In the long shadow of Partition, one wound festers more visibly, more violently than any other. Kashmir – celebrated once in poetry, now surveilled by drones – is not merely a territorial flashpoint between India and Pakistan. It is, more profoundly, the subcontinent’s most damning indictment: of broken promises, unfinished decolonisation, and the triumph of state power over citizen dignity.

Since 1947, the valley has borne witness to an evolving logic of control. It has mutated from princely ambiguity to plebiscitary betrayal, from insurgent conflict to biopolitical domination. Over the decades, what was once framed as a geopolitical issue has become a theatre for what political philosophers now describe as necropolitics – a term popularised by Achille Mbembe, building on Foucault’s notion of biopower. It refers to the state’s capacity not just to regulate life but to orchestrate death, abandonment and invisibility. Nowhere in South Asia is this more palpable than Kashmir.

The historical anatomy of an unfinished conflict

At independence, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir hesitated, caught between accession to India and alignment with Pakistan. In October 1947, under pressure from an advancing tribal militia backed by Pakistan, he acceded to India. That conditional accession, tied to a future plebiscite, became the original sin of the Kashmir dispute – a sin all sides have since reframed, forgotten or reinterpreted.

The 1948 UN resolution calling for a referendum was never fulfilled. In the decades that followed, Pakistan backed insurgent groups to stake its claim, while India, under Nehru and his successors, gradually hollowed out Article 370 – Kashmir’s supposed constitutional guarantee of autonomy. Today, that special status has been abrogated altogether, and the former state is bifurcated and downgraded to union territories, governed directly from New Delhi.

However, Kashmir’s story is not merely one of cartography. It is about people – people who have increasingly been rendered illegible by the nation-states that claim to represent them.

A cartography of control

Kashmir ranks among the most heavily militarised regions on the planet. India maintains an estimated 700,000 troops in the valley, an extraordinary deployment for a civilian population of just over 8 million. Pakistan, meanwhile, has long treated Kashmir as a strategic proxy through its support of militant outfits, even as it denies culpability.

What emerges is a theatre of mutual militarism where sovereignty is asserted not by governance but by presence. Soldiers at intersections. Razor wire around schools. Surveillance towers where mosques used to be. As Michel Foucault warned, the modern state no longer merely wages war against other states – it disciplines bodies and categorises lives. In Kashmir, this logic reaches a chilling apotheosis.

Democracy, too, becomes contorted. Elections are held, yes – but under such a siege of surveillance, blackouts and paramilitary intimidation that their legitimacy rarely survives public scrutiny. The body politic is suffocated under the weight of the security state.

The economics of occupation

It is easy to overlook the economic dimension beneath the political tumult. But the numbers are stark.

India’s military expenditure reached USD 72 billion in 2024, making it the world’s third-largest spender after the US and China. Pakistan, despite economic near-collapse, devotes nearly 17% of its budget to defense. In both cases, human development lags behind.

In Kashmir, the situation is more dire. World Bank and UNDP figures show that per capita income has stagnated, even declined, since the 2019 lockdown. Youth unemployment stands at over 25%, and tourism – once the valley’s lifeline – is episodic and state-managed. A 2022 report by UNICEF revealed that nearly 70% of children in the region experience symptoms of trauma and anxiety.

Infrastructure in Kashmir often follows the contours of occupation: roads expand for troop convoys, not trade; schools and clinics rise under military gaze, not civic need.

Meanwhile, the global arms industry profits. Drones from Israel, surveillance gear from the US, small arms from Russia – Kashmir is a proving ground for technologies of control. In this economy of violence, Kashmiris are not consumers – they are test subjects.

Identity, demography and the politics of fear

The abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019 was not simply a legal manoeuvre – it was a demographic signal. By revoking land and residency protections that had prevented outsiders from settling in Kashmir, the Indian state set the stage for what many critics describe as “settler colonialism”– an attempt to alter the ethnic and religious makeup of the region.

Pakistan, for its part, has long instrumentalised the Muslim identity of Kashmiris while stifling ethnic autonomy in its own administered regions, notably Gilgit-Baltistan. Thus, both states perpetuate a politics of fear, reducing Kashmiris to categories in nationalist narratives rather than agents of their own future.

What does it mean for a democracy to declare a part of its own population as permanently suspect?

Agamben’s concept of the state of exception – where emergency becomes the norm – fits Kashmir with eerie precision. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), in place in the region since 1990, grants the military impunity. Under its shadow, countless civilians have been detained without trial, tortured or killed. Families search for the disappeared with no recourse to justice. The valley operates under laws designed for war, even in supposed peacetime.

Noam Chomsky’s critique of “manufactured consent” also echoes here. Indian television media, largely subservient to the government, paints Kashmir not as a humanitarian crisis but as a patriotic litmus test. To question state policy is to risk being labelled “anti-national”.

In this ideological crucible, Kashmiris are trapped: demonised by one state, instrumentalised by another, forgotten by both.

It is tempting to think of Kashmir as exceptional. But it is, in truth, symptomatic – a mirror to the failures of postcolonial nation-building in South Asia. India and Pakistan were born invoking anti-colonial freedom, yet both retained the architecture of empire – sedition laws, centralised rule and armed borders. Kashmir is where these contradictions burst into view.

It would begin by hearing Kashmiris – not as proxies to be managed or projects to be shaped, but as people to be respected. It would mean restoring political agency through transparent, internationally monitored processes. It would require the demilitarisation of civilian life – not just the withdrawal of troops but the dismantling of the surveillance economy. And it would demand accountability for past violations: a truth and reconciliation process rooted not in retribution but in recognition.

Economically, a peace dividend is imaginable. A bilateral cut in defense spending by just 10% could finance massive investment in health, education and employment across the region. The revival of dormant cross-border trade routes could shift Kashmir’s role – from a fault line of conflict to a conduit of connection.

The ethical imperative

Kashmir tests not only policy but principle. It compels us to ask: what is a nation for, if not its people? What is security, if not the ability to live without fear? And what does it say about postcolonial freedom when a citizen must be grateful simply to be alive?

The world watches Kashmir in moments of crisis. But it is the long, slow violence – the curfews that never lift, the trials that never begin, the education that never arrives – that defines its reality.

In the end, Kashmir is not just about who controls the land. It is about who is allowed to belong.

And in a region born of dreams – Tagore’s “heaven of freedom,” Iqbal’s “vision of selfhood” – that question may be the most haunting of all.

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