Kashmiri Kalies Dream of Freedom.. to Walk along at Night

Kashmiri Kalies Dream of Freedom.. to Walk along at Night
Anjali Mody

New Delhi, 25 January: Tomorrow, among the thousands who will gather at Rajpath to watch the parade of Indian arms will be a group of Kashmiri women on their first visit to the capital. The 20 women aged between 17 and 60, more used to army flag marches, are village level health workers in the districts of Budgam and Pulwama working for the most part, they said, in the cross-fire between militants and the paramilitary forces.

The fact that Delhi, in preparation for republic day, is crawling with police and armed paramilitary forces is not something that they have noticed. Twenty year old Munira simply said, "at home I am scared .. here there is nothing to fear." She looked at the other people in the room and said "aap ko nahin pata aap log kitne lucky hain" (you don't know how lucky you are).

Zubeida, said that the excitement of being in Delhi was looking at the people, "especially the girls .. they roam around .. on their own.. even at night.. we wish we could be like them." Things were different before the trouble started in Kashmir, she said, "now we can't move out of our homes after four o'clock because of the army and the militants." Shabnam at 17, the sole working member of her family, can barely remember a time when things were different. She said, "we want to be like you... to study .. to to do better in life."

Munira, Shabnam, Zubeida and the other women have for the last two years worked with the Shejar and Shadaab community health projects, supported by the voluntary health association of india (VHAI), reputedly the first real effort to fill the gap left by the destruction of local level health facilities in Kashmir in the last ten years. VHAI representatives in Delhi stressed that their support - fiancial and advisory - was minuscule compared with the commitment of the 300 Kashmiris, mostly women, in Budgam and Pulwama districts. Many are volunteers, who receive no payment for their work.

Shezada, a supervisor with the project, which also runs several self-help schemes offering crafts training and financed through self-contributory micro-credit schemes, said that working conditions were hard. There was the curfew to deal with and the fact that there was only two hours of electricity. They lived and worked, she said, under the combined threat of miltant coercion and army violence. "The miltants come and shelter in our homes by force and the army then burns our homes for sheltering them." She added, "but we work despite this".

The last month, some of them said had been different. Sumaira, from Puwama district said that there was a noticeable difference because of the cease-fire. She said: "I live near an air-field.. so normally we have more problem with the firing.. right now it is easier." But not all of them knew that a cease-fire had been declared.. Nikhat from village Dadompoora said, "there was a tiny bit of difference .. because it was Ramzan we were not harrassed so much."