Mapping Disability in Conflict Zone: Memories of Injury and Trajectory of Vulnerability

There can be two ways of looking at disability under an armed conflict: the impact of conflict on persons with disability or people being physically and mentally disabled by the impact of conflict. In recent years, highly militarized Kashmir has drawn attention towards the region where people with mental disabilities are killed by the military on suspicion when they wander around the security installations against the alleged warnings. Along with this, there have been hundreds of stories where people have developed anxiety, hypertension, memory loss, insomnia as well as mental retardation witnessing or surviving violence. According to Christine Sylvester, war needs to be seen as a physical and emotional experience where the human body comes into focus as a unit that has agency in war and is also the target of war violence. India's perennially ‘disturbed’ regions like Kashmir or Northeast India are not short of difficult narratives of injured bodies and souls, albeit under-represented. In this paper, I examine the personal narratives of violence and the political debates of security disabling human lives in conflict zones. Based on my fieldwork around the memories of insurgency and counter-insurgency in Assam, I share my reflections on the less-discussed concern of disability in conflict zones in Northeast India and try to analyse the idea of vulnerability through a gender lens.