Every February, the people of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) remember what the occupying state wants them to forget: Kunan Poshpora.
There’s something deliberate about this remembrance. In IIOJK, where power works overtime to bury the truth, memory is one of the few tools left. Remembering Kunan Poshpora means insisting that what happened on the night of 23-24 February 1991 won’t just disappear, no matter how hard the occupying state tries to make it.
That night, occupation forces ran a cordon-and-search operation in Kunan and Poshpora, two remote villages in Kupwara district. The operation involved 125 soldiers from the 4 Rajputana Rifles regiment. By morning, more than thirty women had been gang-raped. Men had been dragged from their homes and tortured. A child was thrown from a window into the snow. A woman nine months pregnant was raped; her child, born days later, had a fractured arm attributed to manhandling by soldiers.