Online Desk: Political history in Kashmir is rife with betrayal, manipulation, systematic structural, militarized state violence, and human rights violations. Powerful rulers, politicians, military bureaucracies, and nationalists in the Indian media are responsible for the oppression in the occupied territory. They have worked together for decades to colonize this beautiful land.
A significant part of India’s colonization project is the oppression, disempowerment, and invisibilization of Kashmiris. Strategies of assimilation and elimination have been combined. Kashmir’s history has been appropriated and distorted unrelentingly through attempts to dehumanize the Kashmiri people.
International legal luminaries have described these violations as ‘crimes against humanity’, as they exceed the threshold for ‘crimes’ under international law. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has observed: “Impunity for human rights violations and lack of access to justice are key human rights challenges in… Jammu and Kashmir.”
This preemptive repression is marked by defilement, harassment, surveillance, prohibitions, detentions, torture, and targeted and custodial killing of the members of these organizations by the paramilitary personnel. The malicious aim is to increase the costs of supporting resistance against Indian rule.
Using police and army spokesmen as objective sources of information, colonizing authorities play down Kashmiri political resistance. They justify dubiously legalistic and excessively militaristic retaliation as a lawful response to the presumed ‘threatening law-and-order situation. The rejection of Indian hegemony is portrayed as a threat to India’s unity and integrity.
In contrast to what India would have the rest of the world believe, petitioning for national security laws and incarceration laws against Kashmir dissenters is not an exceptional and extraordinary measure; it is integral to their Brahminical colonial-settler enterprise. It is the cutting-edge tool with which they chisel the settler-colonial Hindu state into existence.
Kashmir has become the Hindutva-inspired settler-colonial laboratory for the ruling Hindu nationalist policy. They are ready to hold Kashmir forever, even though they can keep it only at gunpoint.
They reframe the heartless state-sanctioned violence, reducing the Kashmiri to a pro-Pakistan (therefore anti-Indian) agent, who, as a terrorist enemy, must be killed or otherwise neutralized by a permanent removal from social and political life through prolonged and unremitting jail sentences.
As a result of an ever-evolving repressive regime, the state has lost its moral authority to rule Kashmir. Resentment against Indian rule has reached a point of no return due to the state’s deceitful political maneuvering and brutal militarism.
In a vastly asymmetrical power relationship with the colonizer, Kashmiris fight a battle for survival as they suffer material, psychological, and physical impacts from the conflict. A long haul is ahead of them. Currently, they are digging in under the shadow of the guns.