Table Of ContentResisting Occupation in Kashmir
THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Tobias Kelly, Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
RESISTING OCCuPATION
IN KASHmIR
Edited by
Haley Duschinski, mona Bhan,
Ather Zia, and Cynthia mahmood
uNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www .upenn .edu /pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978- 0- 8122- 4978- 1
Contents
Introduction. “Rebels of the Streets”: Violence, Protest,
and Freedom in Kashmir 1
Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Ather Zia
Chapter 1. Contesting the Law, Contesting the State: Jurisdictional
Authority of the Majlis- e- Mushawarat in Kashmir 42
Haley Duschinski and Bruce Hoffman
Chapter 2. “In Search of the Aryan Seed”: Race, Religion,
and Sexuality in Indian- Occupied Kashmir 74
Mona Bhan
Chapter 3. The Killable Kashmiri Body: The Life
and Execution of Afzal Guru 103
Ather Zia
Chapter 4. From “Terrorist” to “Terrorized”: How Trauma
Became the Language of Suffering in Kashmir 129
Saiba Varma
Chapter 5. Sexual Crimes and the Struggle for Justice in Kashmir 153
Seema Kazi
Chapter 6. Police Subjectivity in Occupied Kashmir:
Reflections on an Account of a Police Officer 184
Gowhar Fazili
vi Contents
Chapter 7. The Contingencies of Everyday Life in Azad Jammu
and Kashmir 211
Ershad Mahmud
Chapter 8. Interrogating the Ordinary: Everyday Politics
and the Struggle for Azadi in Kashmir 230
Farrukh Faheem
Chapter 9. Epitaphs as Counterhistories: Martyrdom,
Commemoration, and the Work of Graveyards in Kashmir 248
Mohamad Junaid
Chapter 10. Perturbations of Violence in Kashmir 278
Cynthia Mahmood
List of Contributors 291
Index 293
INTRODuCTION
“Rebels of the Streets”
Violence, Protest, and Freedom in Kashmir
mONA BHAN, HALEY DuSCHINSKI, AND ATHER ZIA
I’m the rebel of the streets that been eulogized in blood
Dramatized in politics duly hated with no love
Demonized in the news with their fabricated tales
While sodomized young kids are still screaming in their jails
Lost and never found in this facade of peace
Reflected in thoughts, that Dajjal1 now breathes
He speaks to his puppets and silhoets now tremble
‘Cause the brave men are dead and all cowards resemble
Satan’s evil empire is reaching out to hold thee
Since money can buy out your political theory
And your unborn child, is raised as a traitor
Livin’ on blood money and he doubts his Creator
misleaded by his greed till his soul starts to blacken
And he sees his own face in the signs of Armageddon
And this earth will shake ‘cause of the crimes he did
His bones will break holdin’ the coffin of his Kid
They gave us blood and hate then wondered why we all
are rebels
In the Land of Saints each man raised is called a rebel
—mC Kash, Why We Rebels
2 Introduction
“Rebel of the streets”: These powerful lyrics by Kashmiri rapper MC Kash
reflect a new phase in the politics of dissent in Kashmir, shaped by a long-
standing popular struggle against India’s brutal military occupation that
has dominated the cultural, social, and political landscape of the region for
decades. Since India’s independence from British colonial rule and the sub-
sequent partition in 1947, India and Pakistan, both of which claim sovereign
control over the region, have fought four inconclusive wars over Kashmir.
In Indian-a dministered Kashmir, a series of forced, rigged, and illegitimate
elections have installed what MC Kash refers to as “puppet” regimes that have
constrained expressions of people’s will for Kashmir’s political resolution
while completely ignoring a series of United Nations (UN) resolutions for
a free and fair plebiscite to settle the Kashmir dispute. Reinforced by Indian
military’s ubiquitous presence in Kashmir, the locally elected governments
have turned Kashmir into a “late modern colonial occupation” in which state
violence is obscured and justified through claims of humanitarianism pre-
mised on principles of democracy, good governance, development, and rule
of law (Mbembe 2003, 25–30).
In 1989 Kashmiris, long resistant to Indian rule in their homeland,
launched a popular armed rebellion against the Indian state. India sought to
crush the rebellion through a massive counterinsurgency assault against insur-
gent and civilian populations, deploying more than 700,000 military and para-
military forces in the region. More than 25 years later this counterinsurgency
regime remains, producing a perpetual state of siege that subjects the entire
population to everyday conditions of surveillance, punishment, and control.
With a population of approximately 12.5 million, Jammu and Kashmir has
1 soldier for every 17 Kashmiris, making it one of the most densely milita-
rized zones in the world (International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights
and Justice in Indian-A dministered Kashmir and Association of Parents of
Disappeared Persons 2015).2 Indian military, police, and paramilitary forces
carry out extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances,
torture, and sexual assault. These operations have been facilitated by emer-
gency and national security laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers
Act (AFSPA), which gives the military supreme powers to kill with impunity
(Amnesty International 1999), and the J&K Public Safety Act, which provides
for preventive detention without trial (Amnesty International 2001, 2011a,
2011b). International and Kashmiri human rights organizations document
that more than 70,000 people have been killed and over 8,000 have been forc-
ibly disappeared in counterinsurgency operations, and there are around 6,000
“Rebels of the Streets” 3
unknown and unmarked graves and mass graves in Kashmir (International
People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-A dministered Kash-
mir and Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons 2015).
The armed rebellion transformed into a new mode of resistance in the
first decade of the twenty- first century, with widespread anti- India street pro-
tests marking the beginning of a new intifada (Kak 2011). Clashes between
youth protesters and state armed forces escalated in the summer of 2010, with
Indian state armed forces killing 120 civilians, a period marked in Kashmiri
consciousness as “the year of killing youth” (Bukhari 2010).3 These young
men and women, also called “Kashmir’s new warriors” (Thottam 2010), con-
tinued a long- standing struggle against what they viewed as the illegitimacy
of India’s “evil empire” through new modes of protest and resistance, mar-
shaling strategies of artistic and literary representation, documentary film
production, music, sit- ins, candlelight vigils, street marches, and stone pelt-
ing, in an effort to secure their aspiration for a free (azad) Kashmir. These
popular modes of protest—in which music and literature as well as jokes,
rumors, and stone- pelting become potent forms of political dissent—are
derived from, not a departure from, the armed struggle of the 1990s; they
are part of a longer continuum of antioccupation struggles that can be traced
to India’s historic denial of the Kashmiri right to self- determination, traced
even to the violent repression of Kashmiri uprisings against the tyranny of the
princely ruler in 1931 (Faheem, this volume). Viewed along this continuum,
the protests of the 2000s resist any attempt to draw easy distinctions between
violent and nonviolent forms of resistance. MC Kash burst onto the cultural
scene during this critical time as a popular and powerful voice of defiance,
giving expression to the cumulative rage of these “rebels of the streets” who
came of age during the armed rebellion of the 1990s. Building on new social
media and solidarity networks, MC Kash rose to prominence early in the
summer months of 2010 with his song I Protest (Remembrance), which bears
witness to the indiscriminate killings of teenagers by the state’s armed forces:
“Don’t talk restitution / ‘Cuz the only solution / Is the resolution of freedom.”
Drawing links with other occupied and oppressed populations in Palestine,
Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, MC Kash’s rap music has given voice to
a new generation that has pursued the freedom movement through hybrid
forms of opposition, combining local poetry, art, fiction, and literature with
global models of cultural production and resistance.4
Kashmiris have consistently challenged—both through armed and
unarmed resistance—widespread attempts by sections of the Indian media,
