Dark & Bloody Nights of Indian Occupied Kashmir
Here is a story of a 50-year old woman, named Atiqa Bano, who cried her heart out, while narrating the incident she faced. On May 9, 2020, the personnel of Jammu & Kashmir Police and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) raided the Budgam village of Indian occupied Kashmir. While seeing those armored vehicles entering the village, most of the men, including Ms. Bano’s husband and three sons, fled fearing detention. So when the troops came to raid her house, she was alone with her 25 years old daughter.
The Indian security forces thrashed the main door of her house, asking where their men are. One of those armed men ran into the kitchen and decided to torture a 50-year-old woman along with her daughter. Atiqa Bano said that they took the salt from the kitchen and rubbed it on their eyes. Table salt scattered, along with broken fragments of a water pipe, a firepot, a wall clock, and utensils remained on the floor in the single-story house. “The men stormed in from the front gate, over the boundary walls, from every direction,” she says. To stop the women from screaming, “they shoved the barrel of their guns in our mouths.” The staircase of their house has been dismantled and is lying in the front yard. Ms. Bano says the forces tore it from the wall to prevent them from escaping. They ransacked through Ms. Bano’s belongings, and looted her gold jewelry, two power inverters, and their rice stock, she says. While Ms. Bano was gagged, she says, her daughter was beaten up with the butt of a gun, injuring her right arm badly. Ms. Bano ran to the fields after the forces had left, and people there took her daughter to a hospital. They detained Mrs. Bano’s weak father, an 80-year-old man, named Abdul Ghaffar Dar, along with other seven men, whom they kept tied to a tree, and took away in the evening. Even after getting back to her house, Bano finds it heart wrenching in the times of darkness.
The ransacked house of Abdul Gaffar Dar, who is Atiqa Bano’s father.
Photograph by Kuwar Singh for The Kashmir Walla
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