On 11 January, 2020, Davinder Singh, a high-ranking officer of the Jammu & Kashmir Police, was arrested along with two militants, while the three were on their way to Jammu from Srinagar. Two days before this arrest, Deputy Superintendent Singh was part of the team which received a delegation of foreign diplomats in Kashmir, including the United States' ambassador to India. The diplomats were visiting Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370 and Article 35A of the Indian Constitution, which had stripped the region of its statehood. Curiously, Singh was also the officer whom Afzal Guru, who was executed for the 2001 parliamentary attacks, had named in his testimony and implicated in the incident.
So, who is Davinder Singh? An honest, brave officer who risks his life for the protection, integrity and sovereignty of India? Or is he someone who in the name of the dreaded 'counter-insurgency' fills his own pockets and basks in the glory of unbridled power, in one of the world's largest military-industrial complex? The question might appear confusing and nauseating, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. The reality in Kashmir, unfortunately, is much more complex. But complexity does not mean that the issue is impervious to inquiry.
This is what the 70-year-old tensions and the three-decade-long counter-insurgency have done to Jammu & Kashmir. What this violence does, apart from terrorising the local population, is to make binaries difficult, where the boundaries between resistance and collaboration, oppressed and oppressor, can appear blurred, and yet essential. This is where Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, a recent collection of essays edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia and Cynthia Mahmoodbook, charts new territory.
For a long time, the issue of Jammu & Kashmir has been seen as an unfinished agenda of Partition, and the root of the conflict between India and Pakistan. Meanwhile, scholarship on Jammu and Kashmir remained focused on the elite local leadership, often ignoring the local population and their everyday lives amidst all the violence and political turbulence. Studies of the region have largely examined 'major events' and characters important for India or Pakistan. Interestingly, despite the voluminous amount of anthropological work done on Southasia, there was hardly a single volume of anthropological work dedicated to Jammu and Kashmir. The authors of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir have, therefore, produced for the first time a full volume of anthropological writings, which makes its way into the dense narratives of violence and resistance in Kashmir. With every new chapter, the book presents a compelling account of the region, and does so without denying the complexity and difficulty of understanding Kashmir.