Militarised Kashmir: Where Peace Remains Elusive

The Hindu

24-05-2025

Published : May 24, 2025 18:15 IST - 5 MINS READ
In the shadow of the Himalaya, the Kashmir Valley—once serenaded by poets—is now eerily quiet. The hush is not peace but paralysis, a silence heavy with occupation, suspicion, and forgotten promises. Once envisioned as a crown jewel of India's postcolonial federation, Kashmir today lies buried beneath a fortress of military installations, surveillance drones, and barbed wire.
India's claim of development is dwarfed by the reality of desolation. With nearly 700,000 troops stationed in the Valley, Kashmir holds the distinction of being one of the most militarised zones on earth. The omnipresence of military boots is not incidental; it is intentional. This is the face of state power in the 21st century—what Michel Foucault described as 'biopower', the ability to manage life by calculating what lives, and what dies.
India's defence budget swelled to $72.6 billion last year, outpacing healthcare and education combined. Pakistan, though economically beleaguered, follows a parallel track, investing in F-16s and Chinese drones while millions of its citizens struggle with food insecurity. This is not budgetary imbalance; it is a political theology that prizes territorial domination over human well-being.
Arms race
Both nations have adopted what Noam Chomsky termed the logic of the 'manufactured enemy': an ever-present threat used to justify the machinery of war and the erosion of civil liberties. Kashmir serves as this manufactured arena, a theatre where nationalism is rehearsed through force, not dialogue.
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The greatest casualties are not just lives lost but futures erased. In rural Kashmir, over 60 per cent of schools lack reliable electricity or clean drinking water. A UNICEF report said that 70 per cent of children in the region show signs of psychological trauma. Curfews, lockdowns, and Internet blackouts have made learning episodic and livelihoods impossible.
Media narratives from New Delhi or Islamabad rarely capture these subtleties. Instead, Kashmir is reduced to two binaries: security and sedition.
The lived experiences of farmers unable to sell fruit owing to blockades or schoolgirls whose teachers have fled for safer jobs are ignored. These human costs are not collateral damage—they are the central plot.
Colonial playbook
Both India and Pakistan emerged from the crucible of anti-colonial struggle. Yet both have internalised and intensified the colonial playbook. Surveillance, sedition laws, mass incarceration, and enforced disappearances are mechanisms inherited from imperial administrators. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben warned, we now live in a permanent 'state of exception', a place where constitutional rights are suspended indefinitely in the name of security.
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in India and Pakistan's draconian anti-terror legislation have normalised impunity. Soldiers shoot without consequence. Homes are raided without warrants. Dissenters vanish without trial. In this zone of lawless legality, human rights are not protected—they are strategically erased.
Kashmir is not just a case of state control; it is a laboratory of 'necropolitics', a term coined by the philosopher Achille Mbembe. In necropolitical regimes, power is exercised not just by preserving life but by deciding who may die, and how. The border, once a demarcation, becomes a weapon; the checkpoint, a ritual of humiliation.
The violence is intersectional. In India, Dalit and tribal soldiers, drawn disproportionately from marginalised communities, are sent to patrol territories where they are simultaneously feared and expendable. In Pakistan, it is young, jobless Pashtuns who are conscripted into the line of fire. This is a shared tragedy: militarism consuming the poor to defend the illusions of the powerful.
Kashmir's suffering
Arms dealers from the US, Israel, Russia, China, and Türkiye profit from the suffering in Kashmir. Between 2020 and 2024, both India and Pakistan ranked among the top five arms importers in the world. Surveillance systems, anti-riot gear, and sniper rifles are marketed not only for defence but for suppression. The global military-industrial complex has no morality—only contracts.
International institutions offer rhetoric but little resolve. The UN and the World Bank note rising instability in South Asia, yet the economic interests of weapons-producing states outweigh the calls for justice. This is neoliberal militarism at its most insidious: state violence funded by international finance, legitimated by silence.
If there is to be a future for Kashmir—and for South Asia at large—it must begin with moral clarity and policy courage.
What India, Pakistan must do
First, India and Pakistan must urgently recalibrate their defence priorities. Diverting even 20 per cent of military expenditure toward healthcare and education could end child malnutrition in India and rebuild Pakistan's crumbling schools.
Second, an international embargo on Kashmir-bound weaponry must be seriously considered. Countries that arm governments to suppress citizens must be held accountable. No peace is possible with rifles aimed at classrooms.
Third, a credible peace process must centre not just the states but the people. Kashmiris—Muslim, Pandit, Sikh—must be at the table. Political resolution cannot be achieved through nationalist tokenism or bureaucratic decrees. It demands listening to those who have borne the weight of war, curfew, and betrayal.
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Arundhati Roy once distilled the region's tragedy into a single line: Kashmir remains the subcontinent's most haunting remnant of Partition. But in truth, it is also the unfinished dream of postcolonial dignity.
We must continue to believe that Kashmir, a region rich in culture and history, can rise above the barbed wire and gunfire to embrace freedom, equality, and justice.
The ghosts of the Valley are not silent. They are asking the subcontinent, what kind of nations do you wish to be? Militarised shells ruled by fear or plural democracies animated by hope? The answer may determine not just Kashmir's fate but the moral soul of South Asia itself.
Debashis Chakrabarti is a political columnist and Commonwealth Fellow, UK.