Opinion Please acknowledge

Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited J&K, addressing armed forces personnel at Leh, there was a quieter breakthrough in the state. For the first time, the J&K government told the state high court that it was “not averse” to paying compensation to victims of the alleged mass rape that took place in the villages of Konan and Poshpora on the night of February 23-24, 1991. Konan Poshpora, once dismissed as a “massive hoax” by a Press Council of India report, seems to have been tacitly acknowledged as fact by the state government. It should not have taken 23 years.

Soldiers of 4 Rajputana Rifles are alleged to have raped and tortured women from the two villages during a cordon-and-search operation that February night. After an initial visit to investigate the claims, S.M. Yasin, then deputy commissioner of Kupwara, had written to the divisional commissioner (DC), saying he was “ashamed to put in black and white” the brutalities that had taken place. But since then, the case has had to cut through layers of official denial. Both the DC and the PCI report, which was compiled at the behest of the army, discredited the initial accounts. The first police investigation was inexplicably replaced by a fresh one five months after the event, and by October 1991, the case was closed. It was only when the Kupwara district court dismissed the police closure report and ordered that the cased be reopened, 22 years after the alleged mass rapes, that the pall of official silence was lifted.

Advertisement

Over the years, Konan Poshpora has become a powerful symbol of hurt in the Valley. The state government’s tenuous offer of compensation may be some measure of political recognition of the tragedy. But it cannot detract from the fact that the investigation has barely inched forward over the last year. In the larger argument over the army’s role and the nature of the incident itself, questions of individual culpability have been lost. Justice must be delivered to the survivors of Konan Poshpora, and the government must ensure that due process is followed rigorously. At stake is the credibility of state institutions, which in turn lends legitimacy to a larger political process in Kashmir — that of reconciling a people bitterly estranged from their government.