Showkat A Motta is a Srinagar-based Mass Communication and Journalism postgraduate engaged in human rights since 1999. Besides being the Country-Coordinator for Swiss Peace Foundation, a Berne-based organization involved in conflict research, he’s an Executive Board member of Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society. He can be contacted at
The death of Aasia Jeelani, a human rights activist from Indian-administered Kashmir, in a landmine explosion on polling day on April 20, 2004 has added another gory chapter to the Himalayan state’s 15-year history of pain and suffering.
Aasia (30) was killed as her taxi with activists from Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS- an NGO monitoring the Indian parliamentary elections), was blown up after it ran over a landmine in Chandigam village in northern Kupwara district, 85 km from Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, a state claimed in entirety by India and Pakistan.
The driver of the taxi, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh (34) died instantly while the JKCCS programme coordinator Khurram Pervez (26), suffered badly injured right limb which had to be amputated later. Three more JKCCS volunteers, including one from south Indian state of Karnataka, also sustained injuries in the blast apparently triggered by suspected militants fighting the Indian rule in Kashmir.
Indian armed personnel and some locals who saw the injured did nothing to help. The result was that Aasia, whose right arm, leg and face were mutilated, bled for 45 minutes on the road and died while being carried to a hospital.
The blast that killed Aasia, a beautiful young woman, is not unusual in Kashmir since the present armed struggle began in 1989, but her death came as a rude shock for the budding civil rights activists and hundreds of families of victims of human rights abuses—a part of the unending conflict that has turned this beautiful land into a virtual hell.
In a place where enforced disappearances, extra-judicial executions and torture and trauma is the order of the day, and women have few lofty ideals of emancipation, gender equality, etc., Aasia was the first woman to take on the mantle of human rights.
Those who knew her closely testify that she was to join a famous architectural college in the Indian city of Mumbai when circumstances took strange twist and she landed in the field of Journalism. She spent some time in journalism after passing her post-graduate exam in journalism from Kashmir University three years ago—securing the second position in her batch—but she soon bade farewell to it, for she could not remain a mute spectator to the sufferings of the Kashmiri people, women in particular.
“When the armed struggle broke out, I was about 15 years old. The security people came into our homes, men were taken out of the houses and women were often molested. One day, security guards came to our house and asked me to accompany them upstairs, I refused and stayed with my sisters but my aunt did accompany (them) and they tried to molest her, but she screamed really loud.”
“In the rural areas, violence like that still continues…. under the Special Powers Act, they (Indian armed forces) have the license to do anything. They usually come from remote villages in India and …they think Kashmiri women are very beautiful and use obscene gestures if you pass them on the road.
“…When you read the newspaper in Kashmir, it’s full of reports about how many people were killed yesterday and how many women were raped or molested. You cannot be immune to all this suffering. How can we, as responsible individuals, just flip through the newspaper and just don’t act.
“…Because of all these incidents, we felt there was no safety, no security. In 1991, a mass rape took place in a village (in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district)…we felt a (women’s) group was a need that would help the people suffering in Kashmir…” Aasia said in an interview in The Netherlands where she was for a peace conference in October last year.
In 2002, Aasia formed and headed the Kashmiri Women’s Initiative for Peace and Disarmament (KWIPD) a constituent of JKCCS, which also includes the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). The KWIPD, formed to involve Kashmiri women in the task of conflict resolution and nation-building, was widely appreciated and hailed by the groups’ across the globe as it was the first group of its kind wholly and solely run by the Kashmiri women.
Aasia worked tirelessly in the dingy office of the JKCCS to invite women from different fields ranging from teachers, doctors, academicians, journalists and psychologists to students and housewives, to launch a joint struggle through the KWIPD.
Besides, she single-handedly chronicled the miseries of Kashmiri women and children in The Voices Unheard, a quarterly newsletter of the KWIPD. “This quarterly publication attempts to highlight the plight of women…Stories, anecdotes and situation reports about women, especially their fortitude, sufferings, ordeal and awareness about their basic rights will be the main focus,” Aasia wrote in the first editorial of the newsletter. The newsletter, she said, was a salutation and tribute to those women who fight with courage and deserve all praise and applause, but go unnoticed even in the eyes of their own people.
Editing The Voices Unheard — her brainchild —was again no mean achievement in Kashmir where massive rights abuses (which even put the Nazis to shame) are downplayed or at times ignored by the local journalists because of obvious reasons.
“To be ‘in the field’ has a different meaning when it comes to Kashmir,” says Toufiq Rashid, a friend of Aasia working with an Indian daily, The Indian Express. “It’s not what it means in Delhi where I, as a reporter, am paid to be in the field…”
Aasia in fact was fully conscious of what dabbling in peace activism meant in Kashmir . “Many activists have been killed. There is always fear. We know we are being monitored. Our activities are being watched . There isn’t much we can do; we have to work within the limitations,” she said in an interview.
Not surprisingly, the unending tryst with armies of orphans and widows, and the women, whose dear ones vanished into thin air, might scare even a trained psychiatrist. In Aasia’s own words, “I work with women whose husbands and sons have disappeared and who have no financial support and I feel really helpless. When I hear the story, it brings tears to my eyes…After 10 years they still don’t know the whereabouts of their husbands or sons. A woman told me `I just want to see my son once before I die. I always pray to God that unless I see my son, I should not die.’
“It is frustrating and depressing to work in such an atmosphere…” Aasia said in an interview in The Netherlands where she did a commendable job to portray the plight of the families of disappeared persons.
She however, was made of different stuff and believed in action. “Things were different for her,” Toufiq said. “For her, reporting meant going into areas where even eagles fear. In remote corners of the Valley, where a bomb can turn up anywhere , where a stray bullet could get you, where you never know who will be angry by your search for a story.”
“She disliked intellectual prudery and wanted to excel in her field by dint of what she called a practical dive,” Hilal Ahmed, a close friend of Aasia wrote in an obituary in the Srinagar-based daily, Greater Kashmir. “I wanted to scale heights in the media world, earn money and make my life comfortable but this (human rights work) is something that has given me contentment, satisfaction,” Aasia, (according to Hilal) once told him.
“She was modest, but seemed to be prepared to take any risk when it came to discharging her obligations towards this suffering nation…” Khurram, who is still grieving the sad death of his colleague, said.
Aasia’s quest for truth and lending an ear to the voices unheard took her to far-off places across the Kashmir Valley and even some inaccessible areas of mountainous Jammu region. One such place was Dardpora, a tiny village near the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, about 120 kms north of Srinagar. The village, with a population of a few thousand, has hogged the headlines in the recent past for having witnessed a huge loss in the killing of hundreds of youth, mostly the insurgents in the past 15 years. In the absence of any initiative from the civil society, about 150 widows and 300 orphans have been left to fend for themselves.
Some months before her death, Aasia had undertaken a project to make the Dardpora widows self-reliant. She had, in fact, started a tailoring center and routinely visited the area to oversee the work.
Aasia’s death caused a setback to everything associated with human rights in Kashmir.
“Her passing was a terrible tragedy,” a friend in the US said. “But it was certainly not in vain. The hours and hours she spent with families of the disappeared providing the support (that few have provided) are priceless and will never be forgotten. On the contrary, her tireless dedication and vibrant energy will remain alive to inspire and motivate people, women in particular, until Kashmir is free and even long afterwards when the stories of Kashmiri heroes are written in history books and told to our future generations.”
You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution!
