Zulm: Popular Imagination of the State and the Everyday Non-Confrontational State-Society Transactions. A Case Study of (Downtown) Srinagar City of Kashmir.

Much scholarship has analysed the effects of Kashmir’s (formerly) special status within India’s federalism with a focus on state-society relationships more generally, and acts of resistance against the state more specifically (Kak, 2013; Duschinski, et al., 2018; Zia, 2019; Junaid, 2019). Little attention, however, has been paid to the non-confrontational everyday state-society transactions that take place in the region, and how the systematic attrition of territorial self-governance in Kashmir has reproduced and reinforced a ‘resistance consciousness’ against the rule of the Indian state (cf. Ganguly, 1996; Bose, 1997). This consciousness forms the foundation of a popular resistance movement in the region, which has over time passed through a continuum of non-violent and violent phases, including armed militancy which first emerged in 1989, as well as protests, demonstrations, strikes, boycott of democratic institutions like elections and open confrontation with the coercive interface of the state. In a novel contribution to the existing academic debate on the effects of Kashmir’s territorial and political status within federal India, this paper explores the varied ways in which different people in Kashmir associate, interact, and appropriate the state in their everyday lives, based on my yearlong ethnographic fieldwork of the downtown locality of Srinagar from summer 2018 to 2019. It highlights the perception of the state as a perpetrator of ‘zulm’ (oppression and injustice), and how different social situations determine people’s vulnerabilities to the ‘zulm’ of the state as well as their reactions to it. My study marks a departure from usual narratives on Kashmir that mostly seem to focus their ethnographic eye on the overt and dramatic forms of resistance and dissociation from state. Instead, it adds to peace and conflict studies by bringing out how different people associate, transact and appropriate the state, in a place that has witnessed a protracted territory-centred conflict. The paper borrows from Timothy Mitchell’s (1991) understanding of the state as an idea as well as a system of institutions with less defined and overlapping boundaries with the society at the local level. References: Bose, S. (1997) The challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, self-determination and a just peace. Duschinski, Haley; Bhan, Mona; Zia, Athar and Mehmood, C. (2018) Resisting occupation in Kashmir. Edited by C. Duschinski, Haley; Bhan, Mona; Zia, Athar and Mehmood. Philadelphia: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press. Ganguly, Š. (1996) ‘Explaining the Kashmir insurgency: Political mobilization and institutional decay’, International Security. MIT Press Journals, 21(2), pp. 76–107. Haynes, D. and Prakash, G. (1992) Contesting power: Resistance and everyday social relations in South Asia. Junaid, M. (2019) ‘Counter-maps of the ordinary: occupation, subjectivity, and walking under curfew in Kashmir’, Identities, pp. 1–19. Kak, S. (2013) Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Srinagar: Haymarket Books. Malik, I. (2002) ‘Kashmir: Domestic Insurgency, International Dispute’. Mitchell, T. (1991) ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, The American Political Science Review, 85(1), p. 77. Zia, A. (2019) ‘Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir’.