Blinding Kashmiris 2019

AZia
Interventions, 2019

Ather Zia

Since July 2016, Indian-administered Kashmir has again raged with mass protests favouring self-determination and freedom from India. In the protests more than ninety-eight people have been killed, over eleven thousand wounded, and more than eight hundred Kashmiris injured in the eyes or blinded by Indian troops using force against protestors and non-protestors alike. Since 1947, when the region was temporarily bifurcated between India and Pakistan, Indian-administered Kashmir has clamoured for a plebiscite, which the United Nations mandated so that the Kashmiri people could choose their own fate. The original options in the plebiscite were mergers with either of the two countries, but Kashmiris have increasingly demanded that a third option for an independent Kashmiri nation-state be added. While the majority of the Kashmiris seek independence, a small faction favours merger with Pakistan. Despite continuing demands for an independent nationhood – one that preceded the creation of India and Pakistan – Kashmir continues to be perceived simplistically as a bilateral dispute between the two nation-states. Using the analytic of “right to maim,” this essay illustrates how the Indian state “blinds” Kashmiri subjects by perfecting a technology of punishment that produces bodies incapable of physical resistance and as a representational threat to the rest of society. By making maiming as a punishment central, this essay will examine India's control of the Kashmir valley as a de facto military occupation.
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Interventions

Constituting the Occupation: Preventive Detention and Permanent Emergency in Kashmir

Haley Duschinski

This article analyzes Indian occupation of Kashmir as a legal, social, and spatial process of asserting power through borders and jurisdictional claims, produced and reproduced through constitutional processes and legal institutions that have enacted generalized notions of emergency and crisis. We argue that the distinctive socio-spatial power structures established between India and Kashmir in a provisional capacity amidst war and partition at the time of independence have been legitimized through rights regimes established through the constitutional structure and institutionalized through laws, executive orders, and the judicial system. We examine how India's legal incorporation of Kashmir was embedded in the constitutional drafting process and the extension of fundamental rights to the region through presidential orders, and how this legal incorporation became sedimented through the work of the courts across time. Building on Ranabir Samaddar's discussion of " colonial constitutionalism, " we consider " occupational constitutionalism " as a form of foreign dominance and control produced through the annexation of part of Kashmir's territory and its legal sovereignty to India 2 in the aftermath of independence and reproduced through a series of legal mechanisms and processes across time that institute a state of emergency and permanent crisis in Kashmir.

India’s Obsession With Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti)Nationalism

Kaul, N. (2018) "India's Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti) Nationalism", Feminist Review, Special Issue on Feminism, Protest and the Neoliberal State in India, Number 119, July (forthcoming). , 2018

Nitasha Kaul

This article attempts to make sense of India's obsession with Kashmir by way of a gendered analysis. I begin by drawing attention to the historical and continuing failure of Indian democracy in Kashmir that results in the violent and multifaceted dehumanisation of Kashmiris and, in turn, domesticates dissent on the question of Kashmir within India. This scenario has been enabled by the persuasive appeal of a gendered masculinist nationalist neoliberal state currently enhanced in its Hindutva avatar. My focus is on understanding how the violence enacted upon the Kashmiri bodies is connected to feminised understanding of the body of Kashmir in India's imagination of itself as a nation-state. I argue that the gendered discourses of representation, cartography and possession are central to the way in which such nationalism works to legitimise and normalise the violence in Kashmir. I conclude with a few reflections on how Kashmir is a litmus test for the discourse on (anti)nationalism in contemporary India.
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Kaul, N. (2018) "India's Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti) Nationalism", Feminist Review, Special Issue on Feminism, Protest and the Neoliberal State in India, Number 119, July (forthcoming).



Women and Kashmir: Special Issue EPW/RWS
Economic & Political Weekly (RWS), 2018

Nitasha Kaul

Ather Zia

We would like to thank the guest editors Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia, and the members of the editorial advisory group of the Review of Women's Studies Mary E John, J Devika, Kalpana Kannabiran, Samita Sen, and Padmini Swaminathan for putting together this issue on " Women and Kashmir.

A new addition to critical Kashmir studies resources: ‘Women and Kashmir: Knowing in Our Own Ways, ‘ published in Review of Women’s Studies, Economic and Political Weekly. An all Kashmiri women-scholars team: Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia as guest co-editors, authors include Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal , Inshah Malik, Mir Fatimah Kanth, Samreen Mushtaq, Uzma Falak, Essar Batool and Aaliya Anjum.

Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Economic & Political Weekly (RWS)

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