A little over a month ago, I went to Srinagar for the launch of Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, a book we at Zubaan recently published. Written by five young Kashmiri women lawyers and PhD scholars, the book takes a fresh look at the Kunan Poshpora rape case of 1991 where the army is accused of accosting and sexually assaulting a large number of women in the two adjacent villages of Kunan and Poshpora.

The room where the launch took place, on the fourth floor of a shopping mall, was overflowing with people — survivors from the two villages, young and old men, and a large number of women, many of them clearly students. They listened with rapt attention and what seemed to me to be a barely controlled anger, to the stories of the survivors and those of the young women who had written the book and taken on the task of reopening the case.

Handed over to the army at the time — because Kashmir comes under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act — the case, the young writers discovered when they began to look at it, was never officially closed. It had just been allowed to drift. And this is what pushed them to demand that it be reopened.

But my reason for writing about this event is not to talk about the case or indeed the book. Instead, it is to talk about what I saw and heard that day in Srinagar. The organisers of the launch had had a difficult time finding a space for the event. Everywhere they went, they were refused and were told that hotels, clubs, and others had been instructed by the police to not host the launch.

I wondered when something even as simple as a book launch can face such obstruction, what must it be like for other activities that we, in places like Delhi and Mumbai and others, take for granted — theatre, music, poetry and more?

Apparently the organisers only managed to get the space they eventually did by threatening to hold the event in the open, on the road, with signs saying they had not been allowed to rent a space. It was only after this that they were allowed to hire a room in the mall — a smaller one than they would have wanted, which explains why it was so full.

It also explains, at least partially, why every person in that room was so angry. Why should the police have any say in whether you can or cannot hold an event in your own city? The cumulative anger of over two decades of denial that the sexual violation of the women of Kunan and Poshpora had ever taken place, and the army’s taking over of the case (but what does sexual violence have to do with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, you might well ask), coupled with the difficulty of finding a space to even talk about this — the anger is not difficult to understand here.

It’s the same kind of anger we’ve seen recently when protests erupted over the allegations of sexual assault of a young girl, now known as the ‘Handwara girl’. The truth of this incident is now lost in all the many layers of insensitive and authoritarian actions on the part of state institutions. No one any longer knows who is speaking the truth, who is to be believed and what really happened. Meanwhile, lives have been lost, the child is traumatised and frightened, her privacy has been violated, her mother has been intimidated and political parties can only resort to scoring points against each other.

On previous visits to Kashmir — maybe less than two years ago — I had allowed myself to believe, because of the seemingly reduced presence of the army in the streets of Srinagar, that perhaps things were beginning to improve. But I realise that it’s easy to fool yourself if you want to.

This time it took only a day to feel the palpable anger, the simmering resentment, and the deep sense of betrayal. I realised that just because there had been elections, it was no guarantee that the people had faith in political parties. I also realised that the disillusionment and, yes, despair of Kashmiri Muslims was no longer directed only at the State. That we too, as people, as citizens of India, need to understand this anger.

Pretending the anger is not there, or hoping it will transform into political capital, will not make it go away. Anger does not go away with inattention. It finds new forms, creates new dangers. It’s time we understood this.

Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan

blink@thehindu.co.in

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