Gender,Jihad, and Jingoism¹: Women as Perpetrators, Planners, and Patrons of Militancy in Kashmir

Abstract

The Kashmir case is a conundrum in the study of women's roles in religio-political militancy. While traditional social structure and gendered hierarchies have been retained, public spaces have also been available to women to don more political and militant roles. This article looks at the multiple roles of women in the militancy in Kashmir and the discourses around them. Women's participation in the militancy has not found any mention in the nationalist narratives and Kashmiri women struggle to claim their share in the contemporary political discourse. Ambiguities remain about how the maledominated Kashmiri nationalist and conflict discourse may have influenced inclusions and exclusions. Through a case study based on interviews conducted in Kashmir, this article argues that women's violent activities or their support to the militancy is altogether excluded or maneuvered to preserve existing gender norms and patriarchal traditions. This has dangerous implications as it tends to exclude women's voices in the peace processes. , where she interacted with and interviewed, among others: the founder and head of Dukhtaran-e-Millat, Asiya Andrabi; MKM chief Yasmeen Raja and other members; political activists Anjum Zamruda Habib, Farida Behenji and Hamida Nayeem, Missing Persons Activist Parveena Ahangar; several former (male) militants turned political activists; women police officers and trainees; police officers dealing with militancy in different parts of the Valley; army officers and soldiers, media persons, filmmakers, peace activists, scholars/academics, and journalists working in Kashmir; women judges and lawyers in the district court in Srinagar; women's and Human Rights NGOs; students at Kashmir University; common men and women in Kashmir and policy analysts and journalists in Delhi. The author thanks the Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies at The Fletcher School, Tufts University for its support of the initial research project in 2007. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided extensive and constructive feedback on the earlier draft.

Rwandan Women No More

“…I have been unable to interview her again, but it would be interesting to see how her sentence has shaped her opinion of the RPF. 34 See, for example, Dara Kay Cohen's (2007Cohen's ( , 2013 work on female perpetrators in Sierre Leone or Swati Parashar's (2009Parashar's ( , 2011 publications on female militants in Kashmir and Sri Lanka.…”

Militarized social reproduction: women’s labour and parastate armed conflict

“…For example, in Angola, the Philippines, and Kachin State (Myanmar), women engaged in subsistence food production, farming rice and other critical supplies for the armed forces and the communities caught in the fighting (Ducos 2000;Hedström 2015Hedström , 2016a. In Northern Ireland, India, and Kashmir, women equipped soldiers with uniforms and food and sent provisions to imprisoned fighters (Alison 2004;Dowler 1998;Parashar 2011Parashar , 2013. In Algeria, moussebilate, or female civilian activists, hid fighters in their homes (Mortimer 2012), and in Kayah State (Myanmar), women concealed weapons in the crawlspace under their houses.…”

Militarized masculinities beyond methodological nationalism: charting the multiple masculinities of an Indonesian jihadi

“…Most of the spaces that fighters occupy are homosocial with strict limitations on interactions with women. But based on what we know from other contexts and from the few women that we had the opportunity to talk to, their exclusion seems to have more to do with former foreign fighters understanding of the network as a brotherhood than it does to do with women’s real lack of significance (Parashar 2011). When directly prompted, Ali has some comments about the role of women (that they should obey and not try to go beyond the talents God gives them).…”