Occupier/occupied

Abstract

As military occupation increasingly informs the politics of both democracies and dictatorships, capitalist and socialist regimes, this essay asks why it is foundational for sovereignty and the post-war state-form. In particular, it questions the complicity of post-colonial theory with security discourses in reading movements for self-determination as threats to the state or as forms of terrorism rather than as alternate possibilities for freedom and liberty. It suggests not only that the ongoing twenty-first century relations between occupier and occupied reprise the racialised forms of identity that characterised relations between coloniser and colonised in the preceding two centuries, but also that relations between occupied peoples may produce affiliative poetics and shared terms of political reference or solidarity.

Keywords:

• military occupation
• tourism
• post-colonial theory
• civil society
• security discourse
• poetics

Acknowledgements

I thank Ruken Sengul, Akbar Hyder, Puneet Kohli, Mohamad Junaid, Suvir Kaul and Sanjay Kak for helpful reading of the essay. I am grateful to Sajad Malik for permission to reproduce his photograph ‘Tourism’ from his singular website: www.kashmirblackandwhite.com. I thank Cheran Rudhramoorthy, Chelva Kanaganayakam and Nurjehan Aziz of TSAR Press for gracious permission to reproduce the English translation of the poem ‘Letters from an Army Camp’. Lines from Aga Shahid Ali’s poem Ghazal are quoted with permission of W.W. Norton.

Notes

1. This essay picks up on themes in my introduction to the volume, Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East. Kamala Visweswaran (ed). University of Pennsylvania Press (forthcoming).

2. This was never proved: although the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was deployed in the area where the women were killed, state authorities announced the women had drowned despite conclusions of the post-mortem to the contrary. Forensic evidence of rape was suppressed or compromised, and local Kashmiri police ultimately charged with the murders. See International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (2009) and the fact-finding report by the independent women’s initiative for justice (p. 11).

3. Kazi (2009, p. 97) reports that in 1990, the first year of Kashmir's uprising, Indian troops numbered 150,000; they increased to 400,000 by 1994 and were between 500,000 and 700,000 in 2004.

4. Indian security forces in Kashmir routinely fire empty tear-gas shells at protestors, which are far more dangerous than the live smoke-filled shells, since people cannot see them coming. See Mohamad Junaid's riveting account of the ‘Stone Wars’ that summer (unpublished manuscript).

5. The question is not entirely a rhetorical one. According to a recent article in the Economic Times (2012), 10.02 million tourists (including Hindu pilgrims to Mata Vaishno Devi and Amarnath) visited the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 2011, whereas India's Ministry of Tourism said 12.24 million visited the state in 2012. Junaid's (2012) recent Op-Ed questions whether tourism actually contributes to Kashmir's environmental degradation or to its economy. Kabir (2009) traces the long legacy of post-colonial tourism in Kashmir through Bollywood film and other imagery.

6. Kaye started writing the novel while living in Kashmir in 1941; the gap between its originary colonial context and its post-war publication in 1953 as ‘Death Walked in Kashmir’ – the first instalment of her successful ‘Death Walked in’ mystery series – is perhaps less obvious than one would expect. On the Nedous Hotel, see also Kaye's (1999a, 1999b) memoirs. I thank Nyla Ali Khan for pointing to me the connection between Kaye and the Nedous Hotel.

7. Fanon (1963), of course, famously warned of the ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, among the perils of new nation states in his ‘Wretched of the Earth’, but the last stanzas of his speech before the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in September 1956 communicate a more hopeful view: ‘The logical end of this will to struggle is the total liberation of the national territory. In order to achieve this liberation, the inferiorized man brings all his resources into play, all his acquisitions, the old and the new, his own and those of the occupant. […] The occupant's spasmed and rigid culture, now liberated, opens at last to the culture of people who have really become brothers. The two cultures can affront each other, enrich each other. In conclusion, universality resides in this decision to recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once the colonial status is irreversibly excluded’. See Fanon (1967, pp. 29–44). NB: ‘Occupant’ has been too literally translated from French to the same word in English, when ‘occupier’ is the more accurate term.

8. For an alternate reading of the consequences and political possibilities rendered by another kind of splitting, see Sengul (forthcoming).

9. Kaul's (2011) recent essay ‘Indian Empire (And the Case of Kashmir)’ is, however, an important step in this direction. Khan's (2006) essay ‘Kashmir: A Postcolonial Nation’ also marks this dynamic. Historian Perry Anderson's indictment of India's post-colonial nationalist intelligentsia is more wide-ranging, but provides an incisive re-evaluation of Kashmir's military occupation as ‘the final act of [the 1947] partition’. See Anderson (2012).

10. I am thinking here of Wallerstein's classic formulations of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery,’ as well as recent attempts (with which I am in sympathy) to think through ‘colonialism without colonies’ by situating debt as a form of imperial expansion. See, for example, Bigelow and Peterson (2002).

11. Ironically (or not), even US State Department officials in 2006 noted (in released WikiLeaks cables) that ‘Manipur was less a state and more a colony of India’ and that ‘The general use of the AFSPA [Armed Forces Special Powers Act] meant that the Manipuris did not have the same rights of other Indian citizens … ’ (Nambath 2012). For a telling analysis of violence in Manipur, see Kshetrimayum (2009). For the history of militarisation in NE India, see Baruah (2005). On the colonial roots of AFSPA, see Baruah (2010).

12. The international law on occupation was codified at the Hague Peace conferences of 1899 and 1907, then reformulated at the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. For an analysis of the law of occupation in relation to Palestine, see also Falk and Weston (1992).

13. The use of sexual epithets to denigrate Indian and Kashmiri Muslim men and women before, during and after episodes of torture or communal violence is well documented; see Dar (2011). Bora (2010) also explores the racialised nature of the rape of Manipuri women in her essay ‘Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal’.

14. This despite the prescience of Spivak's (1999) ‘Critique of Postcolonial Reason’. Interestingly, but in different ways, both Chatterjee's (2004) writing on political society and Appadurai's (2002) writing on the ‘Deep Democracy’ of NGO politics can been seen as an extension of post-colonial theory's tendency to deal with militant opposition to the nation state as one of failed governance rather than serious political critique entailing alternate visions of the future. I thank Ruken Sengul for this observation.

15. I thank Ruken Sengul for urging me to make these points more clearly and for their rhetorical precision.

16. In her preface to Kazi's (2009) book, Kaldor cites ongoing conflict in Kashmir as a typical example of a ‘new war’ blurring distinctions between civil war and an international one (2009, pp. viii–x), but does not mention the fact of military occupation. Pape's (2005) study on suicide terrorism ‘Dying to Win’, on the other hand, notes that occupation is often central to the intensification and prolongation of conflict. (Indeed, according to Pape, there are more than 58 conflicts due to occupation between 1980 and 2003 alone.) ‘Occupation by Democratic States, 1980–2003’ shows that 22% of these are in South Asia, with half of those in India alone, whereas about 31% occur in South Asia and the Middle East. Interestingly, by Pape's definition, a majority of ongoing occupations concern indigenous peoples throughout the world. Pape's index is mostly interesting for the work his expansive definition does, but there are several notable (and obvious) omissions from the index (Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico) and some regrettable factual errors (i.e. Arabic being listed as the main language of Pakistan, rather than Urdu). See Pape (2005, pp. 265–266).

17. See Rana (2011) and Puar (2008) for accounts of this process in the US context.

18. See, for example, Waheed's (2011) compelling novel of occupied Kashmir, ‘The Collaborator’.

19. My formulations here follow Junaid (forthcoming).

20. Permission to use excerpt of poem by TSAR Press is gratefully acknowledged.

21. I thank Syed Akbar Hyder for this point. For a telling analysis of how ‘Karbala’ as a trope of mourning and suffering travels from Shia eschatology into Hindu and Muslim secular or poetic traditions, see Hyder (2006).

22. Lorca's casidas and gacelas were partially published in 1936, then posthumously as a full collection of poetry entitled Diván del Tamarit (The Diván of Tamarit). See also Hashmi (2012). Neither Lorca's nor Ali's translations of the form into Spanish or English strictly conformed to the metric requirements of the ghazal.

23. The ghazal is a recurring theme in this collection of poetry; there are two other poems titled ‘Ghazal’ that close sections I and IV of the volume.

24. I thank Keisha-Khan Perry and Omer Oczan for their anecdotes about the places they have lived in and worked. See also analysis of Bahian women's struggles against tourist development in Perry (2012).