Hafsa Kanjwal’s book Colonizing Kashmir is an important addition to Critical Kashmir Studies. Broadly, the book analyzes how modern forms of colonialism take place within “post-colonial” nation states and perfect control over people, their land, and resources. It is especially timely when part of divided Kashmir (also called Jammu and Kashmir, J&K, or just Kashmir) is reeling from yet another phase of ever tightening control by India. Kanjwal’s laser-sharp analysis focuses on the 1950s, a notorious time in Kashmir known as the Bakshi Daur (era). During this time, the Indian government weaponized institutions of state-building—such as autonomous governance, territorial sovereignty, elections, infrastructure, development, media, culture, religion, and even feminism—to camouflage its military occupation. This essay keeps critical interventions made by Colonizing Kashmir central and reflects on their impacts on political resistance and gendered activism, which are pivots of my own research.
Since the late 1940s India’s colonial power has distorted and exploited the identity and agency of Kashmiris. Kanjwal illustrates how from the get-go the Indian government put into place a clientelist structure to govern the region and steadily criminalized the Indigenous Kashmiri movement for independence and self-determination. Kanjwal shows how state building and its dissolution were equal processes, especially pivoting on tensions between different communities living together. In 2019, the Indian state came full circle: it went from propping up Kashmir’s political system via clientelism to militarily dismantling the quasi-autonomous state and dividing the region into two. Unprecedently, Kashmir was demoted from a state to a union territory to be ruled directly from New Delhi. Even after more than 70 years, India has had to employ military tactics to remove regional autonomy to further tighten its control over and occupation of Kashmiris. Most Kashmiris distrust Indian policies, with the brutal removal of autonomy being likened to BJP stabbing Kashmiris from the front as opposed to previously being stabbed in the back.
When India and Pakistan became two nations in 1947, Kashmiris were reeling under economic slavery and religious persecution. The region had been under centuries of foreign occupations, the latest being the Dogras, a clan of Hindu warlords. The Dogras had purchased the region of Kashmir along with its people from the British in exchange for their loyalty in regional wars. The Dogra despot fled to India in the face of Kashmiri rebellion in 1947. A clientelist structure would soon emerge from the emergency administration left in charge of Sheikh Abdullah at end of Dogra rule. The state apparatuses that were allowed to flourish were enmeshed in Indian militarism and clientelism and fueled by rank corruption, nepotism, and horse-trading. Policies preyed on the economic desperation and rampant illiteracy of the Kashmiri publics who were emerging from the despotic rule of Dogras. Electoral politics—which the United Nations initially objected to because the region was under dispute—were closely controlled by India. India weaponized electoral politics to create the perception of a legitimate democratic system and solidify its governance. Kanjwal brings together analysis around this period aptly contextualizing the succeeding events which ultimately led to the demise of autonomy.
Client Politics in Action
Kanjwal’s analysis shows how Bakshi Gulam Mohammad’s regime became a prototype for India in governing Kashmir through a mix of military occupation and clientelism. In 1953 Bakshi was installed as the Prime Minister of Kashmir. At that time, under special article 370, Kashmir was a semi-autonomous region that had its own constitution and flag. The previous administrator, Shiekh Mohamad Abdullah, an iconic leader of Kashmiri nationalism, was ousted in a coup. Bakshi, even though Abdullah’s close aide, lost no time in turning against his colleague and friend. Bakshi’s unconditional kowtowing to India earned him the moniker of the “biggest traitor” of the Kashmiris. Abdullah was later framed in a conspiracy case against India for seeking independence of Kashmir. He was imprisoned and exiled on and off for two decades before coming to heel after agreeing to abide by limits on his political actions put in place by India.
Kanjwal’s analysis shows how Bakshi Gulam Mohammad’s regime became a prototype for India in governing Kashmir through a mix of military occupation and clientelism.
Previously in the 1930s and 1940s Abdullah was lionized as “sher” (lion) and “bab” (father) for his revolutionary leadership against despotic Dogra rule. Kanjwal reiterates that Abdullah did “withstand” Indian government’s attempts to erode Kashmir’s autonomy. However, in time he felt the full force of India strongarming him, and ran into disfavor. He was deposed and jailed in 1951 and replaced by an infinitely more plaint Bakshi, whose regime is central to Kanjwal’s analysis. In the 1950s and 1960s India quickly exhausted its earliest cache of local Kashmiri client-politicians. In 1975 Abdullah was returned to power after signing an agreement that effectively ended his political aim of forming a plebiscite in Kashmir to shape its future. It had taken about two decades to fully defang the lion of Kashmir. Kashmiris often hold Abdullah responsible for colluding with India for an autonomous status, which is seen as a death knell for their sovereignty and self-determination. The anger against Abdullah is so deep that his grave has 24/7 police protection. Similarly, Bakshi is not forgiven for his compliant status with India and his era continues to be steeped in shame and dishonor. Bakshi’s own disenchantment for the kind of politics he peddled is manifest in his advising of his heirs to stay away from it.
Eroding Autonomy, Erasing Identity
In 1947, the Kashmiri negotiators, whether rank “opportunists” or “naïve,” saw the autonomy agreement or Article 370 as an ironclad safeguard for self-rule and territorial sovereignty. However, India deployed it as a trojan horse. The moment Article 370 came into effect India used it to pass laws that eroded Kashmir’s autonomous structure. Executive orders, statutes, direct coups, incarceration, detentions, exile, clientelism, and election rigging became a norm for engineering a compliant constituency for India and steadily criminalizing the movement for self-determination. Shiekh Abdullah, who had been pivotal in supporting the agreement, became its first iconic victim.
The Indian state fetishizes Kashmiris and undermines their political and cultural autonomy by controlling the narrative of Kashmir’s history and politics. Resonating with my own work on Kashmiri gendered subjectivity, Kanjwal reveals how Kashmiri men are often depicted through a lens of suspicion and violence as militant and hypermasculine figures. This depiction helps justify militarization and surveillance. Kashmiris are also stereotyped as servile in the romanticized and commodified depiction of Kashmir as a “paradise on earth” that subsists on the scraps of Indian tourism. The exotification of Kashmiri women either as victims or as resilient figures of beauty also plays into the broader colonial and patriarchal projects. As my ethnographic research shows, even the defenders of human rights who mobilize against the Indian military’s abuses, such as the Association of Parents of the Disappeared Persons, are not immune to such brazen appropriation. The reduction of Kashmiris into simplistic tropes reinforces a colonizer-colonized dynamic, one which has enabled the Indian state to justify its control over the region. Indian policies are systematically altering Kashmiris distinctive identity and Islamic-majority character. Within the Hindutva ideology Kashmir is being reframed as a sacred Hindu land. Kashmiri indigeneity is being reframed via legal changes, demographic reengineering, cultural erasure, epistemic domination, and economic restructuring, with a focus on the pre-Islamic past and the demonization of Islam and Muslims. The weaponization of religion and indigeneity reinforce broader settler colonial logics of elimination, replacement, and domination over the distinctiveness of Kashmiri identity. As Kanjwal also illustrates, these processes did not start with the BJP government, but have been in the making for a long time. These processes aim to make Kashmir and Kashmiris compliant within the broader Indian nationalist project, which is also euphemistically called “integration.”
The Indian Politics of Handling Kashmir
Pivotal in the Indian policy of handling Kashmiris has been creating conditions which whittle down the local leaders into mere collaborators. Kashmiris often say that India ensures that no tall graves remain in Kashmir, meaning leaders who would be revered in perpetuity. Such policies of breaking-in Kashmiri leaders and the fragmentation of the political terrain to ultimately cause collective disempowerment continue to remain entrenched in Kashmir’s politics. Leaders like Abdullah and Bakshi are exemplars of this political decimation. They went from being forebearers of Kashmiri nationalism—ones who bargained for self-rule and did not readily accede to India—to becoming compliant clients. When British rule was ending, for regions like Kashmir there was no way of achieving some amount of sovereignty without acceding to larger nation states. This nascent neocolonial system, ridden with imperial Eurocentric hubris, was imposed by the fleeing British colonists. It planted the seeds of many tragic disputes among newly liberated peoples, Kashmiris being one of them. Kanjwal has discussed this in detail throughout the book and pertinently analyzes the Indian military occupation within the settler colonial frame as it has been unfolding since 1947.
The Bakshi regime, as Kanjwal notes, preyed upon the economic desperation of the formerly enslaved Kashmiris in what is now the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir. The military, judicial, electoral, and bureaucratic structures are rigged to generate continued clientelism. Kashmiris who resist this mode of operation are imprisoned, exiled, isolated, or killed. All administrations installed since 1947 have become increasingly authoritarian in dealing with dissent and resistance to Indian rule. Over the years the institutionalization of policies to manufacture Indian loyalists has deepened nepotism and corruption. Bakshi, as Kanjwal illustrates, would often say that if someone did not get rich under his regime, they never would, propagating the idea that Kashmir could only prosper with India. Bakshi began what Kanjwal conceptualizes as developmentalism, a process where economic development is deployed to achieve political legitimacy. Over the long term, this policy would create a chronic dependency on India. Hallmarks of modernity, especially infrastructure, literacy, and development—which Kashmiris badly need—were used to manufacture compliance. Women’s empowerment emerged as state feminism which was weaponized within these policies to create a gendered constituency. Women were thus reigned in by the opening economic and educational opportunities but thwarted of any meaningful or radical political engagement. The tradeoff of gendered empowerment was to remain uncritical of the state and apathetic to politics.
Hallmarks of modernity, especially infrastructure, literacy, and development—which Kashmiris badly need—were used to manufacture compliance.
Kanjwal argues for a critical understanding of the Bakshi era which has been overlooked in scholarly analysis because it is often characterized as being “the first in series of governments through which the Indian state attempted to erode Kashmirs’ autonomy” (30). Kashmiris derogatorily called local supporters of Bakshi “Goggeh” for their collaboration with India and repression of their own people. For example, an uncle in my extended family joined Bakshi’s party mainly for economic opportunities. He was able to secure admissions to professional colleges for his son and daughter. Such was the level of ostracization for Bakshi’s camp that this uncle had trouble finding a match for either of his well-educated children. They were also disinvited from family functions. Such treatment was also reserved for members of Indian parties, such as the India National Congress, who first made an open foray into local Kashmiri politics in the 1960s. Even today, pro-India outfits in Kashmir, both old and new, are popping up every day, and they are seen as proxies for India. Currently, Kashmiri disdain is foremost reserved for the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party. In the recent parliamentary election, Kashmiris, who often boycott polls, voted to keep the BJP and their proxies from gaining seats in the region. India continues to patronize pro-India politics in the region and the leaders of resistance political groups, armed and unarmed, are either killed, jailed, or exiled.
Since 2019, Kashmir has increasingly been facing cultural, religious, and political erasure. Autonomous and territorial sovereignty have been militarily removed and Indian settler colonial policies are fully underway. The Indian government says that the removal of Kashmir’s autonomy is for development, but as I have written elsewhere it should be seen as embedded in a structure of neocolonialism, described by Kanjwal as Third World Imperialism (22) based on fundamentalist Hindu ethnonationalism or Hindutva, and fueled by neoliberalism. Against this backdrop even Muslims living in India are cast as invaders and foreigners. Kashmiris are doubly marked as the Other: first as Muslims and second as seekers of self-determination. Kashmiris are facing the loss of territorial sovereignty, policies of dispossession, ecocide, and rampant exploitation of resources, resulting in neocolonial maldevelopment and settler influx. Kanjwal’s book is a timely arrival that complements Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship that teaches us that such policies in Kashmir are not new and that the “Kashmir issue” is not an intractable conflict but instead has been made intractable by Indian colonial politics over the last 70+ years. Kanjwal pushes against the “territorial and historical conceptions of India, whereby all other political visions and aspirations become mere aberration” (26). This book is a testament to the face that Kashmiri political aspirations for sovereignty are not an aberration yet continue to face tremendous violence at the hands of the Indian nation state.
