Mass surveillance and the crisis of dissent in indian-occupied Kashmir

by M. Rather

“The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state maybe sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be… Real power begins where secrecy begins.” — Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism[1] [open endnotes in new window]

Since 2014, when Modi won political power in India with a clear majority, the Indian political approach to Kashmir has seen drastic changes. One of the biggest policy shifts towards Kashmir occurred on August 5, 2019, when India revoked Article 370 from its Constitution. This provision had safeguarded Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status with India. Changing the Constitution also led to the dissolution of Article 35A, which protected the rights of the Kashmiris over their own land, effectively opening the doors for the civilian settler ambitions of the Indian state.[2] The move was unilateral with almost all Kashmiri political and separatist leaders in jail or house-arrest, and was preceded and followed by a complete communication, media, and Internet blackout.[3]

In fact, the abrogation of Article 370 does not mark the beginning of Indian settler colonialism in Kashmir, which was already under way with large swathes of land under military occupation. However, the abrogation of Article 370 has now opened avenues for the Indian civilian population to settle in Kashmir, a move which has extended lawfare against the Kashmiris, in which the legal system is used to kick Kashmiris off their own land.[4] Farmers in remote villages are ousted from their agricultural land—which in turn is handed over to industrialists from the Indian territory.[5] This has particularly damaged the tribal community in Kashmir. Several sheep-rearing (bakarwal) and nomadic communities of Kashmir were made landless under the new laws in the aftermath of revocation of Article 370.[6]Amid all the new forms of human rights violations in Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370 (alongside the ones persisting for decades), the ambit of solidarity for Kashmiris within the Indian mediascape has significantly declined.

Kashmir has had a tumultuous relation with previous Indian governments; however, the current regime keeps producing new social and political realities that severely impact communication, representation, and the nature of protest in Kashmir. In order to account for these changes, I focus here on relations between surveillance and visual control, especially to trace how the two inform and evolve with each other in neo-colonized spaces such as Kashmir. I evaluate how control over visuality plays a crucial role in the tendency toward autocracy within a democracy and its extension into the citizenry of a fear of surveillance.[7] In particular, I track how current systems for mass surveillance, such as on-ground informant networks as well as digital surveillance, have created new regimes of visual control to stifle dissent in Kashmir and restrict representations of solidarity for Kashmiris. In this process, surveillance in Kashmir functions on a principle of secrecy in which the neo-colonial subject is constantly visible to the state, but the state overall stays invisible.

This shift in visuality is reflected in media representations of Kashmir before and after the revocation of Article 370 in 2019.[8] While Indian media production often focuses on different topics about Kashmir, I highlight here media representation that speaks about and to the political occupation of Kashmir, especially in news, documentary, and Bollywood. By doing so, I demonstrate how the revocation of the Article 370 in 2019 and the surveillance infrastructure of the Indian state have increased state sponsorship of propaganda against Kashmiri Muslims while also stifling solidarity with Kashmir. My goal is to explore the “responsibility of distance and creative solidarity” as a mechanism for sustaining political resistance while it is under threat through state surveillance and looming disenfranchisement.[9]

Access to visuality is wrought with power. Who is watched and who watches is the basis of colonial and neo-colonial occupations. Speaking to the process of studying colonialism, in The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe cautions us from understanding coloniality’s devastation solely through the images and texts present within colonial literature and history. Rather, we should look for and analyze all that is systematically absent within these texts. By evaluating these absences, we can expose the brutality of the colonial machinery.[10] With the faltering of the principles of democracy in India, we have witnessed a shift from protesting towards gagging of the people in Kashmir by the state.[11] Today within mainstream media there is a silencing about Kashmir, an absence of mass mobilization since 2019, and a broader erasure of solidarity towards Kashmir; we must study such shifts through the lens of the national surveillance and visual occupation of Kashmir. Yet while our own stories of suffering and resilience get silenced, we Kashmiris cannot be characterized as invisible. For invisibility is a privilege unto itself. Invisibility’s enforced parameters and ubiquity do not lie under our control; the apparatus of visuality has to be understood as an extension of occupation itself. This visuality derives from the Indian state’s surveillance infrastructure, policies, and propaganda as it incentivizes and coerces media industries into representing Kashmir and Kashmiris in a specific way that coincides with the state narrative about Kashmir.

Surveillance and visuality in Kashmir

Surveillance in Kashmir is not a new phenomenon. Surveillance has been the staple and sustaining force of the Indian occupation in the territory. However, more recently a transformed visuality of surveillance created a crisis of communication and dissent. For Kashmiris, surveillance long existed in the form of army checkpoints at every few kilometers, as well as through violent crackdowns—Cordon and Search Operations, or CASO—on Kashmiri houses and villages.[12] Both are a form of surveillance, and both are physically and visually accessible. When a car drives at night near a checkpoint in Kashmir, the dome lights turn on for the Indian forces to see who is driving the vehicle. In fact, this visibility of passengers and drivers never determined if they would be murdered by the Indian army or not; many have been shot irrespective of their visibility. However, such physical checkpoints did have a reciprocity of gaze between the Kashmiri civilian and the Indian army regardless of such skewed power relations.

The number of physical checkpoints has since decreased in Kashmir. However, surveillance has not. More recently, the state has been increasing its digital surveillance, which operates through visually inaccessible forms of control. For example, Kashmir has seen an increase in high resolution CCTV camera surveillance that function as round the clock checkpoints similar to Blue Wolf employed by the Israeli forces in Occupied Palestine.[13] Biometric tracking and automated facial recognition eliminate the reciprocity of gaze between the occupied and the occupier as well as enforce a constant visibility of the occupied body. Whether it is through the dome lights illuminating a car, or showing the Indian government-issued biometric ID, the neo-colonized subject does not have privilege of being unseen. But now, through the transition from physically and visually accessible markers of occupation to visually inaccessible ones such as digital and interpersonal surveillance, neo-colonial powers like India make their violence invisible. As such, the control that the Indian state exercises on the people of Kashmir is not just of the body and mind, but more importantly over what is visible and what is not.

In addition to digital surveillance, India has also expanded its network of secret informers, in turn activating the fear of the unknown.After the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, the Indian state has aggressively increased its web of informants in the region, involving not just individuals but also local organizations and smaller communities. These informants are coerced to work with the army to inform them of any ‘suspicious’ activity. This practice has a long history, with the Indian government long using Kashmiri citizens as state informants.

After the beginning of a guerilla movement for freedom in 1990s, the Indian state began to build a web of informants and counterinsurgents, bribed by the Indian army and the police; this was in addition to army checkpoints and physical crackdowns on people’s houses and hospitals. The establishment of inter-personal surveillance through informants and counterinsurgent militia grew when popular dissent erupted in the form of a guerilla militant movement in 1989. Analyzing that movement, Haris Zargar stipulates the importance of viewing the armed insurrection in Kashmir specifically as a form of dissent and protest. He does so in order to resist the imperialistic narrativization of the movement and the people involved as “fringe elements,” a kind of politicized interpretation that the state uses to distort the freedom movement in Kashmir and simultaneously validate the Indian colonial clampdown on the protestors in the region[14]

In addition, through recruitment of Kashmiris within the folds of counterinsurgent militias (Ikhwani) and informants (mukbir), the discourse of loyalty among the people gets deeply complicated. Mohamad Junaid theorizes this tactic as “turning Kashmir into a gray zone, the space where a clear distinction between the victims and the oppressors and between loyalty and betrayal became harder to establish.”[15] Here, the Indian state’s tactic of crushing the movement and mobilization for freedom in Kashmir depends upon creating foreboding suspicion among the people themselves.

I conducted fieldwork in Kashmir during the summer of 2023. Upon the condition of anonymity, people told me how Indian army generals have meetings with Masjid (mosque) committees, housing committees, local corporations, union of traders and farmers, and smaller non-profit organizations. The army’s goal is to obtain information about unlawful activity taking place in the area, new persons joining these organizations or entering the town, Indian-based Muslim organization (like Jamaat-e-Islami) trying to work or collaborate with them, and activity of the local political groups and parties in the area.

The information sought from the informants does not simply deal with political activity or guerilla fighters, but is about any interaction that could suggest discontent among the people, especially about being forcibly occupied by the Indian state. These meetings of the Indian army with different groups across Kashmir has increased a feeling of mistrust and suspicion among the people with their own community. Apart from the fear of communication devices tracking and tracing activity on behalf of the Indian state, the government has effectively extended that suspicion and fear to the community members at large in Kashmir. The on-ground surveillance through a network of informants therefore is not simply for the purpose of ‘Indian national security’ but for regulating and controlling the interactions and behavior of the people of Kashmir.

Importantly, the control over the interactions and behavior of the neo-colonized people ensures that efforts for civilian mobilization are crushed before they are even formed. Without outward civilian mobilization and mass resistance against Indian occupation, the Indian state ensures that its visual regime of normalcy in Kashmir is maintained on the global stage. For instance, due to fear and suspicion of each other, Kashmiris now participate in Indian national celebrations, including Independence Day (August 15th) and Republic Day (January 26th). In the past, both of these days were historically marked by widespread shutdowns and silence throughout Kashmir.[16] However, post-2019 with an increased surveillance infrastructure and use of informants in the territory, any form of outward dissent gets crushed, even if the dissent was through silence. Therefore, holding the livelihood and lands of Kashmiris as ransom, the images of them participating in Indian national holidays gets captured by the media to be shown on a global stage, fitting in with a narrative and image of normalcy and integration of Kashmir within India.

The network of on-ground informers in Kashmir has an intense effect on interpersonal communication because it targets people’s land and the livelihood. Outside of agriculture and horticulture, the Jammu and Kashmir State Government is the biggest employer in the territory. Criminalization of dissent under the Modi government does not simply lead to the detention and arrest of the people involved, but also a threat of unemployment.[17] Since the abrogation of Article 370, fifty people have lost their jobs for unclear and vague reasons, especially teachers, professors, and staff of schools and universities. For example, Zahoor Ahmed Bhat was suspended from his job as a senior lecturer of Political Science soon after he appeared in the Supreme Court to argue against the revocation of Article 370 in August 2023. Moreover, three government employees were terminated from their jobs in November 2023 for alleged ‘anti-national’ activities.

Pervasively the invisibility of on-ground surveillance through informant networks breaks down the intimacy and sense of loyalty within a community. This web of suspicion creates a sense of threat not only from state actors in the form of police, army, and auditors but also from fellow community members. The proliferation of spies has chilling consequences for the nature of mobilization and the expression of dissent even within private communal and familial spaces. The invisibility of the surveillance apparatus and the perpetual visibility of the colonized body creates a system of validation of the neo-colonial occupation of Kashmir within the media industry and silences any and every voice of dissent.

Neo-colonial visuality and India-Israel relations

By controlling visuality of Kashmiri life, India is engaging in an effective enforced disappearance of the narratives of people’s trauma, suffering, resistance, political agency, and identity. In another context, Gil Z. Hochberg argues that the “uneven distribution of visual rights” between Israeli armed forces and the occupied Palestinian people creates uneven forms of visibility, where Palestinian civilians are simultaneously made invisible through law while undergoing forced visibility in the form of surveillance.[18] In addition, Hochberg demonstrates how the Israeli state controls images of Palestinians and the contexts within which they appear in order to conceal its status as a the settler-colonial ethno-state.[19] Neo-colonial occupation in the twenty-first century thus pivots upon visual occupation of the people where the images and narratives of the colonized people are controlled and manipulated by the occupying forces. This occupation operates in two ways: both images which emerge from and are allowed into the territory are severely controlled. Visual occupation is an assault meant to isolate colonized people and turn their struggle invisible on the global stage.

By controlling the visuality of those they oppress, neo-colonial countries like India exert diplomatic soft power on the global stage. As Joseph Nye explains, the term

“soft power” refers to the manipulation of geopolitical influence beyond military control, especially through “instruments such as communication, organizational and institutional skills, and manipulation of interdependence.”[20]

Included here too are digital dimensions of security as well as media representations that form the basis of regimes of visuality in neo-colonial contexts. Through a performance of democratic values on the global stage that is orchestrated upon the invisible forms of oppression and surveillance, neo-colonial states like India and Israel use their soft power to manipulate and erase diplomatic outrage over their actions.

It’s important to acknowledge here that that the connection between India and Israel go beyond similarities in manipulating neo-colonial visuality. As Azad Essa documents, India and Israel have longstanding geopolitical and diplomatic ties which translate into transference of weapons, surveillance technology, and occupational tactics between the two states.[21] In the post 9/11 world, measures to exponentially increase defense and surveillance technology influenced India as well as the United States, especially after it underwent two major attacks: the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and 2008 Mumbai attacks (or the 26/11 attacks). By 2004, India had purchased radars, night vision devices, and jamming devices to be used in Kashmir from Israel.[22] After the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, India authorized the use of Central Monitoring System (CMS) on its people, a program akin to America’s NSA’s PRISM. CMS shifted surveillance from storing and gathering data to real-time surveillance of phone calls and Internet activity. Sangeeta Mahapatra explains this shift in surveillance as transitioning from targeted surveillance to mass surveillance, which can legally be utilized to curb dissent and protests in the country as CMS does not require court or parliamentary approval (unlike NSA) and has no mechanism in place for redressing violations of rights.[23]

The extent of Israeli and Indian collaboration on surveillance technologies was exposed by the 2021 report on the Pegasus Project.[24] Pegasus is a hacking and surveillance software program developed by the Israeli private intelligence firm NSO that works with government organizations of different countries. It came as a solution to the data encryption by various websites and apps that protected data from surveillance. Pegasus circumvents individual use of encryption by giving unrestricted access to the device itself to foreign governments.[25] According to the 2021 Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project report,

“More than 2,000 Indian phone numbers appeared on the leaked Pegasus list, indicating that they were potential targets of the software. They include hundreds of human rights activists and academics, as well as diplomats from neighbouring countries.”[26]

At least twenty-five Kashmiri activists, journalists, politicians, historians, and separatist leaders were targeted using this software by the Indian government. Several Indian journalists who have previously shown solidarity with Kashmir also appeared on the list.[27]

Ultimately, the technological, defense, and diplomatic ties between India and Israel establish an important context within which to understand the shift in the visual representation of Kashmir and Kashmiris in Indian media. This is especially the case since the authoritarian pivot of the Modi government impacts artists, creators, and filmmakers both in Kashmir and India. In what follows, I examine how the transformation of media representation about Kashmir before and after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019 creates new forms of neo-colonial visuality that enact the disappearance of Kashmiri struggle. These shifts in media representation complement the expansion of state surveillance in Kashmir used to curtail dissent, protest, and solidarity.

Visual control through media representation

The control over visuality has historically influenced the nature of images which are allowed from Kashmir and Kashmiris to be displayed and broadcast. Mapping the trajectory of commercialized fetishization of the Kashmiri landscape and body in British photography through the works of Samuel Bourne and John Burke, art historian Ananya Jahanara Kabir explores how the beauty, and the violence of Kashmir were fetishized and commercialized by British colonial power and the Indian state.[28] This visual history of Kashmir has continued through the twentieth century, where it has been impacted by a number of major political events. The movement for self-determination in Kashmir reached a tipping point during the election rigging of 1986, which evoked a memory of the previous political betrayal by India during the coup of 1953 that ousted the then Prime Minister of Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah.[29] Kashmir erupted in an armed rebellion against the Indian state in 1989 which was met with the implementation of the draconian law Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which gave the Indian armed forces impunity to conduct human rights violations in the territory, including extra-judicial killings, executions, torture, rape, and seizure of property.[30] Decried by the Amnesty International as a “lawless law,” AFSPA shaped the visuality of Kashmiri solidarity representation on screen through depictions of suffering and suppression.[31] Finally, the Kargil War of 1999 propelled the Indian state into manipulating news media for its geopolitical goals in the region.[32] This war forms the foundation of much of the state propaganda about the valour of the Indian army in Kashmir in a bid to assimilate the territory into the Indian nation-state and overshadow the struggles of the Kashmiri people.

Prior to 2019, the representation of the occupation of Kashmir was markedly nuanced, focusing primarily on the human rights violations conducted under AFSPA. To be sure, this is not to suggest that these media representation were perfect; they often contain critical blind spots and skewed towards legitimizing the Indian state’s control of the territory. In addition, prior to 2019, some mainstream media and propaganda attacked the movement for self-determination in Kashmir. Many others valorized the brutality of Indian armed forces in Kashmir. Nonetheless, news, documentary, and film gave visual space to addressing AFSPA, human rights violations, and the suffering of the Kashmiri people.

National news channels would often air Kashmiri scholars, experts, and even separatist leaders in their debates. During the different critical moments of Kashmiri freedom movement— including the armed uprising of 1989, the 2008-10 civilian uprising, and the mass protests after the killing of Burhan Wani in 2016—news channels were not restricted access into Kashmir.[33] Documentaries would focus on the human rights violations conducted under AFSPA. For example, since 2006, Iffat Fatima has been collaborating with the Association of Parents of Disappeared People to document different families in Kashmir, focusing on people who have lost their loved ones to forced disappearances. Sanjay Kak’s film Jashn-e-Azaadi (2007, PSBT), speaks to various people who have lost their loved ones to the state suppression of the militant uprising since 1989. Similarly, Bilal Jan's Ocean of Tears (2012, PSBT) documents the mass-rape of the women in two northern villages of Kunan Poshpora in Kashmir by the Indian armed forces in 1991. Moreover, independent and solidarity documentary movements started to grow in Kashmir in early 2000s, often with vital financial support from semi-governmental organizations such as the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, a not-for-profit organization funded by the Ford Foundation and partially by the government of India through Prasar Bharati.[34]

Prior to 2019, Bollywood produced diverse narratives that were often (but not always) nuanced about the Kashmiri people and their aspiration for freedom. These include Roja (1992, Ratnam), Mission Kashmir (2000, Chopra), Yahaan (2005, Sircar), Lamhaa (2010, Dholakia), and Haider (2014, Bharadwaj). Two prominent examples of the same are Mission Kashmir (2000, Chopra), and Haider (2014, Bharadwaj). While both films have assimilationist tendencies, they significantly contributed to the construction of the image of a Kashmiri Muslim person within the representational imaginary of the Indian audiences.

Mission Kashmir addresses the armed uprising of 1989 and the human rights violations of AFSPA. The film follows the journey of a young Kashmiri boy who joins the militant movement after his whole family is killed by the police. Although the film demonizes the militant movement for freedom in Kashmir, it does depict the violence and inherent power with the armed forces under AFSPA over the Kashmiri body through the impunity they enjoy despite killing the Kashmiri people.

Haider was produced in the aftermath of the brutal suppression of the civilian uprising from 2008-2010, but the plot was based in the 1989 uprising in Kashmir. The film follows the story of a young man, Haider, as he tries to look for his father who has undergone enforced disappearance after being reported by an informant (Haider’s uncle) to the armed forces. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Haider represents the network of informants (Mukbirs) financed through the Indian government, the counter-insurgent movement (Ikhwanis) creating suspicion among the Kashmiri people, and the human cost of AFSPA. Although they suffered minor controversies in India for not giving the Indian armed forces an overwhelming positive representation, both films enjoyed widespread national and international release.

The tapestry of lawfare against Kashmiri media representation

Since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, the Indian state has implemented specialized media laws which have both increased surveillant control over media practices in Kashmir and transformed expressions of solidarity. Such policies amount to a form of media lawfare. Lawfare is “the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure.”[35] Through manipulation and amendment to laws and rules, a government can effectively engage in a form of a warfare against the people. Lawfare represents the phenomenon of authoritarian states across the globe within which they weaponize laws to suppress any form civil and political dissent as well as criminalize oppositional stance altogether. It allows the government to chip away at the freedom of speech and expression by infiltrating different aspects of the media industry in order to surveil and control them with complete impunity. In Kashmir, lawfare has resulted in an overwhelming production of state coverage of Kashmir within the Indian mediascape. In addition, it has allowed the Indian state to stay invisible and unaccountable for silencing and self-censorship among media professionals.

The scale of coercion exercised by Modi’s government is facilitated by implementation of new and amended laws for film and digital media industries, particularly with respect to dissent against India’s control of Kashmir. Media Policy 2020 in Kashmir gives the power of deciding what is “fake news, plagiarism, and unethical and anti-national content” to government officials to carry out actions or sanctions against journalists reporting about Kashmir.[36] Similarly, Film Policy 2021 requires submission of scripts for approval to the government officials before filming can take place in Kashmir.[37] In the digital media industry, the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (2021, with the latest amendment in November 2023), vaguely define offences within the digital space as “threats to sovereignty, integrity, or security of India.”[38] Similarly, Section 69A of the Information Technology Act empowers the government to block any content, website, information on the digital space that it deems to “threaten the sovereignty, integrity, or security of the country.” These forms of media lawfare not only legitimate state censorship and state-sponsored propaganda, but also suppresses criticism from journalists, filmmakers, and social media users about India’s policies towards Kashmir.

Modi’s government is notorious for using state machinery and laws to coerce media industries into sponsoring Hindutva messages as well as to curb criticism of his government.[39] Take, for example, the transformation that took place at New Delhi Television (NDTV), a broadcast and digital news channel in India that had a long history of independent journalism.[40] In 2022, after a hostile takeover of the company by Adani Group (which has close ties with Modi and his political party Bharatiya Janata Party), the founders of NDTV –Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy—stepped down from the board.[41] This was soon followed by an exodus of major and senior journalists from the network including Ravish Kumar, Nidhi Razdan, and Srinivasan Jain. Many other national and regional news agencies have faced similar troubles. They include: the 48 hour shutdown of Media One in Kerala after its critical coverage of the attacks on Muslims in Delhi in 2020;[42] the imprisonment of Sajad Gul, a senior Kashmiri journalist in 2022;[43] and the closure of the Kashmir Times offices in 2020.[44] In addition, Modi’s government has also imposed bans on documentaries critical of the state and his regime. These include India’s Daughter (Leslee Udwin, 2015), a film about the rape and murder of a woman in Delhi in 2012 that sparked massive outrage and protests in India; India: The Modi Question (BBC, 2023), a two-part series about the authoritarian shift of the Indian state under the Modi government; and India… Who lit the fuse? (Al Jazeera, 2023), a film about the communal violence against Muslims in India by the far-right Hindu groups.

Since the unilateral annexation of Kashmir in 2019 by India, Modi’s government has been carefully orchestrating a narrative of ‘normalcy’ and ‘development’ in Kashmir. Cultural anthropologist, Mona Bhan has demonstrated how Modi has used the narrative of economic development to further his agenda for an ethno-state and secure electoral victory.[45] This narrative of economic development was also used as an argument for annexing Kashmir by revoking Article 370. The state effectively focused on highlighting images of said ‘development’ taking place in Kashmir as well as the images ‘of normalcy returning to the conflict zone.’ Such imagery attempts to erase the visual evidence of Indian brutality and occupation of Kashmir, which falls within the larger purview of denigrating the political conflict in Kashmir as an ‘internal/domestic issue’ of India.[46] Given the vast control over media through amendments to laws in the Indian Constitution, the government is able to control and manipulate the narratives about its occupation of Kashmir.

Representation of dissent among Kashmiris is not permitted by the state. Consequently, media industries adhere to maintaining narratives of normalcy about Kashmir. For example, the news media (that has consistently been under attack from the Modi government since 2014) only report about Kashmir through the visuality of development. Consider, for example, the G20 summit held in Srinagar, the capital city of Kashmir, in May 2023 under the presidency of India. This was the first diplomatic event that took place in Kashmir after the revocation of Article 370 in 2019. During the summit, the Indian government exercised extensive control over the images that were allowed to appear in the media about Kashmir. The performance of normalcy and development of Kashmir was manufactured with high precision. The event was strictly controlled and heavily guarded by the Indian army. Kashmiri rebels accelerated their attacks in the region in the lead up to the event in order to counter the narrative of normalcy perpetuated by the Indian state. The locations where the events were taking place were restricted to the Kashmiri population except those authorized by the state to be there.

However, the extent of control that the Indian state exercises does not extend beyond its territory. As China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey openly boycotted the meeting taking place in Srinagar, the issue of the occupation of Kashmir came in the purview of the global stage again.[47] There is a stark difference in the images used by the global media and Indian media of the same event. In the images below, which are from prominent Indian news channels (Indian Express and Live Mint), the depiction of G20 summit in Kashmir is showcased through aesthetic celebration, with one image showing the delegates taking tourist-like pictures in the gardens of Kashmir and the other showing a banner with a Kashmiri woman in her traditional attire welcoming the delegates to the region. In contrast of these images, international news agencies like BBC and Al-Jazeera document Indian armed forces in Kashmir enforcing the images of normalcy presented in the Indian news media by keeping the areas for the delegates free from any dissenting Kashmiris.

Not surprisingly, Modi’s media lawfare has resulted in a decrease of solidarity for Kashmir among India’s liberal public. Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “sanctioned ignorance,” Ather Zia addresses how the neo-colonial occupation of Kashmir by India engenders selective solidarity whilst negating the movement for freedom in Kashmir as a “deviance,” devoid of “political history, identity, or aspiration.”[48] According to Zia, this selective solidarity has led to the creation of boundaries within which the validity of any discourse on Kashmir is sanctioned or not. She views such solidarity as “selective and shallow,” insofar as it engages with human rights violations in Kashmir following the implementation of AFSPA but never extends to support the freedom movement in totality.[49] Therefore, this selective solidarity ends up reinforcing India’s colonial claim on Kashmir by treating it like a domestic issue. The boundaries of acceptable solidarity within media production for Kashmir have shrunk dramatically after 2019, where now it seems that the only acceptable solidarity includes narratives about Kashmiri Pandits or those that exonerate the Indian state as an oppressor in the region while incriminating the freedom movement in Kashmir. Put differently, post-2019 has not seen a decrease in media production in and about Kashmir, but the ambit of acceptable solidarity has significantly decreased.

The shifts in media representation about Kashmir are impacting the documentaries that are emerging from and about the territory. Independent documentary filmmaking has long been a critical source of counter-narratives that have openly contested propaganda against the Kashmiri freedom movement. Visuals of Indian atrocities in Kashmir and narratives of traumatized Kashmiri people are quickly becoming forbidden subjects, and the ambit of solidarity within documentary narratives is getting smaller. Some of the documentaryfilms about Kashmir that have emerged within the Indian film festivals after 2019 include Ghar ka Pata (Jalali, 2020), Iron Khan (Khanday, 2020), and Nybreum – The Unsettled Shade (Sharma, 2022). There is a significant narrative shift from the earlier films that spoke about the occupation in Kashmir and worked as counter-archives against the Indian state like Khoon Diy Baarav – Blood Leaves its Trail (Fatima, 2006), Jashn-e-Azaadi – How we Celebrate Freedom (Kak, 2007), Inshallah Kashmir (Kumar, 2012), and Inshallah Football (Kumar, 2010).

For instance, the documentary Iron Khan (Khanday, 2020) depicts the post-surrender life of an ex-militant in Kashmir, a topic previously exploredn documentary. However, the treatment of the topic is starkly different from the previous films made about such issues prior to 2019. Parvez Khan (aka Iron Khan) runs a business within the larger tourism industry in Kashmir. While he experiences bureaucratic struggles, the film focuses on the joy he finds in serving the tourists who arrive in Gulmarg, a major tourist destination in Kashmir. The cinematic style of the film promotes fetishization of the landscape of Kashmir where the viewer is invited to focus on the apparent beauty of the land as well as the life after surrendering to the Indian forces.

By contrast, Inshallah Football (Kumar, 2010), focuses on the journey of a young footballer from Kashmir who is struggling to acquire a passport from the Indian authorities as his father is a surrendered militant. While both films appeal to the empathy of an Indian middle-class audience by (quite literally) de-arming the figure of the Kashmiri man in order to erase dissent against the Indian state, Inshallah Football does not restrain from showcasing the inherent violence in the presence of the Indian army in Kashmir. If Parvez Khan is shown to be living a seemingly better life after surrendering, Bashir (in Inshallah Football) continues to struggle to live a life of dignity after surrendering, a burden passed on to his son Basharat.

Similar transformations can be observed in Bollywood where the ambit of solidarity for Kashmir has a seen a steeper decline. Only a handful of films made about Kashmir in mainstream Bollywood directly address the political situation in the territory since 2019, including Uri: The Surgical Strike (Dhar, 2019), Notebook (Kakkar, 2019), Shikara (Chopra, 2020), Mera Fauji Calling (Saxena, 2021), The Kashmir Files (Agnihotri, 2022), Pathaan (Anand, 2023), Article 370 (Jambhale, 2024), and Fighter (Anand, 2024). Most of these films select Indian army personnel or Kashmiri Pandit as protagonists. These representations are built at the cost of the demonization of Kashmiri Muslims in the films in an attempt at discrediting the movement for self-determination in the territory and erasing the history of hurt and resistance of Kashmiris.[50]

Most of these films experienced widespread success at the box office and many received government support through tax-exemption. Some state governments even incentivized their employees to watch these films (like The Kashmir Files and Uri: The Surgical Strike) by granting them a half-day holiday. In addition, some films like Uri: The Surgical Strike, Article 370, and Pathaan valorize the covert missions of the Indian army in Kashmir, in turn representing the Kashmiri body as a suspicious figure and the Kashmiri landscape as a threatened space for national security. By doing so, these films garner latent support for any and all forms of surveillance of the Kashmiri people—digital and on-ground—irrespective of the human rights violations such methods create.

Across these aforementioned media representations, we witness that the ambit of solidarity has not simply decreased but is progressively being eliminated. This shift is heavily influenced by the governmental onslaught on media professionals and companies that do not openly participate within the state’s propaganda machinery. Works that support nuance with respect to Kashmir are tacitly silenced and unable to be produced, undergoing a phase of self-censorship. By contrast, narratives that support Indian propaganda about Kashmir are directly and sometimes financially encouraged by the government. However, it must be noted that while the mainstream media in India is leaning heavily towards supporting the Indian state propaganda on Kashmir, there are certain alternative Kashmiri and solidarity filmmakers who are producing works in solidarity with the movement for self-determination in Kashmir, such as Maagh (The Winter Within) (2022) by Amir Bashir and I am not River Jhelum (2022) by Prabash Chandra.

Visual control and creativesolidarity

A visuality of ‘normalcy’ in Kashmir is critical for the settler colonial ambitions of the Indian state. The aim is to posit Kashmir as a viable space for capitalist and industrialist ‘development’ despite the grave environmental devastation such ‘development’ can cause to Kashmir’s fragile ecosystems. In turn, the people of Kashmir are muzzled from speaking out against the atrocities and human rights violations conducted by the Indian state. The combination of lawfare, digital, and on-ground surveillance is not simply an extensive apparatus for regulation of images coming out from and about Kashmir, but the mechanism to prevent the creation of any image of dissent altogether.

Resistance to visual occupation needs to occur through giving space to the counter-current and underground movements still taking place in Kashmir. Within the rapidlyshifting context, many Kashmiri journalists, scholars, filmmakers, and artists have gone into a self-imposed exile to avoid the consequent silencing due to the digital surveillance infrastructure and the network of informants imposed upon Kashmir by India.[51] This exile allows them to continue protesting the neo-colonial occupation of Kashmir. In this context, it is imperative to understand what Cheran Rudhramoorthy calls the ‘responsibility of distance’ within movements for creative solidarity.[52] As Rudhramoorthy explain, distance—either through geography or class— can confer a level of safety and security from the oppressive state apparatus. Through this distance, it is possible to sustain movements that create archives and narratives of resistance and lend support through creative, academic, and journalistic endeavours. Creative solidarity that does not adhere to state sponsored frameworks and boundaries of acceptable narratives is critical for sustaining resistance movements such as that of the freedom of Kashmir. Creative solidarity through distance has engendered transnational solidarity for Kashmir and sustained journalistic, academic, and artistic resistance for the movement of self-determination. It has circumvented state-imposed silencing that we are currently witnessing in Kashmir. As the Indian state rewrites the history, demography, and archives of Kashmir, it is imperative to create counter-archives and resist the neo-colonial erasure of Kashmiris.

Notes