By Tariq Ahmed

Jan/Feb 2024

Kashmir and India have been in a state of political conflict for decades. The theater of the conflict has been — and remains — Kashmir. The stakes are high for both. For the Indians, the endgame is consummating the settler-colonial occupation. For the Kashmiris, the goal is to resist and uproot it. 

At stake are the lives of and nationhood for Kashmiris. India, a colonial power, has violently usurped this former princely state’s land against its Muslim-majority inhabitants’ wishes and tried every means conceivable in its “counterinsurgency” to contain and quell the Muslims’ resistance to its rule. The caravan of coloniality began around the time of colonial Britain’s 1947 partition of India and is now at its culminating point, for the next step is memoricide and erasure.

In contrast to appearances, there’s no letup in the state-sponsored repression or the Kashmiris’ ongoing struggle; their resistance is in suspended animation. How else can one explain the repetition and regurgitation of the same policy mistakes made by India in this century? 

A case in point: India’s continuing need for sociopolitical and militaristic machinations in Kashmir since its occupation in 1947 has not diminished, despite decades of political maneuvering and military repression or even after pouring in billions of rupees in developmental aid. Neither has India’s awe-inspiring rise to the status of an economic superpower made a dent in the resistance narrative. New Delhi has been able to subdue — but not to erase — it.

In this sense, then, not much has changed in Kashmir and its fraught and testy relationship with India since the settler-colonial project’s embryonic stage. Now, as then, the Machiavellian sociopolitical engineering has failed to cut it with the Kashmiris. The old game plans continue even today. Although the actors have changed, the script remains the same.

“Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Occupation”

This matter is a theme of Hafsa Kanjawal’s “Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Occupation” (Stanford University Press: 2023). Its microscopic insider-outsider account reflects India’s wheeling and dealing to keep its control of Kashmir. The author investigates the state’s formative years of settler-colonial occupation since India’s partition. This seminal and detailed work, based on meticulous and grueling years of research in Kashmir, challenges many myths about India’s settler-colonial enterprise that are unabashedly purveyed by Indian politicians, unsuspectingly accepted by ordinary Indian citizens, dishonestly unchallenged by the Indian or even international academe and problematically borne by the international community without scrutiny.

This is a must-read for anyone who cares to know how India’s decades of colonial-settler machinations have led to this dispute’s intractability and how some Kashmiri collaborators, the “integrationists,” have willfully contributed to and actualized the process of coloniality for their own personal glory and benefit. 

Kanjwal’s work is a piece of art as much as it is an expository treatise on the inside story of Kashmir’s potential erasure. The book artfully demonstrates how Nehru and his accomplices in Srinagar (Bakhshi et al.) pinned their hopes on the now-defunct thesis that the Kashmiris’ nationalist sentiment was not unwavering and could be modulated through sociopolitical, educational, cultural, economic and militaristic means. 

Together, they often invoked states of exception, crises and emergency, along with portraying Kashmiris as biddable and Pakistan as an opportunist enemy. This concoction of self-imagined factors then justified and led to an overwhelming response through both the “politics of life” as much as through a reign of state-sponsored terror. 

Meanwhile, Indian nationalists projected Kashmir as an exotic land whose integration with the Indian Union was essential or vital to India’s very being, a place of “national affect” and interest whose separation could unravel India and impede its progress. Therefore, they did everything in their power to eliminate and/or subordinate the Kashmiris’ nationalist sentiment to that of Indian nationalism. They attempted to de-emphasize the affective causes of the freedom sentiment and highlight the instrumentality of the interference of an external power trying to prevent a land grab — the irredentist neighbor, Pakistan.

The nationalists retaliated against Pakistan’s supposed interference by fetishizing and licensing repression against the latter’s so-called “Islamist” loyalists in Kashmir. This tactic simultaneously appeased the unsuspecting Indian citizens while calming any international voices that were less interested in interrogating the dark underbelly of India’s secular-democratic stance.

By introducing bio-power politics in tandem with the necropolitical system of control, India forced not only the colonization of Kashmir’s territorial space, but also the colonization of its citizens’ biological spaces — their lives. The state’s overwhelming militarized intelligence apparatus sought a complete submission of those whom it could intimidate, humiliate or otherwise manipulate, and the death of those it could not. New Delhi instrumentalized the politics of life, surveillance and death to bring the citizens’ revolt against its rule under control and to legitimize its sovereignty over Kashmir. 

Simultaneously, in a carefully crafted strategy directed at denying them agency, India deployed cinematic soft power through Bollywood’s fantasy-filled pleasure machine, seeking to obliterate Kashmir’s identity and mixed cultural ethos and integrate it into the Indian (exclusively Hindu) union. By using Kashmir as an idyllic set for the Bollywood movies and insinuating politically motivated cinematic dialogs, they attempted to arouse the lust of an Indian tourist for its exotic land to be desired, eventually claimed and bolstered as part of the Indian nation. The objectives were to manipulate or erase its people’s identity and memory and subsume them within an Indian identity and memory.

Overtly, they successfully projected India’s secular facade while covertly, for the domestic audience, foregrounding Kashmir’s Hindu religious past and downplaying or outright erasing its Muslim heritage and influence. Kanjawal goes on to demonstrate that far from being a secular-democracy, “colonialism and domination were at the root of Indian state-formation.” These strategic measures were intended to justify, rationalize and routinize the Hinduvized settler-colonial occupation of Kashmir.

Has India’s overall strategy succeeded? 

New Delhi hoped that the psychological distance between India and Kashmir could be bridged via calibrated doses of tyranny and some perfunctory salutary means. Apparently, the calculus was that if Kashmiris were unwilling to change their hearts, they might be receptive or enticed to change their minds about Pakistan or independence.

Thus, Kashmir became a theater of settler-colonial tyranny as well as a case study in developmentalism (the cynical “politics of life”) that sought to distract the restive population from its political aspirations and focus more on the daily grind of life and living. The refrain was, as is the case in all colonial occupations, “we must develop them, with or without their consent” — a civilizing and redeeming intervention by the “well-meaning, cultured and progressive” Indians for the good of a “gullible, primitive and timid” Kashmiris.

To entrench its stranglehold, India — through devious economic strategies, sinister educational and cultural policies, cunning deployment of cinematic soft power, as well as the brutal silencing of dissent through both stern and “soft” repression — attempted to articulate subjectivities and configure and reconfigure political proclivities and aspirations in Kashmir. The sole aim was to legitimize and sustain Kashmir’s continued colonial occupation as a necessity without which Kashmiris could not survive. 

When the “development and progress” mantra lost its traction, New Delhi enhanced the militarized silencing of dissent. This tyrannical subjugation presented Kashmiris with the binary of complete submission or the inglorious life of the “living dead.” In this survival struggle, Kashmiris made a rational choice: They chose life, which inevitably led to the uneasy co-existence of the tyranny of breathing under a repressive and manipulative regime and the realities of daily living. 

Kanjawal notes, “Strategies such as the politics of life build, maintain and sustain colonial occupations. They enable political subjectivities that are paradoxical in their demands and aspirations, forcing individuals to reconcile their desire for political freedom with their desire to lead ‘normal’ economically stable lives.”

The Indian governments of the past and present have successfully manipulated and suppressed the resistance and immobilized the street protests. The nationalists have misinterpreted and conflated this as consent to its rule. The inconvenient truth is that instead of following an inverted U-trajectory, the resistance struggle has followed a W-trajectory, going up and down and back up again.

India will soon discover that the political resistance against settler-colonial occupation cannot be effectively eliminated by demobilizing street protests. As has been the case in other settler-colonial occupations, India has provided no breathing space for the expression of political dissent to render violent resistance superfluous, and in doing so, created the seeds of a future confrontation and strife.

The book’s premise applies to current and future times as much as it lays bare the past.

Tariq Ahmed is a Kashmiri-origin freelance writer. He grew up in the sixties in the strife torn region

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The post Building a Colonial-Settler State in Kashmir appeared first on Islamic Horizons.

By Ghulam Nabi Fai

Sept/Oct 2023

The crisis in Kashmir — and the United Nations ineffectual response — represents an example of the failure of the UN to respond effectively against massive and persistent violations of human rights. Kashmir also represents a failure of the UN to use its mandate to seek an equitable peace and justice. The UN always tries to examine how it can more effectively prevent human rights violations, it is instructive to examine the experience of Kashmir and seek lessons for increasing the UN’s effectiveness.

In 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the massive expansion of freedoms around the world, Kashmiris began to seek their right to self-determination, as promised by the UN resolutions (Res. 47 adopted by the 286th UN Security Council meeting, April 12, 1948). In an effort to suppress this growing sentiment among the Kashmiris, the Government of India began committing massive abuses of human rights.

These abuses, which continue today, include: the systematic use of rape; the arbitrary arrest, torture, summary execution of Kashmiri civilians; firing into unarmed peaceful demonstrators; and the burning of entire villages and communities by Indian troops. Since 1990, the Indian occupation forces in Kashmir have killed more than 100,000 people, while thousands more have been maimed or wounded. Many of the victims are women and young children. Over 10,000 women have been raped by Indian occupation forces. And according to a report published by “The International Peoples Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian Administered Kashmir,” 8,000 to 10,000 people have “disappeared” in Kashmir. Their wives are known as “half-widows” because they do not know whether their husbands are dead or alive.

After the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A of Indian constitution on Aug. 5, 2019, India enacted the Domicile Law on April 1, 2020 to change Kashmir’s demography. More than 3.4 million fake domicile certificates have been issued to non-Kashmiris to allow them to reside in the occupied state, reported “The Tribune” (of Pakistan) Feb. 4, 2022. Today, India is the worst example of settler colonization. It is reported that the Government of India has earmarked 20,3005 acres of land in Jammu & Kashmir for land grab. Besides, the Indian army is engaged in confiscating local homes and evacuating the locals from their business establishments, in particular from the hotels which have been built in the most scenic areas in the Valley, like Gulmarg – famous for its skiing scenes in Asia. Shinzani Jain wrote that in early 2018, former chief minister of the occupied state, Mehbooba Mufti informed the legislative assembly 6389.5 acres of state land in Jammu and 47,477 acres of land in Kashmir was under the army’s unauthorized occupation (Feb. 15, 2023, under “Land to the Tiller’ to land to the highest bidder: Land grabs in Jammu and Kashmir,” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/).

All these actions are perpetrated by India with one singular purpose to prevent the implementation of the UN resolutions. And yet, the UN has been unable to respond effectively to this political and humanitarian crisis.

The solution to the crisis in Kashmir lies in dialogue between all parties concerned – the governments of India, Pakistan and the genuine leadership of the people of Jammu & Kashmir. But India has chosen destruction over dialogue, jailing political prisoners, like Yasin Malik, Shabir Ahmed Shah, Masarat Aalam, Aasia Andrabi and human rights activists, like Khurram Parvez, journalists like Irfan Mehraj, Asif Sultan, Sajad Gul, and Fahad Shah, and implementing a brutal campaign of terror against the civilians in Kashmir.

How long will the world watch in silence as India carries out the genocide of Kashmiris? This is a question the Kashmiris are asking today.

At this guardedly propitious time, the role of global Kashmiri diaspora leadership is pivotal, and its responsibilities are correspondingly great, particularly when leaders like Syed Ali Geelani (d. 2021) and Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai (d. 2021) are no more with us and rest of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leadership is incarcerated. It is a historical fact that diaspora in other international conflicts have proved essential to political change and direction, like South African diaspora became instrumental in toppling the scourge of Apartheid. An amorphous collection of people, no matter how well intended, have never achieved anything politically significant. The leadership of the global Kashmiri diaspora cannot blithely assume that progress towards achieving self-determination will come spontaneously from the people without their advice, guidance, example and encouragement. The diaspora leadership cannot be summer soldiers or sunshine patriots. History will hold them accountable for success or God forbid of any failure. 

The diaspora’s responsibilities are manifold. First is to teach and practice the adage that if we do not hang together, we will all hang separately. The diaspora leadership must subordinate individual quests for political power, prominence, and other gain to the common good for all Kashmiris.

In addition, what matters is not who obtain public credit, but that success is achieved. Petty jealousy has no place among Kashmir’s diaspora leadership circle. All should accept unreluctantly personal sacrifices necessitated by the urgency of the Kashmir issue. As Dr. Gregory Stanton, chairman, Genocide Watch has warned, “Kashmir is at the brink of genocide” (February 2021). Emulation by the Kashmiri people will follow and generate the dynamics indispensable for the inevitably arduous struggle for self-determination. Time has come that all Kashmiri diaspora organizations, councils, associations, forums, coalitions, missions, movements, foundations, etc. must pursue a single agenda item: unfettered right of self-determination of the people of the State of Jammu & Kashmir. If need arises, we can gladly agree to disagree.

The North Star for diaspora leadership must be feasible, not the utopian. The world is unsentimental. On the international stage, might is customarily more powerful than right. National interests ordinarily trump intellectual consistency, international law, democratic rights and professed universal standards of justice. But there are exceptions, God only knows why? such as East Timor, Namibia, Southern Sudan. Moral suasion occasionally exhibits teeth. Diaspora must be skillful in orchestrating the complex array of cynical and high-minded motives of nations to achieve a symphony playing the lofty theme of self-determination for Kashmiris. Such orchestration will be more an art than a science and will require sleepless labors and lucubration to succeed. It is not a task for the indolent or dull.

The diaspora must neither stumble nor waver in the task of attaining self-determination for millions groaning under repression and grim privation.

In approaching a Kashmir resolution, the sole non-negotiable issue should be respecting the consensus of the people of all five regions of the state of Jammu & Kashmir with whom sovereignty resides.

The diaspora leadership not only has to maintain its narrative, but narrative should be equally coherent. We do not need to invent it. It is already there with international sanctity. Here is a prime example of the international recognition of Kashmiri narrative.

When India felt that the Kashmiris will never vote to accede to India, its delegate, V. P Krishna Menon delivered speech of record length on Jan. 23-24 1957 at the Security Council where he said, “In any case, the changed conditions since then had made the agreement obsolete, and the merger of Kashmir with India could not be revoked.’ The response to this fabricated narrative came from a person no less important than Professor Joseph Korbel, former chairman, UN Commission for India, and Pakistan (UNCIP), who wrote in “The New Leader” on March 4, 1957, entitled, “Nehru, The UN and Kashmir,” “This new Indian stand raises issues which far transcend the problem of Kashmir. For if a nation which has accepted a United Nations commitment can blithely assert that ‘circumstances have changed’ and the commitment is no longer binding, then the effectiveness of the United Nations has been dealt a staggering blow.”

Korbel added, “More is at stake in Kashmir than the fate of a remote Asian province. On the UN’s handling of this question may depend much of its future moral and political authority.” He also wrote in “Danger in Kashmir ” (Princeton University Press, 1954) “The people of Kashmir have made it unmistakably known that they insist on being heard. Whatever may be their wishes about their future, they must be ascertained directly or through their legitimate, popular representatives.” He added. “If it (solution of Kashmir) is not achieved, India and Pakistan, indeed the whole free world may reap the harvest of shortsightedness and indecision of unpredictable dimensions”. Professor Korbel was the father of Dr. Madeleine Albright, and teacher of Dr. Condoleezza Rice at Colorado University, both former United States Secretaries of State.

Let us take a leaf from Korbel’s vision and move forward unitedly to try to achieve our ultimate objective: the unfettered right to self-determination for the people of the State of Jammu & Kashmir.

Dr. Fai is the secretary general, World Kashmir Awareness Forum and chairman, World Forum for Peace and Justice. Find out more at www.kashmirawareness.org

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