Kashmir and Palestine: itineraries of (anti) colonial solidarity

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the itineraries of anti-colonial solidarity between India & Palestine and argues for placing Kashmir’s anti-colonial struggle for sovereignty in these itineraries. Examining routes of solidarity through transnational and translocal assemblages, the essay highlights the need for critical reflection on anti-colonial solidarity. The paper is also an argument for the need for anti-colonial solidarity with Kashmir and Palestine to take account of the context of contemporary geopolitical alliances within global capitalism, which indicates a (settler/post) colonial formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• transnationalism
• solidarity
• India-Israel relations
• Kashmir
• Palestine

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on this article. I would like to thank both current and past Identities editors for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the case for Kashmiri self-determination, see Fozia N. Lone (2018). While Joseph Massad (2018) critiques the concept of self-determination for its appropriation for settler-colonial purpose, I use the phrase to indicate Kashmiri claims to decide their political future as part of their anti-colonial struggle.

2. I use Kashmir as a shorthand for describing the Kashmiri sovereignty struggle being waged against the Indian state. Kashmir references the erstwhile princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, part of the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. This state has now been annexed and bifurcated by the Indian government into two Union Territories as mentioned in the essay.

3. See Hafsa Kanjwal (2019).

4. See Deshmane (2019).

5. See Bhan, Duschinski, and Osuri (2019).

6. See Bhandar and Ziadeh (2016) for a nuanced account of the lens of settler-colonialism to frame Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

7. By pre-individual embodied affects, I refer to Brian Massumi’s understanding of affect as ‘openendedly social’, i.e., before individuality (2002, 61). Here, as Patricia Clough explains it, emotion can be understood as narration of affect’ (qtd. In Clough 2008, 3).

8. See, for example, Leena Reghunath’s (2014) story of the RSS’s links to Hindutva terror.