‘We will memorise our home’: exploring settler colonialism as an interpretive framework for Kashmir

Abstract

In this article, we examine the practices of India’s military occupation of Kashmir in the framework of settler colonialism to map its entrenched nature in sustaining control and countering the struggle for Azaadi (freedom). Post 5 August 2019, when the Indian state proceeded with a reading down of the laws that enabled Kashmir’s permanent residents exclusive rights over land and jobs, scholars and activists noted it to be an advancement of India’s settler logic of elimination. In this essay, we complicate its trajectory and trace these recent practices as part of long drawn processes including spatial, demographic and ecological manifestations that are now further deepening and expanding a matrix of control characteristic of such a project. The paper argues that while settler colonialism could be used as a crucial interpretive framework for Kashmir and make it legible for an international audience, the reliance on a future Indian-citizen-settler runs the risk of invisibilising the Indian armed forces already permanently stationed in Kashmir and occupying vast tracts of land. The settler colonial framework can be a useful concept for Kashmir when its shrewd combination of assimilationist and eliminationist tactics is placed within the framework of military occupation, rather than as a distinct alternative.

Keywords:

• Settler colonialism
• Kashmir
• India
• violence
• military occupation
• demography

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their extremely helpful feedback and for bringing to our attention crucial debates that we had initially missed. This research article builds on some preliminary arguments made in our essay ‘India’s Settler Colonialism in Kashmir is Not Starting Now, Eliminating the Natives Is a Process Long Underway’ that appeared in the Polis Project, 27 June 2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samreen Mushtaq

Samreen Mushtaq is Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Ashoka University, India, under the Governing Intimacies project. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender and militarisation. Her work looks into the ways in which violence manifests itself on gendered subjects, and its intrusion into intimate spaces in the context of the military occupation of Kashmir. Her writings have appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, Identities, Contemporary South Asia, Middle East Eye, The Caravan, E-International Relations and the LSE Engenderings blog.

Mudasir Amin

Mudasir Amin recently submitted his PhD thesis in the Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. His doctoral dissertation maps the landscape of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Kashmir, situating their role and effectiveness in the larger conflict–NGO dynamic as it manifests in the region. He was until recently affiliated as a Research Fellow with the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University, India.