Description
IR has paid little attention to race or militarism beyond ‘the West’, or to their relationship generally. Building on emergent scholarship on racial militarism, this paper examines Indian militarism in Kashmir, focusing on its annexation via the August 2019 revocation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution. While often likened by supporters and critics to an ‘Israeli model/playbook’, I argue India’s actions in Kashmir are better understood as a form of racial militarism somewhat entangled with Israeli militarism, but not reducible or analogous to it. The influence of Israel on Indian racial militarism has predated Hindutva ascendancy, but Hindutva ascendancy has heightened and intensified consonances and convergences with Israeli racial militarism. This has occurred through mutually legitimating ideological invocations of the Zionist project as well as material ties supporting Indian colonialism, ‘counterterrorism’, and ‘development’ in Kashmir. This involves de-indigenizing and dispossessing racialized Muslim Kashmiris while coding, in racial-civilizationalist terms, Hindu Indian settler colonialism as a reclamation of indigeneity. Contributing to transnationalizing and deprovincializing discussions of racial militarism, this paper emphasizes how Indian racial militarism upholds violent Western colonial-modernity and global forms of racial-militarist civilizationalism which are historically entangled but self-styled as endogenous, as with Hindu nationalist India.
