Women of Kashmir: Casualties of an Armed Conflict - Paradigm Shift
 

Hey! I found this research paper on Paradigm Shift due to yesterday's Kashmir Day, why is why I wanted to share this interesting read.

(Source) Instagram: paradigmshift_pk

Here's a summary if you do not wish to read the entire paper:

For the past seventy-three years, the valley of Kashmir is in a perpetual conflict which has morphed a serene mountainous landscape into a militarized zone damaged by violence and armed dispute. Its impact is even more debilitating for the Kashmiri women because of the abject intersectionality of their position.

Facing sexual abuse, objectification of bodies, invasion of privacy, loss of spaces, enforced disappearance, and extrajudicial killings of male relatives, the author notes that IOK’s women suffer from exceptionally psychological and physical trauma within the patriarchal society.

The gendered narrative of Kashmir cannot be furthered without elucidating the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. According to the UNSC resolution 1820, sexualized violence is “a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or an ethnic group”.

Deep-rooted misogyny and the repulsive patriarchal norms—festering in the subcontinent’s culture—exasperate the suffering of women in Indian-Administered Kashmir.

Enforced disappearances are again a tool of war employed by the Indian state to hegemonize the rights of the Kashmiri people. ‘Half-widows’ is the parochial lexicon coined in Kashmir to refer to those women whose husbands have been the victims of the conflict-zone.
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You can read the original paper on “Paradigm Shift”.


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