“There was darkness all around. At 9:30 pm in the evening the army entered the village. They took the men and children out and they were taken to a nearby bus stand. Then they entered our homes at around 11:00 pm and started assaulting women.”

Draped in an embroidered pheran (a traditional Kashmiri gown) and a white scarf, a bespectacled elderly woman recalls the night of February 23, 1991. She is sitting in her home in Kunan-Poshpora, a small village in the north of Kashmir, the northernmost Indian state that has witnessed much violence and turmoil since 1947.

According to the old woman, around 10 to 15 soldiers entered every home in the village. “They would gag women to prevent them from raising hue and cry. We were not able to make much noise,” she says. There must have been around 1,000 soldiers in the village that night, she recalls.  When interviewed in 1991, villagers claimed about 100 women had been molested. “They left the very small girls untouched,” she adds. “Besides them, no one was spared.”

The women were systematically assaulted and gang-raped, regardless of marital status, pregnancy, or age.

The next day at 10:00 am, the deputy commander of the soldiers came to the village. “He told the women that the army has not done anything wrong.”Furious, this elderly lady pulled her friend, who was also abused that night, out of her home to stand in front of the army commander. “I told him that she is an 80-year-old lady, but even she was not spared by his men.”

“He didn’t say a word. He stood speechless,” she recalls. “He just looked down.”

Seventeen years have passed since that night, but justice has yet to be achieved for the rape victims of Kunan-Poshpora. Up until now, nobody in the village has been willing to talk. Silence about that night, a collective gesture from the villagers, greets you like a wall. But behind this silence lie tragic stories.

On April 7, 1991, the New York Times reported the Kunan-Poshpora rape incident under the headline, “India Moves Against Kashmir Rebels.” According to the report, on March 5, 1991, villagers complained about the incident to the then-Kupwara District Magistrate, S.M Yasin, who visited the village two days later to investigate. “According to a report filed by Yasin,” the article reads, “the armed forces behaved like violent beasts.” He identified them as members of 4th Rajputana Rifles and said they rampaged through the village from 11:00 pm on Feb 23 until 9:00 am the next morning.

The Indian authorities have dismissed the mass-rape charges as “groundless.” No further investigations have been conducted. The Kunan-Poshpora rape case has been buried like thousands of other cases of rights abuse by men in uniform in Kashmir.

However, in its 1992 report on international human rights, the United States Department of State rejected the Indian government’s conclusion, saying there was “credible evidence to support charges that an elite army unit engaged in mass-rape…in Kunan-Poshpora.”

After initial reluctance and much prodding, Saifuddin, a village elder from Kunan-Poshpora, opens up. (Family names are not commonly attributed to people from Kashmir and were not collected for this story). His story is like that of the old woman. “It was snowing outside that night. People were sleeping in their homes. The army came and entered every home. The men were taken out and interrogated near the village bus stand.”

He pauses, briefly. “Then they locked the rooms and raped our mothers and sisters.”

As dawn broke on that night in 1991, the soldiers let the men of the village go. The men immediately ran for their homes. “When we reached our homes we found our womenfolk weeping,” says Saifuddin. Despite their rage, which prompted them to seek swift justice for the crimes of the soldiers, the people of the village were unable to do anything. “We would have gone to lodge a First Information Report (FIR) against the army, but we couldn’t as the entire village was cordoned off.”

Four days after the incident, the villagers eventually were finally able to gain an audience with the nearby authorities. They collectively lodged an FIR at the nearby rural police station. The police arrived in the village to collect evidence and file a case against the army.