Containing Contagion in a Garrison State: Field Notes from Kashmir

Check out this research article by Amrita Sharma & Peerzada Raouf Ahmad in History of the Present.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1215/21599785-10253358

Histories of contagion reveal penetrating schisms in societies. Xenophobia, fear, and violence undergird such histories. Entwined with histories of colonialism, fears of contagion engender racism, casteism, objectification, sexism, misogyny, and religious and ethnic persecution. Crisis becomes “war” and challenges are anthropomorphized as enemies that are defined along familiar narratives of vicious prejudice. For instance, just before the nationwide lockdown, Tablighi Jamaat’s congregation in Delhi inspired bellicose narratives about COVID-19 being a “Muslim conspiracy” and neologisms coined to deal with the threat of “Covid Jihad.” These included attacks and economic boycotts against Muslims across India (Mayaram). Colonial legacies of communalism characterize the postcolonial condition in India and frame its politics, policy, and instincts.

India’s “Muslim other” gets embodied in Kashmir. As a petri dish for perennial crisis, innovative politico-military experiments by the state, and multiple insurrections by the people, Kashmir spatiotemporally engenders a protracted pandemic. Since death, violence, torture, and deceit are a part of collective popular consciousness in Kashmir, death by disease elicited unique responses. In a society where martyrdom is a metonym for a “good life,” how is death by virus perceived? In a volatile war zone, how does the state wage a “war on Covid”?

In South Kashmir’s Anantnag, the wife of erstwhile People’s Democratic Party (PDP) worker Aijaz Parray passed away in June 2021 after battling COVID-19 for twenty days. Her funeral was attended by two: Aijaz and his five-year-old son. No maulvi (Muslim priest) in the area consented to perform the last rites. Villagers spoke of the woman with pity and regret, while some hinted at “divine providence.” Parray was a figure of ridicule for many because he worked with PDP, which is seen as a rejection of pro-freedom politics. Others were envious of the wealth and connections his association with the party afforded him. In the current political context in Kashmir, an unattended funeral shamed Parray and marked him socially as “the other.” It also served as a reminder for him to find the “right” politics. Furthermore, ill-attended funerals in Kashmir have historically symbolized stigmatized, compromised lives, usually of army or police informers or so-called traitors to the cause of freedom who are killed by the militants. Namaz-e-Janazah (farewell prayers) without namazis (participants in prayer), even in the context of the pandemic, marked the aggrieved family as pathogenic. Around the same time, the armed forces renewed their offensive against the rebelling militants and the number of real and fake encounters increased. While the pandemic meted out death copiously, it also aided a conspiracy to take away martyrdom—the death that is celebrated, that unites. For as long as Kashmiris have fought the Indian state, their deaths have been their moments of freedom and revival. COVID-19 became a sinister logic of divestment of the life that was meticulously structured and embedded in death.

States across the globe have used war metaphors to respond to the pandemic and consequently have imposed warlike emergency lockdowns, suspended freedoms, denounced accountability, bypassed democratic procedures, and further marginalized minorities. In Kashmir, a stringent and impermeable lockdown had been in place since August 2019 to crush popular anger at the Indian government’s divestment of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status that offered nominal political autonomy to the disputed state (Syed). Localized lockdowns predate the pandemic in Kashmir by more than seventy years. Since India manages Kashmir through a vast network of spies, informers, agents, and a thick military presence, the pandemic offered an occasion for updating information on individuals, families, and villages using all channels of surveillance. While elsewhere, pandemic-induced lockdowns fueled new social geographies of techno-digital connectivities, Kashmir’s lockdown was accompanied by an Internet shutdown. When real-time information about the virus was crucial to saving lives, Kashmir was living under the world’s longest Internet shutdown; it lasted for 552 days (SFLC). Lockdown in Kashmir was enforced as a curfew, through machine guns and the frequently abused section 144 of the Indian Penal Code that prohibits “suspicious” movement and assembly of people and punishes it with imprisonment (Indiankanoon), for that is how historically the state there has engaged with both crisis and normality.

There hasn’t been a time since 1947 when Kashmiris weren’t suspects. Kashmir and Kashmiris were always the proverbial source of contagion for the Indian body politic—the virus that polluted its sacred geography, threatening its territory, delegitimizing its secular claims. How does a state purge disease in a land that is itself treated as a diseased tissue? Kashmiris became doubly contagious. The pandemic presented a unique opportunity to both “teach them a lesson” and benefit the profit-starved recuperating economies of the capitalist world as they finally began active exploitation of this region for resources. New land ownership regimes were instituted as the historical cultural territory of Jammu and Kashmir was carved up into smaller, disempowered units. Its forests were cut down, privatized, and offered up as land banks for industry. Executive orders put in place new policies relating to industrial land allotment, mining, property tax, agriculture, education, and employment (Maqbool). As the citizenry and the political class were placed under house arrest, these laws enabled the capture of vast tracts of private agricultural and horticultural land by the armed forces for expanding numerous camps across the region, lending a sense of permanence to what had been temporary army camps. The screening of government employees in all departments began on the pretext of vaccination. As the COVID-19 crisis transformed into an economic crisis, the lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir arbitrarily fired employees for “suspect loyalties” or supporting a Pakistani cricket team, among other banal charges (Al Jazeera).

During the pandemic, an Indian national security adviser identified “civil society as the new frontier for a fourth-generation war” (Krishnankutty), targeting civil liberties organizations like the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons as illegal and arresting their activists (Ahangar). Many NGOs and religious organizations in India were widely praised for life-saving endeavors like supplying medical essentials to critical patients. In Kashmir, civil society organizations and individuals were banned from distributing medical supplies and oxygen cylinders to patients deprived of treatment in hospitals (Ganai), while doctors were banned from addressing the media and speaking out about the pandemic on any public platform (Fareed). Information in a military state always carries mutinous possibilities.

Militarized societies endure many invasive techniques of control and violence that split open and restitch society in vulgar ways. Therefore, mistrust of the state is matched only by suspicion of each other. Existing and refurbished sociocultural hierarchies of class, caste, gender, religion, and ethnicity throw up many immediate, less purposive enemies. As we traveled across Kashmir in a shared local cab after the first COVID-19 lockdown eased, some Kashmiri men sat discussing the unhygienic practices of lower caste Watuls and Kanils, whom they unanimously (albeit with varying examples) agreed were instrumental in spreading all disease. As they sat venting their distrust of these communities, a tall, middle-aged Gujjar man with a flowing henna-colored beard and a turban entered the cab. Almost immediately, everyone in the cab covered their noses with masks and fell silent. The distrust and disgust transferred, in an instant, from Watuls to the Gujjar—both minorities who are debased by both the state and the society. The intersections of their marginalization compounded their vulnerabilities during the pandemic as political conflict intensified. Ironically, it was the lower caste Dalits of Kashmir who were the frontline workers during the pandemic, as the Grade IV jobs in municipalities and hospitals are overwhelmingly taken up by the lower castes, since the practice is consistent with historical caste-based labor that reserved menial jobs for the lowest castes. While the state eulogized and launched an ill-advised campaign for people to clap and loudly bang utensils in support of the “Covid warriors,” the lower-caste COVID-19 warriors were facing intensified stigmatization.

An uneducated, poor woman from the itinerant Gujjar community in Kashmir who suffered beatings and fines for migrating during a lockdown asked us if we believed in the virus. “What harm can a beautiful flower do to people that they haven’t done to themselves?” she asked, wrapping together her hands and opening the fingers to imitate a blooming flower. Looking at our confused expressions, she asked another question, “Aapne dekha hai corona ka phool?” (Have you seen the corona flower?). Disappointed in our lackadaisical approach to current affairs, she explained that she saw the “covid ka phool” (COVID-19 flower) on national news. To her, it was a radiant, red, unusual flower with spikes and thorns. We realized only then that she was referring to the blown-up microscopic image of the virus being circulated across the media. She continued, “Those two flowers came from China and crossed the border three months ago in Ladakh,” when China and India were locked in a border skirmish, and India’s defense apparatus was being mobilized to go to war because the Chinese army had infiltrated the disputed border region. So she discerned that the pandemic related lockdown was hogwash, since those two beautiful flowers that crossed the border could not possibly harm anyone. The surveillance, beatings, and sadism meted out to people in the name of COVID-19 were what the security forces and the state had been up to for a long time. This time around, they were hiding behind a ridiculous notion of a threat from a flower. Anyhow, she added with conviction, she and her community were immune from any such threats because they were pure, incorruptible Muslims, unlike many in the valley, and they drank pure goat milk daily: they were some of the very few communities in the world that continued to live by the Prophet’s word, his legacy of working with animals and living in harmony with nature. This imagination challenged certain established and normalized responses to the pandemic across the world. It offered normative critiques of the state and its repressive agencies and of capital-guided human enclaves as towns that offered breeding grounds for contamination and disease. In such imaginations, the state wasn’t fighting the a priori, externally constituted pandemic. The state was imagined with the pandemic as coconstitutive and congenital. This view indexed pandemic as the zeitgeist of “normal” times in conflict-torn Kashmir.

As we bear witness to the proliferation of authoritarian regimes globally, marking the unfolding histories of our present, the many faces of the state in Kashmir could bring us into a dialogue with the “exception” to the supposed norm of legal-democratic state practice. Amid the land-grab operations ongoing in Kashmir to set up another five-hundred-acre security establishment for the Central Reserve Police Force and for settling their families permanently, the villagers of Anantnag, Pulwama, and Shopian have been protesting every day since August 2021. In their attempts to carve out newer, unmarked spaces of dissent, the people of Oukhoo village in the Kakapora area in Pulwama are protesting at multiple sites simultaneously—in their fields, outside their houses, and in the marketplaces and mosques. They expose militarized geographies to challenge the official narratives that offer Kashmir as a crushed rebellion and a tamed other. During the pandemic lockdown, Prime Minister Modi showered high praise on this very village in a nationwide broadcast of his radio program, Mann ki Baat, calling it the “pencil village,” as it supplies nearly 90 percent of the wood used to make pencils in India (Ali). This village is set to be wiped out by the Modi government’s plans to further securitize the most militarized zone in the world. Despite the daily violence and precarity of life, heightened and made banal during the pandemic, novel modes of survival, protest, and imagination were/are attempted here that archive lives and mutinies of these stigmatized publics in the era of standardized and sanitized histories.

Acknowledgments

All personal and local place names have been changed to maintain the anonymity of the interlocutors. We are thankful to everyone in Kashmir who helped us navigate our field work, shared their stories, and opened their homes for us. Our thanks to Nishita Trisal for prompting us to write this piece. Many thanks to Aditi Saraf, Anjali Arondekar, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

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