Kashmir: Negotiating the Boundaries of Gender, Nationhood, and Community
By Nyla Khan

March 24, 2008 – (Kashmir Watch) What are the traditional freedoms and prerogatives of Kashmiri women in the land of a spiritual luminary like Lalla-Ded? Over the years, tremendous political and social turmoil has been generated in the state by the forces of religious fundamentalism and by an exclusionary nationalism that seeks to erode the cultural syncretism that is part of the ethos of Kashmir. These forces are responsible for the shutting down of dissenters who voice cultural critique, repression of women, political anarchy, economic deprivation, lack of infrastructure, and mass displacements that have been occasioned by these events. Since 1949, the United Nations and Pakistan have consistently demanded that a plebiscite be held in order to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people. India has denied this wish for fear of losing the vote in the predominantly Muslim Kashmir valley. India uses Pakistan’s reluctance to withdraw its forces and the decision of the United States government to supply arms to Pakistan in 1954 to justify its denial.i Nearly 400,000 Indian army and paramilitary forces have been deployed in the state, in India’s most beefed up counterinsurgency operation till date. Financing these operations has taken an enormous toll on the annual administrative budget of the state.(ii)

Since the inception of the secessionist movement in 1989, more than 38,000 Kashmiris have been brutally murdered by Indian forces, 100,000 Pandits have migrated to other Jammu and other parts of India for fear of persecution, over 5000 women have been violated, innumerable people have been incarcerated and held incommunicado. United Nations experts on extra judicial, summary, and arbitrary executions have not been invited to Kashmir and international human rights monitoring organizations have been prevented from entering the state.(iii) In such a conflict situation, the law and order machinery is rendered dysfunctional increasing the vulnerability of women and children. The counterinsurgency operations in Jammu and Kashmir have been brutal, not just militarily but politically and economically as well.

Kashmir lives in the unpleasant reality of Indian and Pakistani dominance, which is full of redoubtable paramilitary troops, barbed wire, and invasive searches; dispossessed youths trained in Pakistani training camps to unleash a reign of disorganized and misguided terror in the state; custodial killings in detention centers and mothers whose faces tell tales of woe waiting outside those gloomy detention centers to catch glimpses of their unfortunate sons (an exercise in futility); burqa-clad women afraid of the wrath of fundamentalist groups as well as of paramilitary forces bent on undercutting their self-respect. The military has carte blanche under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act of 1978 and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities [Prevention] Act of 1987.(iv) The traditional communal harmony in Kashmir has been eroded by Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism in the state, India’s repression of every demand for local autonomy and shelving self-determination for Kashmiris, the eruption of ethnoreligious fervor as the central government disregarded democratic institutions in Jammu and Kashmir.(v) The anarchy that pervades the cultural and political fabric of Kashmir has been stoked by government-sponsored militants and foreign mercenaries. In such an unwieldy situation, women are psychologically incarcerated.(vi) Such occurrences do not enable an autonomous Kashmiri life, devoid of the pressures that Kashmiris have been subjected to since 1947. The brutalization of the culture has been rendered more lethal by the socialization of Kashmiri boys and men into military culture. Within such a masculinist discourse and praxis the rigidly entrenched hierarchical relationship between men and women is inextricably linked with sexualized violence.

For instance, more than 5000 rapes were reported to have been committed by Indian security forces in the state since the inception of the secessionist movement in 1989.(vii) A number of women have been ruthlessly violated by members of the paramilitary troops deployed in Kashmir as a tool to avenge themselves and indelibly scathe the consciousness of the culture that dared to raise its insurgent head against the two mammoth nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent. Custodial disappearances, custodial deaths, and bestial interrogation methods have indelibly scarred the psyche of the Kashmiri people.

Parveena Ahangar is one of many unfortunate mothers whose son was a victim of custodial disappearance. Her son, Javed Ahmad, was picked up by the National Security Guards (NSG) in Batmaloo, Srinagar, Kashmir, on August 18, 1990 and taken to one of the interrogation centers which had reared their ugly heads all over the Valley. Javed was a school-going adolescent when the NSG suspected him of being affiliated with a militant organization and brusquely picked him up without a substantial rationale for questioning. I met Parveena at her house in July 2006 where she graciously spent a couple of hours with me explaining the plight of ordinary Kashmiris who do not have access to the echelons of power, and therefore live anonymously in the fortresses of ruthless militarism until they are buried in the catacombs of history.

Parveena, a courageous and forthright woman, chose to shed the veil and the inhibitions imposed by her cultural mores in order to verbalize the agony of a wounded mother. Instead of lamenting voicelessly behind the closed portals of her cultural and societal mores, Parveena formed an organization called Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), comprising bereaved mothers whose sons had been victims of custodial disappearances or custodial deaths. Politicians at the helm of affairs in the Valley have only managed to turn the groans of these mothers into screams that cut through the air, laden with pain and an unrequited longing for their children. In early 1999 Amnesty International estimated that since 1990, over eight-hundred people been victims of custodial disappearances; in August 2002 the Kashmir Times, local English daily, estimated the figure at 3,500.viii The members of the APDP mobilize the concept of protecting the dignity and rights of non-partisan citizens who do not have vested political interests. The APDP is an apolitical organization which doesn’t receive funding from any regional or national political organization. The organization hasn’t been patronized either by the establishment or by political parties in the opposition. She succeeded in assembling relatives of persons who had been subjected to unwarranted torture, death, solitary confinement, and other brutal methods while in the custody of police or military forces in various parts of the Valley. While foregrounding the trials and tribulations of such parents, Parveena, who hitherto had been unexposed to other political, cultural, and social perspectives, participated in conferences on human rights violations in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and even organized peaceful demonstrations in the backyard of India’s political gurus and masters, New Delhi. She stuck to her convictions in the midst of forceful antagonism and even refused monetary compensation which was offered to her to forget “the unfortunate incident.”

Parveena and other mothers like her seek to know the fate of their children who disappeared in the abyss of political and military oppression before life had a chance to beckon them. The unknown fate of their children is a constant presence, like a leaden sky whose clouds are getting lower and lower. The lack of closure in the lives of such parents makes their infernal existences unbearable. Their sagas evoke tragic destinies, unredeemed by justice. “There are many families of disappeared persons who are on the verge of starvation. There are hundreds of half-widows (grass widows), who are in a dilemma whether to remarry or not,” says Parveena.(ix) Ethnographer Sharon Pickering, in her study of women in Northern Ireland, theorizes that historically political analysts and social scientists haven't considered the experiences of those coerced and tortured by state violence as relevant to the studies.(x) But the unflinching courage of marginalized women like Parveena in their fight for justice in an era of rampant corruption symbolizes the self-actualization and intervention of Kashmiri women in patriarchal national history by speaking from their locations about the current political realities. The resolve of the members of the APDP to make their voices heard as resilient resisters validates their experiences and perceptions as a centrifugal force, vehemently calling into question the coercive power of the state.

In contemporary Kashmiri society, the question of the role of women in the nationalist scenario remains a vexed one. As Ann McClintock observes about the role of the subaltern woman in “Third-World” societies, “Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit.”(xi) For instance, the only women’s reactionary organization in Kashmir, Dukhtaran-e-Milat, claims that the image of woman as a burqa-clad faceless and voiceless cultural icon, devoid of the agency to pave a path of her own choosing, is sanctioned by the versions of religious scriptures that this vigilante group subscribes to and reinforces her strength and courage of conviction to sacrifice for the family. This vigilante group uses intimidating and questionable tactics to raid houses that allegedly have been converted into brothels and brutally censors romantic liaisons between college-going boys and girls. The women members of Dukhtaran-e-Milat would perhaps never identify the modern Kashmiri woman with the liberated woman of the Western world. On the contrary, they make a facile attempt to reconstruct historical and cultural discourses in order to inspire the kind of cultural nationalism that fundamentalist politics requires. This organization advocates the creation of a homogeneous culture devoid of the freedoms that Kashmiri women have traditionally enjoyed. Their draconian methods to enforce purdah, reinforce a patriarchal structure in which an unaccompanied woman is rendered vulnerable, and curtail the mobility of the technology savvy youth is an attempt to arabize the syncretic ethos of Kashmir.(xii)

There seems to be an insensitivity in such reactionary organizations as well as in former and current regional and national administrations, such as the Congress and People’s Democratic Party coalition government in the state and the centralizing regimes of the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the National Democratic Front in the center, of the diverse interpretations of religious laws regarding the institutions of marriage, divorce, inheritance rights, etc.; of the rich heterogeneity of cultural traditions and to the paradoxes within them. The vociferous members of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat would better serve the female population of the state by campaigning for quotas for women in the legislative assembly, legislative council, parliament, and the judiciary. An increase in the female representation in these institutions of authority would facilitate a cultural shift in terms of gender role expectations, legitimizing a defiance of the normative structure. The intrusion of women in traditionally male domains would cause perceptible erosion in the structural determinants of sexualized violence. This form of empowerment would “frame and facilitate the struggle for social justice and women’s equality through a transformation of economic, social, and political structures.”(xiii) In the present scenario, no thought is given either by the state authorities or by insurgent groups to women who have been victims of the paramilitary forces and/or of militant organizations.

Women in Kashmir have borne the brunt of the violence. In the absence of their menfolk, hapless women have been negotiating with officials and military personnel, both materially and sexually. Unfortunately, the innate conservatism of Kashmiri society disables women from overtly describing and condemning sexual exploitation. Kashmiri women are further dehumanized because of the self-denigration that accompanies physical defilement. There is no statistical data of rapes and molestations in the State because of the secrecy with which such bestial acts are shrouded. I asked a Gujjar matriarch, Pathani Begum, about the political awareness of women in her native village, Mahiyan, and neighboring rural areas in the Valley. I asked her if she was familiar with the ideology of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat. Pathani, who hadn’t pursued a formal education for fear of being ostracized claimed that she and her ilk hadn’t heard about the Dukhtara-e-Milat and its political agenda. Her concern was the inability of rural women to retaliate to the harassment that they were subjected to by militia groups like the Special Task Force and Indian paramilitary forces. The molestation of three women by members of the Special Task Force in Pathani’s village marked the ebb of youthfulness and stanched the blooming atmosphere.(xiv)

The validity of these fears were established by an Indian newspaper, which recently reported that, “There can be no two opinions that the women of Kashmir during the past two decades have been in the vanguard and have been fighting battles against all kinds of injustices and crimes against humanity committed by the State and by some dubious non-state actors.”(xv) A large percentage of rape victims and war widows are afflicted with post traumatic stress disorder and are prone to suicidal tendencies.(xvi)

Educated Kashmiri women like Dr. Hameeda Naeem, reader at the University of Kashmir, are unable to relate to the ideology of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat. Hameeda Naeem had articulately delineated the brutal human rights violations occurring in Jammu and Kashmir at the United Nations Conference in Geneva in 1996, after which the Government of India had impounded her passport, rendering it impossible for her to speak at other international confrences. In the enlightening conversation that I had with Hameeda at my parents’ house in Srinagar, Kashmir, she described the Dukhtaran-e-Milat as self-styled custodians of the Islamic faith, who had caricaturized Islam by reducing it to the veil. She categorically stated that the Dukhtaran-e-Milat did not represent all Kashmiri women and lacked the authority to enforce a code of conduct. I asked Hameeda how sixteen years of armed insurgency and counter insurgency had pervaded the social fabric, and what measures, if any, had been taken to redress the grievances of women adversely affected by militancy. Hameeda expressed an adverse judgment on the government of Jammu and Kashmir for having facilitated the psychological, sexual, economic, and emotional violation of women, particularly in insulated rural areas. The law of the jungle which prevails in those areas leaves no scope for the rehabilitation of the victims of violence. The desecration of the political, social, and cultural landscape looms large in the lovely face of nature in its pure undesecrated majesty. The grievances of these lacerated hearts and aggrieved souls are, inevitably, not redressed. The unalloyed purity of nature and the spiritual illumination it inspires are indelibly tarnished.(xvii)

Women politicos in the current legislative assembly and legislative council of Jammu and Kashmir play the role of tokens who bolstered the social, cultural, and moral institutions that maintain a male-dominated power structure.(i) Even those with access to the echelons of power refuse to engage “more effectively with the politics of affiliation, and the currently calamitous dispensations of power.”(ii)

Despite its firm promise, the current state government has been unable to incorporate the Special Operations Group, a paramilitary division of the police accused of heinous human rights violations, entirely into the regular police force. The SOG continues to run amok and functions as an entity that only obeys the law of the jungle. Alongside the SOG, the Special Task Force, a militia group comprising renegade militants, has been incorporated into the regular police force as well but has not been disbanded, which the PDP government had promised at the time of its installation in office. These forces have been deployed to handle extrajudicial matters in arbitrary ways and are responsible for gross misdemeanors against women.(iii)

Why is gender violence such a consistent feature of the insurgency and counter-insurgency that have wrenched the Indian subcontinent for about decades? In nationalist rhetoric the equation of the native woman to the motherland has in recent days become more forceful. In effect, the native woman is constructed as a trough within which male aspirations are nurtured, and the most barbaric acts are justified as means to restore the lost dignity of the “women.” The story of the partition of India in 1947 into two separate nation-states, India and Pakistan, is replete with instances of fathers slaughtering their daughters in order to prevent them from being violated by the enemy; and women resorting to mass suicide to preserve the “honor” of the community.(iv) If a woman's body belongs not to herself but to her community, then the violation of that body purportedly signifies an attack upon the honor (izzat) of the whole community.

In one instance, the crime of a boy from a lower social caste against a woman from a higher upper caste in the Meerawala village in the central province of Punjab in Pakistan in 2002 was punished in a revealing way by the “sagacious” tribal jury. After days of thoughtful consideration, this jury gave the verdict that the culprit’s teenage sister, Mai, should be gang-raped by a group of goons from the wronged social group: The tribal jury ruled that to save the honor of the upper caste Mastoi clan, Mai’s brother, Shakoor, should marry the woman with whom he was accused of having an illicit relationship while Mai was to be given away in marriage to a Mastoi man. “The prosecution said that when she rejected the decision she was gang-raped by four Mastoi men and made to walk home semi-naked in front of hundreds of people. The lawyer for one of the accused argued the rape charge was invalid because Mai was technically married to the defendant at the time of the incident.”(v) Such acts of violence do occur on the Indian subcontinent and bear testimony to the intersecting notions of nation, family, and community.

The horrific stories of women that are in most instances attributed to folklore underscore the complicity of official and nationalist historiography in perpetuating these notions. I might add that the feminization of the “homeland” as the “motherland” for which Indian soldiers, Kashmiri nationalists in Indian administered Kashmir, and Kashmiri nationalists in Pakistani administered Kashmir are willing to lay down their lives serves, in effect, to preserve the native women in pristine retardation. Although this essentialist portrayal of the Kashmiri woman is clearly suspect, it is embedded more deeply in the quasi-feudal culture of Pakistani administered Kashmir. Pakistani administered Kashmir has been a fiefdom of feudal lords whose only concern is with the impregnability of their authority and the replenishment of their coffers. Tribal women in “Azad” Kashmir are still circumscribed within the parameters created by the paternalistic feudal culture that disallows the creation of a space for distinct subjectivities.(vi)

My attempt to theorize women’s agency involves framing the concept in cognitive, psychological, economic, and political aspects. I borrow eminent educationist, Nelly Stromquist’s assertion regarding agency which involves taking decisions that deconstruct cultural and social norms, and beliefs that structure seemingly intransigent traditional gender ideologies; the psychological aspect refers to developing self-esteem for which some form of financial autonomy is a basis; the political aspect involves the ability to organize and 3mobilize for social change, which requires the creation of awareness not just at the individual level but at the collective level as well.(vii) For me, empowerment is a process which enables the marginalized to make strategic life choices regarding education, livelihood, marriage, childbirth, sexuality, etc., which are critical for people to lead the sort of lives they want to lead and constitute life’s defining parameters.viii It is important to keep in mind, however, that women are constrained by and grapple with the normative structures through which societies create gender roles.

I was raised in a secular Muslim home in which we were encouraged to speak of the “liberation of women” and of a culturally syncretic society. I was taught that Islam provided women with social, political, and economic rights, however invisible those rights were in our society. It was instilled in me that Islam gave women property rights—the right of Mrs. Ghulam Kabra, a Kashmiri state subject, to inherit the property to which she was the legal heir was challenged as early as 1939 because she had married a non-state subject, but the High Court legislated that she could inherit the property bequeathed to her by her parents; the right to interrogate totalizing social and cultural institutions; the right to hold political office—Khalida Zia and Sheikh Hassina in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Najma Heptullah and Mohsina Kidwai in India, my maternal grandmother, Begum Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, in Kashmir, who represented Srinagar and Anantnag constituencies in Jammu and Kashmir in the Indian parliament from 1977-1979 and 1984 to 1989, respectively, and was the first president of the Jammu &Kashmir Red Cross Society from 1947 to 1951;ix the right to assert their agency in matters of social and political import; and the right to lead a dignified existence in which they could voice their opinions and desires so as to “act upon the boundaries that constrain and enable social action by, for example, changing their shape or direction.”(x) Tariq Ali, amongst many others, writes about Begum Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s enormous political and social contribution: “She threw herself into the struggle for a new Kashmir. She raised money to build schools for poor children and encouraged adult education in a state where the bulk of the population was illiterate. She also, crucially, gave support and advice to her husband, alerting him, for example, to the dangers of succumbing to Nehru’s charm and thus compromising his own standing in Kashmir.”(xi)

Women have more or less power depending on their specific situation and they can be relatively submissive in one situation and relatively assertive in another. Assessing women’s agency requires identifying and mapping power relations, the room to maneuver within each pigeonhole and the intransigence of the boundaries.(xii) A woman’s level of empowerment also varies according to factors such as class, caste, ethnicity, economic status, age, family position, etc. In November 2007, an intra-Kashmir Women's Conference, “Connecting Women Across the Line of Control,” was organized in Srinagar by the Delhi based Center for Dialog and Reconciliation (CDR) in collaboration with Women's Studies Programs at the Universities of Kashmir and Jammu. Women delegates from both sides of the Line of Control participated in the conference to productively discuss concrete methods of rehabilitating victims of violence, either state-sponsored or militancy related. Women from Indian and Pakistani administered Jammu and Kashmir discussed the socioeconomic hardships, psychological neuroses, and political marginalization caused by dislocation, dispossession, and disenfranchisement. Delegates at the conference sought mobilization of women for effective change in political and social structures. They vehemently endorsed diplomacy and peaceful negotiations in order to further the India-Pakistan peace process; withdrawal of forces from both sides of the Line of Control; decommissioning of militants; rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits to rebuild the syncretic fabric of Kashmiri society as well as the rehabilitation of detainees.xiii Some of the strategies delineated at the conference may seem utopian, but the ability to imagine confidence building measures that grapple with normative structures and underscore the decisive role that women can play in raising consciousness not just at the individual but at the collective level as well, giving the marginalized a vision with which to redefine life's constituting parameters.

Historically, cultural, societal, and market constraints have denied women access to information about the outside world. But the sort of advocacy concretized by the intra-Kashmir Women's Conference could overturn the historical seclusion of women and provide them with routes to make forays into mainstream cultural and socioeconomic institutions. Perhaps the mobilization of women at the collective level would enable a metamorphosis, fostering the skills and ability of women to make informed decisions about issues in the non-domestic sphere. This conference provided a forum at which women's experiences were contextualized, theorized, and politicized.

Refrences
i. Chapter Five: Negotiating the Boundaries of Gender, Community, and Nationhood
. Ganguly, 43-57; Rahman, 4; Schofield.
ii. Ganguly, 1-2.
iii. Amnesty International, “India Must Prevent Torture;” Schofield.
iv. Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency; Widmalm; Wirsing.
v. Ganguly, 14-20.
vi. Butalia.
vii. Prasad, 478-506
viii. Amnesty International, “If They are Dead Tell Us;” “Militancy in Kashmir Valley Completes Fourteen Years.”
3ix. Conversation with Parveena at her Residence in Srinagar, Kashmir, 2006.
x Pickering, 490.
xi. McClintock, 345.
xii. Schofield.
xiii. Bisnath and Elson; Porter and Verghese.
xiv. Kashmir, Summer 2006.
xv. “5 Lecturers Among 30 Injured.”
xvi. Kashmir Human Rights Site.
xvii. Conversation with Dr. Hameeda Naeem in Srinagar, Kashmir, 2006.i. Amnesty International, “India;” Kashmiri Women‘s Initiative for Peace and Disarmament.
ii. McClintock, 396.
iii. Amnesty International, “India.”
iv. Kaul; Kumari and Kidwai; Jayawardena; Sangeet Ray.
v. Reuters.
vi. Cohen; Talbot; Ziring.
vii. Stromquist.
viii. Kabeer, 437.
ix. Lok Sabha.
x. Hayward, 27.
xi. Ali, 230-31.
xii. Hayward.
xiii Barve..

Nyla Ali Khan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She is the author of The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2005). Email: nylakhan@aol.com

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