Abstract
This article identifies the colonial imperative of ‘we must develop them, with or without their consent’, which is used by the Indian state in order to dominate Kashmiri Muslims, and argues that this notion of development combines patriarchal silencing of the subjugated as well as a gendered fantasy of liberating oppressed Kashmiri women and minorities. While the colonial nature of Indian rule over Kashmir has been a long-term phenomenon, the focus in this article will primarily be on a specific political transformation imposed by the Indian state since August 2019, when even the pretence of autonomy and recognition was given up, and all phenomena constituting coloniality became conspicuous and acute. Adopting a feminist lens, I highlight nine features of contemporary Indian coloniality in Kashmir: denial of consent, paternalism, violence, enforced silencing, lack of accountability, arbitrariness, divide and rule, humiliation and a specious idea of development. I further argue that such a notion of coloniality as development is better understood as ‘econonationalism’ (akin to homonationalism and femonationalism), where the supposed liberatory ideas are rhetorically deployed to mask a dehumanising subjugation.
Highlights
For it is not true that there are some good colons and others who are wicked
As democratic rights come to mean much less in India,[1] the usual rationales given for why power is exercised in this way by the Indian state upon Kashmiris wear thin
This article identifies the colonial imperative of ‘we must develop them with or without their consent’ that is used by the Indian state in order to dominate Kashmiri Muslims, and argues that this notion of
Summary
For it is not true that there are some good colons and others who are wicked. There are colons and that is it. The features of Indian coloniality in Kashmir I have highlighted here from a feminist perspective—consent, paternalism, violence, enforced silencing, unaccountability, arbitrariness, divide and rule and humiliation— which are ever more conspicuous, are underscored by a final feature of a contemporary imperial-colonial project, which frames control as a choice between ‘development’ or ‘freedom’: between enhanced economic welfare plus well-being aspirations or political and individual rights, where the ‘choice’ is forced by the controlling power itself. Nowhere else is the implication of the liberation rationale of development as linked into the coloniality of India in Kashmir as in the question of gender and, Kashmiri women. The nationalist project in India, as elsewhere, is deeply gendered, and the Hindu nationalist project of the BJP on Kashmir is filled with contradictions in how it combines coloniality with social conservatism as well as the language of liberation (on various aspects, see Kaul and Zia, 2018; Dhar, 2019; Mushtaq, 2019; Naqvi, 2019). Despite the overwhelming acceptance within India of the right-wing government’s constitutional coup in Kashmir, the fact remains that the move is part of a toxic nationalism that operates with an often violently and coercively enforced Hindu supremacism making political use of religion, along with hypocritical doubletalk on gender, and is comprised of the usual discourse of liberating women and the fantasies of possessing women as property.
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