Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?

On a cold February night in 1991, a group of soldiers and officers of the Indian Army pushed their way into two villages in Kashmir, seeking out militants assumed to be hiding there. Incensed at the villagers refusal to talk, they pulled the men out of their homes and subjected many to torture, and the women to rape. According to village accounts, as many as 31 women were raped. Over the years, the two villages came to be known as the villages of raped women, and it is said that women from there found it virtually impossible to marry because they carried the stigma of being from the raped village . For a while, the army carried out cursory investigations and then, the case was shelved. Twenty-one years later, in 2012, the rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi galvanized a protest movement so widespread and deep that it reached all corners of the world. In Kashmir, a group of young women, all in their twenties, were inspired to re-open the Kunan-Poshpora case, to revisit their history and to look at what had happened to the survivors of the 1991 mass rape. This book, through personal accounts of their journey, examines questions of justice, of stigma, of the responsibility of the state, and of the long-term impact of trauma. "