THE CRITICAL ISSUE. History is here to stay

A quarter century is not long enough to forget. For the survivors of violence and torture, memory is an essential part of the process of seeking justice. But this is what is so often wilfully forgotten by states and their institutions that are meant to provide justice. By forcing memory underground, they often hope to escape their own culpability and to silence those who wish to remember.

This is what has happened with the survivors of violence and rape from the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora, Kupwara, in Kashmir.

Twenty--seven years ago, on the cold night of February 23, an army ‘operation’ shattered the calm.

Search and seizure operations are common in States that come under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and it was under the same that the army went into the two villages to flush out ‘militants’. The dead of night was a carefully chosen time.

Villagers recall how men and boys were called out into the village compound, and while they were interrogated and tortured, many women were sexually assaulted and raped inside their homes.

As is well known by now, the battle for justice reached nowhere. The villagers fought legal battles that were clearly weighted against them, and at some point, the fight fizzled out. The courts did not close the case. But memories do not go away, and inside the villages, within the community, they were kept alive by being told and retold, by the history of ‘shame’ that many women had to live with, and the ways in which the two Kupwara villages became linked with the history of rape in Kashmir.

As long as the memories remained private, they were no threat. But the last few years have seen a slow but inexorable process of these memories finding their way into the public domain. Every year, small groups of survivors visit Srinagar as a ritual of remembrance and the public marking of this day.

This year was no exception. In ones and twos, villagers made their way to Srinagar to address a meeting where they planned to update attendees on the status of the petition filed by a group of women seeking to reopen their case.

What kind of threat can such a meeting pose? Especially to an all-powerful establishment that has, in any case, chosen to ignore the people’s legitimate search for justice. What does it mean to speak out about something that has long been in the public domain? People may not know the details of the legal case, but the history of Kunan-Poshpora has been widely written about. And yet, the police in Srinagar chose to ban this activity. The excuse was that such a meeting could pose a threat to peace. If it were not so tragic, this would be laughable.

The situation this year was made worse by the fact that the last couple of years have seen terrible violence and brutal repression in Kashmir. Perhaps the fear was that allowing speech about one kind of violence may open up the floodgates for other truths to emerge. The question that remains unanswered is: if the survivors are not allowed to speak, how will justice be done? Or is it that there is no interest in justice at all — which is why chief minister Mehbooba Mufti has forgotten her pre-election promise to the survivors?

Author Krishna Sobti once said of the Partition that it was difficult to forget, but dangerous to remember. Dangerous because remembering means confronting our own complicity in the violence, and facing the uncomfortable truth that emerges. The truth of Sobti’s statement is repeated time and again in India. We have come to unquestioningly accept that the uncomfortable truths of the past can be wished away, and sanitised into a harmless narrative.

However, histories have a way of returning. The story of the violation of women in Kunan-Poshpora returned to public attention in the wake of the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi. This moment alerted a group of young women in Kashmir to the continuing histories of sexual violence in their backyard. And thus began a new search for justice.

If there is a lesson here, it is this: the past is before us to learn from, to examine what we did, to resolve to not repeat the terrible histories in which we are, in some way or the other, implicated.

But it takes maturity and courage to confront our own mistakes.

Urvashi Butalia

Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan

blink@thehindu.co.in

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