India has not become Kashmir

With protests spreading across India and state repression deepening, some Indians are describing what’s happening in the country as the “Kashmirisation of India”. Our guest correspondent responds.

India, we are told, is being Kashmirised.

The phrase provokes in me, by turns, anger, amusement and indifference.

Why? Because it is a claim that can only be made by negating what Kashmiris have lived through under a prolonged occupation.

The occupation is not a singular event but an everyday lifeworld, carried across generations.

Think of a Kashmiri man who has been in exile for over two decades and cannot return home.

He is a real person, not a metaphor or an invented example.

Let us call him Nazir. I will not use his real name, because that may invite the state’s wrath.

This, too, is Kashmir: a place and a people who witness repression and cannot speak of it.

Back home, Nazir had an apple orchard. There were so many apples that, as a young man, he would bite into the reddest part of one and toss the rest away. Now he lives alone in a small room somewhere I cannot name.

He cannot even call home.

Nazir’s elder son has been in prison for the last seven years under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

In Kashmir, the UAPA is also used to punish families. In this case, the UAPA is punishing Nazir by targeting his son.

He cannot call home because it would place his wife and younger son in harm’s way.

That younger son now acts as the “man” of the family.

He had to age many years in a few, so that he could take on the brief prison visits, the endless court hearings and everything else that comes with having a family member in prison.

These are the rites of passage in Kashmir, the way our children become adults.

He was still in his mother’s womb when Nazir was forced into exile.

Nazir learned of his birth from a letter that took about two months to reach him across the Line of Control.

Nazir’s parents, too, died while he was in exile, and he could not be there.

They had raised his children in their father’s absence, so when they died, the children felt orphaned.

After many requests, the imprisoned son was permitted to visit the graveyard to pray for one of them.

The permission order said “15 minutes.”

He was brought to the graveyard, where he stood in handcuffs for exactly fifteen minutes and prayed. He could see his home in the distance. He passed it on the way back to prison.

That son was, in a sense, lucky.

Another man, let us call him GQB, has been in prison for nearly three decades.

His wife died while he was inside. So did his mother. His children have hardly ever seen him under an open sky. He was not allowed the fifteen minutes.

So Kashmir is also a place and a people whose expectations of life, and hopes for their world, have been disfigured.

Some hope only to learn where their children are buried.

Some want their loved ones moved to a prison closer to home. If that were to happen, they would smile and know joy, in a broken sense.

What is the point of saying all this?

The story of Nazir is not exceptional in the world of Kashmiris.

It is a story that numerous Kashmiri families share, in whole or in parts. It is to say that Kashmir cannot be reduced to this or that tactic or method of repression.

Not every place that sees tear gas or an internet shutdown is Kashmir.

These are, after all, practices that almost every modern state keeps within reach.

Kashmir is too heavy a claim to be thrown around so lightly.

Nazir’s story should make that very clear.

Nor was the Indian state’s repression ever confined to its occupation of Kashmir.

Violence is not an aberration in the life of this state. It is part of how the state came into being and how it has held itself together since.

Think of Hyderabad in 1948, and the way it was made “integral” to India: an army action, then massacres whose scale the government’s own inquiry recorded and then kept from the public for decades.

Think of Punjab in the eighties and nineties.

Think of the Adivasi communities of Bastar, to whom the state has mostly arrived as a mining lease, a dam or a paramilitary camp.

The present violence in India did not need a “Kashmir model.”

The phrase presupposes a clean centre, corrupted by importing methods first tested in the colony, much as older denouncers of empire wrote of colonial violence returning home like a boomerang.

But there never was such a clean centre.

Kashmir is a world, with its own time and space.

It shapes our hopes and fears, our dreams and nightmares, our joys and wounds.

No one claims to know a language because they know a word or two of it.

Internet bans and tear gas are a word or two of this language.

This is not to say that Kashmiri suffering is exceptional among the world’s dispossessed. It is not.

Nor is it to say that comparison is never possible.

It is, though it always risks flattening differences that matter. Nor is it to say that the current student movement in India has no good in it. It may have some.

But good for whom?

In many ways, the movement’s legitimacy among the wider Indian public, and its acceptability to India’s opposition parties, depends in part on its reproducing the state’s position on the foundational questions, Kashmir among them.

It is by differentiating itself from us, consciously or not, that they become legible. Here the difference between the two kinds of violence becomes visible in the protests themselves.

The citizen protests as a member of the nation, and must prove that membership to be heard.

I am reminded of a moment from the farmers’ protests against the ruling party’s policies a few years ago: a protester telling a journalist that the men in her family had served in the Indian military in Kashmir for many years, and so the farmers deserved to be heard.

Our subjugation was their claim to citizenship.

A Kashmiri Muslim is India’s primal Other, and evokes an anxiety without parallel.

There can be no promising politics in India that does not count this realisation among its starting points.

 

Oppression in Kashmir has never been the work of a single individual, or even of a single political party.

It did not start in 2014, or 2019. Rather than treat this as an abstraction, consider it through a concrete figure: the Kashmiri political prisoners, jailed since the 1990s. Or before. Some have not spent a single day outside prison since their arrest; others have moved in and out of it for decades.

Governments have come and gone, in New Delhi and in Kashmir, across the political spectrum, and yet the figure of the Kashmiri political prisoner has endured.

Much has shifted from one period to the next: the laws used to detain them, the conditions inside the prisons, how much contact they have with their families, how often visits are permitted.

Under the current ruling party, all of this has grown more brazen. But the fact of imprisonment itself has remained constant, and that constancy is the mark of occupation. To understand both what has changed in Kashmir and what never has, one need only look at its prisoners.

To call the repression now spreading across India “Kashmirisation” is to get both places wrong.

It confuses a violence long native to the Indian state for something borrowed from its colony, and it shrinks Kashmir to a metaphor, a misunderstood one at that.

The repression in Kashmir is of a different order altogether: in its animating principle, in its telos, and in its intensity.