The main informants: Women’s legal advocacy and state violence in the Punjab counterinsurgency (1984–1997)

This article examines how women navigated legal and human rights advocacy responses to state violence during the Punjab counterinsurgency (1984–1997). By analysing oral history interviews, human rights archives, legal records, and court decisions, it highlights how gendered state and public representations of terrorism allowed women to bear witness to police violence and act as advocates on behalf of abducted men. Yet these interpretations of terrorism and state security also suppressed the legal visibility of police abuse experienced by women. In examining how women simultaneously served as symbols, activists, and legally invisible victims within the courtroom, this article reconstructs the state of exception that emerged during the counterinsurgency and reveals how its gendered scope ultimately limited judicial recognition of state violence.