Epistemes of human rights in Kashmir: Paradoxes of universality and particularity

Abstract

Human rights violations through militarized control have been the cornerstone of Indian statecraft in Indian-administered Kashmir. This article offers a close reading of the April 2017 episode of using a civilian Kashmiri Muslim man as a human shield by the Indian Army in Indian-administered Kashmir. Whereas the existing scholarship on the relationship between militarization, human rights violations, and Hindutva politics have employed political or feminist analytical frameworks, this article focuses on rereading the episode of human shield usage to analyze how “universality” of human rights in India is being redefined. It reflects on how the ruling right-wing government in India appropriates the language of violations and afflictions to embolden its strategies to alter the grammar of human rights in India. Drawing on a discourse analysis of the human shield event, the article deliberates on how anthropology of Hindutva and right-wing extremism research could pay greater attention to the conversation between Hindutva theology of rights and neoliberal ethics when approaching questions of recurrent human rights violations in Kashmir.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Heather Smith-Cannoy and Tricia Redeker Hepner for their patience, compassion, and generosity. I am grateful for the opportunity to have presented this paper and receive valuable comments at the virtual global conference, “Human Rights on the Edge: The Future of International Human Rights Law and Practice,” organized by Arizona State University. Stimulating discussion of ideas and concepts with Malay Firoz, Sourav Roy, Haziq Qadri, Antony Pattathu, Sarah Ewald, and Max Kramer have immensely contributed to the making of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, which helped develop the arguments of the article.

Notes

1 The term is derived from the two terms “Hindu” and “Tattva” (essence), and literally translates to “Hindu Principles,” which have been defined as the ideological basis of the militant Hindu nationalist movement in India (Jaffrelot, 1996).

2 Adivasi is the term used to refer to the indigenous people of India.

3 The Public Safety Act (PSA) is a preventive detention law arbitrarily used by the state in Kashmir to arrest human rights activists, including children, under the pretext of maintaining public law and order. PSA allows the State Police to imprison individuals without trial for up to two years. For details, see Duschinski and Ghosh (2017).

4 The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) is one of India’s most stringent antiterrorism legislations. The Act is used to declare any association or a body of individuals “unlawful” if they indulged in any activity that included acts and words, spoken, or written, or any sign or representation, that supported any claim to bring about “secession of a part of the territory of India,” or which questioned or disclaimed the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It enables law enforcement bodies like police in India to gain judicial custody of any accused person for 180 days before a charge-sheet is even filed in the court, making it impossible for the accused to gain bail or parole before the trial begins or ends.

5 The term Azadi is a Persian word meaning freedom. Azadi has been used as the clarion call for demanding the right to self-determination movement in Kashmir Valley.

6 For a detailed discussion on the jurisdiction of international humanitarian laws (IHL) regarding human shield usage by armed forces of nation-states or resistance groups in both international and noninternational conflict zones, see Vestner (2019).

7 Violence being antithetical to Hinduism has been long justified using Hindu theological explanations of a Brahmanical vegetarian diet as well as the concept of Ahimsa (nonviolence). For a detailed discussion on how vegetarianism and nonviolence underwrote the Gandhian anticolonial movement, see Devji (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant ID 2029490.

Notes on contributors

Sarbani Sharma

Sarbani Sharma is an assistant professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India.