As the title suggests, Hafsa Kanjwal’s overarching argument in Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation is that Indian rule over Kashmir represents a case of colonial occupation. She characterizes the policies and practices of the Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad government (1953–1963) as part of a state-building project premised on a colonial mode of control. In doing so, Kanjwal is simultaneously challenging our understanding of Kashmir’s relation to India as well as rethinking the category of colonialism. Her argument is framed by two interconnected paradoxes. One concerns the configuration of the Indian state as a colonial power, as is apparent in its actions in Kashmir, which during the very same period is emerging as a postcolonial nation-state. She thus argues that colonialism sits at the very foundation of the Indian state and is not an exception to its otherwise democratic order of rule. The second paradox relates to the Bakshi regime’s deployment of a new mode of colonial control in Kashmir, which Kanjwal characterizes as the “politics of life.” Rather than domination through repression and violence, the politics of life is directed towards the care and administration of life.
Kanjwal characterizes this politics of life as a state-building project aimed at materially and emotionally integrating Kashmir into India. In the rest of this contribution, I explore the context and contours of Bakshi’s politics of life as a mode of colonial governmentality. In doing so, I am not only interested in illuminating Kanjwal’s approach to the governance of Kashmir, but also critically evaluating the possibilities and limitations of thinking with the politics of life as a mode of colonialism. Understanding the politics of life as a colonial governmentality directs attention to the desires, interests, and motivations that the Bakshi regime sought to produce in Kashmiri subjects and inquires about the conditions of life that were targeted by this politics. How did the regime envisage the impact of these population level interventions on processes of Kashmiri subject formation? How effective were they in transforming Kashmiri subjects? How do they compare with other modes of colonial governmentality that are based on extraction, racialization, denial of sovereignty or genocidal violence?
The Politics of Life and State-Building
At the time of India’s establishment as an independent nation in 1947, Kashmir was part of a princely state under the deeply unpopular rule of the Dogras. Despite comprising a sizable majority of the state’s population, Muslims were highly disenfranchised and even subjected to ethnic cleansing in the Jammu region by the Dogra army. While the Dogra ruler formally acceded the state to India, his decision was contested by Pakistan and rejected by large swathes of Kashmir’s population. India and Pakistan fought their first war over the Kashmir state which resulted in the bifurcation of its territory between the two countries with a UN ceasefire line dividing the region. Sheikh Abdullah was installed as the first prime minister of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, which was given a special autonomous status within the union through Article 370 of the Indian constitution. It was allowed to have its own constitution, laws, flag, prime minister, and control over internal matters, while the Indian government’s mandate over the state was limited to communications, defense, and foreign affairs. Sheikh Abdullah’s regime (1947–1953) was concerned with preserving this autonomy but was subjected to increasing interference by the Indian government. It was finally brought down through a coup which led to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed being installed as the new prime minister.
Understanding the politics of life as a colonial governmentality directs attention to the desires, interests, and motivations that the Bakshi regime sought to produce in Kashmiri subjects and inquires about the conditions of life that were targeted by this politics.
Eschewing the policies of his predecessor, Bakshi set about integrating Kashmir into India by launching a series of state-building projects. Framed by Kanjwal as the politics of life, this state-building was conducted through a “biopolitical mode of governmentality” which “entailed foregrounding the day-to-day concerns of employment, food, education, and provision of basic services” while suppressing “questions of self-determination and Kashmir’s political future” (9). Kanjwal views these attempts to shift Kashmiri sentiments towards integration with India (by offering them a better life) as premised on essentialist assumptions about Kashmiris as primordial beings who are motivated by a hearty meal rather than any complex desire for freedom. In Kanjwal’s formulation, the politics of life comprises a series of policies and projects in the realms of economic development, tourism, media representation, education, food security, and culture. These interventions were designed, on the one hand, to open up Kashmir to India and Indians by making it available for trade, tourism, and filming cinema. On the other, they sought to make Kashmir economically and emotionally dependent on India. They did this by having the central government fund education and subsidize food. The regime also attempted to represent Kashmir in a positive light to multiple audiences—Kashmiris, Indians, as well as on the global stage—by producing propaganda material and curating visits by tourists, filmmakers, journalists, and foreign dignitaries. Besides cultivating emotional and material attachments to India, these state policies also sought to improve the material conditions of life in Kashmir, especially for Muslims, by offering them opportunities for economic mobility.
Molding a Kashmiri Subjectivity
One of the key objectives of the politics of life was to shape Kashmiri subjectivities in a particular secular mode by presenting Kashmiri history and culture as secular or Hindu. Kanjwal sees this as an attempt by the Bakshi regime to underplay the state’s links with Islam and the Muslim world and forge the region’s historical links with India. Yet even as the regime sought to contain communalism, religious difference was fundamental to its own dealing with Kashmiri society. Rather than religious neutrality, Muslim and other religious identities and communities were critical to the way in which the state saw, organized and managed Kashmiri society, further exacerbating its polarization. Such contradictions are also reflected in the new Kashmiri subject’s relation to India. While on the one hand, the regime sought to emotionally integrate Kashmiris into India, on the other their representation of Kashmiris as a soft, easy-going and simple people who just desired a good meal highlighted their difference from modern India. Such characterizations also reflect that the politics of life was not just premised on creating a new Kashmiri subject but tactically sought to build upon and redirect the existing desires of Kashmiris towards a greater acceptance of India. Since the question of erasure/assimilation is central to Kanjwal’s understanding of the politics of life as a colonial governmentality, it is important to highlight these contradictions in the state’s policies. It suggests that the Bakshi regime’s political project was defined by the need to forge a distinctive Kashmiri identity while simultaneously creating emotional and cultural linkages with India. The defining ambition of the politics of life is therefore not to strike some balance between these cultural formations but to promote affinities between them such that the Kashmiri identity and “India” pull in the same direction. The result, according to Kanjwal, is a process of selective erasure, which ultimately results in the crafting of a “fragmented Kashmiri ‘self,’ one for whom the cultural terrain remains deeply contested and suspect” (233). This model of cultural appropriation points to some key differences between colonial governmentality in Kashmir and Orientalist approaches to the colonization of culture whose exploration can be fruitful for establishing the distinctiveness of this particular mode of colonialism.
Kanjwal demonstrates that as a leader, Bakshi cultivated a paternalistic political style in which he loomed large as an authoritative figure. He also fashioned himself as a modernizing reformer who delivered infrastructure and economic opportunities to Kashmir, especially to its neglected Muslim population. Even though he lacked legitimacy, Kashmiris, and even Muslims beyond the state, looked up to him as someone who could solve their problems. He was bestowed with several titles including that of the “architect of Kashmir,” which reflected the widespread recognition of his authority. Yet Bakshi’s politics of life ultimately failed in its goal of emotionally assimilating Kashmiri Muslims to India. As Kanjwal relates, alongside the politics of life, Bakshi’s government relied extensively on “surveillance, violence, and repression, to contain political dissent against its rule” (236). When the Bakshi regime came to an end in 1963, it was followed by mass protests against the theft of Prophet Muhammad’s hair from its shrine which “paved the way for a mass movement for self-determination against the Indian state, underscoring the tenuous nature of Bakshi’s state-building project during the prior decade” (13). The question that arises then concerns this failure of Bakshi’s politics of life. Why was it that despite significant material improvements for Kashmiri Muslims and their widespread recognition of Bakshi’s authority and his policies, they ultimately rejected the Kashmiri state and refused to diminish their demands for self-determination?
The Bakshi regime’s political project was defined by the need to forge a distinctive Kashmiri identity while simultaneously creating emotional and cultural linkages with India.
This is a lingering question that is not entirely addressed by Kanjwal. It also speaks to the methodological choice of focusing on how power shapes subjectivities. While this approach offers important insights into techniques for shaping subjectivities, the ways in which the subject themselves respond to them is not as clear. For example, consider Kanjwal’s descriptions of the ways in which the Kashmiris engaged with Ghulam Bakshi. She argues that while they rejected his legitimacy to rule over Kashmir, nonetheless, they recognized his authority and even demanded that he use it to improve their lives by providing them with better education and health facilities, etc. What is missing though is an account of how the regime’s policies lead to such dual attitudes towards it. An examination of how these policies were debated, made sense of, acted upon, and even appropriated for their ends by the Kashmiri people can open avenues for understanding the limitations of the Bakshi colonial project as well as offer insights into how it was actively resisted or channeled into unplanned directions.
Questioning the Politics of Life
While Kanjwal does a remarkable job of marshaling a diverse array of archives and interviews to paint a wide ranging and detailed picture of the Bakshi regime’s governance, her use of the “politics of life’” does raise certain questions. How does the plethora of policies and projects that Kanjwal describes coalesce around the category of “politics of life”? Clearly, her use of this category is meant to emphasize the difference between Bakshi’s political era and the violent repression unleashed on Kashmir by the Indian state from the 1980s onwards. In fact, she contrasts this militarized mode of control as “necropolitics” or the “politics of bare life” (273). Yet the question of how state propaganda that seeks to sell an image of a peaceful, beautiful, and secular Kashmir to the international media shares its rationality with state policies of subsidizing food to increase and improve the diet of Kashmiris remains unanswered. While the latter is a clear-cut example of biopower, that is, the power to bring new forms of life into being and calibrate the productivity of subjects by targeting the conditions in which life is lived, it is much more complicated to think of state propaganda for foreign audiences as a politics of life.
Kanjwal’s interest in deploying the framework of politics of life is not so much in establishing the internal coherence of a political rationality but to delineate a modality of control, which she sees as one of many that repeat across Kashmir’s colonial history. However, as I see it, her claim that Bakshi’s regime is colonial is not just premised on the fact that it lacked legitimacy and denied Kashmiris the right to self-determination but also because its policies and strategies sought to create a new Kashmiri subject that is economically, culturally and emotionally assimilated into India. I find her choice of “politics of life” rather than the broader category of “hegemony” to be quite telling in terms of the specificity she wants to bring to her analysis of colonial modalities of control. However, my one quibble with an otherwise meticulously researched and written book is that further developing and sharpening her framework of politics of life would have gone some way to strengthening her argument.
