NGQ: After the Kargil war there has been a rigorous, concerted effort of what you describe as making the Kargilis ‘active stakeholders’ in the long-term peace, stability and development of the region. Prominent in this has been the creation of the Autonomous Hill Development Council with an aim to decentralise political power within the state. The state considers it ‘critical to integrate’ the population fully into the ‘national mainstream’. At the same time, there is the overwhelming anti-India and pro-Independence sentiment among Kashmiris who would imagine Kargilis as being on ‘their side’ – something that the Indian nationalist discourse never fails to challenge by attempting to project the Shia Muslims [in the majority in Kargil] as a community at loggerheads with the larger Sunni majority. How do you see this ‘integration into the national mainstream’ with regard to the demand of independence playing out in Kargil in the longer run?
MB: The Hill Council is ‘democratic’ only to the extent that it relies on formal procedures of democracy – elections, constituencies, campaigning, etc. – for its functioning and legitimacy. Indeed, any democracy that privileges the narrow statist agendas of ‘security’ and ‘integration’ can hardly bring about substantive and meaningful political transformation. And, unless the Kashmir issue is resolved in accordance with people’s aspirations, hill councils and other such initiatives in border areas will be less about extending democracy and more about disciplining populations through various political experiments. Unfortunately, the kind of democracy we have is one in which myopic security interests always trump healthy political alternatives or a robust political will. A case in point is the recent Aam Aadmi Party fiasco in which holding a referendum to reduce the military’s presence in Kashmir was immediately denounced by the party.

Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity in India: from Warfare to Welfare? by Mona Bhan. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2014, 248 pp.
In order to fully grasp the regional complexities in Jammu & Kashmir – without resorting to hegemonic tropes that use ideological and regional differences between Shias and Sunnis to undermine the struggle for self-determination – we need to consider the ways Kargilis have been fighting their own real battles, like the one related to the region’s connectivity, especially during winter months, or the battle for self-realisation via dignified work.
Apart from material grievances, I see the struggle of Kargilis as a fundamental quest for pride and dignity, an aspiration to restore their rights and make their voices count in a political context in which Kargil’s image is that of an unforgiving battlefield, a place devoid of people, culture, and civilisation, where the only sign of human life perhaps is the image of an Indian soldier tirelessly guarding the nation’s cold and rugged frontier.
Now, while these struggles might seem unrelated to the pursuit of azadi, Kargilis have suffered immensely because of nationalist agendas to carve out borders and divide families, friends and neighbours. Therefore, while Kargili struggles cannot be entirely reduced to Kashmiri aspirations of azadi, they are not entirely divorced from it. Any attempt to uncritically promote national integrationist agendas in Kargil often represent it as India’s backward and neglected periphery, a construction that deprives Kargilis of their very rich and complex history and undermines their ongoing struggles for reimagining territory and sovereignty.
Critical scholarship on the region has shown us how Kargil was not always ‘remote’ or ‘peripheral’. These are ideological labels that have become synonymous with Kargil and profoundly shape local struggles for dignity and self-respect. Until the 20th century, Kargil was often referred to as a ‘delightful oasis’ where travellers and traders experienced a welcome break from the tedium of an otherwise harsh landscape. Unlike the past, however, when Kargil was a centre of bustling trade connecting people and places, the only road that now connects Kargil with Kashmir is the National Highway 1, which was built predominantly to sustain the Indian military’s continued and easy access to an important and strategic border zone in the 1960s amid rising fears that China had already built roads to connect Xinjiang with Western Tibet.
From 1947 onwards, a spate of border wars between India and Pakistan over the status of Jammu & Kashmir militarised Kargil profoundly, contributing to Kargil’s image as a politically unstable periphery. Kargilis have long demanded the restoration of their connections with places, family and friends that the LoC so violently disrupted. For them, reclaiming past connections and histories that defy nationally scripted boundaries is a deeply felt aspiration, and Kargilis do this through music, poetry, memorialisation projects, and – when possible – travelling across borders to reconnect with people and places.
NGQ: You talk about India’s need to ‘secure the loyalties’ of people at the borders. One also understands from your book that there was no such need when there was no war. While you seem to doubt the ‘hegemonic narrative of India’s unequivocal victory in 1999’, is India today winning what it calls ‘heart warfare’ with populations at its borders and elsewhere? And how do you see the future of this warfare in Kashmir at large?
MB: The governance initiatives of the state and the military in Kargil are based on the fundamental assumption of disloyalty. As I said before, the pursuit of national security is deeply tied to securing, fixing and deepening people’s ‘loyalties’ to the nation state. Disloyalty does not always mean resorting to violent activities against the state (we don’t see any anti-state violence in Kargil). Disloyalty is a profoundly ideological term that can mean different things at different times and is therefore used to justify a range of governance/surveillance initiatives by the state. Disloyalty could also mean sharing affective, emotional ties with people across the border. It could mean asking for peace when national politics is hawkish and combative. It could also mean speaking the same language or performing the same rituals that your counterparts across the border speak or celebrate.
Many Kargilis in Gurgurdho, a border village in Kargil, told me how the Indian military thought the villagers were communicating with Pakistani villagers the night of Shab-e-Baraat when they lit up their homes to mark an important day on the lunar calendar. Likewise, the military officials I interviewed expressed concern about ‘latent’ but ‘deep’ religious and affective crossborder connections that could ignite into inflammatory anti-India politics if ‘adequate’ steps were not taken to ensure people’s ‘loyalties’. Of course, what they mean by ‘fixing loyalties’ is to ensure that people feel no crossborder allegiance and are willing to kill and die for the country. Indeed, a large emphasis in my book is on the category of ‘incipient terrorism’, a term that one Lt General Arjun Ray borrowed from the US’s counterinsurgency vocabulary to justify, and extend, the military’s reach into civilian life; it is a term that makes ‘latent disloyalties’ in people (however this is mapped and measured) a legitimate reason for military action. Calling threats in Ladakh incipient – compared to Kashmir where they were obviously full blown – allowed the military to view their task in Ladakh as a moral mission to transform seditious or potentially seditious populations into law-abiding citizens who would unquestioningly subscribe to the imperatives of state security and nationalism. Widespread images of potential subversion have thus consistently been used by the military to legitimise its growing hegemony over minority bodies and landscapes, a power that ultimately threatens the projects of human rights, citizenship, and substantive democracy in the region.