Can an oppressed people who gain independence, end up becoming the oppressor of others?
Hafsa Kanjwal, associate professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College, examines this in a hotly contested area of the world.
Hafsa Kanjwal is an associate professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation, published by Stanford University Press in 2023.
Colonized to Colonizers
Is it possible for a postcolonial country like India, which was colonized by the British empire, to also engage in colonialism? The contested history of Kashmir—the most militarized region in the world, and disputed between India, Pakistan, and China–might shed light on the nature of contemporary forms of colonialism.
India is often lauded for its anti-colonial struggle against the British, and the leadership of figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru played a critical role in establishing Indian dominance in the Third World order in a moment of decolonization. It also established ‘the idea of India’ as a secular liberal democracy that was built on the foundational idea of unity in diversity.
Yet, even as India’s early postcolonial leaders denounced colonialism elsewhere, my research examines how they oversaw India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir.
The exercise and expansion of Indian territorial sovereignty, especially in Kashmir, has been a colonial exercise. It is coercive, lacks a democratic basis, denies a people self-determination, and is buttressed by an intermediary class of local elites or compradors. But it is also colonial because India’s rule in Kashmir relies on logics of more ‘classical’ forms of colonialism from Europe to the Global South: civilisational discourses, saviourism, mythologies, economic extraction and racialisation. As with all imperial or colonial forces, India has sought to rule over Kashmir through subjugating its people and trampling their rights.
Many countries around the world have their own Kashmirs, places they have subjugated either through overt forms of violence or through assimilating forms of control, and at times both.
Contemporary forms of colonialism exist across authoritarian and democratic governments. In the case of India, they exist in a country that claims to be the largest democracy in the world. The case of Kashmir not only challenges this claim but contests the idea of India altogether.
Read More:
[Stanford University Press] – Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation
[Aeon] – Colonies of former colonies
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