Tariq Ahmed
Scholars of political resistance have argued that domination by a settler-colonial hegemon requires not only silencing the colonized but also continuous buttressing and entrenchment through displaying and enacting power through legal, structural, and militaristic means, and ceremonial symbolization.
“The powerful,” writes James C. Scott in his Domination and Arts of Resistance: Hidden Tran-scripts (1990), “…have a vital interest in keeping up the appearances appropriate to their form of domi-nation. Subordinates, for their part, ordinarily have good reasons to help sustain those appearances or, at least, not openly to contradict them.” It is an accurate description of the current relationship between India’s total domination in the Indian Administered Kashmir (IAK) and Kashmiris’ subtle resistance.
Matrix of control in Kashmir India has dominated the political discourse through military control, extra-judicial killings, and disappearances, civilian surveillance, police raids on adversaries’ homes, incarceration of human rights advocates and non-conforming journalists on trumped up charges. They relying on the lawless colonial law– Armed Forces, Special Powers Act (AFSPA), militarized traffic control and curfews, and curtailing civil liberties. And, all the while, forwarding its settler-colonial project through demographic changes aimed at changing the Muslim-majority character of Kashmir. This demographic engineering is designed to impact the UN-mandated vote of self-determination—long overdue.
This matrix of control also includes collective punishment of the population using a wide range of tools of the repressive regime such as assaults, subtle and harsh indignities, and defilements– including torture, mass frisking, cumbersome vehicle searches, disappearances, tying of hands to electric poles and trees, blindfolding, using pellet guns for blinding protesters, or chasing them towards fast flowing rivers — resulting in their death by drowning.
To camouflage the reality of Kashmir and Kashmiris, the Indian government uses opportunities to promote a false image of “normalcy” couched as development. The only time India invites foreigners to Kashmir is for supervised tours of representatives of foreign dignitaries while caging the locals.
Public displays of grandeur, such as holding in-ternational conferences in the disputed territory, pock-marking the scenic landscape with Indian flags, holding musical concerts and other social festivals showcasing and eulogizing India’s progress under the façade of “development” have become a staple of their propaganda tactic.
Claws of biopower and necropolitical systems of control To manufacture consent, where the occupier’s writ goes unchallenged, even accepted under duress, the state has used administrative, legislative, judicial, Machiavellian political, and military power to manage the everyday affairs of the people’s lives, including arrogating itself to immiserate and end lives at will.
he Kashmiri bodies have been rendered expend-able using the claws of bio-power and necropolitical systems of control and servitude.
These necropunitive techniques not only cause but also tolerate a certain threshold of death as nec-essary. Having caged the population to the largest open-air prison on earth- Kashmir-, the state has imprisoned thousands in the far-flung dingy jails in India. These incarcerative sentences are also served vicariously to the relatives and others deemed to be associated with political activists.
While maintaining a semblance of normality in their living conditions, militarized as they are, Kashmiris harbor lingering memories of the injustices perpetrated by the state. While overt public resistance is in suspended animation, the hidden resistance is well and alive. It percolates the psyche of every living generation of Kashmiris in the region and elsewhere.
Kashmiri’s political disguise, where they in-sinuate their resistance through diverse survival strategies, cannot be mistaken for consent. The lux-ury of moving ‘freely’ and maintaining a semblance of life’s routine amid a daunting network of police and military surveillance network is contingent upon the population giving into this daunting matrix of control. This absent presence of resistance–a presence that is strategically incognito, unspoken, and covert — while strikingly proscribed and repressed by the state — is best described through the cliche ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
Governmentalization of life A common hallmark of settler-colonial occupation is the governmentali-zation of people’s lives. Anyone seeking government jobs, or a passport must undergo police verification of non-involvement in purported anti-state activities. The structural violence of unemployment and police scrutiny has sought to demobilize collective resistance and erode nationalist solidarity among the desperate masses.
The state, being the primary source of economic activity, employment, welfare, or security against routine crime, and the captive population’s depend-ence on the state for these civic and material needs, is used as an inducement to remain peaceful and silent.
Constitutive silence This haplessness has inevi-tably led to silence on the streets of Kashmir while the memories of multiple massacres linger in people’s collective memory. This is the sulking of a subaltern- powerless and disenfranchised people whose hands have been tied. Kashmiris are not silent by choice; they have been silenced through structural, legal, and aggressive methods and technologies of state repression.
Some compelling ethnographic surveys in Kashmir have demonstrated that counter-hegemonic and counter-mapping narratives are operationalized at the deepest levels of Kashmiri society. This is par-ticularly true among the youth: millennials and Generation Z. Conversations about the injustices and the crip-pling technologies of repression are a staple of office and dinner-time conversations, daytime chats in the tea shops and buses, social gatherings and weddings, hushed-up voices in schools and universities, and various social media platforms. The truth of Kash-miri’s subjugation, alienation, and resistance lies under the carpet, expressed only in a whisper. They represent the resistance narratives through art forms, fiction, poetry, and resistance literature.
Diasporic Kashmiris are overtly and covertly working with allies in the social and political justice spaces to highlight the plight of their kith and kin in Kashmir. Kashmiri-origin scholars and their partners from diverse fields actively contribute to knowledge -creation about Kashmir’s political struggles and India’s settler-colonial enterprise in the territory.
Failure to erase Kashmiri nationalism Repression has not secured Kashmir for India. Decades of attempts at erasure or manufacturing consents have failed to integrate Kashmir with the Indian Union. Kashmiris have always viewed the Indian occupation of their territories as an existential threat and likened it to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
[The writing has been on the wall for a long: As a settler-colonial power, India may have been able to force submission, but it has garnered no loyalty in Kashmir. It never will.]
