‘We Will Memorise Our Home’: Exploring Settler Colonialism as an Interpretive Framework for Kashmir

‘We Will Memorise Our Home’: Exploring Settler Colonialism as an Interpretive Framework for Kashmir

Samreen Mushtaq and Mudasir Amin examine India’s military occupation of Kashmir through the framework of settler colonialism, to show how deeply it is entrenched and how it works against the Kashmiri struggle for azadi, or freedom. They argue that the Indian state’s decision in 2019 to remove the legal protections that reserved land and jobs for Kashmir’s permanent residents should not be seen as a sudden break. It extends long-running spatial, demographic and ecological processes that together form a “matrix of control”.

The authors find settler colonialism a valuable way to make Kashmir understandable to international audiences. But they warn that focusing on future Indian settlers risks hiding the Indian armed forces already permanently stationed on large areas of Kashmiri land. They conclude that the framework is most useful when the state’s mix of assimilation and elimination is understood as part of a military occupation, not as a separate alternative to it.

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