Kashmir—Resistance is the Way Forward

India-China stand-off has been going on since March this year. Apparently China has brought reinforcements in the area which is strategically crucial to the security of its national highway 219—the road connecting Tibet with Xingjiang—-, and of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor(CPEC).

This piece is an attempt to think through the complexities and disjunctures in undertaking anti-colonial feminist solidarity work, confronting our complicities in the ongoing coloniality, violence and dispossession of marginalised peoples exacerbated by the state, in which we remain invested and from which we benefit. Here I am thinking specifically of India’s actions in the Kashmir valley

Suchitra Vijayan and Uzma Falak discuss the “impossibility” of speaking about violence in the context of the occupation in Kashmir, the role of poetry and visualization, and the space of singularity as a site of cultural and political resistance

I was a teenager when I lived through a long curfew in Kashmir in the 1990s when the rebellion against Indian rule was at its peak. After decades of betrayals, broken promises, and pent-up resentment, Kashmiris had risen up in arms.

On 5 August 2019, the Indian government unilaterally changed the legal status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This measure not only undermined India’s own constitutional process, but also effectively annexed a territory that remains disputed in the international arena. Since then, the government has placed Indian-occupied Kashmir on lockdown

The Pakistan-India relations, apart from brief interludes, have remained fairly antagonistic. The memories of the 1965 and 1971 wars and major skirmishes especially Kargil are still fresh in the minds of many. But what we are witnessing now is clearly one of the worst periods in our history of 72 years.

It was a dark, chilly night. The words were colder still. A horde of outwardly respectable, people had huddled together – bundled up in their hate.

Attentively, they took in every ugly, dishonest and vicious remark of the Indian Consul General in New York, Sandeep Chakraborty. The crowd, emboldened by delusions of grandeur, supremacism and a concocted history of wrongdoing, sat in a trance.

100 days and running. In fact, stampeding. Kashmir remains under siege. Kashmir remains a civilization shutdown. Kashmir remains a land with no laws. Kashmir remains in news but with such stale familiarity of the state of oppression that futility is in danger of triumphing over opportunity.

Kashmir has been cut off from the rest of the world for more than two months now, with little certainty about what is coming next. Kashmiris living in and outside the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir remain disconnected with hardly any means to communicate with each other. Just a few days ago some mobile connectivity was restored.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, was a man on a mission at the United Nations, imploring members last week to persuade India to lift its siege of Kashmir, a longtime flash point between the two nations, which both have nuclear weapons.