This page concerns mass rape and sexual torture. It states what was documented and what the legal process did with it. It does not reproduce survivors’ testimony at length, and it names no survivor who has not chosen to be named publicly. The dossier index is here.
Kunan Poshpora, 23 February 1991
On the night of 23 February 1991, according to survivors and to a local administration official, soldiers from the 4 Rajputana Rifles regiment of the Indian Army gang-raped around twenty-three women of the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara district, during a cordon-and-search operation in which the men of the villages were removed for questioning.[1]
The local administration official was S.M. Yasin, then Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara district, who stated in his official report on the incident that army personnel had committed multiple rapes in the two villages. The Indian Army and the Government of India have denied the allegations.[1]
What followed is the reason this case, and not another, is the reference point for impunity in Kashmir. The United Nations describes it as “one significant case that illustrates the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute allegations of sexual violence and addressing impunity for sexual crimes in Kashmir” — a case in which “attempts to seek justice have been denied and blocked over the years by the authorities at different levels.”[1]
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 23 Feb 1991 | Soldiers of the 4 Rajputana Rifles gang-rape around 23 women during a search operation. The Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara, S.M. Yasin, records in his official report that army personnel committed multiple rapes. The Army and the Government of India deny the allegations. |
| 1991 | Wajahat Habibullah, then divisional commissioner of the Kashmir region, files a report with the state government addressing the allegations. In July 2013 he accuses state authorities of deleting the parts of his report in which he had recommended a higher-level investigation and a special order to ensure army cooperation. |
| March 1991 | Mufti Bahauddin Farooqi, former Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, leads a fact-finding team that interviews survivors. He reportedly notes that “he had never seen a case in which normal investigative procedures were ignored as they were in this one”. |
| 8–9 June 1991 | The Indian Army invites the Press Council of India to investigate. A three-member PCI commission visits the villages over two days and reports the allegations “baseless”. Its members were journalists and, as OHCHR records, their investigation had no legal standing. The report has since been criticised by several civil society groups. |
| By October 1991 | The Jammu and Kashmir Police stop investigating, having declared the case “untraceable”. Eight months after the events, the file is effectively shut. |
| October 2011 | The State Human Rights Commission directs the state government to reopen and reinvestigate the case, and to prosecute a senior official. |
| June 2013 | A court in Kupwara orders reinvestigation of the case. |
| July 2017 | The Kashmir Editors Guild tells a Press Council of India delegation that the only way of salvaging the PCI’s credibility in Kashmir is to revisit its 1991 report — which the Guild describes as a “bid to undermine and subvert the institution of media in Kashmir”. |
| 2 July 2014 | The High Court asks the state government to consider paying compensation within three weeks. Note the verb: the Court asked the state to consider it. Survivors say no compensation was received. |
| February 2018 | The Support Group for Justice for Kunan Poshpora Survivors files further proceedings. The case continues to move through the legal system. No one has been convicted. |
Read the sequence again and notice what actually closed the case. Not a court. Not a finding after evidence was tested. A three-member panel of journalists, invited by the accused institution, spent two days in the villages and pronounced the allegations baseless — and OHCHR records plainly that this exercise had no legal standing. Four months later the police declared the case untraceable and stopped. Every subsequent order — the SHRC in 2011, the Kupwara court in 2013, the High Court in 2014 — has been an attempt to restart something that was terminated in 1991 by a body with no authority to terminate it.
The book that reopened it
Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? (Zubaan, 2016) was written by five young Kashmiri women — Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Samreena Mushtaq, Munaza Rashid and Natasha Rather — who were among the petitioners who reopened the case. It is both an account of the night and a record of what twenty-five years of seeking a remedy actually involves. In the library →
The pattern in the documentary record
Kunan Poshpora is the best-known case, not an isolated one. Amnesty International’s 1993 case study on Sopore described, as part of the established pattern in Jammu and Kashmir, “rape of women during search operations” alongside torture and extrajudicial executions.[2] That was written two years after Kunan Poshpora and it treats the practice as characteristic rather than exceptional.
The 2019 APDP/JKCCS torture archive puts figures to the sexual dimension of custodial abuse across its 432 case studies:
The report’s documented methods include sexualised torture, rape and sodomy. That the second figure applies to victims of both sexes is the point: sexual violence in this record is not only a crime against women during search operations but a standard instrument of custodial interrogation. File 02 →
Why prosecutions do not follow
The obstacle is the same one that governs the rest of this dossier. Section 7 of AFSPA bars prosecution of armed forces personnel without the prior sanction of the Government of India, and in more than three decades the UN found that no such sanction had ever been granted. File 04 →
For sexual violence the barrier compounds. A survivor must report to a police force operating alongside the accused, in a community where the disclosure carries severe social cost, into a system where the eventual answer — as it was in 1991 — may be that the case is not fit to prosecute. The absence of convictions in a thirty-five-year record is not evidence that the crimes were rare. It is evidence about the remedy.
The current record
OHCHR’s 2018 report lists rape among the human rights violations documented in Jammu and Kashmir, and raised concern about the reported high level of violence, including enforced disappearance, against women.[3] In November 2025 the fourteen UN mandate holders recorded reports of torture and other ill-treatment among the roughly 2,800 people detained after the Pahalgam attack.[4]
Sources & notes
- UN OHCHR, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir, 14 June 2018, paras. 129–131 and accompanying footnotes. That report is the source for the naming of the 4 Rajputana Rifles; the figure of around 23 women; the official report of S.M. Yasin, Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara; the denial by the Indian Army and the Government of India; Wajahat Habibullah’s 1991 report and his July 2013 statement that parts of it were deleted; the March 1991 fact-finding team led by former Chief Justice Mufti Bahauddin Farooqi and his remark on investigative procedure; the three-member Press Council of India commission that visited the villages on 8–9 June 1991, found the allegations “baseless”, and whose investigation OHCHR records as having “no legal standing”; the Jammu and Kashmir Police declaring the case “untraceable” and stopping investigations by October 1991; the SHRC direction of October 2011; and the Kashmir Editors Guild’s July 2017 call on the PCI to revisit its report. The June 2013 Kupwara court order and the High Court asking the state government on 2 July 2014 to consider paying compensation are cited by OHCHR to The Telegraph (18 June 2013) and The Indian Express (2 July 2014) respectively. Human Rights Watch reported on the Press Council commission in its World Report 1992. Correction note: an earlier version of this page stated that the government declared the case “unfit for launching criminal prosecution” in September 1991 and closed it a month later, and that the 2014 High Court “ordered” compensation. Both came from secondary accounts and neither matches the primary UN record; they have been corrected to what OHCHR documents.
- Amnesty International, India — Sopore: a case study of extrajudicial killings in Jammu and Kashmir, April 1993, ASA 20/17/93.
- UN OHCHR, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir, 14 June 2018.
- UN OHCHR Special Procedures, 24 November 2025.