And then there were none...

UNWAVERING WOMEN

Despite not having seen heir sons and husbands for decades after their “disappearances” at the hands of the Indian army, Kashmiri women do not give up hope, notes Sana Altaf.

Every Sunday, Atiqa Begum has a special chore. It’s the day she enters her son Javaid’s small, neatly painted blue room. She throws open the windows to let the sunlight in. She rearranges the bed, which has not been used for years, organises the bookshelves and dusts the cupboards. Then she locks the room for the week.

This weekly ritual has become a lifeline for Atiqa ever since Javaid disappeared from their home. He was then but a 14-year-old Class Seven student and the lone son of his parents. “Every time I clean Javaid’s room, I feel he is coming. It gives me immense pleasure and the strength to live,” says Atiqa, who hails from Pulwama in Jammu & Kashmir.

Son down

On a fateful day in October 1993, Javaid was having lunch with his father, Ghulam Nabi, when security forces cordoned off the whole area. Ghulam recalls that suddenly security personnel barged into their house and took Javaid away. “That was a time, when people were arrested for suspicious activity, and security would name anyone a militant to save their skin. Javaid was the victim of the same,” he says sadly.

When they were taking Javaid away the security personnel assured his parents that they were only taking him in for questioning and would leave him home soon. But they failed to keep their ‘promise’. Recalls Atiqa, “I went to every bunker and camp in the army to look for him. But every time we were told to come back the next day. Several days went by in this manner but there was still no news of my son.”

Javaid’s parents went to plead to the security forces to leave their son six months after he had disappeared but “they simply denied the reports”. Since then, there has been no news of Javaid. “He was my lone son. He was the centre of our world. I don’t know where he has gone,” adds a dejected Atiqa, who has left no stone unturned to find him.

Buried hopes

Mugali Begum’s dream of being reunited with her son has remained unfulfilled. Mugali struggled all alone for 20 years to trace her son but died in 2009 without seeing him. From the beginning, her life hadn’t been easy. Mugali was divorced by her husband about a year after marriage. She was then the mother of a three-month-old Nazir Ahmad. The mother-son duo lived in a single room modest dwelling in Old Srinagar city. She worked hard in a school as a helper in order to educate Nazir, who eventually became a government teacher. Things were going on just fine till August 1990, when all hell broke loose for Mugali. Nazir was going to collect his monthly salary when he was allegedly picked up by security forces. Mugali, during an earlier interaction with this reporter, had recalled that she would spend days together visiting police stations, camps, bunkers and interrogation centres to trace Nazir’s whereabouts. All the money that she earned was spend on filing cases and travelling to distant corners of the state to look for her beloved son. Today, she has taken her wish to the grave.

Alone together

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a group that came together in 1994, includes mothers and wives of those who have allegedly been subjected to enforced disappearances in Kashmir. Even as it has been campaigning for several years to know the whereabouts of missing relatives, it has also been providing financial assistance to women, who have no proper means of making ends meet.

According to the APDP, nearly 10,000 people have disappeared in Kashmir during the past 23 years of conflict. However, the government has been giving contradictory figures on the missing persons. APDP’s Praveena, whose son has also been lost for the last 21 years, is determined to see that women like her get justice one day. She is pursuing the case of Mugali as well as several other women. She, however, fears that she might not be able to see her own son in her lifetime.

These women have braved the toughest odds and waged lone battles for the safety of their beloved family members. It remains to be seen how far they can go only on hope and prayer.