The Endless Wait

There are hundreds of women who have been carrying the burden of Kashmir’s enforced disappearances. Mothers and wives of missing men spend their entire life and all their possessions, often in abject poverty, searching for their loved ones in jails, police stations, army camps and torture centers. There is even a name for the women who are still waiting to find out what happened to their husbands, not knowing whether they are alive or dead: “half-widows.” While some women are not able to cope with the unending pain and suffer from depression and various other mental disorders, others have refused to succumb to the notion of victimhood. Many of them, despite living with this unresolved grief, have struggled hard to raise and educate their children amid extreme social and financial challenges. “Enforced disappearance” is a tactic used in conflicts all over the world, but the vanishing of thousands of Kashmiri men has received little attention outside the valley. Human rights groups place the numbers at 6,000 to 8,000, which, in recent years have found nearly 2,700 graves, some with more than one body. Most families have never found their loved ones, so even with the occasional news of more graves, they continue to hold out hope.