On 11 December 2023, the Indian Supreme Court declared its verdict on the legality of the government’s revocation of the ‘special status’ of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). On 5 August 2019, the Indian government deoperationalised Article 370 of its constitution, which had previously given a semblance of autonomy to the region after a contested accession to India in 1947 . The five-judge bench of the apex court unanimously upheld the government’s decision, noting that J&K did not retain any sovereignty when it acceded to India.
Three days prior to this ‘expected’ decision, the United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Palestine, and the UK abstained. A single hand raised far away from the bodies, ruins, and rubble in Gaza determined that the Palestinians, who have often been referred to as less-than-human, would continue to be bombed.
Elsewhere, for Kashmir, the Indian Supreme Court put a stamp on what Kashmiris have always known – that “pervasive dishonesty” is symbolic of India’s judicial conduct in and over Kashmir. As hollow rhetoric on durable peace continues, we must ask what avenues of justice remain for occupied peoples – from Kashmir to Palestine! Even as these wars – on bodies, homes, narratives and memories – happen ‘elsewhere,’ it becomes crucial to identify the complicity of multiple institutions and mechanisms of ‘justice’ globally in inflicting injustice.
Long history of violence
Following the Supreme Court (SC) verdict on Kashmir, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called it a “resounding declaration of hope, progress and unity for our sisters and brothers.” This narrative is part of the Indian state’s policy of deploying the tropes of development to cover up for violence.
Even in August 2019 as Kashmir witnessed a curfew and the world’s longest internet shutdown, it was celebrated in India in the name of development, women’s empowerment and rights for sexual minorities. It is a reflection of saviour complex and pinkwashing as the state projects itself as the protector of women and sexual minorities, against the dangerous, savage Kashmiri Muslim men.
When a popular armed struggle for freedom (azaadi in the local lexicon) erupted in the late 1980s against Indian rule in Kashmir, India’s response was brutal counter-insurgency tactics. Human rights groups have documented widespread killings, arrests, use of torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearances as marking this phase. By early 2000s, the state was shifting to language of peace and dialogue in its attempts at ‘integrating’ Kashmir, even as dense militarisation continued.
Between 2008 and 2010, over a hundred young boys were killed when mass protests erupted in the region. People widely referred to this phase as Kashmir’s second intifada – borrowing the term from Palestinian resistance, as a way of shaking off the empire it was up against. In 2016, Kashmir witnessed the “year of dead eyes” as hundreds were left fully or partially blinded by the state’s use of “non-lethal” pellet guns. The spectacular and everyday forms of violence are telling of the framing of a Kashmiri body as killable, maimable, in the Indian imaginary and how it becomes a site to reproduce India’s sovereignty.
In recent years, there has been absolute silencing of any narratives around the right to self-determination. Journalists, human rights defenders and academics have been arrested for reporting on human rights violations or holding views contrary to the state narratives. Such incidents have had a chilling effect on free expression. In many ways, the forms of violence reflect experiments from the “Palestine Laboratory” brought to Kashmir through a military-industrial-surveillance complex.
The failings of ‘domestic’ and international legal mechanisms
The Indian legal (dis)order in Kashmir has, over the decades, imposed a permanent emergency in the region marked by “normalisation of wartime ordinances.” Laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) have respectively enabled excessive powers and impunity to armed forces and long years of incarceration on vague accusations of terror weaponised against dissidents.
In cases where people have approached the courts, it has been years of exhausting legal processes, rarely resulting in conviction of Indian forces accused of violence. A 2014 court hearing of a widely reported case of mass sexual violence by Indian forces in 1991 had the army counsel referring to women’s testimonies as “recorded rotten stereo sounds that play rape all over again.”
The courts have continued to be sites of further violence and dehumanisation for Kashmiris, sustaining the military occupation. The state reinscribes violence through hyperlegal structures and iterative “performances” of the rule of law. This is true of the recent SC verdict, a “ringing endorsement” of the state’s use of law as a site of warfare to subjugate the people’s aspirations of azaadi.
Under the garb of being the “world’s largest democracy,” India has managed for Kashmir to be seen by the international community as a question of constitutional rights internal to India, enabling it to refuse international oversight as well as the application of laws of armed conflict to it.
Not only the ‘domestic’ legal regime in such contexts, even the international arena is a site of imperial violence. With regard to international systems and mechanisms, it has never been clearer than in the present moment of how imperial powers are able to play a hegemonic role therein, effectively shutting down any means of holding violating parties accountable.
Even as officials of the United Nations have repeatedly advocated for ceasefire in Palestine, invoking ‘powerful’ provisions of the UN Charter, ringing alarm bells of a global threat from the war, Israel has continued with its relentless violence. It is no surprise then that the Palestinian journalists reporting from the ground decry the world’s apathy, and powerfully remind us, “We will not forgive you . . . Even if we die, history will never forget.”
Justice for occupied peoples?
As killings in Palestine continue, the purpose of this article on the recent developments in Kashmir is not to divert attention from a genocide that we are all watching unfold in real time. It is to push us to think through these current developments and intersecting axes of oppression in order to build transnational solidarities and resistances.
The UN where a raised hand this time meant that no resolutions would be passed for ceasefire, was the same platform where a resolution for plebiscite in Kashmir was passed in 1948 – never to be fulfilled. People under military occupation approach these platforms with caution, expecting little but also acutely aware of the lack of alternate avenues for accountability.
At a time when people are ever more hopeless of avenues of law and justice both ‘domestically’ and at the international level, our decolonial commitments to the ideas of justice need them to be divorced from being a function of law. Instead, our sense of it must centre people’s struggles to dismantle the multiple structures of oppression and violence, as well as their calls for liberation.
I am constantly reminded of the people I work with in Kashmir, many of whom emphasise the incapability of the existing systems to deliver justice and consciously refuse to engage with them. Some others see the engagement as a way to expose systemic violations, and challenge the erasures imposed by the empire. The struggle for justice and liberation is rooted in bearing witness, and in this constant refusal to forget.
Due to safety concerns for the author, this blog has been published anonymously.
