Colonialism in Kashmir

While the world is still busy combating the Corona epidemic, India has been slowly but surely enforcing settler colonialism in Kashmir, since renouncing its special semi-autonomous status and bifurcating the disputed region into two union territories in August 2019. At stake is not just the legal personality but also the demographic character of the contested state of Jammu and Kashmir and ethno-religious identity of its majority-Muslim people, writes Ishtiaq Ahmad.

Jammu and Kashmir is a UN-mandated international dispute. The UN Security Council has passed several resolutions that call for the holding of a free and fair plebiscite to determine the political aspirations of the Kashmiri people. This makes self-determination an inalienable right of the Kashmiris. Therefore, by revoking Article 370 of the Constitution, which granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir the special status, and then dividing and annexing it, India has violated its international obligations on the dispute.

The fact that Article 35-A was also revoked alongside Article 370 of the Indian Constitution is more worrisome. This is where both the scale and impact of India’s unilateral action on Kashmiri's demography and identity become quite obvious. Since August 2019, the Hindu nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken successive steps, blatantly in the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic that is symptomatic of its settler-colonial intent.

Simply put, Article 35-A defined who could be the resident of the disputed region and allowed only them the right to own and buy property as well as have privileges with regard to employment and education. With this constitutional protection gone, the Kashmiri land is up for grabs.

Settler colonialism entails displacing the indigenous people and replacing them with the outside settlers. Israel has done this with the Palestinians in the past century and Australia with the aboriginals in the previous one. India is the latest entrant in the league of settler colonials in an internationally disputed territory.

As part of the saffron project, the Modi regime had started to fantasize the scenic Himalayan land for Hindu pilgrims and invite Indian investment there in the guise of tourism and development much before abrogating Article 35-A. In the past two years, it has openly encouraged non-Kashmiris to migrate and settle in the disputed territory and actually handed over large swathes of Kashmiri land to Indian investors and armed forces.

A potent example of settler colonialism is the new Domicile Order, which has awarded almost half a million non-Kashmiris, largely Hindus, the residency status in the disputed region. Many of these new residents are the security personnel and their families. They have been given the same right to land ownership and equal share in jobs and opportunities, as Kashmiris enjoyed under Article 35-A.

The current population in the disputed territory is close to 14 million. For decades, with nearly three-quarters of a million soldiers and paramilitary deployed, Kashmir has rightly qualified as the world’s most militarized land. Human rights groups estimate that there is one-armed person for every 17 civilians and roughly seven armed personnel to every square kilometre of land in the region.

Indian militarization of the state of Jammu and Kashmir began with the eruption of insurgency in 1989. However, even before that, despite Article 370, the autonomy of the disputed region had been violated many a times through 47 presidential decrees and eight Governor Rules, which led to the introduction of a series of draconian laws such as Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Public Safety Act, and consequent arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Human rights groups estimate over 8,000 instances of extrajudicial killings since 1990, including nearly 2,000 during the period 2008-18.

In a sense, therefore, India’s settler colonialism project in Kashmir has been in vogue throughout the post-Partition period. Until the 1980s, its target was undermining the political autonomy of Kashmiris. Thereafter, until the fateful month of August 2019, it was to physically exterminate and internally displace the majority-Muslim Kashmiris, constituting almost two-third of the population, first in the guise of counter-insurgency and then, after 9/11, counter-terrorism.

Now, with full grip over Kashmiri destiny, the settler colonialism project has assumed a more sinister dimension. India had locked down the Kashmiris months before the COVID-19 pandemic locked down the world, through communication blackout, death and fear, and even imprisonment of pliable Kashmiri politicians. The pandemic has been the new cover for subjugating Kashmiri freedom voices, which in the worst of circumstances post-9/11 would give rise to youthful uprisings as a populous challenge to brute force.

More recently, the silenced and subjugated Kashmiris have seen their ancestral lands being sold at cheap rates through a new Land Act, which, besides new domiciles, empowers non-Kashmiris to re-purpose agricultural land, which constitutes 90% of the region, for non-agricultural purposes. In total, 165 Indian laws have been introduced in the disputed region and more are on the way to reinforce the colonial legal regime. A parallel territorial delimitation process is also underway to empower the majority-Hindu Jammu at the expense of the majority-Muslim Valley of Kashmir in a future political dispensation.

Indian settler colonialism in disputed Kashmir ultimately aims to create a new Kashmiri identity through displacing and excluding the indigenous Kashmiris and handing over their land and resources to new Indian residents for colonial exploits. Unless the world rises to the occasion to preserve international law and protect Kashmiri self determination, Kashmir as we have known with its peculiar demography, ethnicity and identity may soon become a footnote of history.

The author is an academic and author, who served as the vice chancellor at Sargodha University and the Quaid-i-Azam Fellow at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

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