Political Activism of Women in Kashmir: A Demystification of Women's Agency

In this paper, I have tried to explore the agentive nature of women's agency in Kashmir. Down the history, Kashmiri women have displayed active public roles, be it against the autocratic Dogra rule or the tribal invasion of 1947. These roles got by and large bypassed in the mainstream narratives that always portrayed women as the vulnerable, and victims and mourners. Now collectively a good number of feminist scholars have broken the siege and come up with an alternate discourse wherein they have talked about the women organisations like Dukhtaran e Milat (DeM) and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). DeM talks about the rights of women in Islam, thus uses religion in a liberating sense, for example the 'veil' is used as a tool for privatising women's 'body' and subverting the male gaze. Similarly, APDP has made 'motherhood' the turf of its activism. These modes help the women conform to the conventional notions of feminity that, makes the agency debatable. No women's organization is operating independently, and the ethnic ridges get visible in the collective agency of women. The picture of women in mainstream politics is worse in the region. The paper is mainly concerned with this flawed nature of women's agency in Kashmir.