In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), thousands of women live with a loss that never reaches an ending. They are known as half-widows, wives whose husbands disappeared and whose fate remains unknown. Unlike widows, they have no confirmed death to mourn. Unlike married women, they cannot live with the certainty that their husbands will return. They remain trapped between hope and mourning, often for decades.

For these women, disappearance is not simply the loss of a husband. It creates a continuing legal, economic and social crisis. A woman may remain legally married while living alone, unable to access her husband’s property, inheritance or other family rights. She may raise children without knowing whether their father is alive or dead. The absence of an answer becomes a permanent condition of life.

The scale of this suffering can be seen in Dardpora, a village near the northern edge of IIOJK. From a distance, the hamlet appears peaceful, surrounded by dense deodar trees, terraced cornfields, apple orchards and craggy mountains. Yet behind this picturesque setting are around 300 widows and half-widows carrying the scars of decades of conflict.

Begum Jaan, 52, has spent years without knowing what happened to her husband, Shamsuddin Pasal. He left home for evening prayers in 1998 and never returned. “His disappearance is still a mystery,” she says.

Bibi Fatima’s story is no less painful. Her daily-wage worker husband, Vilayat Shah, left home in 1993 in search of employment. He never came back. “I spent months looking for him. I looked everywhere for him except at the army camps,” she recalls. Eventually, she gave up. “We are vulnerable and lack the education and knowledge. We don’t know how to handle the situation legally in this distant, unrecorded world.”

Dardpora, however, represents only a fraction of the wider crisis. Since the beginning of the insurgency in 1989, the Srinagar-based Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) has recorded at least 8,000 disappearances in IIOJK. The Indian government has maintained that the actual number of missing persons is closer to 3,000 to 4,000. The difference between these figures itself demonstrates the absence of a universally accepted and comprehensive record.

The danger lies not only in the number of missing men but in the thousands of families left behind without answers. The APDP, together with the International People’s Tribunal on Kashmir, has also documented comparable unmarked graves in at least eight districts. Yet no comprehensive, independent survey has established the full dimensions of the disappearance crisis. What remains undocumented cannot simply be assumed to be insignificant. In many cases, the absence of records is itself evidence of an institutional failure to properly document the fate of missing people.

The consequences for half-widows are profound. Studies have reported depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, along with intense emotional distress and difficulty managing everyday life. In the most severe cases, researchers have reported suicidal thoughts and self-harming behaviour associated with prolonged socioeconomic pressure, hopelessness and feelings of worthlessness.

Social isolation compounds the suffering. Many half-widows face stigma and withdraw from public life. Their grief is prolonged because they cannot establish whether they have lost their husbands permanently. A confirmed death, however painful, provides an opportunity to mourn. An unexplained disappearance keeps the family suspended between grief and expectation.

This is why the issue cannot be treated as a collection of individual tragedies. It is also a question of law and accountability. A government commission has proposed at least $15,000 in compensation for each fatality, along with prompt DNA sampling and forensic testing to identify bodies by matching remains with relatives of missing persons. Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations have repeatedly called for impartial investigations into allegations of enforced disappearances and unlawful executions by Indian forces.

International law also provides a framework for addressing such cases. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance requires states to investigate disappearances and provide remedies and reparation to victims and their families. Enforced disappearance is recognized as a serious human rights violation precisely because it removes a person from the protection of the law while denying families the truth about what happened.

Half-widows are therefore not simply waiting for sympathy. They are waiting for a system capable of answering basic questions: Where did their husbands go? What happened to them? Where are their remains? Who is responsible? And what rights belong to the families left behind?

Decades of silence cannot substitute for justice. Until independent investigations, accurate records, forensic identification, legal recognition and meaningful compensation become available, the women of IIOJK will remain trapped in an uncertainty they never chose. Their husbands may have disappeared, but their suffering must not be allowed to disappear with them.

The author is pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from International Islamic University Islamabad and is also a Research Associate at Kashmir Institute of International Relation (KIIR)