February 23, 2018 marks the 27th anniversary of Kunan Poshpora mass gang rape case. Two contiguous villages from North Kashmir, Kunan and Poshpora, on that cold and dark night of February 23, 1991 experienced a massive sexual assault by a group of soldiers and officers of the 4th Rajputana Rifles regiment of Indian army. As many as 32 women had openly alleged rape in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Though, the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission had validated the claims of sexual assault against these women, the perpetrators remain yet to be prosecuted.
 

After many instances of distortions, cover-ups and humiliation of survivors, in 2016, five women namely Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Samreena Mushtaq, Munaza Rashid and Natasha Rather came up with the book, “Do you remember Kunan Poshpora”. The book is a tale of the many legal battles the women waged in order to get justice, as also an evidence of the resilience of Kashmiri women. It documents the experience of filing the PIL that as many as 50 women filed in 2013 in before the Jammu and Kashmir High Court seeking to reopen the case. Though the High Court rejected the petition after three hearings, the legal battle was restarted with a fresh series of petitions.

In this conversation with CJP, Ifrah Butt, a young activist, a petitioner of the PIL in Kunan Poshpora case and also the co-author of the book, takes us through the deep dungeons of memory and urges us to remember and support the survivors in their struggle for justice and dignity.
 

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—  Yet the early and mid-1940s remained a period of rapid growth, with the number of shakhas doubling between 1940-42, and with 10,000 swayamsevaks being trained by 1945 in Officers Training Camps (set up in nearly every province).

—  Similar to the Muslim League and the other Hindu communal groups, the RSS, too, benefited from the fact that it was never a target of British wartime repression.

—  But much more important was the way in which Hindu and Muslim communalism were feeding into each other, with the drive for Pakistan making more and more Hindus feel that the RSS was their best and perhaps only defender. Such sentiments spread particularly among the Hindus of the Muslim-majority province of Punjab as well UP, where there was a highly articulate and aggressive Muslim leadership. A section of the Congress, too, had come to consider the RSS a useful bulwark against the increasing intransigence of the Muslim League.

—  In Bengal, the other major Muslim-majority area, in contrast, the already powerful progressive and Left traditions were able to block large scale RSS inroads. Taking the country as a whole, however, recruits were trooping into shakhas, and money, too, was pouring in.

—  It was a time of prosperity for trading groups, with ample opportunities for war contracts and profiteering, and traders have always provided the major social bases for the RSS. Significant inroads seemed to have been made during these years into government services also.

—  The communal holocaust of 1946-47, ushered in by Jinnah’s call for direct action and the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946, was regarded as its ‘finest hour’ by the RSS.

—  Through active participation in riots, relief work in Hindu refugee camps and virulent propaganda, the RSS contributed vastly to the development of a massive fear psychosis among large sections of Hindus about the ‘foreign’ Muslims.

—  Even a section of the Congress high command, particularly Vallabhbhai Patel, had become fairly sympathetic towards the RSS, although Nehru remained bitterly hostile. In the interviews they gave us, GL Sudarshan kept discreetly quiet about these bloodstained years; BL Sharma, however, boasted openly about his active role in the Punjab riots. (Authors of Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags).

—  The onward march of the RSS was abruptly halted by the impact of the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.

(Source: Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, Orient Longman, 1993).

Archived from Communalism Combat, August 2004, Anniversary Issue (11th), Year 11    No.100, Cover Story 10

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