Lo ndon: The London-based Jammu & Kashmir Council for Human Rights (JKCHR) has filed a report with the United Nations to raise the issue of some 400 Pakistani women stranded in India for varying periods since the 1990s.
Most of these women hail from the Pakistani side of Kashmir, and were married to Kashmiri freedom fighters who crossed over from the Indian side during 1990s.
These families moved back to Indian Kashmir during a thaw in Pakistani- Indian relations during the early 2000s, and got stuck there when relations between the two countries took another dip.
JKCHR, which is headed by known lawyer and writer, Dr Syed Nazeer Gillani, has been pursuing the case of these women at the UN for nearly two decades.
It has now asked the UN and its Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to raise this issue with the Indian government and ask it to provide citizenship and/or travel documents to the women so that they can visit their families on the Pakistani side. Or move back to their erstwhile homes for good.
In this regard, the UNHCR has also requested the UN to ask for cooperation from the Pakistani High Commission in Delhi, and also mobilise the International Committee for Red Cross (ICRC) for protection and rescue operations where needed.
The UNHCR session begins today and will continue until October 10.
According to a report submitted by the JKCHR at the UNHRC, the council has been able to “track down 200 stranded women who are citizens of Azad Kashmir and their 300 children.”
Additionally, the council has identified 40 women who hail from the Pakistani mainland, and their 120 children. All these women married the freedom fighters from the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) who crossed into Pakistan during an anti-India insurgency that hit Kashmir in 1988-90.
Most of them gave up the gun when the insurgency ran into a stalemate, and started a normal life on the Pakistani side, convinced that they will never be able to return to their parental homes again, says Arif Bahar, a senior journalist based in Muzaffarabad.
Things changed after 2008 when Pakistan-India relations eased and formal as well as backdoor peace negotiations started, including measures to rehabilitate uprooted former militants.
This is when many former fighters who had taken local Kashmiri or Pakistani wives decided to return to their country – mainly by air travel via Nepal, Bangladesh and other destinations as the post-1990 fighters were not allowed to travel via the bus service which the two countries started between Muzaffarabad and Sri Nagar.
Pak-India relations hit the rocks again after the 2016 killing of a freedom activist in Occupied Kashmir, Burhan Wani, and have continued to worsen over the subsequent years, bringing cross-LoC travel in Kashmir to a virtual halt.
The women from the Pakistani side who married husbands from the Occupied Kashmir have been the worst hit.
According to the JKCHR report filed with the UNHRC, at least three such women have committed suicide so far, five have been divorced while 15 have been widowed.
The numbers could be much higher, but all the affected women are not contactable, the report says.
Some protests held by these women to demand that they may either be granted local citizenship or allowed to travel back to their homes across the LoC have led to “police violence” against them.
These women, including those widowed and left without any means of livelihood, have been denied the issuance of travel documents.
“It is important that Human Rights Council intervenes so that these women are granted citizenship rights and travel documents. They have not been able to travel, for the last many years,” the report says.
