Those children are not your regular innocent school kids minding their own business with candy in their mouth. They are part of gangs that throw stones at the army. What sort of people let school kids throw stones at the army? Shameless creatures and we all know who is behind this.
Stop demanding separation from India and the army will go away.
On the night of 23/24 February 1991, Army personnel of 4 Rajputana Rifles entered Kunan Poshpora village in Kashmir with the mission to cordon off and to find grenades. Instead, they caught all the men of the village, interrogated them and severely tortured them physically and emotionally to the extent of barbarism while the women of the village were raped irrespective of their age, at gun point. One of them had even delivered a child a few days ago. All were raped in front of their small children who looked on crying in horror while their mother was raped by beasts. On March 19th, a UK based newspaper ‘The Independent’ carried a report titled, ‘Indian villages tell of mass rape by soldiers’, based on narratives the reporters had heard in Kunan Poshpora. Among them was the story of a woman who was assaulted by six soldiers. “One by one, they raped me, while my five year old son was forced to watch, weeping beside the bed,” she told the paper. Almost all the women of the village were raped. The next morning when the men were released, they were shocked to see that their daughters, mothers, sisters and female acquaintances had been raped by the men in uniform. The whole village froze on that morning of 24th February, not because it was cold but due to the nature of the heinous crime which infected villagers with dead silence yet loud mourning. They wandered like madmen, crying on top of their voice still shaken up by the jolt to think of anything about their next step. How are people supposed to react when they are stripped off their dignity, that they have nurtured for years leaving them haunted with their own bleeding flesh?
On 25/26 February, villagers sent letter to DC of Kupawara and police authorities regarding the rape and torture. After receiving the letter dated 25/26 February and protest on the part of villagers of Kunan and Poshpora, DC Kupawara visited the village for enquiries and informed the Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir and other authorities, including the local police via a letter dated 7th march, 1991, regarding the incident. Upon receiving this letter, the Trehgam Police Station registered FIR under section 376, 452 and 342 RPC. It is to be noted here that the incident took place on 23/24 February 1991 but the FIR was registered some days later. The delay obviously happened because of the long course of ‘sending and receiving letters’ and the investigation followed by it. Moreover, the army personnel did leave the village but had surrounded the village for 3-4 days for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, this delay in filing the FIR was taken as an advantage by director of prosecution who said the delay was absurd as the police station was just a few kilometers away from the village. If the incident had happened then they could have registered the FIR the very next day and called all the accusations absurd and far fetched stories done by people who sympathize with militants. Before moving forward, it is necessary to read the investigation report of DC Kupawara, based on which the FIR was registered.
The rapes committed by members of the Indian armed forces are well documented through independent investigations of national and international enquiries by agencies, such as Asia Watch, the Asia wing of the international organisation Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, a non-profit organisation. Although several rapes committed by the members of the armed forces are not reported in areas such as Kashmir due to the fear of reprisals and the associated stigma, there are reported cases that prove this a reality even today.
On 30 May 2009, the bodies of 22-year-old Neelofer Jan and her 17-year-old sister-in-law Asiya Jan were found in a stream in the Shopian district in Kashmir, not far from the Central Reserved Police Force (CRPF) camp in the region. Neelofer and Asiya’s family alleged that they had been abducted, raped and murdered by the members of the security forces. Later that day, the police released a press statement stating that no marks were found on the bodies. However, two hours later, the police withdrew this statement. The incident sparked violent protests across the Kashmir valley, which were to last 47 days.
In one of its August 2009 issues, the bi-monthly magazine Frontline carried a story titled, ‘A Flawed Inquiry.’ In it, the magazine recounted the investigation. On 1 June, Omar Abdullah, the then chief minister of the state, appointed a one-man commission headed by the retired Justice Muzaffar Jan to look into the matter. Four days later, under pressure from its alliance partners, the Congress, the state government asked the police to register an FIR. Jan’s report, which was released on 10 July, confirmed that the women had been raped, that the location at which the bodies were found suggested that the perpetrator was likely not a civilian, and that not enough evidence was left behind to name a perpetrator. However, the report contained an annexure that seemed to suggest that Neelofer and Asiya’s family were involved in their murder. Two days after the report was published, Justice Jan distanced himself from it, saying that the police had tampered with his report and added the annexure despite his rejection of it. As protests continued in the state, the police and the government vehemently denied these claims. A few months later, the case was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Little came of the CBI enquiry. No one was ever held responsible for the crime.
In 2013, 70 cases of sexual violence were registered against Indian Armed forces. On 10 July 2004, a Manipuri woman, Thangjam Manorama Devi, was picked up from her home by members of the 17 Assam Rifles regiment that were posted in the state, for allegedly working for a militant organisation. She was raped and shot in the genitals repeatedly, and her bullet-riddled body was found in nearby fields on the next day. This incident sparked protests across Manipur, many of which were widely covered by the media. Such was the fury against the Indian army that a group of women stripped naked and marched to the Army Headquarters, daring the army personnel rape them “as they had raped Manorama.” In 2005, following a legal process the Assam Rifles opposed at every step, the high court was forced to rule that it did not have any administrative control over the forces as they had been deployed under the AFSPA, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which prevented anyone but the central government from ruling on acts committed “in the line of duty.” In Chhattisgarh’s Basaguda block of Bijapur district, between 19 and 24 October 2015, paramilitary personnel looted homes, molested and raped several women. The district collector of the region filed an FIR based on the charges by the victims and admitted that this was a serious issue but not without saying that the allegations were “hard to believe.” Over the past few years, reports coming out of Chhattisgarh have been full of cases of extrajudicial killings and mass sexual violence by the police and paramilitary forces of the region. These examples from the recent past should have been enough to silence all those who believe that soldiers no longer commit rape.
1991 Kunan Poshpora mass rape and torture case, when close to 80 women were raped by the Fourth Rajputana Rifles of the Indian army during a cordon and search operation. Verghese, who was a member of the Press Council of India team constituted to investigate the matter, called the charges “a massive hoax,” in his report, even though the villagers we met during our reporting maintain that he never visited the village.
LOL. 'India are proud indians first'. This is the nation where anyone that eats beef or is muslim gets lynched or killed? Who are you trying to fool? India is not in the clouds, it is beneath the ground.
to those who think majority Kashmiris are proud Indian's first or last!! You wouldn't have an army of a million there is that was the case.
