Abstract
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. I focus on understanding how the violence enacted upon Kashmiri bodies is connected to feminised understandings 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.
What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can only
function in a state of emergency? (Mbembe,
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle
to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy
of the good life, or a political project. (Berlant,
Introduction
Historically, India as the world's largest democracy has repeatedly been credited with a distinguished record which combines the anti-colonial roots of its political system, and sets it favourably against its geographical neighbours, such as Pakistan, which are beset with problematic and violent transfers of political power, or China with its Communist one-party state. Against this reading of India's political system as a secular, multiparty, diverse democracy, there is an alternative account which relies on a serious acknowledgement of the ways in which the state in India has always been violent towards Dalits, Adivasis, women, sexual and religious minorities, and the people of Kashmir 1 and the Northeast, to name a few. In the last three decades, this violence has become additionally layered with the force of neo-liberalism and the ascendancy of Hindutva. In contemporary times, we find the new post-2014 ‘Modified’ Indian nation, a neoliberal state with a Hindutva basis and a super-enhanced idea of enforced nationalism and patriotism. The question then arises as to how this state functions as a democracy for those who are not seen to, or do not wish to, belong within it. To understand this, I focus on the specific subject of Indian democratic discourse as it relates to Kashmir in highlighting how violence and failure of Indian democracy in Kashmir is disregarded and masked by the use of nationalism and anti-nationalism.
‘Kashmir’ is the popular term used here to connote the long history and
contested interpretations involved in the dispute; the state of Jammu and
Kashmir is used when such a definition is needed for an argument (for
further details on the nuances of terminology, see Snedden,
Patriarchal visions of the nation state are an enduring feature of the
(inter)national system, since ‘nationalism typically has sprung from masculinized
memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope’ (Enloe,
The Indian democratic ‘management’ of Kashmir echoes the British colonial practices
of centre-periphery relations, as does the way in which mass protests in Kashmir—the
dominant and most visible form of democratic assembly—result in tragic cycles of
deaths such that funerals and demonstrations are indistinguishable (see Kaul,
Indian democracy and Kashmir
The experience of democracy in India has been differentially distributed across many
of its marginalised populations. Kashmir, in particular, has been a political
‘issue’ that has a longer life than that of independent postcolonial
India.
2
On
15 August 1947, when India became independent from British colonial rule, the
present-day state of Jammu and Kashmir was not a part of the Indian union. It was
only on 27 October 1947, following a cross-border invasion and the involvement of
Indian forces in driving back the attackers, that the instrument of accession to
India came into effect. What is more, there is a complex set of political
entanglements that ensued over the first few years, the result of which include the
following: the territory of the erstwhile princely state effectively being divided
as being under the actual control of the three nations of India, Pakistan and China;
the first Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 to 1948 and the UN Security Council mediation;
the promise of a plebiscite made by the first Indian Prime Minister Jawahar Lal
Nehru; the enduring presence of the line of control that divides Indian and
Pakistani sides of Kashmir; and the permanent status of Article 370 of the Indian
Constitution, which grants special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and
Kashmir (see Brecher,
By the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, the British sold Kashmir to Maharaja Gulab
Singh and the subsequent Hindu Dogra rule was oppressive and exploitative
(see Rai,
Indian press reportage is routinely state-centric on the issue of Kashmir,
‘characteris[ing] it as a dispute over real estate between India and Pakistan, and a
matter of national prestige’ (Joseph,
For journalistic accounts to the events and the aftermath, for instance, see
Gulati (
The 1990s in Kashmir was a decade of extreme violence against the Kashmiri Muslim
inhabitants who were, and continue to be, caught between militancy, resistance and
state oppression (see Mathur,
See reports by different human rights organisations including Amnesty
International (
In the last few years, there have been cycles of summer uprisings (in 2008, 2010 and
2016) mainly led by the youth of Kashmir, including those who pelt stones, which are
met with a fierce response by way of bullets, metal pellets and other lethal means.
Even a cursory glance at the physical landscape of Kashmir today reveals the
strongly felt hostility and resentment against the Indian state; entire areas are
covered with anti-India and pro-freedom graffiti of various kinds (see Kaul,
In contemporary Kashmir, therefore, the experience of Indian democracy is marked by
the two divergent strands of voting, on the one hand, and public assemblies of
protest on the other. While the Indian perspective celebrates the periodically held
elections in Jammu and Kashmir as ‘a festival of democracy’, most Kashmiris consider
voting in the elections for the necessity of sadak, bijli, paani
(roads, electricity, water). The promises of good governance, employment and
development are used in such a scenario as a trade-off against aspirations for the
resolution of a political dispute. In any case, in order to be claimed as an
integral part of the ‘world's largest democracy’, Kashmir Valley is held under
occupation as one of the most militarised regions of the world and, in spite of the
formal democratic practice of elections, is marked by a widespread and continuously
simmering resentment that results in cycles of mass uprisings. One could argue that
these protests, which repeat ad infinitum calls for freedom
(‘Hum Kya Chahte? Azaadi’, ‘What do we want? Freedom’), are the
Kashmiri version of a festival of democracy as popular sovereignty—a democracy not
of identity, but of alterity: a drawing of attention to the radical otherness of
democratic aspirations that cannot be accommodated within the circumscribing of
elections alone in the fraught context of Kashmir. When protesters gather in Kashmir
to chant slogans of resistance against the Indian occupation, they are aware of the
inherent defiance and incitement of that public assembly. When their chants and
stone pelting are met with live ammunition or metal pellets, it is already clear
that they are not part of any Indian democratic imagination. Nowhere else in the
world have metal pellets been used in this way against political protesters,
especially targeting their eyes (see Waheed,
A reflection from an ex-Army officer: Can we be unmoved if this had happened in any other part of
‘undisputed’ part of India? There must have been a reason why pellet
guns were not used during the Jat agitation in Haryana. There must
have been a logic behind security forces not firing live bullets
during the Patidar and, more recently, Dalit agitations in Gujarat.
(Singh,
When the funerals of those who die in such protests are held, the gatherings once
again transform into political demonstrations and so result in funerals again. In
her notes on a performative theory of assembly, Judith Butler (
Gender, Violence and Kashmir in the Indian Imagination
There are various ways in which gender and violence have been studied in the context
of Kashmir. The experiences of Kashmiri women have been the central theme of studies
on sexual violence and abuse including rapes and abuse by armed forces, rapes and
abductions by militants, domestic abuse and instances of mass rape (see Kazi,
Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Nation) is a women-only right-wing Islamist conservative group.
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), formed in 1994, is a collective of relatives of victims of enforced and involuntary disappearances in Kashmir. See Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, http://www.apdpkashmir.com [last accessed 18 March 2017].
There is a specifically gendered aspect to the exoticisation of Kashmir as a territory, which results in a feminisation of the Kashmiri landscape and Kashmiri bodies. This representation of Kashmir and Kashmiris is intrinsic and ever more crucial to the ‘strong’ hegemonically masculinist neoliberal state of India to perform its violent democracy in Kashmir by dehumanising Kashmiris. It is this feminised understanding of Kashmir that has historically been a driver of the violent Indian nationalist urge to possess the territory of Kashmir, even if it means killing, torturing and abusing the Kashmiri people. Furthermore, since this feminised understanding of Kashmir as a woman, by contrast, posits the Indian state in conventionally masculine and patriarchal terms, it makes the possession and control of Kashmir an integral part of the Indian nationalist imagination of itself.
In contrast to work on gender and violence in relation to Kashmir that locates this violence in Kashmir and upon Kashmiri bodies, this article attempts to shed light upon how this violence is enabled, justified and perpetuated in ways that are shockingly spectacular but seemingly banal. In other words, my focus is on understanding how the violence enacted upon Kashmiri bodies is connected to feminised understandings of the body of Kashmir in the Indian state's imagination of itself. There are three specific ways in which the feminisation of Kashmir occurs, which I will focus on here.
Firstly, there is the realm of cinematic representation, feminisation and
exoticisation. Studies of Indian popular culture have analysed Bollywood's cinematic
obsession with Kashmir in terms of the role played by a fetishised idea of Kashmir
in the collective desires of the Indian nation (see Kabir,
The ‘Quit India’ movement was a campaign against British rule of India
launched by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 8 August 1942 in Bombay. For
further reading, see The Open University (
See Kaul (
This was recently illustrated in the case of Zaira Waseem, a young Kashmiri
female actor in a mainstream Bollywood movie (see Gopalakrishnan,
Secondly, the cartographical imagination of India as ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) has
historically functioned and played a key role in creating a special kind of fervent
nationalist piety around the question of Kashmir's relationship to India. Sumathi
Ramaswamy (
First and most commonly, Bharat Mata literally occupies the map of India, filling up what would otherwise be empty social and cartographic space with her body. There are many ingenious ways in which her body blurs the neatly drawn boundaries of state cartography which virtually disappear, particularly in postcolonial bodyscapes. Invariably, her head is made to occupy Kashmir, and the territories of neighbouring nation-states, especially (west and east) Pakistan and Bangladesh, more often than not fade away in the folds of her billowing saree or her flowing tresses […]
The geo-body emerges as an object of geopiety in and through such bodyscapes. The most explicit of these that celebrates the virtues of patriotic martyrdom was published in 1966, soon after the wars with China and Pakistan of that decade…. Entitled ‘Ma ki Pukar’, ‘The Mother's Call’, it shows Bharat Mata occupying a map of India (whose borders are fairly clearly delineated, but with the contested territory of Kashmir hidden by her head), her two arms held out in a gesture of blessing, (ibid., pp. 175, 181)
The colonial and postcolonial visual depictions of the nation as a feminine form of the Mother have been historically powerful in evoking a patriotic devotion to the nation. In the last few decades, with the appeal of the Hindutva sentiment becoming ever stronger, this unquestioning devotion to the idea and service of the nation, of Mother India, has become an important signifier of who is seen as a ‘nationalist’ and who is liable to be attacked as an ‘anti-nationalist’. Among many other reasons why Kashmir is seen as an existential matter of possession of territory for Indians, there is the important visual fact in such ubiquitous depictions of Kashmir being the ‘head’ of Mother India. To the adherents and devotees of Bharat Mata, it is a sacred duty to answer the call of their Mother and defend their nation. Just as India was once the ‘jewel in the crown’ for the British Empire, the status of Kashmir in the Indian geographic and psychogeographic imagination is that of an extremely valuable possession for the status it confers. Bharat Mata is, of course, a Hindu imaginary, and it would be well nigh impossible to find any similar depictions of an Indian geo-body that would have any Islamic markers, notwithstanding the fact that right in the middle of the face of ‘Bharat Mata’ lies the contested valley of Kashmir with its predominantly Muslim population!
In this case of visual representation of the territory of India as the body of the woman, Kashmir is, owing to its geographical placement in the North–South depiction, the head of Mother India. To take a position on Kashmir that dissents from the mainstream nationalist Indian position (which is that Kashmir is an integral part of India) is to opt for the ‘beheading’ of Mother India. Any suggestion of a complex political history of Kashmir's relationship to India, such as the manifest alienation of a majority of Kashmiris from India or of the various uprisings as calls for Azaadi (freedom), is instantly seen as seditious, anti-national and worthy of being met even with violence, since it is seen to threaten the life and honour of the Mother, which is viewed as the duty of every patriot to protect. This is even more important in the Hindutva context, because of its link to militarised masculinity of patriarchal norms, which require the male Hindu Indian to act in service of the (Hindu) nation. Furthermore, Kashmir as an issue mobilises and unites Indians in the service of nationalism, much in the same way the anti-colonial movement once did. The ‘sacred’ nature of the duty required to serve the nation cannot be more important than to keep the Mother from being beheaded. This emotional, psychological intensity is evident in the Indian nationalist slogans that convey the clear potential for brutalisation if Kashmir is raised as a question. For instance, the well known: Doodh Mangoge to Kheer Denge, Kashmir Mangoge to Cheer Denge (if you ask for milk, we will give you pudding, if you ask for Kashmir, we will tear you to bits).
The figure of the ‘Mother’ of course has been the subject of numerous feminist
analyses of the way in which it symbolises the nation. In the Indian context, the
idea of the nation as a mother played an important role in the anti-colonial
struggle against the British. This idea of service to the nation as a mother is also
at work when a politician's devotion to the nation and his policies are sought to be
legitimised by using the figure of his
11
mother and mother nation. Modi,
for instance, in one of his early speeches in the Indian Parliament, tearily and
with much emotion, declared that service to the nation is analogous to serving one's
mother, a duty of which one can never tire.
12
He subsequently provided the
media with several images that gave prominence to his care and affection for his
mother, and at the peak of resentment against his demonetisation policy in 2016
(which had caused chaos, deaths and much misery), his 96-year-old mother was shown
going to the bank to withdraw money from an ATM in order to signal the good faith
implied in his political decisions about the economy, which were being borne in the
interests of the nation by his mother and thus should be endured by all Indians in
the service of the nation as mother (see Ananya,
The ‘his’ is a revealing pronoun in this case. The male political figure is an ideal nationalist in his service to the nation and/as to his mother. The female political figure is not viewed as nationalist in similar terms, since her devotion to her own mother is not part of the narrative. This indicates the fundamentally gendered bedrock of (any) nation viewed as female/mother. This is also evident in the term Mauj Kasheer (Mother Kashmir) used by Kashmiris; however, unlike in the Indian case, there is no analogous anthropomorphically cartographic dimension of the resistance imaginary.
See ‘Emotional PM-elect Modi pledges to serve “mother”’ in The Malay Mail (2014).
Radhika Vemula, for instance, the mother of the Dalit scholar and activist
Rohit Vemula who committed suicide in January 2016 at Hyderabad Central
University, has been struggling for justice in vain. Rajini Krish
(
In February 2017, Nivedita Menon, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),
gave a lecture at an academic conference on ‘History reconstructed through
literature: nation, identity, culture’ held at Jodhpur University in the western
Indian state of Rajasthan, in which she criticised the RSS and Hindutva and showed
an upside down map of India. Menon (
Because after all, we all know the earth is round, and nothing is upside down or right side up. […] This was in the context of my critique of the Hindutvavaadi and RSS notion of nationalism, which sees the nation as a body, the body of the mother. This implies that the nation pre-exists the people, and so if some group wants to leave the nation, it can only be seen as amputation or dismemberment. […] I said the RSS Bharat Mata can be easily transposed on to the map of India we are familiar with, with Kashmir as the head, Bengal and Gujarat as the arms and so on, but if we turn the map the other way round, which is still an accurate depiction of the region, suddenly you can see that the nation is not a natural unchanging object, but something constructed by people. (ibid.)
Such is the state of affairs that in spite of professing her patriotism and for explaining the reasons for showing an upside-down map of the country, 14 the fact of mentioning Kashmir and criticising the Hindutva forces can lead to an enormous backlash. The event was followed by charges of anti-nationalism and the filing of a police FIR (First Information Report) against Menon and the suspension of the academic, Rajshree Ranawat, who organised the event. 15
In 2016, the government also introduced new legislation that seeks to ban
maps showing Kashmir (and any other areas) as disputed territory, and impose
fines of $15 million and 7-year jail terms for ‘wrong’ maps of the country
(see Mallet,
This suspension was later overturned by the court; however, it is one in a
series of such incidents where dissenting on Kashmir in India, including by
prominent figures, leads to litigation, violence and intimidation in the
public sphere. Arundhati Roy and others were charged with ‘sedition’ in 2010
for their remarks on Kashmir (Roy,
Thirdly, the landscape of Kashmir has been a feminised territory in the Indian
imagination, functioning alongside a discourse of possession and control by the
masculinist Indian state. Fabled for centuries for its natural surroundings, the
‘feminine’ aspect of Kashmir's beauty was spelt out by none other than Jawaharlal
Nehru (quoted in Yaseen,
Nehru saw Srinagar as “a fairy city of dreamlike beauty” which “is no fancy
picture, for fairyland lies all around it; the magic is there already…. “ And,
“Kashmir calls [him] back, its pull is stronger than ever; it whispers its magic
to the ears, and its memory disturbs the mind. How can they who have fallen
under its spell release themselves from this enchantment?” (Korbel,
This enchanting pull goes to the heart of a long story of unrequited love of India
for Kashmir. Indians often proclaim their love for Kashmir, notwithstanding any lack
of reciprocation. No commentator of Indian politics can fail to notice the obsessive
way in which Kashmir is claimed by Indian popular media and political narratives.
Barring literally a handful of exceptions, it is impossible to hear Indian opinions
that accord Kashmiris any right to have political agency over their own identity and
belonging. This ‘possessiveness’ in India about Kashmir is not unlike the clichéd
Indian Bollywood hero or the patriarchal man who feels that he has a right to the
affections of even a woman who refuses him.
16
From PM Modi to aggressive
television anchors to the average Indian on Twitter—everyone declares loud and clear
their love for Kashmir and claims it as their own, saying that Kashmiris who protest
are ‘misled’ and swearing that not an inch of Kashmir will ever be ‘given away’. In
2016—in the midst of armed forces committing atrocities against anti-India freedom
protesters in Kashmir with the use of pellet guns, blinding hundreds, injuring
thousands and killing scores of people;
17
the snapping of
telecommunications; the banning of newspapers; and the arresting of human rights
activitists—Modi declared in his speech: ‘Every Indian loves Kashmir. The freedom
that every Indian has also belongs to every Kashmiri. We want the same bright future
for every youth in Kashmir’. With no hint of irony or recognition of the sacrifice
of Kashmiris for their freedom, the PM also launched the ‘70 saal Azaadi,
Yaad karo Qurbani’ (‘70 years of freedom, remember the sacrifices’)
programme to commemorate the sacrifices of Indian freedom fighters (see TNN,
The famous Bolllywood stalker hero saying ‘k … k … k’ preceding Kiran (a
girl's name) in the movie Darr (Fear) (
The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) (
The nature of this unrequited and one-sided love of India for Kashmir (see Drabu,
Taken together, these ways of perceiving Kashmir and Kashmiris enable the erasure of the violence in Kashmir from memory and conscience. Of course, this violence is perpetrated as violence against the bodies of Kashmiris, but the gendered discourses of representation, cartography and possession allow for the perpetuation of a situation where the Indian state-centric narratives on Kashmir are unable to be challenged. Moreover, they create a situation where any political move towards demilitarisation, dialogue, repeal of unjust laws or recognition of historical injustice and trauma for Kashmiris of different religions becomes nearly impossible; the narratives of the Indian state and the Kashmiri people become ever more divergent, with an arithmetic of competing martyrdoms on each side.
Anti-Nationalism and ‘Democracy’
Kashmir is a litmus test for hegemonic masculinist Indian nationalism. In February
2016, on the anniversary of the hanging of Afzal Guru on 9 February 2013 (a Kashmiri
man sentenced to death on the basis of circumstantial evidence for his part in an
attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001; his sentencing included the mention that
his hanging was ‘to satisfy the collective conscience of the Indian nation’; his
body was buried in prison and his family informed after his hanging),
18
student political
leaders (especially Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya) in JNU
were accused of having raised slogans for the Azaadi of Kashmir.
This accusation led to charges of sedition against them. Kanhaiya Kumar was
assaulted in court, stones were thrown at members of the media, and several lawyers
in their robes led marches on the streets of Delhi chanting for ‘Bharat Mata’ (see
Tran,
It can be observed that ‘the Indian state, in the curfewed aftermath of the
hanging, certainly staged a rarest of the rare mis-en-abyme—the Kashmiri
body in the Indian state prison and the body of Kashmir in the prison of the
Indian state’ (Kaul,
Much violence in Kashmir is committed in the name of democracy. Yet the underlying principles are imperial: an assumed economic rationality and a moral superiority. The specific postcolonial economic rising-power nature of the Indian rhetoric ties with the resurgence of the Hindu cultural masculinity to produce the varying kinds of in/conspicuous dynamics of violence in Kashmir. There is violence as explicit violence, such as the killings of militants, which includes the callous and under-reported killings of civilians, the rapes and mass rapes of women that go uninvestigated, and the everyday structural violence faced by survivors and families of the disappeared. There is violence masked as progress, such as the destruction of the environment, the splitting of communities by employment rewards, and the narratives of progressive Hindus versus backward Muslims who need to be enlightened. There is the violence of imaginaries that are the outcome of cartographic anxieties, so that the unfolding of Kashmiri political aspirations could be a beheading of Mother India. There is ultimately the violence of concepts, such as democracy, so that the state is at war with women, stateless subjects are produced in democratic countries, and souverainism is seen as secession.
The ongoing enforcement of patriotism in India, the silencing of dissent with
violence, the vitiated atmosphere of universities and other public bodies, the
revisionist historiography, the rewriting of textbooks, the appointments of
right-wing hardliners to key posts, the conspicuous miscarriages of justice in cases
involving Hindu right-wing violence (see Visweswaran et al.,
The violence of Indian militarisation in Kashmir is perceived as the expected natural
behaviour of a strong masculinist state, as uncompromising as its leader, denouncing
any weakness and dealing with ‘insurgency/separatism’ in a ‘firm’ manner. Indeed, a
statement by Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat in February 2017 made it clear
that the Kashmiris who pelt stones or raise anti-India slogans or flags will be
treated as terrorists by the Indian Army and can be fired upon (Mir,
Kashmir will always remain ours and there has been no change in thoughts since
1947 and neither will it ever come. In 2004, our Prime Minister said that the
boundaries of India won't be altered anyhow, but the facility for inter-country
transportation will be sanctioned. The early [sic] you accept
the fact, the better the conditions will turn out to be…. Cooperate with us so
that we can help you. Whole [sic] world knows the power of
India and knows that India has a very special recognition in future also. Do you
want to be a part of this epic-story of India? (Singh quoted in ANI,
The choice between political demands and proposed economic development is being offered to Kashmiris by India—erasing the politics of the economic—under the shadow of trauma, injustice, dehumanisation and militarisation. The gendered discourses of representation, cartography and possession create a situation where violence against Kashmiris is legitimised. Indian nationalist democracy can thus finally be understood as the masculinist patriarchal bureaucratic governmentality of a postcolonial emerging power with hubris that seeks to uncompromisingly possess Kashmir and derive a validation of its identity from the exercise of such power.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the referees, editors and everyone else who has worked to finalise this manuscript on behalf of Feminist Review. Especially, I would like to acknowledge the nurturing comradeship of Dr Navtej Purewal; she was understanding and supportive when I was stuck in Kashmir in spring/summer 2017 with poor web connectivity. My thanks to Dr Sophia Dingli and Dr Navtej Purewal for inviting me to be a part of the workshop ‘Gendering (in)security: the exclusionary effects of the global neo-liberal turn’ held at the University of Hull on 1–2 July 2016.
Author Biography
Nitasha Kaul is a Kashmiri novelist, poet, multidisciplinary academic, artist and
economist. Over the last fifteen years, she has worked on themes relating to
identity, democracy, political economy, feminist and postcolonial critiques, Kashmir
and Bhutan. She holds a joint doctorate in Economics and Philosophy (2002) from the
University of Hull. Currently an Associate Professor in Politics and International
Relations at the University of Westminster, she has previously been an Associate
Professor in Creative Writing in Bhutan and an Assistant Professor in Economics at
the Bristol Business School. She writes and speaks within and outside academia:
