“Dear one, may my life be sacrificed for you 

Pray, tell us, where will we go to beg?”

The lament of an 83-year-old elder resonates with the impending land dispossession in the valley of Kashmir occupied by India. The Indian state’s strategic institutionalization of land expropriation is central to displacing native Kashmiris. The infrastructure projects in the war-torn, ecologically fragile Himalayan territory have always been a part of a broader Indian military occupation. Kashmiris perceive India as strengthening its colonial control, facilitating troop movement, demographic shifts, an intensified phase of state-backed land grabs and property dispossession, and the final push for settler expansion. Since 1947, India’s colonial project has focused on conquering, controlling, assimilating, and ultimately erasing Kashmiri indigeneity. On August 5, 2019, India stripped Kashmir’s autonomy and territorial sovereignty through military action without the consent of Kashmiris.

Currently India has increased land acquisitions exponentially by changing laws to alter land ownership, enabling widespread evictions, demolitions, and confiscating properties. These legal changes are focused on promoting settlements and demographic change to systematically dilute and erase the Indigenous population while criminalizing their movement for sovereignty and self-determination. The Indian government operates unimpeded under the guise of integrating the territory, development, and fighting Kashmiri resistance that is cast as terrorism or proxy war.

In violation of international law, India has changed Kashmir’s landscape through dense militarization, resource extraction, and economic exploitation that entrenches colonial benefits at the cost of local communities. The structure of invasion (Wolfe 2016) that India established in 1947 has grown over time under varying guises. Here, I argue that the settler colonial framework possesses an iterative temporal dynamic, a mechanism that evolves and adapts over time in which native peoples are enmeshed in processes that enable establishing, changing, and, in time, diluting, eliminating, and replacing the indigenous population to secure settler control. Just as settler colonialism has evolved in contexts like Palestine and Turtle Island, we can trace a similar structural progression of settler colonialism in Kashmir under Indian rule. We must keep in mind the regional and historical particularities while problematizing India’s status as a postcolonial democracy to recognize how military occupation and settler colonialism are enabled, enacted, and justified in Kashmir. Postcoloniality and democracy are seen as India’s hallmarks as a country. Yet in Kashmir, they have become tools that are used against Kashmiris, whose political resistance otherwise mirrors the subcontinent’s own anticolonial struggle against British colonization.

Indian settler colonialism has developed in distinct phases over different periods, with each stage building upon and reinforcing the ones before it, resulting in cumulative native dispossession. This layered process includes the initial annexation and territorial control, followed by clientelist politics and manipulation of democratic politics designed to undermine local agencies and UN resolutions. Over the years, Indian governments, both liberal and right-wing, have consolidated control through juridical and legal frameworks and militarized governance through laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). These reinforcing strategies have created an ever-evolving ecosystem of military occupation, human rights violations, criminalizing resistance, and, since 2019, removal of autonomy, outright demographic change, demolitions, and land dispossession have deepened Indian control. India also enforces cultural erasure by tightly controlling narratives, institutionalizing censorship, and openly enervating media, forcing assimilation policies and engineering complicity that are eroding Kashmiri identity and impacting resistance.

Kashmir is the world’s most densely militarized region. It is occupied by approximately 700,000 Indian troops. Human Rights groups reveal approximately 70,000 killed and 10,000+ enforced disappearances amongst other violations by the Indian forces since the armed resistance began in 1989. A mix of custodial executions, torture, mass incarcerations, rape used as a weapon of war, the world’s first recorded mass blindings, curfews, crackdowns, and military checkpoints have become hallmarks of Kashmiri life under military occupation. In 2019, India abrogated Kashmir’s autonomy through a brutal escalation of military aggression, placing the region under siege and communication lockdown for over seven months. International media were banned, plunging the region into a communication black hole. Genocide Watch issued an alert, and The Lancet sounded an alarm about the growing humanitarian crisis. Over the last five years, Indian authorities have unilaterally made new laws entrenching dispossession, imprisonment, and criminalization of dissent and resistance to their rule. Before 2019, India had systematically chipped away at Kashmir’s autonomy, but it still needed local approval to change laws. Indigenous people were permanent residents of the region, a status that preceded the creation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan. They had exclusive rights to land, voting, and standing for public office. Non-permanent residents, even if Indian citizens, were limited in rights, but they still occupied high administrative positions, owned businesses, and leased properties and land. Since 2019, they have been eligible to become permanent residents. Indian authorities have registered about 2.5 million new voters, signaling a huge demographic shift that Kashmiris dread. Indian military, which already occupies a sizeable portion of the territory, is empowered further to seize areas or property deemed “strategic” without anyone’s consent. The participation of native Kashmiris in political and economic decision-making is almost negligible.

India has unapologetically formalized its direct control over the region since 2019, when Kashmir was stripped of statehood and demoted to two Union territories with Indian appointees governing both. The Kashmir Valley is being ruled by an appointee from the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), a right-wing Hindu supremacist outfit. With extended powers, this appointee holds sole control of land, public order, and police. The BJP has long framed Kashmir as a Hindu land, casting aspersions on Kashmiri Muslim indigeneity and depicting them as invaders and outsiders. Kashmiris’ demands for self-determination and liberation are used to stigmatize them as anti-nationals and terrorists doubly. A local administration was elected in 2024, but its legislative powers are curtailed. Before 2016, they could legislate on most matters, except for defense, foreign affairs, finance, and communication, which were under Indian control. Kashmir had a separate flag and constitution, and most Indian laws did not automatically apply, but that is now relegated to the past.

In 1963, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had boasted in Parliament about their barely concealed colonial ambitions, saying Kashmir’s autonomy had to end. Integration of Kashmir, which the Indian government has portrayed as a benign nationalist goal, constitutes military aggression and forced assimilation and elimination of the Kashmiri people. Indian settler colonialism has continued through an interwoven process of military, political, administrative, and juridical actions. Each stage consolidates the colonial hegemony with a cumulative impact on native dispossession. The Indian government framed the removal of Kashmir’s territorial sovereignty as a “final push” for full control, which Kashmiris recall as a humiliating re-annexation. GNM, a Kashmiri elder, captures this dynamic aptly: “Hindustan chu asi akis bales khalan te akis walan; pateh kunwohas manz korukh monji shraki seeth khash” [India (has) always sought to exhaust us by uphill and downhill (different) tactics; and (in 2019) they slit our throats with a dull knife].^[1] His explanation reflects the temporal dimensions of the settler colonial predations since 1947 on every facet of political, cultural, economic, and religious life that have been weaponized to extend India’s control.  It took India sixty-seven long years to reach this stage, attained by duplicitous, coercive, undemocratic, and unconstitutional means facilitated by military force. “There was a time when Kashmir’s masjids were used as stables,” GNM says, recalling the brutal monarchy that ruled Kashmir before India’s annexation.  He adds, “Imperialism plans, but then Allah is the real sovereign, the greatest planner, this will pass,” reflecting the historical resilience of Kashmiri people against settler colonial elimination.

Notes

[1] Personal communication with Mr. GNM, 12 December 2024. GNM prefers to stay anonymous due to fear of reprisal by Indian authorities.