests, and killings spanning over two decades in the Kashmir valley. Rashid, with the help of sociologists, doctors, lawyers and human rights organisations like the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), has not only compiled cases of enforced "disappearances" of ordinary Kashmiris, but also followed-up on the cases, only to find the victims and their kin denied justice by the courts and the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC). Rashid documents how the police beat up women from APDP who sought information about their missing kin. And how Nobel laureate and head of APDP Parveena Ahangar once tried to erect a memorial for the 10,000 missing in Narbal, but an FIR was filed against her and the memorial material seized. These instances make it seem as if the state aims to obliterate, by force, every memory of human rights violations in the region. Rashid writes that, according to the international NGO Doctors Without Borders, not a single family has escaped the trauma of violence. And she documents innumerable cases. To take an example, the deaf and mute Zaytoon lost her husband in 2003 and was left with three children to feed. According to her eldest daughter, her father died due to continuous torture by the army. "Every time he was arrested, he was tortured brutally, and one day he turned insane and finally passed away." Death might have offered Samad (Zaytoo's husband) relief from pain and torture, but we continue to live and suffer, laments Zaytoon in the book. Another typical case is that of Mohammed Shafi Dar, a student of class XII from Batamaloo. He was abducted by the BSF, along with his friend, during the night of May 22-23, 1990, as per the police reports. His friend was released eight days later from the Joint Interrogation Center (JIC) at Hari Niwas, but Dar went missing. The SHRC maintains that the student was not connected to militancy, and recommended monetary interim relief to the family. But so far the family has not received relief. When thousands of mass graves were discovered in the region in 2009, the SHRC broadened its investigation to look into 2,717 unidentified graves in Pooch and another 1,127 in Rajouri. In August 2011, in north Kashmir, the SHRC found 2,730 unidentified bodies — 574 of which were of local residents who had "disappeared". The International People's Tribunal on Kashmir (IPTK) stated, "Not taking Poonch into estimation of averages (because the number of graves is almost double those of other districts), an average of approximately 1,000 graves/district and 1,100 bodies/district can be predicted. If similar estimates are applied to other districts that were affected during militancy… the total number of graves and bodies fall approximately to around 10,000 and 11,000 respectively." This reverses India's long-time insistence that the dead were all militants killed in Kashmir's two-decade-long struggle for self-determination. Yet, despite these numbers, on September 27 this year, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said, "There are no mass graves in Kashmir. It is important to put the record straight." Widows And Half Widows will serve as an eye-opener for all those who want to know more than what a jingoistic national media lets on about the region.