State Violence and Transformation of Public Spaces in Kashmir | Arup Kumar Sen

The abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 brought about a historic shift in the constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir. However, Kashmir witnessed deep-rooted transformations over a long period of time, particularly with the onset of armed struggle in the Valley in the late 1980s. Very recently, I chanced upon a paper by Gowhar Yaqoob, presented in a symposium on Violence and Democracy, jointly convened by the British Academy and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi in 2018, and later published in a collection of presentations by The British Academy (September, 2019). In his preface, Ash Amin quoted a significant observation made by Michel Foucault in 1978: “There is no antinomy between violence and reason, in things concerning the state at least.”

Gowhar Yaqoob, in her presentation, talked about her personal experience: “In 1999, when I completed high school and joined one of the colleges in Srinagar’s old quarter, known as Downtown, I had to cross the city, where I confronted slow change in the urban landscape. I began photographing the military bunkers that appeared in civilian localities.” Yaqoob theorized this transformation of public spaces in the Valley: “The presence and activities of the Indian military have been constantly transforming public places in Kashmir. Streets, bus stands, market places, post-offices, banks and bridges are transformed into checkpoints, barricades, bunkers and barbed wire enclosures creating a sequence. Following Marc Auge, I use the term ‘non-spaces’ to refer to bunkers, military camps, barricades, barbed wire enclosures and checkpoints…The conversion of spaces into non-spaces allows military surveillance in the civilian domain as well as the naturalisation and neutralisation of excessive militarisation on the pretext of security.” What is the fallout of this militarization of public places in the Valley? To put it in the words of Gowhar Yaqoob: “The conversion of public spaces into ‘non-spaces’ has reached a point where a barricade or a barbed wire enclosure does not surprise the passers-by…because the civilians have now internalised the military geography.”

After the abrogation of Article 370, militarization of the Kashmir valley has intensified. The insightful observation made by Michel Foucault long back is substantiated in the context of counter-insurgency strategy of the Indian State in Kashmir: “There is no antinomy between violence and reason, in things concerning the state at least.”