Kashmir: Crackdowns and Plunder

On a warm spring day last March, I visited Ali Mohammad Sagar at his home in Humhama, a middle-class neighborhood in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. As we sat inside his high-walled compound, in a well-tended garden below cypress hedges, he cast a dismal glance at heaps of debris that lay to one side of the enclosure—the remains of a two-story residence that, two months before, the Indian government had deemed built on “state land” and demolished. Sagar was not at home when the structure was leveled. Like many well-to-do Kashmiris, his family was idling away the winter months in the warmer Indian plains. He rejects the government’s claims and says he has the documents to prove it. 

Sagar was one of thousands of Kashmiris targeted in an eviction drive last January, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) deployed policemen across the region, ostensibly to seize state land back from “encroachers.” They bulldozed homes and businesses in rural hamlets and urban localities, expelled families from farmland they had cultivated for generations, and displaced indigenous nomads from forests where they camped.

It was an unprecedented exercise of mass dispossession. According to official data, more than 42,000 hectares were seized. The evictions were paused only when protests threatened to break out. A year later there is little clarity on the number of properties flattened and people made homeless. Kashmiri activists who document state abuses are often harassed by authorities; some have been imprisoned for years on trumped-up terrorism charges. 

When the Modi government came to power in 2014, one of its aims was to hollow out Kashmiri sovereignty, which decades of Indian occupation had already severely eroded. In 2019 the Lok Sabha revoked Article 370, a constitutional statute that allowed Kashmiri legislators to write laws to protect land, jobs, and culture, thereby ending Kashmir’s semiautonomous status—the condition on which it acceded to India in 1947.

The consequences of the revocation cannot be overstated. First, it has facilitated a land grab: under Article 370, outsiders could not acquire property in Kashmir. Now they can. Authority over public lands has passed from the state government to New Delhi, which has evicted locals and sold plots to new arrivals. 

Kashmir’s political landscape has also been transformed. There used to be two camps: unionist parties and a broad range of separatist outfits and guerilla forces. The former contested elections, seeking to administer and thus legitimize India’s occupation; they enjoyed the spoils of office and were often corrupt. The latter called on Kashmiris to boycott polls and fought the Indian military; they were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. But the distinction between the two has now blurred: the Indian government has refashioned its allies as enemies. 

Sagar is a case in point. A former law minister of Jammu and Kashmir, he is the senior-most leader of National Conference (NC), the unionist outfit that has dominated the state’s politics since accession. NC distanced itself from the armed freedom struggle that broke out in the 1990s after security forces murdered dozens of peaceful demonstrators. At the height of the insurgency, when even uttering the name “India” was considered a betrayal, Sagar pushed to strengthen ties between New Delhi and Srinagar. The guerrilla leadership put a mark on him. He told me that at least twenty-five people have been killed in attempts on his life. India, as part of its policy to protect unionist politicians, gave his family personal security—but retracted this protection in 2023. The guards used to live in the demolished building in his compound. “It is like throwing him to the wolves,” a colleague remarked when I visited.

Modi said that the revocation of Article 370 would “integrate” Kashmir into India. In fact it marks the onset of a settler-colonial project. After decades of suffering under army occupation and violent counterinsurgency, the region is now exposed to Indian settlers and industrialists. Kashmiris justifiably fear being turned into a minority in their own homeland and eventually driven out. In November 2019 Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul-general in New York City, told a gathering of expatriates that settlements have “happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.”

The land and resources of Kashmir have long been coveted by outsiders. In 1846, after winning the first Anglo-Sikh war, the East India Company acquired Kashmir and then sold it for 75 lakh rupees ($90,000) to the Hindu Dogra ruler of Jammu, an arid region to the south. The Dogra rulers imposed a corvée and levied punitive taxes on the Muslim-majority peasantry, who were forbidden from cultivating their own land, and empowered Pandits, a tiny minority of upper-caste Hindu landlords.

At independence, the Indian National Congress, led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a Pandit, strong-armed the Dogra king Hari Singh into acceding as a semiautonomous state. The eventual deal gave Jammu and Kashmir its own constitution and a separate flag, and allowed local legislators to make laws on all significant matters save for defense and foreign relations. Kashmir’s head of government was a prime minister, not a chief minister, as in other states. Nehru also promised to hold a plebiscite on Kashmiri self-determination under UN supervision. But neither he nor his successors were serious about that promise—a betrayal that has led generations of Kashmiris to rebel.

Sheikh Abdullah, the founder of the National Conference, was Kashmir’s first Prime Minister. He was a progressive leader, inspired by Soviet socialism and prodded on by leftist Indian intellectuals. In what remains the most successful project of its kind in South Asia, he redistributed some 90 percent of the land belonging to feudal landlords among the peasantry. Kashmiris were allowed to grow food and put cattle out to pasture on commons. The state also set up robust free education and healthcare systems. These reforms ushered in a period of relative prosperity: incomes rose, as did life expectancy. Even today Kashmir boasts one of the lowest poverty rates in South Asia and has far better social indicators than India (whose public schools and hospitals are largely dysfunctional).

In 1953 Nehru dismissed Abdullah on the charge of consorting with insurgents, jailed him, and replaced him with a pliant local leader, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed. Abdullah was released for good only in 1964. Nine years later, long after India amended the state’s constitution and abolished the title of prime minister, he signed an accord with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, to become chief minister. But by then he was a shadow of his former self: Kashmiris viewed him as a desperate old man who was sacrificing his ideals. He died in 1982 and was replaced by his golf-loving son, Farooq Abdullah.

In 1988 a younger generation of leaders disgusted by accommodationist politics launched a nonviolent uprising. The Indian government’s response was ugly. Through the late Eighties and early Nineties security forces killed scores of unarmed protestors—more than 180 people in Zakura, Tengpora, Hawal, Gawkadal, and Handwara in 1990, fifty-seven in Sopore in 1993, forty-three in Bijbehara the same year, twenty-one in Kupwara in 1994 (this is a partial list). The bloodletting pushed tens of thousands of young men to heed separatists’ call for an armed insurrection. With assault rifles supplied by Pakistan, guerilla fighters went after local police, soldiers, unionist politicians, and anybody seen as collaborators, including the local Hindu population. Over 130,000 Pandits fled.

The main guerrilla outfits that emerged were Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), Lashkar-e-Tayebba (LeT), and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. Pakistani intelligence officials trained their members in secret camps in Azad Kashmir, the part of Kashmir that Pakistan administers. Thousands of guerrillas hiked through mountain passes and crossed the heavily fortified frontier; hundreds were killed along the way.

Soon the Indian government had stationed more than half a million troops in Kashmir, turning it into a military colony. They were legally protected from prosecution for crimes committed while on duty, including murder. They disappeared countless civilians, killed others in “fake encounters” (in which civilians were retroactively labelled insurgents), and burned down homes. In 1991 security forces raped dozens of women in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora. 

The first phrase that entered our idiom during the counterinsurgency was crackdown haa lug (crackdown has begun). When someone announced this, you knew that security forces had arrived in a neighborhood, dragooned its residents to a nearby location—a school ground, a football or cricket field, a graveyard—and were conducting “search” operations. On three occasions, as a teenager, I sat by my grandfather’s grave as troops rummaged through our homes. He was a die-hard Abdullah admirer, who brooked no criticism of the “Lion of Kashmir.” I was glad he was not around to see what his hero’s party had brought upon us. Informants picked out young men who soldiers took to vacant houses for “questioning”—that is, torture. Their screams made our blood run cold. Many returned broken and scarred, never to play with us again. 

At least seventy thousand people have been killed since the insurgency began, a vast majority of them civilians. Although guerrilla fighting has markedly declined, Indian troops remain on the ground—and are no less violent. In 2016, during mass protests over the killing of Burhan Wani, a charismatic guerilla commander, security forces fired pellets at civilians, blinding over 1,100 people. Journalists described the event as the world’s “first mass blinding.” The Indian government remains apprehensive about another uprising, which is partly why it eventually revoked Article 370.

In August 2019 Modi ordered hundreds of thousands of Indian migrant workers, holidaymakers, and Hindu pilgrims to leave Kashmir. The message was clear: the government was planning something big. Soon thousands of troops rushed into the Kashmir valley, reinforcing the roughly half million men already stationed there. Close to midnight on August 4, the internet was cut. Phones stopped ringing. Security forces raided homes and abducted thousands of civilians, many of whom were spirited to jails outside the state. Unionist politicians—including three former chief ministers, Farooq Abdullah, his son Omar Abdullah, and Mehbooba Mufti—were detained in relatively sumptuous guest houses. Resistance leaders were dumped in squalid jails, from which a few returned home in coffins, including Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai, Altaf Ahmad Shah, and Ghulam Mohammad Bhat. 

By morning, a security lockdown had been imposed; no one could leave home. A profound silence fell on the valley. We learned what was happening on Indian television. Jingoistic news presenters gleefully declared that Article 370 had been revoked, and that the state was split into two union territories to be controlled by New Delhi: Jammu and Kashmir as one and Ladakh as another. The clampdown lasted nearly seven months, through which phone and internet access was cut. The troops bussed into Kashmir in 2019 have not left. 

Along with removing Article 370, the Modi government drafted laws allowing Indians in Kashmir to vote, work, and purchase land. Since then New Delhi has poured billions of dollars into the region, scaling up infrastructure—roads, railroads, and so forth—to make it easier to access. The government has entered into public-private partnerships with enterprises it is close to, such as Megha Engineering and Infrastructures, which has given millions of dollars in donations to the BJP.

One project is to build the first railroad through Himalayan gorges, erecting pillars on near-vertical slopes to lay tracks and boring tunnels into mountains. Down in the valley work is underway on a four-lane highway, which includes bridges over streams, canals, and rivers. (An extensive road network also makes it easier to dispatch troops and military hardware.) Most of the workers are brought from India for lack of locals trained to handle heavy machinery. They often have to labor in subzero temperatures.

In 2021 New Delhi formulated a policy to “transform” Jammu and Kashmir into an “industrialized territory.” It has received more than $10 billion of “investment proposals.” The enormity of the planned so-called development is staggering: a vast network of luxury hotels, IT campuses, medical centers, movie theaters, cement factories, malls, a film city, and much else. As of last year the government had allotted land to 1,854 industrial units. It has even courted foreign investors; the UAE-based Emaar Group is setting up a shopping complex in Srinagar. 

Who is all this infrastructure meant for? Surely not the local population, which hovers around thirteen million people. Kashmiris widely believe that the Indian government is creating jobs for Indian workers who will disrupt the region’s Muslim demography. Indian capitalists are also buying up land with fervor. In February 2023 Sajjan Jindal, who chairs a conglomerate called JSW Group, posted on X that he had “laid the foundation stone” for a nine-acre steel factory in the southern town of Pulwama. Jindal vocally supported the revocation of Article 370.

When Modi ended Kashmir’s semiautonomous status, he said “peace and development” would come to the region. Yet guerrilla raids have not abated. At least four armed groups are currently active: HM, LeT, Jash-e-Mohammed, and Resistance Front. R. R. Swain, head of the Jammu and Kashmir police, claims that only a few dozen insurgents are left among them, but this number cannot be independently verified. It also seems belied by the fact that, in the last three years, dozens of Indian soldiers have been killed in Jammu’s forested mountain slopes. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, 1,050 guerrilla fighters and 319 Indian troopers have died in combat between 2018 and 2023.

Rebels have also broadened their attacks to target civilians, murdering 134 between 2019 and 2022. Many are migrant workers from the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, and Orissa. Blighted by India’s caste system and its neoliberal economy, they are drawn by better wages and a milder climate to Kashmir, where they do everything from building homes to harvesting apples and rice. Now, however, they are vilified as settlers.

The guerrilla attacks come amid a ferocious crackdown on civil liberties. Kashmiris are familiar with military raids. But now nattily dressed sleuths from the National Investigation Agency rummage through bedroom closets, spice cabinets, bookcases, toy boxes, and shoe racks, and seize material as innocuous as flash drives, hard drives, laptops, cell phones, books, and spiral-bound dissertations. Security forces harass groups as varied as businessmen, activists, journalists, and preachers. Hundreds have been incarcerated. In 2021 the noted human rights activist Khurram Parvez, who has tirelessly exposed atrocities committed by Indian troops, was himself put in jail under the fraudulent charge of having links to guerrillas.¹

In 2022 the Indian government shut down the Kashmir Press Club. It was the only place where journalists could meet, talking shop over biryani and tea under the shade of a chinar tree. This is part of a wider campaign to block critical reportage. They raid our homes, summon us to police stations for questioning, and the Criminal Investigation Department calls us for “background” checks. Last November Fahad Shah, a journalist, was released after nearly two years in jail. This February Asif Sultan, another journalist, was released after five years. Irfan Mehraj has been in a New Delhi prison for more than a year now. All of them were arrested under India’s anti-terror laws.

In March Modi addressed a rally in Srinagar’s Bakshi Stadium, just a mile or so away from the spot where, the previous month, a rebel had killed two migrant workers. It was the prime minister’s first visit to the territory since Article 370 was revoked; the event was clearly a spectacle for his Hindu nationalist constituency. Seven thousand government employees were herded onto buses and driven to the venue. NC leader Omar Abdullah wrote on X that those “who don’t show up are being threatened with disciplinary action by their department heads.” They waited hours in the cold for Modi to make his entry. 

On a stage bedecked with flowers, Modi gave a thirty-minute speech extolling his own achievements: a record-breaking two million tourists had visited the state in 2023. Indians, he said, should hold weddings there and “spend lavishly.” Kashmiris listened with a mixture of bemusement and revulsion. Every word felt like a lash, a university student who watched the speech at home told me. A few years ago, he had taken to social media when a state employee was fired for supporting the resistance. The police summoned him and threatened a long prison stay unless he stopped posting “seditious” content. He complied.

Ordinarily there are protests and street clashes when Indian leaders visit Kashmir. But Srinagar was uncannily calm during Modi’s visit, its streets lined with policemen and paramilitary forces. Cutouts of the prime minister and BJP flags hung from electric poles and cables. Beneath them Indian vacationers strutted around in thick jackets and woolen caps, posing for photos with grinning soldiers, while Kashmiris looked on with disbelief—we had never seen troops behaving this humanely before.

The visit came in the run-up to the May federal elections, which are always a controversial affair in Kashmir. India portrays them as a referendum on its rule; the resistance movement rejects them. This election, however, was unusually fraught, not least because the BJP did not field candidates in the three seats, which is rare for a party in power. Instead it tacitly supported fringe Kashmiri politicians—a move that betrayed a certain apprehension. 

Modi had good reason to be worried. Kashmir’s political parties, which are normally fractious, came together on a common platform. The two major unionist outfits—NC and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)—ran on reinstating Article 370. In May, at a public meeting in Srinagar, NC supporters even raised slogans against Bharat sarkar (Indian government). Sagar himself tramped through the narrow streets of Srinagar’s old city, urging people to “make the BJP bite the dust.” The language of resistance seemed to go down well with the separatist and guerilla leadership, which did not issue its usual call for a boycott. The result was a record turnout, the highest in thirty-five years. 

NC held two seats. The third went to Abdul Rashid, popularly known as “Engineer Rashid,” an independent candidate who, for the past five years, has been in jail on bogus “terror funding” charges; his son and volunteers ran his campaign. Rashid trounced NC’s leader, Omar Abdullah. The BJP’s proxy candidates lost terribly.

It was bracing to see Kashmiris set aside their differences and send a clear message to the Indian government. But the political future remains uncertain. After decades of compromise, NC has regained something of its old fighting spirit. By campaigning to restore semiautonomous status, it risks being criminalized, just as Abdullah was imprisoned in 1953. Such defiance has strengthened its relevance to Kashmiri political life, but subverting India’s colonial project will require a lot more than winning elections. “This land is ours since thousands of years,” Sagar told me in 2023, “and nobody can take it away from us.”