From Incorporation to Elimination: Interlocution as an Apparatus of Occupation in Kashmir

Abstract

This chapter argues that India’s continued insistence on framing Kashmir as its internal matter erases not only the long and complex history of international interventions in Kashmir but also the multiple shifts and contradictions of its own political approach toward Kashmir. In particular, we analyze how India’s interlocutory missions offered extra-constitutional means to “compensate” for the incremental attrition of Kashmiri political voice. Such procedural performances, or pretend “political listening” (Bassel, Leah. 2017. Why a Politics of Listening? In: The Politics of Listening. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137–53,167-4_1), upheld the facade of Indian democracy without disrupting or challenging India’s political agenda in Kashmir. In other words, state-mediated interlocutions constitute a form of symbolic violence that normalized the proceduralism of an occupying state and used humanist registers of inclusion and participation to erase the terrorizing face of the Indian occupation.