ABSTRACT
The armed rebellion in India-controlled Kashmir has acquired deeply symbolic characteristics in recent times. With the advent of digital media and, consequently, an information battlespace, images and representations have taken a critical, if not primal, role within the armed resistance against India’s military occupation in Kashmir. During the past decade or so, while Kashmir’s armed rebellion rages on with renewed vigor and an overwhelming popular support, the extent of its military success remains debatable. The sheer magnitude of Indian state’s counterinsurgency operation in Kashmir makes pure military gains hard to come by which, in turn, makes the armed rebellion more a battle of perceptions rather than exercise in kinetic operations with hardcore military objectives. In the absence of regular military gains, the notion and objective of Shahadat or martyrdom is central to the recruitment and functioning of the insurgency in Kashmir, all of whose active recruits are Muslim men from either India/Pakistani controlled Kashmir or mainland Pakistan. In this chapter, I will first set out to explore the modalities of Shahadat or martyrdom within the discourse of Islam and other Abrahamic religions, in addition to explaining how Kashmiri rebels within the mostly indigenous armed rebellion and the Kashmiri population in general have adopted this as a paradigm of anti-India resistance. Expanding on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics (2019), I will set out to explain how his thesis does not take into account the agency of subjects upon whom this “biopolitical sovereignty of death” is enacted. Through this exposition, I will demonstrate how Kashmiris, particularly the armed rebels, have appropriated necropolitics, and imbued it with religious characteristics, to resist the necropolitics of Indian state. In the chapter, the aim is to establish how, by wresting away the sovereign right of the allocation of death from the structures of India’s military occupation, sacred necropolitics – the term that I introduce – has become a dominant mode of popular political resistance in Kashmir.
