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.
The survivors didn’t stay silent. They wrote a complaint signed by more than 30 villagers. They gave testimonies to police, medical examiners, human rights investigators. Medical examinations confirmed sexual assault. The State Human Rights Commission formally confirmed in 2011 that at least 36 women had been raped by occupation forces. The evidence was there. The names were there.
More than three decades later, not a single soldier has been charged.
The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, imposed on IIOJK since 1990, makes it illegal to prosecute military personnel without approval from the occupying state. For decades, that approval never came. Not once. The law itself makes sure soldiers operate above accountability.
So, the pattern played out exactly as expected. An internal army inquiry dismissed the charges as baseless. A government inquiry doubted survivors’ credibility. A Press Council report called it a hoax. The police closed the case as untraced in 1991. The formal closure wasn’t filed until 2013, twenty-two years later.
Case disappeared. Evidence buried. Survivors discredited. Soldiers walked.
But here’s the thing about memory. It doesn’t take orders. The survivors refused silence. They kept speaking, kept testifying, kept demanding justice. Not because they thought the system would deliver. But because staying silent would mean erasing themselves.
In 2013, fifty women filed a Public Interest Litigation demanding reinvestigation. They were teachers, students, lawyers, journalists. Many born after 1991. One of them explained it plainly: “The petition wasn’t filed because justice was expected, but to make the occupation forces answerable. The struggle is about developing a culture of resistance where impunity will be questioned.”
That’s what remembering does. It rejects the occupying state’s version of events. It’s naming the crime for what it was: mass rape as a weapon of war, sexual violence deployed to terrorize an occupied population.
Impunity needs erasure. It needs people to forget, move on, stop asking questions, accept whatever story they’re told. When a crime is remembered, when evidence is cited, impunity becomes harder to sustain.
That’s why occupying states spend so much energy controlling memory. The goal isn’t just avoiding accountability now. The goal is ensuring future generations forget, so the same crimes can happen again.
For the survivors, remembering became the only justice available. Several have died without seeing a single soldier prosecuted. But they died having refused to be silenced, having passed their memories to the next generation. At a press conference in Srinagar, one survivor put it this way: “The occupation forces snatched our honour. Our people were attacked for the same reason they martyr our youth. But the women of Kunan Poshpora feel stigmatized. This was also a sacrifice. No one feels proud of it.”
The young women who filed that PIL understood something important. This sacrifice deserved honoring. This memory deserved carrying forward.
Kunan Poshpora has to be remembered because forgetting only helps the people who committed the crime. It keeps impunity structures intact. Allows the same crimes to repeat. Forgetting is what the occupying state wants. Remembering is what resistance looks like.
