STRUCTURES OF VIOLENCE

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| Structures of Violence
consistently sought extensions and carried out
virtually no investigations. Except for a few
communications the police have sought to delay
investigations; not a single Section 164-A statement of
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the victims, mandated by law, has been taken .
Until the Indian Army got a stay on investigations in the
High Court [and the SHRC decision itself],
Government of Jammu and Kashmir stalled and
delayed proceedings in the High Court, which the
victim had approached in October 2013 seeking courtmonitored
investigations. On 12 August 2014 the
government stated before the High Court, that, “in
principle the decision has been taken at highest level
for accepting the recommendations of the SHRC.”
But, on 11 November 2014 the government, in an
absurd U-turn, stated that “the competent authority
had not approved the payment of compensation”.
Therefore, the directions on compensation were
challenged in the Supreme Court where the petition is
pending before the Registry. The victims will le their
responses and stress on the need for criminal
investigations in addition to compensation.
Rape and Torture as 'Cordon and Search'- A
Critique
The mass violence at Kunan Poshpora is not an
isolated incident; the gang rape and torture
perpetrated on the women and men from the village
must be understood as inherent to the fabric of
' c o u n t e r - i n s u r g e n c y o p e r a t i o n s ' i n w h i c h
premeditated and planned sexual violence and torture
are employed to mark not only the bodies of “militants”,
but their family members, neigbours and relatives.
Such marking extends to “suspected” spaces -
houses, kuthars, schools in which they are
“suspected” to lived, or which form an important
aspect of their everyday lives.
In all narratives of that night in in Kunan-Poshpora,
doors are smashed, electric lamps broken and
household supplies vandalized and rendered
unusable. The male members of the village are
separated from the women and taken to kuthars. At the
same time, kuthars, otherwise used to store grain, are
converted into torture centres where conceptions of
ownership of space and property are inverted in favour
of the perpetrator, as male residents are tortured,
water boarded, electrocuted and roller-treated with
scientic rigor-often with household items appropiated
from the space violently occupied. For example chilli
powder, a common spice consumed in every
household, is mixed with water and transformed into
an instrument of mass torture. In these “interrogation
centres”, to quote a torture survivor one “hit on the
hand with a lathi” equals a “broken wrist” making a
cripple of the “pehelwan” of the village in the span of a
few hours.
The young girls and women, isolated in their own
homes are repeatedly raped by as many as ten army
personnel, many a time in front of their children and
family members. A rape survivor whose daughter was
also raped in the same room as her says that her
daughter's vagina was “completely damaged”-
perhaps an indication of how well the perpetrators
understand the damning power of patriarchal
conceptions of “damage” to women's bodies, while
deliberately scarring the gendered bodies of women –
their breasts, thighs, buttocks and vaginas within
settings of domesticity. Male torture too is similarly
sexualized, with many of those who survive the torture
suffering from sexual dysfunction for the rest of their
lives due to the violence inicted on their genitals.
Many of the women raped that night suffer from poor
reproductive health and have had difculty conceiving.
Others have suffered miscarriages while pregnant.
One rape survivor, who quietly bled for 15 years,
underwent an operation to remove a part of her
intestine infected on account of being anally raped-
something she kept hidden for years. - All this adds up
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to agonizing mental trauma and depression.
In public memory, Kunan Poshpora remains a case of
mass rape-the story of the torture of men that
accompanied the rape is made distant, pointing to how
torture is rendered banal, yet remains signicant as a
'counter-insurgency' tactic. The women of Kunan-
Poshpora have sought justice and resisted the
multifarious attempts of the state to obliterate the truth
of the mass violence perpetrated by the army whether
through casting of aspersions on the survivors'
characters, doubting their motivations in pursuing the
legal process, or subjecting them to intensive scrutiny
and reading even their nervous laughter, as proof of
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their falsity, as in the Brigadier's Condential report .
Though reective of the patriarchal nature of state
discourse, such attempts at subversion and
manipulation of the legal process inadvertently help
foreground the truth of mass rape of women in Kunan-
Poshpora.
The communication of 23 September 1991 from the
Director, Prosecution to the Superintendent of Police,
Kupwara illustrates this vividly. One of the reasons
provided, as justication for closure of the case was
that the victims had been unable to identify the
accused. The Director, Prosecutions, sought to place
the blame of lack of identication of the accused upon
the victims, when in fact, no identication parade was
held by the Police as Army authorities refused and
continue to refuse to co operate. Moreover, the lack of
an identication parade cannot result in the closure of
investigations as more than sufcient other evidence
had already been collected to charge the accused.
Further, this communication considers the delay in
ling of FIR [legally irrelevant in rape cases] to be proof
of the falsity of the claims of the victims though the
victims have stated in their submissions before the
lower court, Kupwara that the army had cordoned off
the villages for two days following the mass violence,
85 According to the Jammu Kashmir Code of Criminal Procedure [CrPc] Section 164-A Statements of “material witnesses" must be
recorded by the Investigating Ofcer in all serious cases, including rape cases, before a Judge. By virtue of being recorded before a
Judge, they are deemed to have greater evidentiary value.
86 Statement of Aafreen to our researchers.
87 See also, Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini-The Kunan Poshpora Mass Rape Case: Notes from a Hearing, Warscapes 10 May 2014, available
at http://www.warscapes.com/reportage/kunan-poshpora-mass-rape-case-notes-hearing