By Safina Nabi
Thirty winters have passed since Atiqa Begum, 59, last held her husband’s hand. Married at the young age of 19, Atiqa spent the next eight years of her life happily with her husband, who worked as a contractual employee in Kashmir’s power development department.
The couple lived in Zogiyar village in Baramulla district with their four children. The youngest was four months old when a knock on their front door on a cold February night in 1990 changed the course of their life.
“We were woken up by loud banging on our front door that night,” Atiqa recalled. “Terrified, I held my husband’s arm tightly with one hand and my youngest daughter with another. My husband assured me that nothing would happen and went out to check the door. But he never returned.”
In 1989, an armed movement for secession from the Indian state took shape in Kashmir – with it came a heavy presence of the Indian military. Kashmiris’ lives were thrown in a vortex of conflict, killings and disappearances. While many families accused Indian security forces of taking away innocent civilians, the government claimed that most of the men who went missing went away voluntarily, to join militant groups.
Atiqa, however, distinctly recalls watching a group of men forcibly take her husband away. “Though their faces were covered with black masks and one could see nothing but their eyes, I remember that they were all wearing army uniforms,” she said.
Despite the best efforts of her father and extended family members, Atiqa, then 27 years old, could find no trace of her husband. Multiple trips to law enforcement agencies bore no results. The family looked for him in military camps and prisons within and outside Kashmir, but received no information. “My father passed away with this grief in his heart that he was not able to find my husband and bring him back home to me,” she said.
The absence of a husband weighs heavily on women in traditional and patriarchal societies such as Kashmir’s. With no separate source of income for herself or her children, Atiqa was left at the mercy of her in-laws.
Much to her indignation, Atiqa’s in-laws suggested she marry her husband’s younger brother. “Another marriage would have brought in more responsibilities and there would have been expectations of more children,” she said. “I was also thinking, if my husband actually came back one day, then what would happen.”
She added, “I had four children and the youngest was just four months old. The future of my children was more important than mine. I could not take such a drastic decision.”
Her in-laws accepted her decision and also assured her that she would be given her husband’s share in the family property. However, things changed after her father-in-law, who was sympathetic towards her, passed away in 2015.
“After the demise of his father, my brother-in-law distributed the family property among all siblings, including his sisters,” she said. “He did not give my children my husband’s share, citing a twisted interpretation of Islamic laws of inheritance.”
Atiqa now lives in Zogiyar with her oldest son, who is married and has a daughter of his own – her younger son and younger daughter, who are unmarried, also live with them.
Her children have had to struggle to build their lives. When her husband disappeared, their oldest son was eight years old. At first, Atiqa’s father managed the expenses of his education – but when Atiqa’s father died, her son had to cut his schooling short and take up work as a daily wager.
Over time, her younger children, too, had to leave school and train in tailoring and needlework so that they could contribute to household expenses.
In contrast, their cousins studied well and secured government employment. One of their cousins works in the district magistrate’s office, while the other one is a teacher.
“My children lived a miserable life,” Atiqa said. “They struggled and worked hard in the hope that the share from the property would ease our difficulties someday, but it feels like we were waiting for another misery to befall us.”
Atiqa’s family lives in a roughly constructed three-room single-storey house. Its makeshift tin roof is covered with a white plastic sheet, to keep water out.
As we were walking out after our conversation, she pointed towards a three-storey house some distance away, with white windows, and crimson red walls.
“That’s my brother-in-law’s house,” she said. “When I look at that house I feel that it is painted with my husband’s blood.”
Atiqa’s story mirrors the plight of countless women in Kashmir, whose husbands disappeared and could never be traced. Since the men were not declared dead, their wives spent decades waiting for them in uncertainty – Kashmiri media coined the term “half-widows” for them.
According to the Srinagar-based Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, or APDP, more than 8,000 men disappeared in the region during the tumultuous period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. The state government has at different points declared widely varying figures for the number of disappeared men, ranging from 1,105 to 3,931.
Some believe that mass unidentified graves, which have been found spread across the region, may be linked to these enforced disappearances.
In 2011, noting that 2,730 unidentified bodies were buried in 38 sites across northern Kashmir, the state-run human rights commission directed the state government to investigate the mass graves. But in the decade since then, no larger probe has been conducted.
Local organisations like APDP, which have been fighting for justice for the families of disappeared people, believe that these graves may hold answers for many of Kashmir’s half-widows. While there are no official estimates of the number of half-widows, in 2011, the human rights group Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Societies pegged the number at around 1,500.
For women whose husbands disappeared, there has been no closure. The emotional pain of losing their husbands has been compounded by the economic hardship that came with the loss of the family’s sole earning member.
The ambiguity surrounding the men’s disappearance meant their wives were unable to access any government help. “We have to understand that there is no way for the wives to try and secure employment, as many state agencies often brand the disappeared men as alleged terrorists, leaving them with little options,” said Dr Samreen Hussain, a legal scholar who has worked on property rights of women in Islam.
But if the government has let them down, Kashmir’s patriarchal society has not been kind to the women either. The cruellest blow has often been dealt by their own families, who have cheated them of a rightful share in the family property.
This story first appeared on scroll.in
