Mass surveillance and the crisis of dissent in indian-occupied Kashmir

by M. Rather

“The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state maybe sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be… Real power begins where secrecy begins.” — Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism[1] [open endnotes in new window]

Since 2014, when Modi won political power in India with a clear majority, the Indian political approach to Kashmir has seen drastic changes. One of the biggest policy shifts towards Kashmir occurred on August 5, 2019, when India revoked Article 370 from its Constitution. This provision had safeguarded Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status with India. Changing the Constitution also led to the dissolution of Article 35A, which protected the rights of the Kashmiris over their own land, effectively opening the doors for the civilian settler ambitions of the Indian state.[2] The move was unilateral with almost all Kashmiri political and separatist leaders in jail or house-arrest, and was preceded and followed by a complete communication, media, and Internet blackout.[3]

In fact, the abrogation of Article 370 does not mark the beginning of Indian settler colonialism in Kashmir, which was already under way with large swathes of land under military occupation. However, the abrogation of Article 370 has now opened avenues for the Indian civilian population to settle in Kashmir, a move which has extended lawfare against the Kashmiris, in which the legal system is used to kick Kashmiris off their own land.[4] Farmers in remote villages are ousted from their agricultural land—which in turn is handed over to industrialists from the Indian territory.[5] This has particularly damaged the tribal community in Kashmir. Several sheep-rearing (bakarwal) and nomadic communities of Kashmir were made landless under the new laws in the aftermath of revocation of Article 370.[6]Amid all the new forms of human rights violations in Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370 (alongside the ones persisting for decades), the ambit of solidarity for Kashmiris within the Indian mediascape has significantly declined.

Apart from agricultural land, the Indian state has also evicted people from the land where commercial structures were set up by Kashmiris. A calculated plan to break the economic standing of the Kashmiris on their own land. (Credit: Sajad Hameed/The Polis Project)

Kashmir has had a tumultuous relation with previous Indian governments; however, the current regime keeps producing new social and political realities that severely impact communication, representation, and the nature of protest in Kashmir. In order to account for these changes, I focus here on relations between surveillance and visual control, especially to trace how the two inform and evolve with each other in neo-colonized spaces such as Kashmir. I evaluate how control over visuality plays a crucial role in the tendency toward autocracy within a democracy and its extension into the citizenry of a fear of surveillance.[7] In particular, I track how current systems for mass surveillance, such as on-ground informant networks as well as digital surveillance, have created new regimes of visual control to stifle dissent in Kashmir and restrict representations of solidarity for Kashmiris. In this process, surveillance in Kashmir functions on a principle of secrecy in which the neo-colonial subject is constantly visible to the state, but the state overall stays invisible.

This shift in visuality is reflected in media representations of Kashmir before and after the revocation of Article 370 in 2019.[8] While Indian media production often focuses on different topics about Kashmir, I highlight here media representation that speaks about and to the political occupation of Kashmir, especially in news, documentary, and Bollywood. By doing so, I demonstrate how the revocation of the Article 370 in 2019 and the surveillance infrastructure of the Indian state have increased state sponsorship of propaganda against Kashmiri Muslims while also stifling solidarity with Kashmir. My goal is to explore the “responsibility of distance and creative solidarity” as a mechanism for sustaining political resistance while it is under threat through state surveillance and looming disenfranchisement.[9]

Access to visuality is wrought with power. Who is watched and who watches is the basis of colonial and neo-colonial occupations. Speaking to the process of studying colonialism, in The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe cautions us from understanding coloniality’s devastation solely through the images and texts present within colonial literature and history. Rather, we should look for and analyze all that is systematically absent within these texts. By evaluating these absences, we can expose the brutality of the colonial machinery.[10] With the faltering of the principles of democracy in India, we have witnessed a shift from protesting towards gagging of the people in Kashmir by the state.[11] Today within mainstream media there is a silencing about Kashmir, an absence of mass mobilization since 2019, and a broader erasure of solidarity towards Kashmir; we must study such shifts through the lens of the national surveillance and visual occupation of Kashmir. Yet while our own stories of suffering and resilience get silenced, we Kashmiris cannot be characterized as invisible. For invisibility is a privilege unto itself. Invisibility’s enforced parameters and ubiquity do not lie under our control; the apparatus of visuality has to be understood as an extension of occupation itself. This visuality derives from the Indian state’s surveillance infrastructure, policies, and propaganda as it incentivizes and coerces media industries into representing Kashmir and Kashmiris in a specific way that coincides with the state narrative about Kashmir.

Surveillance and visuality in Kashmir

Surveillance in Kashmir is not a new phenomenon. Surveillance has been the staple and sustaining force of the Indian occupation in the territory. However, more recently a transformed visuality of surveillance created a crisis of communication and dissent. For Kashmiris, surveillance long existed in the form of army checkpoints at every few kilometers, as well as through violent crackdowns—Cordon and Search Operations, or CASO—on Kashmiri houses and villages.[12] Both are a form of surveillance, and both are physically and visually accessible. When a car drives at night near a checkpoint in Kashmir, the dome lights turn on for the Indian forces to see who is driving the vehicle. In fact, this visibility of passengers and drivers never determined if they would be murdered by the Indian army or not; many have been shot irrespective of their visibility. However, such physical checkpoints did have a reciprocity of gaze between the Kashmiri civilian and the Indian army regardless of such skewed power relations.

The number of physical checkpoints has since decreased in Kashmir. However, surveillance has not. More recently, the state has been increasing its digital surveillance, which operates through visually inaccessible forms of control. For example, Kashmir has seen an increase in high resolution CCTV camera surveillance that function as round the clock checkpoints similar to Blue Wolf employed by the Israeli forces in Occupied Palestine.[13] Biometric tracking and automated facial recognition eliminate the reciprocity of gaze between the occupied and the occupier as well as enforce a constant visibility of the occupied body. Whether it is through the dome lights illuminating a car, or showing the Indian government-issued biometric ID, the neo-colonized subject does not have privilege of being unseen. But now, through the transition from physically and visually accessible markers of occupation to visually inaccessible ones such as digital and interpersonal surveillance, neo-colonial powers like India make their violence invisible. As such, the control that the Indian state exercises on the people of Kashmir is not just of the body and mind, but more importantly over what is visible and what is not.

In addition to digital surveillance, India has also expanded its network of secret informers, in turn activating the fear of the unknown.After the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, the Indian state has aggressively increased its web of informants in the region, involving not just individuals but also local organizations and smaller communities. These informants are coerced to work with the army to inform them of any ‘suspicious’ activity. This practice has a long history, with the Indian government long using Kashmiri citizens as state informants.

After the beginning of a guerilla movement for freedom in 1990s, the Indian state began to build a web of informants and counterinsurgents, bribed by the Indian army and the police; this was in addition to army checkpoints and physical crackdowns on people’s houses and hospitals. The establishment of inter-personal surveillance through informants and counterinsurgent militia grew when popular dissent erupted in the form of a guerilla militant movement in 1989. Analyzing that movement, Haris Zargar stipulates the importance of viewing the armed insurrection in Kashmir specifically as a form of dissent and protest. He does so in order to resist the imperialistic narrativization of the movement and the people involved as “fringe elements,” a kind of politicized interpretation that the state uses to distort the freedom movement in Kashmir and simultaneously validate the Indian colonial clampdown on the protestors in the region[14]

In addition, through recruitment of Kashmiris within the folds of counterinsurgent militias (Ikhwani) and informants (mukbir), the discourse of loyalty among the people gets deeply complicated. Mohamad Junaid theorizes this tactic as “turning Kashmir into a gray zone, the space where a clear distinction between the victims and the oppressors and between loyalty and betrayal became harder to establish.”[15] Here, the Indian state’s tactic of crushing the movement and mobilization for freedom in Kashmir depends upon creating foreboding suspicion among the people themselves.

I conducted fieldwork in Kashmir during the summer of 2023. Upon the condition of anonymity, people told me how Indian army generals have meetings with Masjid (mosque) committees, housing committees, local corporations, union of traders and farmers, and smaller non-profit organizations. The army’s goal is to obtain information about unlawful activity taking place in the area, new persons joining these organizations or entering the town, Indian-based Muslim organization (like Jamaat-e-Islami) trying to work or collaborate with them, and activity of the local political groups and parties in the area.

The information sought from the informants does not simply deal with political activity or guerilla fighters, but is about any interaction that could suggest discontent among the people, especially about being forcibly occupied by the Indian state. These meetings of the Indian army with different groups across Kashmir has increased a feeling of mistrust and suspicion among the people with their own community. Apart from the fear of communication devices tracking and tracing activity on behalf of the Indian state, the government has effectively extended that suspicion and fear to the community members at large in Kashmir. The on-ground surveillance through a network of informants therefore is not simply for the purpose of ‘Indian national security’ but for regulating and controlling the interactions and behavior of the people of Kashmir.

Importantly, the control over the interactions and behavior of the neo-colonized people ensures that efforts for civilian mobilization are crushed before they are even formed. Without outward civilian mobilization and mass resistance against Indian occupation, the Indian state ensures that its visual regime of normalcy in Kashmir is maintained on the global stage. For instance, due to fear and suspicion of each other, Kashmiris now participate in Indian national celebrations, including Independence Day (August 15th) and Republic Day (January 26th). In the past, both of these days were historically marked by widespread shutdowns and silence throughout Kashmir.[16] However, post-2019 with an increased surveillance infrastructure and use of informants in the territory, any form of outward dissent gets crushed, even if the dissent was through silence. Therefore, holding the livelihood and lands of Kashmiris as ransom, the images of them participating in Indian national holidays gets captured by the media to be shown on a global stage, fitting in with a narrative and image of normalcy and integration of Kashmir within India.

The network of on-ground informers in Kashmir has an intense effect on interpersonal communication because it targets people’s land and the livelihood. Outside of agriculture and horticulture, the Jammu and Kashmir State Government is the biggest employer in the territory. Criminalization of dissent under the Modi government does not simply lead to the detention and arrest of the people involved, but also a threat of unemployment.[17] Since the abrogation of Article 370, fifty people have lost their jobs for unclear and vague reasons, especially teachers, professors, and staff of schools and universities. For example, Zahoor Ahmed Bhat was suspended from his job as a senior lecturer of Political Science soon after he appeared in the Supreme Court to argue against the revocation of Article 370 in August 2023. Moreover, three government employees were terminated from their jobs in November 2023 for alleged ‘anti-national’ activities.

Pervasively the invisibility of on-ground surveillance through informant networks breaks down the intimacy and sense of loyalty within a community. This web of suspicion creates a sense of threat not only from state actors in the form of police, army, and auditors but also from fellow community members. The proliferation of spies has chilling consequences for the nature of mobilization and the expression of dissent even within private communal and familial spaces. The invisibility of the surveillance apparatus and the perpetual visibility of the colonized body creates a system of validation of the neo-colonial occupation of Kashmir within the media industry and silences any and every voice of dissent.