Description
The Indian government abrogated Article 370 of the constitution on August 5th, 2019 which was followed by an indefinite curfew and complete communications blackout. This was followed by prohibitions on movement, restrictions on media coverage and obstacles on receiving even basic medical supplies. These carceral conditions of existence demand a reflection on the visual politics of occupation in Kashmir. Drawing on Jasbir Puar and Ather Zia’s work on the sovereign ‘power to maim’ this article enquires into the visual configurations of power and political construction of sight and practices through which one circumscribes and contours the understanding of the Kashmir conflict. It focuses on the pellet gun injuries sustained during protests in 2016 to analyse visual violence in Kashmir that helps us understand the inhuman biopolitics of dispossession saturated with the debilitating futures of the survivors. The paper develops on the complementary logic to the presence of Indian forces and the manifestation of settler colonialism which thrives on creating and maintaining the population of Kashmir as ‘permanently impaired’ yet simultaneously ‘living’ for exercising state control. The blinded body is used as an ‘analytical tool’ to trace the socio-political construction of the Kashmiri body within the nationalist imaginary and demonstrate how the visual instantiates the political. The paper explores linkages between violence, visuality and disability within the recent ‘visual turn’ in International Relations by inquiring into the visceral ways of seeing affected by the use of pellet guns and how the blinded body serves both as a sight and site of politics.
