Sovereignty and necropolitics at the Line of Control

Abstract

This paper considers how the sovereignty of the Indian government over Kashmir is asserted and contested around the Line of Control, and the military checkpoints that visualize such forms of sovereignty. Beginning with a discussion of the ways in which the Government of India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Public Safety Act provide a paralegal context for extrajudicial killings and torture, the article proceeds to consider how recent literary and cultural representations of Kashmir such as Naseer Ahmed and Saurabh Singh’s Kashmir Pending, Bhasharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown not only document the crossing of the Line of Control by so-called insurgents, but also raise questions about the violence of state sovereignty by mourning the lives and deaths of those who dare to challenge the Indian state’s spatial performance of sovereignty. In so doing, the paper suggests that postcolonial narratives of mourning offer an important counterpoint to the necropolitical logic of India’s performance of sovereignty over Kashmir.

Keywords:

• Kashmir checkpoint
• Indian sovereignty
• necropolitics
• South Asian novel
• postcolonial narratives of mourning