The Asiya and Neelofer double rape and murder case from Shopian 2009, remains one of the few cases to have been documented in the pages of the war time sexual violence in the Valley of Kashmir. Although constant efforts were made by the state to negate that the rapes happened in the first place, the Kashmiri memory refuses to forget.
Today happens to be the 12th year since the rape. On the intervening nights of 29th and 30th May, 2009, two women from the same family were raped and then murdered.
These women, who were sisters in law, on their way back home on 29 May 2009 went missing from their orchard. The next day, early morning, both their dead bodies were found at the Rambi Ara Naala. The dead bodies were a kilometer apart from each other.
Neelofar Jan (22) and Aasiya Jan (17) were residents of Bongam, Shopian. Neelofar, who was married to Aasiya’s brother Shakeel Ahmad Ahangar, left behind a two year old son. As an aftermath of the rape, Kashmir saw huge protests. Hurriyat Leaders were put under house arrests, curfews were imposed and various stone pelting incidents took place.
Later a CBI enquiry dismissed the double rape and murder and said that the deaths had happened as a result of ‘drowning’ in a rather shallow stream.
Rape has, since years, been used as a tool of psychological warfare to humiliate the Kashmiri civilians, according to Human Rights organizations. An already lesser gender, a subject from the land which has been at a constant war, is subjected to rape; the rape is termed as an allegation and later, proved to be wrong allegation.
The state’s commitment to disapprove of the subject’s rights and the shame and the stigma attached to the rape are one among the many reasons that most of the sexual violence against the Kashmiri subjects goes unreported.
Seema Kazi, a senior fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi, says in ‘Rape, Impunity and Justice in Kashmir’, that the Indian media has ”displayed unseemly haste in exonerating security forces” from rape allegations.
The statement rang a bell. It took me back to how a 2010 news report by Harinder Baweja, a senior female Journalist, refutes all allegations against the security personnel and says that Nilofer died due to “asphyxia as a result of antemortem drowning”.
“Dr Nighat and her associates falsely mentioned in their postmortem report that Asiya’s hymen was ruptured,” she writes.
She ends the report with “Security forces have committed excesses in Kashmir in many cases, but Shopian clearly was not one of them.”
This senior journalist took the liberty of dismissing the ‘allegations’ of rape; the liberty to define ‘the other’ and to disregard the rights of ‘the other’. But this other remembers, and that is its strength. Kashmir remembers Nilofar and Aasiya, it remembers Kunan Poshpora, it remembers the myriad reported and unreported rape cases.