By Zunaira Komal

“Kehtay hain Kashmir jannat hay: jannat kisi kaffir ko mili hay na milay gi. Ay kaffiro hatt jao k Kashmir hamara hay, saray ka sara hay…Mein kehti hun Kashmir ki Azadi tak jang rahay gi, jang rahay gi.”

“They say Kashmir is paradise. Paradise never belonged to a nonbeliever nor will it ever. O disbelievers, move aside, for Kashmir is ours. In its entirety, it is ours…I say until Kashmir is free, war it will be, war it will be.”

– Ayesha Sitara[1]

Ayesha Sitara, an admitted patient in the psychiatry ward of a Pakistani military hospital, spoke these words to me during our very first conversation. Ayesha belongs to what she describes as a “mujahideen family”—a family engaged in moral and physical struggle in the way of Islam. Two of her brothers, before their deaths, served as mujahideen (warriors) for Jihad-e-Kashmir (a fight for the liberation of Kashmir) in various capacities. Part of her brothers’ work entailed writing for the movement. Ayesha, being older than those two, helped them pen articles and pamphlets, and eventually took on a full-time writing position once her brothers passed away. Ayesha frequently recited poetry (her own and that of Iqbal and other local poets) and sang songs of Kashmir’s Azadi (freedom), about the unending struggle in the way of Islam and the necessity of not resting easy until practicing Islam is made safe in Kashmir.

Ayesha’s poetics—in the straight path of Islam—informed how she understood her illness and Kashmir’s suffering. The former, her symptom, remains beyond the scope of this essay, but I explore what Ayesha’s poetic recitations signal about Kashmir’s “disputed” status and what we can learn from her regarding India’s recent revocation of Article 370 and 35A and the attendant escalation in brutal state repression.

The present moment, the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A, has been falsely marked by many as a rupture in Kashmir’s relative autonomous status in the Indian constitution and its rule. However, as Kashmiris – activists, freedom fighters, scholars – have demonstrated for a long time, the illusion of “statehood” under occupation has been a cruel and clever lie. The long on-going fight is thus not about reinstating this temporary provision that maintains autonomy-in-permanent-abeyance. So, what then is this fight about? What is the real terror that the revocation signals if not a newly marked non-autonomy? In this time of fleeting global scrutiny, in which purported allies and supposed neutral mediators peddle a false and ever-deferred peace, we must correctly identify the relationship of Islam to both the resistance and to the repressive paranoia of the Indian state. While Islam is downplayed in both right-wing and liberal-secular discourses about Kashmir, it simultaneously undergirds the present moment’s horror and anxiety.

Historical recap:

The decolonization process of 1947, marked by the Partition of Pakistan and India, resulted in a split and, ironically, occupied Kashmir. Kashmir under British occupation was one of a few semi-autonomous princely states, which could elect to join India or Pakistan at the time of Partition. Kashmir’s Hindu king at the time acceded to India (the disputed authenticity of the accession document or Muslim-majority Kashmir’s mass resistance to this decision cannot be discussed here).[2] Pakistan and India went to war over Kashmir for the first time that year, after which the United Nations mediated a bilateral (without considering Kashmiris as separate stakeholders in their own fate) peace talks, resulting in a “cease-fire line” carving a divided Kashmir. The ceasefire included a promise to hold a plebiscite which would determine the will of the Kashmiris, and whether they wished for independence or Indian or Pakistani statehood. This plebiscite has never taken place. Several wars over Kashmir later (see Pakistan-India disputes of 1965, 1971, and 1999),[3] Kashmir remains a point of nationalist stake-claiming, with the “cease-fire line,” later renamed “Line of Control” (LOC), having come to acquire the status of a de-facto border.

1989 marked the beginning of a popular armed uprising against the Indian state.[4] In addition to the armed rebellion, in 2010 wide-spread anti-India protests, marked especially by stone-pelting youth on the streets (in a move resembling Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation), signaled the beginning of what has been described as the “Kashmiri intifada.”[5]

According to conservative estimates 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed by the Indian military-state apparatus since 1989, and 8000 have gone “missing.”[6] Existence of about 3000 “mass graves” that the Indian state was keeping quiet was confirmed in 2009.[7] The occupation has also produced about 32,000 widows and 97,000 orphans in the Valley.[8] By conservative estimates, there are at least 1,500 half-widows (women whose husbands have been disappeared but not confirmed dead), who face unique economic hardships because they do not qualify for pensions and other social services.[9] In the past 20 years, about 17,000 people, most of whom are women, have committed suicides in the region.[10] Currently under the Indian state’s military occupation, the Kashmir Valley has the highest concentration of soldiers in the world (more than Afghanistan or Iraq).[11] Physical space has been transformed through the razing of fields and orchards to build military bunkers and checkpoints.[12] There are endless reports of torture and state-sanctioned rape by Indian soldiers, not to mention the economic, social and psychological costs of living under decades of undeclared war.[13] Further, beginning in 1990, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) termed Kashmir a “disturbed area” and allowed any member of the Indian armed forces complete immunity to carry out acts of violence, enter and search any premises or people, arrest anyone suspected, and use whatever force is deemed necessary – all without requiring a warrant or oversight.[14] There are other draconian laws, like the Public Safety Act, which allows authorities to keep potential organizers for Azadi in jail as preventative detention without trial.[15]

The Global War on Islam OR There Is No “Mask” To Be Stripped Off

India’s recent move that revoked Articles 370 and 35A – the former a special provision in the Indian constitution that was meant to guarantee Kashmir’s semi-autonomous legislative status until a plebiscite could be held, and the latter a povision that prevented explicit settler colonialism in essence – has been conducted as part of an explicit attempt to counter the force of Islam in the region. In a nationally televised speech, Modi claimed that the territory has been stripped of autonomy due to “terrorism and separatism.”

This move is one in a long series of anti-Islam policies by the Indian state. Taking away the temporary-until-plebiscite provisions makes very real Kashmiri fears about the Indian state’s attempt to alter the Muslim majority demographics of Kashmir. These fears have been confirmed further by Indian citizenry’s celebration of the fact that property can now be bought in Kashmir as well as “fair Kashmiri brides” can be obtained. Here we must remember that land is connected to practices of inhabiting that land. While we correctly point out the state’s settler colonial strategy, we must also remember the threat posed by settler colonialism is the threat to local traditions as well as land dispossession.

Cabeiri Robinson, in her comprehensive ethnography with mujahideen families, traces Jihad-e-Kashmir’s contours as ones of struggling for liberation, of defending one’s family and loved ones living under conditions of brutality, and of reestablishing a Muslim life in exile (for those who engage in a protective migration - hijrat - out of the occupied land).[16] Kashmiris, thus engaged in jihad against the state’s occupation, have had their Islamic framework of physical and moral struggle labelled and collapsed under the global phantasm of “terrorism,” a tactic that is strategically deployed by the global “War on Terror” beneficiaries to disenfranchise Islamic anticolonial movements.

In June of this year, the government of Narendra Modi (India’s current PM and leader of Hindu right-wing BJP, connected to the paramilitary organization RSS responsible for anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002 and on-going anti-Muslim riots and lynchings in India) announced that it is considering a new process for burials of Kashmiri Muslim militants. Janazas, Islamic burial rites, for militants killed by the Indian military in Kashmir are open to the public, usually draw thousands of mourners, who celebrate martyrdom, mourn Kashmir’s occupation, and promise on-going resistance. To suppress the outpouring of support for Kashmiri militants, BJP is considering a process that would necessitate that burials should take place “in camera” and be closed off to the public. “The idea is to hand over the body to the family and then hold the burial in front of the local magistrate. Section 144 will be strictly imposed, and no one else will be allowed to attend. Also, the entire event would be filmed,” a source in the security establishment told ThePrint. The proposed new process goes against the earlier thinking of the security establishment, which was to not hand over the bodies.” This move establishes several things. It gives the surveillance apparatus of the state unparalleled and intrusive access to Kashmiri suffering while it enforces the imperative to make private Kashmiri mourning which has been integral to continuation of public memory and Islamic modes of struggle. The surveillant imperative of this move for privacy thereby not only paranoidly suggests clamping down on another avenue of Kashmiri resistance but also delineates how Kashmiri Muslims must practice their faith. In a move emblematic of secular-securitized governance, India continues its secular policy of relegating Islam to the private domain and marks public and political Islam as always already a threat. Preemptive warfare, especially since September 11, has been the hallmark strategy of other prominent democracies, such as the US and Israel, for the creation of populations “primed” on the primacy of a “potential” risk, through a continuous loop of threat and fear.[17] India is now capitalizing on this justification for war based on a threat that has a potential for emerging, and which can never be proven to not occur. This is what has been used as justification for the anti-Islamist[18] militarization and repressive paranoia against Kashmir.

A growing body of critical scholarship shows that Kashmiris under Indian-occupation live in the world’s most militarized zone, experiencing countless displacements, systematic maiming, disappearances, deaths, rapes, torture, economic disenfranchisement,religious persecution, and political exclusion at the hands of a growing anti-Islam alliance between Israel, the United States, and India.[19]

The triangular relationship of military intelligence and support, arms trading and economic aid between India, Israel and the US is well documented. While Israel remains the biggest recipient of US military aid, India has become the largest weapons market for the Israeli arms trade. Not to mention India itself has been a major recipient of US aid, and recently signed what is being called the “mother of all defense deals,” and has been declared a “Major Defense Partner” to the US. Israel and India have conducted and filmed joint military exercises in the Negev desert, claiming to share military expertise learned by Israel in Gaza. In response to Kashmiri protestors’ stoning of Indian armed forces, India’s recent Israeli-inspired strategy of “non-lethal” maiming has produced the world’s first mass blinding. The discourse that Israel is a lone democracy in the Middle East, fighting a terrorist threat,[20] very closely mirrors the discourse that India as the world’s biggest democracy is an “anchor of stability” for regional peace against terrorist threats in the region. The conflation of Islam with terrorism is of course part of a longer Western phantasmagoria, with its newest formulation taking place under the rubric of the “War on Terror.”

These military and economic ties are directly related to a growing cultural alliance predicated on an “anti-Islamist” defense strategy. The growing financial alliance between these settler-nationalisms is predicated on sharing a common enemy. In his book, “How the West Can Win,” Israel’s Netanyahu identifies this common enemy as Islam. Often dismissed as a right-wing ideologue, Netanyahu in fact was describing a very real historical formation. Critical postcolonial and Marxist scholars such as Edward Said, Cedric Robinson, and Joseph Massad have in fact argued something very similar; the “West’s” constitution of itself is in fact paralleled by its constitution of what the West describes as “Islam.”[21] While India receives aid and training from both the US and Israel to quell the Islamic threat in Kashmir, we are also witnessing a cultural interaction between Zionism and Hindutva, predicated on conquest and exclusion.[22] Israeli IDF soldiers, after their months of killing Palestinians, come to India in search of “shanti” or peace in the Himalayas – a space that is specifically marketed to them as spiritual but not Muslim, and hence safe.

As we see this new anti-Islam onslaught in Kashmir, many political analyses have sought to describe Kashmir as a site of human rights violations solely, seeking to shame India into realization that it is failing to live up to its role as the world’s largest democracy. Many Indian analysts have lamented either the failure of democracy, interrupted democracy or the “stripping off of the mask of democracy” to reveal the undemocratic Hindu right-wing nature of India underneath. However, it is important to recognize, in this time of fleeting (if present at all) global scrutiny, that this recent move by the Indian government is not an eruption onto the scene of peaceful or democratic relations in Kashmir. Rather, the revocation of “autonomy” from Kashmiris is entirely consistent with India’s decades long policy. Attempts to appeal to human rights violations to international “unbiased” mediators have long fallen on indifferent ears. While the United States government continues to reinforce that Kashmir is “India’s internal matter,” it has been aware of the systemic use of torture and human rights abuses including state-sanctioned rape as revealed by a WikiLeaks issue.[23] Similarly, India’s use of cluster bombs (a form of ammunition banned internationally), somehow met no legal obstacles in Kashmir.

While securing censure for the violation of basic human rights continues to be an ever-evasive process in Kashmir, the Indian state – mirroring other major democracies of the world – markets its occupation as the very embodiment of human rights. In his speech on the abrogation of Article 370, Modi appealed to an age-old anti-Islam phobia that specifically targets Muslim men: “The daughters of Jammu and Kashmir were deprived of the right that our daughters had in rest of the states.” Referencing how forceful subjection of Kashmir to India’s constitution would make Kashmiri women enjoy the apparently bountiful rights available to Indian women, the state leader firmly positioned himself within a long colonial legacy of saving Muslim women from Muslim men.[24] This claim would be laughable were it not so sinister. Mirroring the claims by other prominent democracies, such as the US’ justifications for invading Afghanistan to save Muslim women, or Israel’s justifications for its brutal tactics of settler colonialism as an attempt at saving Palestinian women and queers, the Indian state has been a partner in a growing global homonationalist and imperial feminist discourse. This discourse of Muslim men as removed from and needing civilization, as oppressors of their own women who would wish to see them punished and on whose behalf the state intervenes, and as violent suppressors of queer rights, are all tropes the Indian state has engaged to delegitimize the Kashmiri armed resistance, all with the support of prominent Indian feminists.[25]

What has remained consistent in India’s decades-long narrative about Kashmir is the phobic construction of Islam as a force at the edge of the state that is to be conquered, and those who resist within Islam’s domain as always already a threat. Few things would thus be more disingenuous than diagnosing the suffering of Kashmir as a phenomenon only present under the new right-wing government or dismissing Kashmiri Jihad to seek some international secular ground for rights. Talal Asad explains that contrary to what one might think, it is not “humans” but rather citizens who are guaranteed human rights. That is, one must have national rights to seek human rights. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights…accepts the fact that the universal character of the rights-bearing person is made the responsibility of sovereign states…”[26] The Declaration appears to make a small provision for resistance in case human rights are not being “protected by the rule of law”: subjects will be “compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.” Asad’s analysis of the legal and moral limitations of this statement deserve to be quoted at length:

“…The Declaration seems to justify rebellion only when it can be seen as a response to the government’s violation of human rights law, although all infringements of the law (and their remedy) can be properly determined only by a court of law. There is no explicit recognition that what is allowed by the law may be unjust and therefore intolerable; there is only the statement that nothing contravening human rights can be lawful (which is either a tautology or untrue). In other words, The Declaration seems to assume a direct convergence of the ‘rule of law’ (a notion that depends on the proper maintenance of rights by state institutions) with social justice (a vision of social life that logically presupposes remedies but not necessarily rights, and that is concerned more with questions of distribution and civility than with individual rights and liberties). If that is the case, the rule called law in effect usurps the entire universe of moral discourse.”[27]

Asad goes on to examine how the Nazi state’s very atrocities caused a retrospective inclusion of “crimes against humanity” into international law. What can be considered a crime against humanity is again not for nonstate norms within communities to decide but is to be arbitrated by the law of the state, into which nonstate norms must seek assimilation to be recognized. In any case, Asad points out that the human rights charter “has been more useful for punishing criminals convicted of genocide than for preventing the crime” and that too not because the world is unaware at the time of such a genocide (as the Nazi state’s atrocities and the Allies’ reluctance to intervene show us).[28]

To add to Asad’s analysis of the explicit language of The Declaration, which highlights the necessity of national rights to obtain recognition within the framework of human rights, we must remember that citizenship itself has not functioned so homogeneously for rights calculation. As I have argued elsewhere, in the calculations of the “War on Terror,” citizens are further dividuated into civilians and militants. I recapitulate my argument here briefly: While civilians are purportedly deserving of non-violence, militants can be targeted and killed with impunity. This is already a metric that is false since civilians and nonviolent protestors of all ages, genders and so forth, are killed and maimed without legal recourse. However, who is militant and who is civilian is also not a self-evident division in a place where people are struggling to hold on to their lives and homes. To buy into such an argument would be a display of how liberalism disapproves not of violence, but of the violent exercise of freedom outside the frame of the law.

From Asad’s astute discussion we can garner how what is not recognized by states’ law is thus unacknowledgeable, and what is unacknowledgeable cannot be addressed. If in the “rule called law [which] usurps the entire universe of moral discourse,” Islam only ever emerges as a threat to be countered, as something tolerable at best when confined to the private sphere, as a source of morality at most in matters of belief but not in matters of knowledge, then any suffering understood or resisted through Islam’s framework is essentially unacknowledgeable through that rule of law. Within such a fraught formulation of recognition, the objection cannot be made that the laws and norms of the “War on Terror”/War on Islam might themselves be unjust or deserving of being unlawful. Legality as a principle to determine right from wrong therefore has always failed Kashmiris devoid of national rights. Further, and this is key, Islam’s own universe of morality, which remains antagonistic to the state, cannot be acknowledged by the law as anything but pathological or dangerous. Kashmiris, thus, are marked as terrorists, potential terrorists or protectors of terrorists . What we are bearing witness to is not the stripping off of the mask of democracy, but the very active operation/enactment of this secular-democratic form itself.

Ayesha’s Islamopoetics:

While modern secular governance would have us distinguish between times of right-wing genocidal violence and times of liberal-secular slow erosion of tradition and autonomy in which the state of exception allows for the continuation of legal violence, Kashmir’s on-going resistance would remind us to not treat the present “crisis” as newness in conditions. Both forms of modern rule have remained antagonistic to Kashmir, in which Islam appears as either threat or obstacle on the way to progressive enlightenment and secularization. Even those condemning the Indian state retain faith in its democracy and law to resolve Kashmir’s plight, and undermine the mujahideen in Kashmir. Chiding the Indian government on its rash decision (to conduct “surgical strikes”) in response to the February Pulwana suicide attack by a 22 year old Kashmiri man on a police check post, Arundhati Roy writes: “Is the Government of India willing to allow the actions of these young men to control the fate of this country and the whole subcontinent?” While Roy appeals to the reason of the Indian state, it is Kashmiri militants who emerge as beyond reason, who in their youthful misguidance could bring the region of South Asia and potentially the whole world to the brink of nuclear war.

Such frameworks of rights or justice cannot but see Ayesha’s Islamopoetics as at best patronizingly misguided, as strategic rhetoric on the way to a proper articulation of rights-based suffering, or at worst a pathological formation. How could the secular-securitized frameworks outlined here accommodate the moral universe evident in her recitals and edited renditions of Islamic militant poetry that remains antagonistic to the law of the state?

Woh sang-e-giran jo hael hay raastay say hata kar dam lain gay;

Ham rah-e-wafa k rah-ro hain, manzil par ja kar dam lain gay;

Ya bazm-e-jahan mehkaein gay, ya khoon mein naha k dam lain gay.

Islam ka sikka ham dunya mein bitha k dam lain gay.

Har dil mein muhabbat ki aik aag laga dain gay.

The heavy stone that is in our path, until we remove that obstacle, we will not rest

Travelers on the path-of-faith(fulness), until we reach our destination, we will not rest

Make fragrant the assembly of the world, or bathe it in our blood, we will not rest

Establish Islam’s rule of law in the entire world, we will then rest

In every heart will burn the fire of love.

Ayesha – diagnosed with Bipolar disorder – was interrupted by her symptom often, bursting out into poetry mid-speech. She was brought to the hospital by her concerned sisters, who feared her poetic recitations were becoming too frequent and inappropriate, followed by episodes of deep depression. Whether Kashmir’s plight was the cause of Ayesha’s suffering or whether it was simply her “flight of ideas” that randomly selected a part of her past to torturously dwell in cannot be ethnographically adjudicated. Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s work in a hospital in Algeria during French colonization examined how the symptoms of the colonized signaled an attempt to “survive the desperation of daily life, and the delirious disbelief in which time is lived over and over again.”[29] Stefania Pandolfo, reflecting on Fanon’s work, argues that for Fanon

“there is no simple exit from the legacy of a violent history…Fanon does not dwell on the individual post-traumatic syndrome, but instead turns the question back to himself and us. He calls us into the historical life of the symptom, the ‘vertigo,’ which we must feel as our own…the point for Fanon is not to eschew but to engage the vertigo of existence. For in the experience of vertigo, in the staggering, and by extension in the symptom, the phantasm, the delusion, exists the encounter with the traumatic reality of a collective history...the vertigo of history becomes for Fanon an ethical site of vision.”[30]

How, then, might we turn the question posed by Ayesha’s poetics—deeply embedded in the literary tradition of Islam—back to us? To let such a poetics provide an ethical site of engagement with Kashmir necessitates that we remain wary as India collapses its long-standing occupation of Kashmir under the popular imperial rubric of Islamist terror. Critical responses to India’s new move will only align themselves with this anti-Islam global convergence if the significance of Islam is denied (or disingenuously labelled “foreign to Kashmiri culture”) in Kashmir’s oppression or resistance. Much focus has remained on the illegality of the move, on human rights violations, on the failure of democracy and so forth. While such analyses are part of a multi-pronged approach to bring the occupation of Kashmir to international attention, what the exclusion of Islam from Kashmiris’ resistance or anti-Islamism of the Indian state in Kashmir’s repression does is reduce the occupation to an issue of legality and humanitarian violence and in the process displays the failure of liberalism to disapprove not of violence, but of the exercise of violence outside the frame of the law. This very framework allows governments to enact genocides while simultaneously classifying the violence of the militants as acts of terror.[31] The struggle in and for Kashmir necessitates that we learn how Islam is simultaneously spectacularized and erased within the logic of the War on Terror. Understanding the resistance to revocation of Article 370 means we understand the confirmation of Kashmiri fears that India plans on altering the Muslim majority demographics of the occupied land. Put yet another way, what is the Indian state’s anti-Islamist biopolitical agenda in Kashmir? Or still, why would the Muslimness of the population be under threat? What is signaled by the instinct to refuse Kashmir as struggling within and for Islam and analyze it as a human rights problem? In such a time of deceptive solidarity, it is imperative that we bear witness to how Kashmiris themselves articulate Azadi. Is it not significant that in mass actions, the cries for liberation echo thus: “Hum kya chahtay? Azadi! Azadi ka matlab kya? La ilaha illallah!” “What do we want? Azadi! What does freedom mean? There is no God but God.” Conventional feminists, upon hearing such an articulation of Azadi, would consider the “coupling” of Islam with freedom in Azadi to mean a reduced space for women’s rights. However, taking seriously the moral universe being espoused in such aspirations would necessitate a nuanced hermeneutic sensitive to the moral discourse of Islam which challenges the very notion of secular freedom itself. It is significant that Ayesha’s utterances cannot be recognized as anything but misguided or pathological by the Indian feminist or the Indian state. These calls for Azadi do not simply denote demands for freedom, but rather express an enthusiasm to set forth the very conditions of possibility of freedom itself, i.e. the shahadah, a collective declarative utterance that “there is no God except God.”

Zunaira Komal is a PhD student at University of California, Davis, currently working on psychiatry, Quranic cures and militarized humanitarianism in Azad Kashmir.

[1] I have made her first name anonymous but have kept her chosen anonymous last name the same.

[2] For more, see Alistair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846–1990 (Hertsfordbury: Roxford Books, 1991); SumantraBose, “Kashmir, Roots of Conﬂict: Paths to Peace,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., Voices of Terror (New York: ReedPress, 2004); Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. Verso Books, 2013.

[3] Victoria Schoﬁeld, Kashmir in Conﬂict: India, Pakistan, and the Unending War (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996). Also see: Abraham, Itty. How India became territorial: Foreign policy, diaspora, geopolitics. Stanford University Press, 2014.

[4] Cabeiri Debergh Robinson. Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists. Berkeley: California University Press, 2013.

[5] Sanjay Kak, ed. Until my freedom has come: the new intifada in Kashmir. Penguin Books India, 2011.

[6] Duschinski, Haley, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, eds. Resisting Occupation in Kashmir. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

[7] Chatterji, Angana P., et al. "Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian administered Kashmir." International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir. Kashmir Process 2 (2009).

[8]Zia, Ather, “Disappeared Men and Searching Women: Human Rights and Mourning in Kashmir,” published in Samar Magazine, Aug 30 2016. [http://samarmagazine.org/archive/articles/364]. See also: See Amnesty International, India: Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, 2001. Accessible via http://www.refworld.org/pdﬁd/3c29def33.pdf. Also see Parvez Imroz, Kartik Murukutla, Khurram Parvez, and Parvaiz Mata, Alleged Perpetrators—Stories of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir (Kashmir: International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir, 2012). Accessible via http://kashmirprocess.org/reports/alleged_Perpetrators.pdf

[9]Dorabji, Tara, and Rahman, Susan, “Makers of Memory: Women in Occupied Palestine and Kashmir,” published in Jaggery, 2014. [http://jaggerylit.com/makers-of-memory-women-in-occupied-palestine-and-kashmir/]

[10]Khalid, Sarir, “Increasing cases of suicide in Kashmir,” published in The Milli Gazette, Jul 28 2016. [http://www.milligazette.com/news/3983-increasing-cases-of-suicide-in-kashmir]

[11] See Until my freedom has come: the new intifada in Kashmir.

[12]Kamala Visweswaran, ed. Everyday occupations: experiencing militarism in South Asia and the Middle East. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. p.22

[13] For documentation of everyday effects of occupation see: http://www.pucl.org/
See the documentary “In Shopian”, Dir. Chris Giamo. [https://youtu.be/za8Ugun6i1A].

[14] See Resisting Occupation in Kashmir

[15]Junaid, Mohamad. “Peace, tourism and political games in Kashmir.” (2012) Retrieved from: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201272612535508711.html

[16] Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists (University of California Press, 2013).

[17] Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke University Press, 2015).

[18] For a detailed discussion of anti-Islamism see Doha, Tanzeen R. "Specters of Islam: Anti-Islamist (Re) Presentations in Secular Media and Feminism (1979-2011)." The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35, no. 2 (2018): 29-62.

[19] Japleen Pasricha, [Interview with Essar Batool] “Dear Indian feminists. Kashmir is Occupied. Period;” Mona Bhan, Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge: 2013); Haley Duschinski and Bruce Hoffman, “Everyday Violence, Institutional Denial and Struggles for Justice in Kashmir,” Race & Class 52, no. 4 (2011), 44-70; Saiba Verma, “Interrogating the “Post-conflict” in Indian- Occupied Kashmir,” Cultural Anthropology (2014); Ather Zia, “Enforced Disappearances in Kashmir: The Case of Fateh Jaan” in Of Occupation and Resistance – Writings from Kashmir – an Anthology, edited by Fahad Shah (Westland Publishers, 2013); Zia Ather, “Women Searching for the Disappeared in Kashmir,” SAMAR Magazine; Shefali Chandra, “’India Will Change You Forever’: Hinduism, Islam and Whiteness in the American Empire,” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 2 (2015), 487-512.

[20] Netanyahu, Binyamin, ed. Terrorism: How the West can Win. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

[21] Massad, Joseph A. Islam in liberalism. University of Chicago Press, 2015. See also: Said, Edward W. "Orientalism: western conceptions of the Orient. 1978." Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin 115 (1995). Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p 67.

[22] Muralidharan, Sukumar. “Conquest and Exclusion: The Parallel Trajectories of Zionism and Hindutva.” https://www.academia.edu/4550466/Conquest_and_Exclusion_The_Parallel_Trajectories_of_Zionism_and_Hindutva

[23]Burke, Jasan, “WikiLeaks cables: India accused of systematic use of torture in Kashmir,” published in The Guardian, Dec 16 2016. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/16/wikileaks-cables-indian-torture-kashmir]

[24] Abu‐Lughod, Lila. "Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others." American anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783-790. Also see, Walia, Harsha. Undoing border imperialism. Vol. 6. Ak Press, 2013.

[25] Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. "Monster, terrorist, fag: The war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots." Social Text20, no. 3 (2002): 117-148.
For an example of Indian feminists replicating dominant state discourses about Kashmiri men and the resistors see: Butalia, Urvashi, ed. Speaking peace: women's voices from Kashmir. Zubaan, 2014.

[26] Asad, Talal. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford University Press, 2003. P 137

[27] Ibid, p138

[28] Ibid, p139

[29] Marriott, David. Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford University Press, 2018. P 242

[30] Pandolfo, p 243

[31] To see how the Indian state used a very similar strategy in 1984 to label Sikh resistors as terrorists while conducting massacres of Sikh populations in Khalistan see: Report of the Independent People’s Tribunal. “State Terrorism Torture, Extra-Judicial Killings and Forced Disappearances in India.” 9-10 February 2008. p 113. Can be accessed at: https://hrln.org/publications/torture-extra-judicial-killings-and-forced-disappearances-in-india/?fbclid=IwAR3zGC3Q8ItGpc1gTAEn_VBCHdaGCAiVRdp7Nk9vtxOcrtwtaW9yW-gibmk