A relief comes too late for Kashmir's half widows

For 13 years, Naseema Begum has been waiting for her husband, an auto rickshaw driver, who left one morning for work as usual but never returned. She looked for him everywhere: at relatives houses, in prisons, in nearby graveyards, but he had just disappeared leaving behind elusive stories of arrest by the Indian Armed forces. And over time, Syed Anwar Shah, Naseema’s husband, became another statistic in the long list of disappeared people in the Indian held Kashmir, while Naseema, with an infant daughter in her arms, became another half-widow: a breed of married woman in the IHK suspended in a limbo of waiting for a missing husband. More than 23 years after the first enforced disappearance in the Indian held Kashmir, an edict came last week from a group of Islamic scholars stating that women like Naseema whose husbands have gone missing could re-marry after four years of waiting for their spouses. “ There is a lot of difference among different Fiqah in Islam over the required waiting period for a woman whose husband is missing before she can re-marry. And in a place like Kashmir where there are hundreds of such women, it was necessary to deal with the issue,” says Syed Rehman Shams, secretary of Jammu Kashmir Mutahad Majlis Ulema and one of the members of the religious conglomerate that gave the edict. “We adopted the thought of Imam Malik who put the Idda (waiting period) for women at 4 years. If a woman’s husband does not return in that time, she is free to marry another man,” Shams told AA. The conglomerate that passed the edict had twelve members and represented majority of the various Islamic organizations in IHK including the Jamaat e Islami, Jamiat e Ahl e hades and Mutahad Majlis Ulema. Shams said that it was up to the women whether or not they chose to re-marry and that their main aim was to clear the religious perspective on it. According to the Association of parents of disappeared people (APDP), an organization of people whose family members disappeared like Naseema’s husband, around 8,000 Kashmiri Muslim men were subjected to enforced custodial disappearances during the Indian counter-insurgency Operations against a popular armed rebellion in the IKH in the 23 years. The pro-India government of Kashmir, however, puts the number of disappeared around 3,000. “Many of those 8,000 disappeared men have left behind wives who are neither married nor widowed. They are simply in waiting,” says Parveena Ahangar, 60-year-old chairperson of the organization, whose own 17-year-old son disappeared after Indian soldiers picked him up from his uncle’s house in 1990. Ahangar says that there is no exact number of the women whose husbands disappeared because most of the cases are still not documented but she says she knows more than a hundred personally. “And I know that 90 percent of them did not remarry,” Ahangar told AA. “Some women are still waiting for the old husband, some do not find it in them to marry again, but most of the women have grown up children now and that is the reason they don’t marry again,” she says. The reason holds good for the 30-year-old Naseema who has consistently refused to marry and has decided to remain a half widow for the rest of her life. Her only daughter, who was a year old at the time of her husband’s disappearance, is now a 14-year-old girl. It is for her future that she refuses to marry. “I always thought of my daughter every time my family brought up re-marriage. I always wondered what would happen to her and always refused envisaging all the changes in her life including a step-father,” says Naseema. Naseema lives in her in-law’s decrepit two-room rented house in Srinagar with her daughter, Shazia, and a handicapped brother-in-law who sells clothes on a roadside cart. Shazia has literally no memory of his father, other than one constructed from stories of her mother and put on the few smiling old pictures of his father around the house. A class III student in a nearby school, Shazia wants to be a lawyer to fight for what her mother and she lost, but her mother has come to accept the injustice as their fate. “We are trapped here and for such a long time now that I have lost the idea of time,” Naseema says. “There seems to be no getting out.” Even for those who wanted to marry but were unsure about the bindings of different sects, says Ahangar, the edict has come a little too late. “We welcome this edict and are happy that at least finally the Ulemas came together to take a decision on it and remove any social stigma from the re-marriages of half-widows. But they should have done it many years ago; now those women are worried about their children’s marriage and have forgotten themselves,” Ahangar says. Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region, is held by India and Pakistan in parts and claimed by both in full. The two countries have fought three full-fledged wars – in 1948, 1965 and 1971 – since they were partitioned in 1947, two of which were fought over Kashmir. Since 1989, Kashmiri resistance groups in IHK have been fighting against the Indian rule for independence or for unification with neighboring Pakistan. More than 70,000 people have reportedly been killed in the conflict so far.