Kashmir and Palestine: archives of coloniality and solidarity

ABSTRACT

What features of contemporary coloniality emerge if we examine geopolitical alliances across settler and ‘post’ colonial contexts? What forms of solidarity become necessary in the context of these colonialities? Referencing the historical and contemporary features of the occupations of Kashmir & Palestine, the introduction to this special issue makes the case for naming the states of India and Israel as part of a contemporary geocolonial formation. Naming and framing require understanding present forms of coloniality and reflexive solidarity. The essays in this special issue form an archive of coloniality and solidarity through which the authors examine the minutiae of living and of dying, of assembling archives from below, and of building and decolonising solidarities across Kashmir & Palestine.

Introduction

Colonial sovereign power speaks in the forked tongue of violence and peace. Agha Shahid Ali, one of Kashmir’s most beloved poets, describes the violence of this duplicity succinctly in his poem, ‘Farewell’: ‘They make a desolation and call it peace’ (2009, 175)

Ali cites the Roman historian Tacitus speaking through the tongue of Calgacus (leader of the Caledonians). Just before the battle with Roman invaders, Calgacus says to the Picts of Caledonia (present-day Scotland): ‘To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace’ (Tacitus 1896, 30). Tacitus is thus a Roman historian teasing out that something rotten at the core of colonial and imperial imperatives – a violent subjugation of bodies for the exploitation of resources and the greed for territory. The colonial lie is that the violence is for the benefit of those bodies and lives whom the colonialist seeks to destroy. Not only does the coloniser want to destroy and usurp, but the coloniser also colonises the idea of peace itself. This colonisation is signified in the phrase ‘Pax Romana’. Of this violent colonisation of peace in Kashmir, one of us (Ather Zia), a Kashmiri scholar and a poet writes in verse: ‘they want us to write. in blood/and only write. of peace’ (2016).

Agha Shahid Ali (2009) and Ather Zia’s (2016) references to the violent colonisation of peace in Kashmir destabilise the identities of coloniser and colonised especially as understood currently in postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. These strands of scholarship, while differing in their approach to studies of colonialism (Bhambra 2014), continue to examine colonialism through divisions between European/non-European or Global North and South binaries. It is important to note that this scholarship remains crucial and urgent for understanding the legacies of European colonialism, settler-colonialism and slavery that continue to affect Indigenous, African and non-European peoples across different nation-states around the world. However, what remains underexplored in this scholarship is the manner in which contemporary postcolonial nation-states draw on colonial forms to enact their own forms of imperialism and colonialism (Kaul 2011; Anand 2012; Osuri 2017).

Ali’s (2009) reference to Tacitus’s tactical use of Calgacus to question Roman imperialism in the context of Kashmir is significant for another aspect. Imperial acts cannot always silence those voices who dissect what lies at their brutal core. These voices constitute an archive in waging a war of justice against the falsity of a violent peace. One contemporary voice within this archive is that of a young Palestinian poet, Dareen Tatour, convicted by an Israeli court in 2018 for writing a poem that spoke of the violence of colonial peace (Al Hayder 2016). Writing in Arabic, Tatour’s poem translates as: ‘Resist the colonialist’s onslaught/Pay no attention to his agents among us/Who chain us with the peaceful illusion’ (Al Hayder 2016). The poem was deemed by the court to incite terrorism. In Kashmir, another poet Uzma Falak (2018) calls out ‘militarist notions of peace’ and ‘statist normality’ as finding ‘no takers on the ground’ in the preface to her poems, ‘The Last Call: Audio Postcards from Kashmir’.

We cite this poetry of naming violent ‘peace’ as colonial violence in order to signal the contribution of this special issue in exploring and naming the techniques of the multi-layered forms of colonial violence and the practices of anti-colonial resistance in Kashmir and Palestine. These techniques and practices are found in the minutiae of living and of dying, of assembling archives from below, and of building and decolonising solidarities. We will discuss the rich tapestries that the essays present a little later in this introduction. For now, we turn to some of the overarching questions as to why this special issue takes on the project of addressing Kashmir & Palestine through the lens of coloniality and solidarity.

The idea for a special issue on Kashmir and Palestine emerged after the 2015 colloquium, ‘Occupational Hazards: Theories and Methodologies (Palestine/Kashmir)’, organised by one of us (Goldie Osuri), an Indian Australian, at the University of Warwick, UK. At the time, the imperative was to explore how state violence in these two contexts might yield a broader picture of what occupation or colonialism means in the present context. State violence, Ruth Blakely (2012) has argued, must be considered state terrorism and criminal (an argument for war crimes) because its violence creates fear and terror amongst a wider civilian population and violates international humanitarian and human rights law. This imperative stemmed from Osuri’s years of research and activism in the context of Australian settler-colonialism on Indigenous lands. There, academic and activist networks often rallied together to address settler-colonial interconnections which continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, the US and Palestine.¹

Osuri’s interest in Kashmir began while she was researching Hindutva nationalism or Hindu supremacism and its emergence in Australia (see Osuri, this issue).² Learning about Indian state violence in Kashmir compelled Osuri to organise the 2015 colloquium as a way to understand what links there might be between two contemporary forms of colonialism – the settler and the ‘post’. As we discuss later, while this special issue was being guest-edited, India’s annexation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August 2019 transformed India’s long history of colonialism in Kashmir, signalling India’s emergence as a settler-colonial state for Kashmiris. Since the annexation on 5 August, in-depth discussions through solidarity events between Kashmiri and Palestinian networks seem to be yielding rich insights across these contexts. This special issue, therefore, is only a humble academic beginning in relation to scholarly work that may emerge on the links between these occupations.

The 2015 colloquium was generative for participants as it yielded insights regarding resonances between the embodied experiences of colonial occupation in Palestine and Kashmir. Some of the participants articulated the need for citations between contexts of occupation or colonialism as a useful tactic that might reveal the ways in which interconnected settler and (post) colonialisms function. Beyond the exploration of coloniality in Kashmir and Palestine, a second motivation for the special issue was to explore the multiple and layered meanings of solidarity in these contexts. Hence, the essays in this special issue explore the features of coloniality as well as the meanings of solidarity within and across these contexts.

Citations of coloniality & solidarity

Regarding the politics of citation, Sara Ahmed has discussed the ways in which a feminist and anti-racist politics often requires vigilance. In relation to the reproduction of whiteness, race & gender through citational practices, Ahmed observes, ‘I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies’ (2013). Extending Ahmed’s argument for geopolitics, we suggest that a certain trajectory of citations – i.e. settler-colonial analyses of Palestine that reference only the US, Canada and Australia – has a similar effect of reproducing analyses that pay scant attention to the ways in which contemporary coloniality functions through significant geopolitical alliances. Citations of coloniality & solidarity through Kashmir and Palestine illuminate historical settler/(post) colonial links, part of the legacy of British colonialism. Beyond historical linkages, there is much to learn regarding the features of coloniality through a study of the techniques of militarised occupations in Palestine and Kashmir in a post 9/11 context, where a global Islamophobia renders Palestinian and Kashmiri self-determination movements as ‘Islamic terrorism’. Such Islamophobia also renders killable, for example, Palestinian Christians or weaponises the rights of Kashmiri Pandits against Kashmiri Muslims.³ Correspondingly, there is much to learn regarding the tactics of resistance and solidarity that Palestinians and Kashmiris engage in. For these techniques and tactics constitute what we need to diagnose as a transnational assemblage (Puar 2007) of colonialisms and anti-colonialisms of our present era.

Contextually, both Palestine and Kashmir are legacies of British colonial treaties and arrangements as well as its cartographic and demographic manoeuvres. There are differences in the inception of their respective colonial occupations in the post-World War II era of a wave of anti-colonial movements in the context of decolonisation. While detailed historical, geopolitical, legal and spatial discussions of the features of colonial occupation in Palestine and Kashmir can be gleaned from the essays in this collection, some significant historical and contemporary features are worth noting here.

In the case of Palestine, the Balfour declaration of 1917 declared British support for the Zionist project of a Jewish homeland (Segev 2000). While historians have debated the politics of British support for Zionism versus its own interests in the Middle East during World War I (Shlaim 2005), Zionism as a planned settler-colonial project was evident from that initial declaration of support by Lord Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Baron Rothschild in 1917. Khalidi (2019), Pappe (2006), Khalidi (2005), and Masalha’s (1992) research has demonstrated how the techniques of Zionist settler-colonialism involved land transfers and demographic change through expulsions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in preparation for the declaration of Israel as a nation-state. Between December 1947 and March 1949, during the Arab-Israeli war, Noura Erakat states that Zionist paramilitary and Israeli armed forces ‘had reduced the Palestinian population from a million to 160,000, and destroyed and/or depopulated more than 400 Palestinian villages’ (2019, 52). For Palestinians, the massacres, the forced displacement and eviction of peoples, and the confiscation of large geographical areas by Zionist militias has been called the Nakba or the catastrophe (Ahmad and Abu-Lughod 2007). Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015, 2014) has discussed these techniques of settler-colonialism as reliant on ‘security theology’, a racial and religious logic of superiority regarding a ‘secular’ Zionist nationalism, embedded in biblical claims and dependent on the erasure of Palestinian lives and dispossession of Palestinian land and resources.

In the case of Kashmir, the British East India Company sold the territory of Jammu and Kashmir in 1846 through the Treaty of Amritsar to a Dogra Hindu Ruler (Lamb 1991 ; Bose 2003). By 1947, given a long history of a repressive Hindu Dogra rule over a largely Kashmiri Muslim population, there was already a Quit Kashmir movement against the Dogras (Rai 2004). The communal violence of the newly created nation-states of India and Pakistan ‘spilled into Kashmir’s Jammu Province’ where 200,000 Muslims were killed, an act ‘endorsed’ by the Maharajah (Zia 2019a, 56). The massacres were instrumental for a desired demographic change in the region of Jammu. Given the subsequent Kashmiri revolt, supported by clans from Pakistan, and the proclamation of independent or Azad Kashmir on 24 October 1947, the Maharajah hurriedly acceded to the Indian state on 26 October 1947 (Snedden 2015; Zia 2019a). Historians have cast doubt on the instrument of accession (Lamb 1997; Schofield 2010; Kazi 2018). Nevertheless, the accession was made with the proviso that the people of Kashmir would be able to determine their political future through a plebiscite or a referendum to join either India or Pakistan. Kashmiris have never had an opportunity to exercise their right to determine their political future. Hence, the history of Kashmir and the struggle of Kashmiris has been that of a denied sovereignty and the struggle for azadi or freedom (Duschinksi et al. 2018; Osuri 2017).

Contemporary histories of both Kashmiri and Palestinian struggles since 1947 to the present show a pattern of gendered resistance (Kaul and Zia 2018; Alsaafin 2014). Armed and unarmed rebellions, street protests, strikes, stone-pelting, art forms and scholarship are part of this repertoire of resistance. Documentation and publication of human rights violations reports form part of this resistance as an assertion of the right to self-determination in local as well as international arenas (e.g., from the courts to United Nations fora).⁴ Meanwhile, both Israel and India continue to up the ante with hyper-militarised as well as blatant legal and constitutional measures that deny and deprive Palestinian and Kashmiri right to self-determination.

In a post 9/11 context, these measures are often justified with reference to the narrative of counter-terrorism against ‘Islamic terrorism’ in order to undermine Palestinian and Kashmiri self-determination. As the essays in this special issue demonstrate, the narrative of counter-terrorism not only undermines the claim to self-determination for Palestine and Kashmir but also produces a justification for Palestinian and Kashmiri bodies as killable others. On 19 July 2019, the Israeli Parliament Knesset passed the Nation law, which among other provisions, restricts the right to self-determination only to its Jewish citizens, thus criminalising self-determination for Palestinians. Dov Waxman (2018) argues that the new law is not a radical change in Israeli state law or policy. However, it enshrines in law a denial for Palestinian ‘legitimate claim to national self-determination, or at least collective rights’ (Waxman 2018). As mentioned earlier, the Israeli state was carved out as a settler-colonial project. The Nation-State law continues the logic of the settler-colonial project by pre-empting any Palestinian claim towards either equal rights within a one-state solution or the principle of self-determination for Palestinians living in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem (Waxman 2018; Erakat 2019). While the Israeli state was carved through the violence of a settler-colonial project; the Indian state has now set the stage for settler-colonialism in Kashmir, transforming the nature of its colonial relationship with Kashmir since 1947 (Kanjwal 2019).

On 5 August 2019, the Indian government annexed Kashmir through the nullification of Article 370 in the Indian Constitution, an article which allowed for Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status (even though this autonomy was progressively hollowed out) since its adoption in the Indian Constitution in 1954 (Noorani 2011). As a provision in the Indian Constitution which side-stepped the question of Kashmiri self-determination, the nullification of Article 370 was not the main issue for many Kashmiris. The annexation, which took place through a blanket communication lockdown of Kashmir and the increase of Indian armed and paramilitary forces, also meant the abrogation of Article 35-A, part of the nullified Jammu and Kashmir Constitution. Article 35-A protected Kashmiri ownership of land through its determination of permanent resident subjects (Zia 2019b). Thus, the threadbare vestiges of Kashmiri autonomy through a law that protected indigenous Kashmiris and their land ownership rights from Indian settler ownership vanished overnight. The Jammu and Kashmir Land Reorganisation Act, which came into effect on 31 October 2019, allows for the sale of Kashmir to Indian settlers ostensibly for developmental purposes though an old Hindutva vision of a demographic change, or ethnic cleansing, from Kashmiri to non-Kashmiri, from Muslim to Hindu (Zargar 2019). Legal regulations, including revocation of residencies, denial of birth certificates, and confiscation and desecration of land and property, embedded in demographic biopolitics and spatial geopolitics have been operational in Palestine since the early stages of the settler colonial Zionist project (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015). In light of these forms of colonialism and state criminality experienced by Palestinians and Kashmiris, there is a cruel irony to naming either Israel or India as democracies.

Naming and framing

The legibility of the violence of techniques of settler and (post) colonialism often depends on how these techniques are named and framed within scholarly debates. Current scholarly framing and analyses of Kashmir and Palestine reference the key terms of apartheid, occupation, settler-colonialism, and (post) colonialism. Kamala Visweswaran has argued that ‘recentering an analytic object or set of events – ‘occupation’ may productively revise historical, political, social and economic frames of analysis’ (2013, 4). In addressing the post-war period of decolonisation (the contexts for the occupations of Palestine and Kashmir), Visweswaran suggests that a new question to address would be: ‘How exactly has occupation shaped the post-war state form, and how might it force a re-reckoning with the body of postcolonial theory and the so-called “era of decolonization”’. (2013, 7). Visweswaran also comments on the limitations of international humanitarian law in relation to definitions of occupation which can function in complicity with occupying states (2013,10). Commenting on this issue, Richard Falk, former Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, has observed, academic scholarship expands ‘the nature of occupation well beyond the confines of the statist bias that underlies the conventional and somewhat technical understanding of international humanitarian law that also characterizes all UN undertakings’ (2013, 221). Thus, it is not only naming and framing colonial violence that is at stake but also scholarly debate which necessarily expands understandings of colonialism, settler-colonialism, and occupation for a contemporary era.

An expansion of approaches to occupation, for example, can be witnessed in the current scholarship in Critical Kashmir Studies. Bhan, Duschinski and Zia cite some of the ways in which the term occupation has moved beyond the realm of international humanitarian law in the context of the rise of contemporary ‘extraterritorial military interventions’ (2018,10). They support the De Matos and Ward (2012) thesis which argues that ‘military occupation must also include cases of forced interventions and annexation of territories, peacekeeping efforts, and the establishment of long-term military bases’ (2018, 10). In the context of Kashmir, such meanings of occupation have been extended. For example, Duschinki and Ghosh (2017) have explored how Indian occupation of Kashmir has proceeded through ‘occupational constitutionalism’ or occupation through the constitutional processes. Alongside the legal and constitutional understanding of occupation, Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia argue that social scientists have a role demonstrating how ‘logics of occupation restructure state society relationships and people’s experiences of normalcy, terror, or violence’ (2018, 10). Mohamad Junaid has demonstrated that exploring the elements of occupation through people’s experiences can make visible the absurd ways in which occupation has functioned in Kashmir: e.g. through the farcical invocations and theatrics of ‘democracy’ or ‘elections’, and the continual war of discourses and narratives which legitimate the occupation (2013, 162–3). It is precisely these understandings and analyses of occupation that have enabled naming Indian state violence as denied sovereignty, imperialism and colonialism (Kaul 2011; Anand 2012; Osuri 2017). This vocabulary of colonialism, imperialism and occupation contests the disciplinary international relations paradigm which has hegemonically tended to offer analyses of Kashmir as a territorial dispute to be resolved bilaterally between India and Pakistan (Behera 2006). This terminology centres Kashmiri claims to self-determination through the experiences, voices and writings of Kashmiris. The framing of Kashmiri experiences of Indian rule as occupation and colonialism also makes this experience legible to an international readership.

While occupation is still a keyword for scholarship on Palestine, the dispossession of Palestinians has also been framed since the 1920s through the lens of settler colonialism (Busbridge 2018, 92). This framing is of immense significance. Citing Illan Pappe, Rachel Busbridge argues that while settler-colonialism as a frame has been ongoing since the 1920s, the current settler-colonial turn ‘brings Israel and its relationship to Palestinians into direct comparative focus alongside New World white settler-colonial states’ (Busbridge 2018, 92). One of the benefits, Busbridge suggests, is that analyses of Palestine through a settler-colonial framework include making the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ ‘comprehensible and legible to an international audience, particularly those already engaged in indigenous or anti-colonial politics’ (2018, 98).

It is worth examining some of the cautions around the use of settler-colonialism as a framework. Busbridge states that the risk of Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination of the native’ settler-colonial theory as a ‘zero-sum logic’ and a ‘historical guiding force’ (i.e., all settler-colonial societies ‘require the elimination of the native’) has some weaknesses. (Busbridge 2018, 101). She argues that both Wolfe (2006) and Veracini (2013) appear to transpose the Australian settler-colonial paradigm to the Israel–Palestine context even as they comment specifically on the Israel–Palestine context by ignoring some of the intricacies of debates regarding Israeli ethnonationalism, Palestinian nationalism, the one-state versus two-state solutions, or how the paradigm of settler-colonialism could offer a decolonising transformation of its conditions. Citing Busbridge (2018) and Svirsky (2014), Amoruso, Pappe and Richter-Devroe also point to some weaknesses regarding structuralist accounts of settler-colonial theory, which may leave ‘little space for indigenous agency’ (2019, 457). However, they stress the generative ways in which settler-colonialism as framing continues to be for Palestinians. Their essay is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Settler-Colonialism in Palestine’ (2019), where some of the essays highlight the productive ways in which the framing of settler-colonialism allows for a narration of Palestinian histories (e.g. Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2019).

Thinking about the settler-colonial paradigm from Australia as interpretive for the Palestinian context also throws up other contemporary colonial links. Indian multinational companies like Adani Global, for example, can be understood as engaging in a settler-colonial project in Kashmir, Palestine, as well as on Indigenous lands in Australia. In 2018, the Adani Defence branch of Adani Global’s alliance with the Israeli company Elbit saw the inauguration of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or drone manufacturing facility in Hyderabad India, among other commercial services, servicing the Indian and Israeli defence forces, and may be used in both Kashmir and in Palestine (Pubby 2019). Adani Australia, a branch of Adani Global, was given approval by the Australian Federal government to open the Carmichael coal mine on the land of the Wangan and Jalingou traditional owners in Queensland, a move that Navtej Purewal has discussed as ‘crony capitalism’ between the Australian and Indian governments (2019). While the traditional owner, Adrian Burragubba, challenged the lease to Adani Australia, an Australian Federal Court gave Adani the green light to start the Carmichael Mine. Adding insult to injury, Adrian Burragubba was bankrupted with Adani’s court costs (Smee 2019). Even worse forms of dispossession were in store for the traditional owners. In October 2019, Adani obtained a Supreme Court order forbidding Adrian Burragubba and his son Coedie McAvoy to enter their own lands; Burragubba and McAvoy were considered to be trespassing (emphasis ours) on Adani land (Robertson 2019). A few days earlier, the Queensland government had ‘extinguished native title over the mine site – including the site of a ceremonial camp’ without informing the traditional owners (Robertson 2019). The settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous nations in Australia, therefore, continues to be revitalised through new settler-colonial capitalist alliances.

The above discussion demonstrates that the meanings and vocabulary of occupation, colonialism and settler-colonialism or who might be considered an occupier or a coloniser are evolving. In this sense, Julie Peteet’s essay on Palestine reminds us that ‘terminology is subject to the historical process’ and ‘can be a means of tracking power in this process’ (2005: 154). Our framing of India and Israel as a geocolonial formation of an interlinked settler and ‘post’ colonialism is an effort to track the networked forms of contemporary colonial power. In this sense, attention to Kashmir and Palestine might be generative of studies of settler and ‘post’ forms of coloniality and their modes of operation.

These networked colonialisms indicate geopolitical neoliberal trade and military alliances between former colonial states (e.g. UK), current settler-colonial states (e.g. Israel, US, Australia) and powerful 'post' turned settler-colonial states (e.g. India). In relation to Busbridge’s critique of the framing of settler-colonialism as the logic of elimination rather than exploitation (Wolfe 2006), we would add that settler-colonial projects can be simultaneously concerned with the logic of elimination of the native as well as the logic of exploitation. Israeli weapons are ‘tested’ or ‘combat-proven’ on Palestinian bodies (Machold 2018). Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has used the term ‘combat-proven’ to describe a certain kind of Israeli geopolitics and arms trade, worth billions of dollars, and based on the productive ‘right to maim’ alongside the ‘right to kill’ as a feature of its sovereignty (Mbembe 2003; Puar 2017). The bodies, lands, and even deaths of those occupied and colonised become another resource, another commodity, in late modern capitalism’s necropolitical arms trade.

Thus, diagnoses of contemporary forms of coloniality through citations, naming, and framing across Kashmir and Palestine increase the power of our analytic lenses so that crucial geopolitical axes of power that may have been out of sight for some can sail into focus. We argue that this citationality can illuminate why it is that referencing these links matter or how they offer a way to analyse the geopolitical formation that shapes contemporary occupations, imperialisms, and colonialisms. While Palestine and Kashmir may not be exceptional instances, and there might be other connections and links to make across colonial legacies of (post) colonial occupations (e.g. the Kurdish struggle against Turkey), the focus of this special issue on Indian and Israeli forms of colonialism and occupation speaks to the ways in which these two geopolitically powerful nation-states with close alliances with colonial and settler-colonial states like the UK and the US constitute a significant geopolitical axis of settler/(post) colonial power.

Assembling archives of coloniality & solidarity

Assembled together, the essays in this special issue form an archive in studies of coloniality & solidarity within and across the contexts of Palestine and Kashmir. This archive addresses, as mentioned earlier, the minutiae of living and dying, as well as the task of assembling archives and of building and decolonising solidarities.

It is perhaps appropriate in a special issue entitled archives of coloniality & solidarity that we begin with an essay that addresses some of the (im)possibilities of archival research. Farrukh Faheem addresses the ways in which archival research pertaining to the framing of Kashmiri history is a challenge, subject to loss or inaccessibility. He traces how the Indian government has repressed historical archives and curbed genuine counter-narratives that do not fit its state policy. The thirty-year-old de-classification rule that is established in India is not applicable to Kashmir. There is no easy access to historical documents which would help shed light on the pre-1947 monarchical regime and the governments that formed after. While Faheem discusses these absences, he also illustrates how gaps in historical narratives have been filled not just by academic scholars but also by fiction writers. For Faheem, ‘the embodied experiences of Kashmiris’ makes for Kashmiri-centred archives. Here, a historical ethnography can function to assemble an archive of embodied experiences of coloniality.

In addition to the temporal aspect of history, ethnographic attention to space and bodies can often reveal how the brutalities of occupation and colonialism, and resistance to these brutalities can be both spectacular and ordinary. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Mohamad Junaid address the spectacular and the ordinary through ethnographic attention to forms of living and dying in Palestine and Kashmir, thereby expanding the meanings of colonialism and resistance.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian explores the ghoulish ways in which the state of Israel has maintained a ‘necropenological regime of dispossession’ in East Jerusalem, one that evacuates Palestinian bodies from humanity not just in life but also in death. By conceptualising ‘necropenology’ as a settler-colonial administrative technique, Shalhoub-Kevorkian extends Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics where Palestinians are rendered ‘subject to conquering, even when dead’. Here necropenology describes the practice of incarcerating the dead, thus expanding carceral spaces and inscribing new forms of torture into the practices of mourning. As Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, ‘refrigerators and cemeteries, as land and spaces of death in the settler colony, become integrated into the political lexicon to further punish and threaten all Palestinians’. Indicating the right to mourn as a political act in colonial conditions across Palestine and Kashmir, Shalhoub-Kevorkian also cites the Kashmiri families of the more than 8,000+ enforced disappeared, whose mourning of their loved ones is an ‘unending uncertainty’ (Zia 2019a). Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s theorisation of this necropenological regime highlights its deprivations, paying attention to the ways in which even the act of mourning becomes subject to a colonial violence which seeks to ‘terminate the possibilities of life following loss, during and after death’.

If Shalhoub-Kevorkian probes the ways in which the Israeli state seeks to incarcerate death itself, Mohamad Junaid examines the spatial politics of walking under conditions of curfew, a technique of Indian occupation to suppress the Tehreek or Kashmir’s freedom movement, in a town in South Kashmir. During curfews, an assembly of four or more Kashmiris is unlawful, but walking or driving alone is forbidden. As Junaid points out, an ‘announcement of a curfew’ is an ‘interpellation’ creating ‘Kashmiris as subjects of the occupation’. And curfews have often lasted for months. Indicating walking itself as ethnographic method, Junaid expands the conceptual frame of counter-mapping as a form of embodied resistant surveillance, one which surveils the ‘ever-surveilling apparatus of the occupation’. This form of surveillance is intuitive, affective, shifting, and often indiscernible to colonial surveillance. As something that is ‘fundamental to the human self’, in conditions of colonial occupation, ‘walking in protest’ is ‘a decisive critique of the occupation’s spatial logic’. Referencing fragmented Palestinian spaces as resonant with the ‘late modern colonial occupation’ (Mbembe 2003, 25 −, 26) of Kashmir, where sangbāzi (game of stones or stone-pelting) has had a long history as a resistant practice, Junaid offers a citational solidarity with Palestinian resistance. While people ‘living under occupation may not offer a clear script of resistance’, Junaid argues for the need for a ‘fuller appreciation’ of these practices as ‘political projects’, political because they are ‘enacted as a bodily demand to be seen as right-bearing subjects’.

If, in the context of colonial occupation, the body is both a target for the occupier and the enfleshed desire and demand for rights, Teodora Todorova explores the politics and praxis of solidarity with those who are occupied by those in whose name the occupation proceeds. Drawing on the settler-colonial framework as generative for the framework of solidarity, Todorova expands on the meanings, politics, and praxis of decolonial solidarity by exploring the practices of Israeli activists who have adopted the settler-colonial lens to discuss the occupation of Palestinians. Through ethnographic method, and assembling an archive of reimagining solidarity, Todorova reminds us that decolonising begins with ‘an acknowledgement of solidarity protest as located in contested indigenous sovereign space’. Thus, decolonising solidarity requires ‘a dramatic reimagining of relationships with land, people and the state’. There is always the risk of centring solidarity activism and activists rather than Palestinians under a colonial occupation intent on killing, maiming, and even incarcerating the Palestinian dead, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian (this issue) argues. Highlighting a praxis of decolonial solidarity through shared vulnerability however, Todorova argues, ‘signals the possibility for co-existence which is not based on the violent and dispossessive hierarchies of the settler-colonial logic’.

Addressing Indian itineraries of solidarity with Palestine and the necessity of solidarity with Kashmiris, Osuri examines a crucial blindspot, that of India’s historical and present relationship with Israel. In the current geopolitical context, where a Hindu nationalist Indian government overtly celebrates its alliance with Israel but plays a strategic dance in relation to its historical solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, Osuri emphasises that there is a need for critical reflection on the routes that anti-colonial solidarity takes. Osuri begins this process by acknowledging and deconstructing her own Indian-Australian positionality in the journey of her solidarity work with the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination. This solidarity process, Osuri argues, requires listening to Kashmiri voices who continue to narrativise, as many scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies scholars have done, India’s relationship to Kashmir as a (post) colonial occupation, now overtly a settler-colonial one since the annexation of Kashmir in August 2019. On a geopolitical level, Osuri locates Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination within the India–Israel alliance, making visible the ways in which India and Israel support each other’s occupations of Palestine and Kashmir. Kashmir has to be placed, Osuri argues, within an assemblage of transnational and translocal solidarity networks: e.g. Black-Palestinian solidarity or the solidarities of resistance against settler-colonialism in Australia, the US or Canada.

Highlighting the little-known route of solidarity between Kashmir & Palestine, Ather Zia centralises ‘affective solidarity’ in her tracing of Kashmiri solidarity with the Palestinian movement. Zia illustrates the myriad ways in which affective solidarity is also resonant in terms of the embodied experience of simultaneous struggles against occupation: e.g. through graffiti, through the histories of stone-pelting, through poetry or through the use of the word ‘Intifada’. The Palestinian movement, for Kashmiris, Zia argues, has been ‘inspirational, cathartic’ and resonant precisely because of Kashmir’s own resistance movement against Indian occupation. Careful not to conflate the histories of Kashmir and Palestine, Zia maps historical differences. Yet, she also argues that settler-colonial techniques in Kashmir predate the foreboding of the siege of August 2019. Referring to a little-known aspect of the Kashmiri struggle for independence during the partition of India in 1947, Zia speaks of the ways in which the massacre of over 200,000 Muslims supported by the then Hindu ruler of Kashmir was aimed at changing the demography of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the face of Kashmiri demands for independence. This act of ‘demographic terrorism’ is known as the ‘Kashmiri Nakba’. The August 2019 siege of Kashmir and the plans for demographic changes to the now bifurcated union territory that the state of Jammu and Kashmir has been transformed into mimic Israeli settler-colonial policies. These policies underwrite the abrogation of Article 35A of the Jammu and Kashmir constitution which protected the rights of indigenous Kashmiris to own land. These changes now solicit direct comparisons between Indian and Israeli settler-colonialism. Kashmiri resonant solidarity with Palestinians however, as Zia demonstrates, predates these changes through an embodied and affective archive.

Concluding remarks

In this embodied and affective archive of coloniality and solidarity that links Kashmir and Palestine, some glittering nuggets of poetic resonance may be noted. Speaking of Arabic as a language of loss, Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali has invoked the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: ‘From exile, Mahmoud Darwish writes to the world: You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic’ (2009 ‘Ghazal’). Speaking of the Palestinian Nakba, Ali writes: ‘Where there were homes in Deir Yassein, you’ll see dense forests – That village was razed. There’s no sign of Arabic’. Ali also translated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Eleven Stars over Andalusia’ from Arabic to English. As Muneeza Shamsie (2002) explains, the eleven poems together form a magical elegy. This elegy ‘not only depicts the exile and expulsion of the Moors from Spain and their farewell to their enchanted land, but cleverly provides an analogy with the homelands of the author and translator – Palestine and Kashmir’ (Shamsie 2002). It is perhaps this analogy that Ali references in the last couplet in ‘Ghazal’: 'They ask me to tell them what Shahid means – Listen: It means “The Beloved in Persian, “witness in Arabic„’ (2009, 226). Commenting on Darwish’s poems, Edward Said has stated that ‘poetry for Darwish provides not simply an access of unusual insight or a distant realm of fashioned order but a harassing amalgam of poetry and collective memory, each pressing on the other’ (1994, 115). In his address to and translation of Darwish, Agha Shahid Ali was perhaps expressing this affective and resonant collective memory and solidarity that Zia speaks of in her essay.

The essays assembled in this special issue form an archive through their exploration of the meanings of contemporary coloniality and solidarity within and across the contexts of Kashmir and Palestine. Collectively, they contribute to historical and present knowledge regarding a contemporary geocolonial formation, that of the India–Israel alliance and the ways in which this alliance supports the mutual occupations of Kashmir and Palestine. They also explore and map the forms of solidarity that such a geocolonial formation necessitates. This collective archive, we hope, is a contribution to counter-hegemonic knowledge through its call for reading this geopolitical assemblage of coloniality and solidarity in alignment with the collective struggles for freedom in Kashmir and Palestine.

Acknowledgments

Our very sincere gratitude to the previous and present editorial teams of Identities for their unwavering support throughout the editorial process. Our sincerest thanks to Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian for her constructive comments and insights to this introduction to the special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The most recent example of this rallying can be witnessed in the organisation of the Black-Palestinian solidarity conference in Melbourne, November 2019. An account of the conference can be found on the webpages of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association: https://acrawsa.org.au/2019/10/28/acrawsa-message-of-support-for-the-black-palestinian-solidarity-contesting-settler-nationalisms-2019-conference/.

2. For scholarship on Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan located across the Line of Control, see Johnson (2013) and Ali (2019).

3. For a sense of the instrumentalisation of Kashmiri Pandit history, see Bhan and Misri (2019), Kaul (2016), Rai (2011) & Duschinski (2008).

4. See for example the webpages of Kashmiri human rights organisations, the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons: http://jkccs.net; https://apdpkashmir.com.