This was not merely a rhetorical flourish. It signaled the final abandonment of a diplomatic convention that had guided Indian prime ministers for decades: the practice of visiting both Israel and Palestine on the same trip. Every previous prime minister who traveled to Tel Aviv also made the journey to Ramallah, a tangible demonstration of India’s commitment to a two-state solution. Modi broke that tradition. His lone visit to Israel, without any stop in Palestine, cast serious doubt on whether New Delhi still supports the creation of a Palestinian state.

The implications of this shift have grown only starker since the war on Iran began. While the Indian government has issued tepid calls for restraint, it has offered condemnation neither for the killing of Iranian leaders nor of the unfolding catastrophe in Iran. This silence is particularly striking given the deep ties between the two countries. Iran, a fellow BRICS member, remains one of India’s largest trading partners and has offered crucial diplomatic support on Kashmir in international forums—standing with India against Pakistan when it mattered. Indian investment in Iran grew substantially throughout the 2010s, including the development of a strategic port that promised significant benefits for both economies.

Despite its deep investments in the relationship with Iran over decades, India’s unequivocal positioning with Israel and the United States in this war signals a meta-shift in its foreign policy—one increasingly guided by the BJP’s Hindu nationalist worldview. To understand the magnitude of this shift, we must first understand what Indian foreign policy was, and where it came from.

Idealist Foreign Policy

India’s foreign policy was shaped by the crucible of anticolonial struggle, and its contours were drawn long before independence was actually achieved. The first stirrings came as early as 1927, at the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels, where Indian leaders and activists played a pivotal role. 

During the Second World War, even as Indian leaders intensified their campaign against British rule, they never wavered in their commitment against antisemitism and fascism. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Indian volunteers traveled thousands of miles to fight for the Republicans. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first prime minister, raised funds in Britain and India to support the Republican war effort. 

At the very moment when Modi’s ideological predecessors were delivering speeches in the streets of Bombay cheering the persecution of Jews in Europe, Nehru was facilitating the arrival of Jewish refugees in India from Europe.

This idealism—forged in anti-imperial struggle and tempered by a commitment to human dignity—shaped independent India’s foreign policy from its inception. In the postwar world, divided between two hostile camps, India joined with other newly independent states in refusing to choose sides. The Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Belgrade Conference of 1961 gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which became the most powerful foreign policy doctrine in the decolonized world. India was not merely a participant but a principal architect, both of the movement itself and of its implementation.

Anticolonial Principles

Crucially, NAM was never the “pragmatic neutrality” its critics caricatured it as. It was an idealistic stance that firmly advocated for peace, nuclear disarmament, and decolonization. This was not abstract rhetoric but lived policy. India headed the international committee that brokered a ceasefire in the Korean War. It opposed the Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It stood against the Vietnam War. It played a mediating role in the Congo crisis. It refused all diplomatic recognition to apartheid South Africa.

The finest hour of Indian foreign policy, however, arrived in 1971. When civil war erupted in Pakistan following East Pakistan’s declaration of independence, India—then one of the poorest countries in the world—sheltered ten million refugees for nearly nine months. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi traveled across the globe, pleading for international attention to the crisis and the unfolding genocide in East Pakistan. When diplomacy failed and the threat of US intervention on behalf of its Pakistani ally loomed, the Indian army intervened alongside the Bangladeshi liberation forces. In a swift thirteen-day war, they broke the Pakistani military’s grip, and the new nation of Bangladesh was born.

But the truly remarkable feat was not the military victory—it was what came after. India withdrew its forces and left Bangladesh to its people and its chosen leaders. It made no attempt to occupy or annex its neighbor. At a moment when it could have pursued expansionist ambitions, it chose restraint. This was foreign policy as an anticolonial principle in action.

Sympathy for Palestine

India’s approach toward Israel-Palestine was not an exception to this foreign policy outlook—it was its logical extension. The anticolonial tradition expressed itself naturally in sympathy for Palestine. Mahatma Gandhi himself drew a direct colonial analogy, declaring that Palestine belonged to the Arabs just as England belonged to the English—recognizing the national sovereignty of Palestinians over their land. Nehru, the committed antifascist who understood intimately the agony of European Jewry after the Holocaust, nevertheless refused to see the occupation of Palestine as a just solution to that crisis. His sympathy for Jewish victims did not translate into support for Palestinian dispossession.

This principled stance found concrete expression at the United Nations in 1947, when India voted against the partition of Palestine—defying both the United States and the Soviet Union in the process. The vote was not merely a foreign policy calculation but a reflection of the ideological position the anticolonial leadership had staked out during the independence struggle: a principled opposition to the division of lands and peoples on the basis of religion. India opposed partition in Palestine for the same reasons it had opposed the partition of its own subcontinent.

India formally recognized Israel in 1950, but this diplomatic gesture did not signal an abandonment of its commitment to the Palestinian people. Nehru visited Gaza in 1960, over Israeli objections and despite security threats. In 1974, India became the first non-Arab state to formally recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization. Full diplomatic relations followed in 1980, and when the PLO declared independence in 1988, India extended immediate recognition. Yasser Arafat was a frequent visitor to New Delhi, received with state honors at a time when the West still designated him a terrorist.

The Unipolar World

The 1990s brought two simultaneous transformations that would strain this tradition. First, India finally opened its markets to the global economy, abandoning the democratic-socialist framework that had guided economic policy since 1947. The repercussions for foreign policy were immediate: idealism gradually gave way to the logic of economic pragmatism. Second, the fall of the Soviet Union rendered the Non-Aligned Movement seemingly obsolete in a unipolar world. 

These twin shifts found their clearest expression in the warming of India-US relations. After decades of Cold War distance, Washington began courting New Delhi as a trusted regional partner, supplanting Pakistan, which had served as the US outpost since the 1950s. China’s rise as an economic and military power only accelerated this realignment.

The Israel-Palestine issue could not remain insulated from these pressures. In 1992, India established full diplomatic relations with Israel—a step it had resisted for four decades. The Oslo Accords, which followed shortly after, seemed to vindicate this shift: the PLO itself had now agreed to a two-state solution, the very framework India had endorsed for a while. But India’s understanding of what two states might mean differed markedly from the West’s. 

Where the United States and its allies deployed the two-state formula as a mechanism to contain Palestinian aspirations—creating an appearance of movement toward justice while facilitating continued Israeli expansion in the West Bank—India continued to view it as a genuine compromise in the service of peace. This is why, even after Oslo, even after establishing relations with Israel, India remained firmly aligned with Palestine until quite recently. While the West bankrolled occupation and looked away as Gaza was bombarded, New Delhi maintained its traditional stance until 2014.

Blueprint of Ethno-Democracy

In 2014, India elected its first majority BJP government with a sweeping mandate. For the first time, a prime minister had both the ideological conviction and the political capital to fundamentally reshape Indian foreign policy according to Hindu nationalist priorities. Since the late 1980s, Hindu nationalist forces began gaining larger mass support, a trend that ultimately culminated in the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992. The rise of Hindu nationalism coincided with the neoliberalization of the Indian economy, initiated by the Indian National Congress. Inequality in Indian society increased manifold following the opening of the market, which, as in other parts of the world, fueled right-wing politics. In 2014, after a brief stint in power from 1999 to 2004 as part of a coalition with regional centrist parties, the BJP returned to power—this time with a clear majority on its own and a clear agenda to transform the political discourse and social fabric of India.

The BJP’s affinity for Israel can be understood through two interlocking factors. The first is ethnonationalism. The BJP’s longstanding project is the transformation of India into a Hindu state—a nation in which religious identity determines belonging, and minorities are rendered permanently subordinate. 

In this project, Israel serves as both inspiration and model. What the BJP admires is the architecture of what has been called an “ethno-democracy“: a state that formally guarantees the supremacy of one religious group while tolerating the presence of others only on condition of their political marginalization. Israel grants Jewish citizens superior status within a self-defined Jewish republic; the BJP wants the same for India’s Hindu majority, with Muslims relegated to second-class citizenship.

The blueprint for this vision is already visible. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offered a path to citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries—Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians—but pointedly excluded Muslims. The message was unmistakable: in the BJP’s India, religious persecution renders Muslims uniquely ineligible for refuge. 

More recently, the government has begun replicating elements of the Israeli settler-colonial model in Kashmir. By stripping the region of its limited autonomy and its constitutional protections, New Delhi has opened the door for Indians from outside Kashmir to settle there, acquire property, and permanently alter the region’s demographic composition. The objective, pursued systematically, is demographic transformation through internal colonization.

Empire of Islamophobia

The second factor is Islamophobia. It is no coincidence that the perceived enemies of the Israeli state and of the BJP’s India are the same: Muslims. By aligning itself overwhelmingly with Israel, the BJP sends a message to India’s own Muslim population—whose historic solidarity with the Palestinian cause is well known—about where they belong in the new Hindu nationalist order. 

The Palestinian struggle for independence, which the Indian state once supported and celebrated, is now routinely designated as terrorism. This rhetorical move aligns India with Israel’s self-perception as a victim of “Muslim terror”, creating a shared narrative of existential threat. The two states, in this telling, are not aggressors but survivors, not occupiers but the occupied.

This empire of Islamophobia extends well beyond Tel Aviv and New Delhi. It is a global network of ethnonationalist movements and governments. Modi’s bonhomie with Donald Trump and Netanyahu is not, as it is sometimes described, a pragmatic accommodation to the realities of a unipolar world. It is a deliberate ideological choice—an expression of solidarity among right-wing movements that share a common enemy and a common vision of who must be punished in the name of national renewal.

But this shared vision is not merely rhetorical. It is material and operational. Israel has become one of India’s largest suppliers of defense technology, with bilateral military trade reaching into the billions. The Indian government has allegedly deployed Israeli spyware—most notoriously the Pegasus system—to surveil political opponents, journalists, and activists, weaponizing technology supplied by Tel Aviv against domestic dissent. 

And while much of the world has grown hazardous for Israeli soldiers facing prosecution for war crimes committed in Gaza, India has remained a safe haven. Approximately 80,000 Israelis travel to India annually; a significant proportion are active-duty or former IDF soldiers, confident that they will face neither legal consequences nor public accountability on Indian soil.

A New Trinity

Today, Indian foreign policy has traded its foundational principles—anticolonialism, peace, Third World solidarity, justice—for a new trinity: ethnonationalism, Islamophobia, and opportunism. The consequences of this transformation are now visible for all to see. India has failed to take a meaningful moral or political position on any major international crisis in recent years. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, India did not use its historic relationship with Moscow to press for peace. Instead, it enabled its capitalist duopoly of businessmen Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani to profit handsomely from buying discounted Russian oil and reselling it to European markets—effectively bankrolling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine while claiming neutrality. 

When Israel launched its assault on Gaza, eventually recognized by international jurists as a plausible case of genocide, India offered neither resistance nor even condemnation. When civil war erupted in Sudan, New Delhi’s deepening complicity with UAE elites—major players in the conflict—precluded any meaningful stance. 

When the US effectively kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, India remained silent. And now, as the United States and Israel pursue an unjustified and illegal war on Iran, the BJP-led government has offered passive support while its rank and file actively cheers the destruction on streets and social media.

For a time, it seemed the BJP could sustain this foreign policy misadventurism without consequence. The Iran war has shattered that illusion. The war has created an unprecedented energy crisis, sending oil and gas prices soaring and dealing a severe blow to an already fragile economy. The material costs of aligning with Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran are arriving ahead of schedule.

But the deeper cost is strategic and moral. India’s foreign minister and his aides repeatedly pitched the country’s approach as a “decolonial foreign policy“—a cynical appropriation of the language of liberation to dress up what is, in practice, pure opportunism. The gap between rhetoric and reality could not be wider. India, which led the Third World in the 20th century, which spoke for anticolonial struggles everywhere, now stands virtually alone on the world stage. It has no genuine allies, no reliable friends or neighbors, no principled partners. It has only the mercy of Trump, the indulgence of Putin, and the embrace of Netanyahu. 

This is not non-alignment. This is not pragmatism. This is the foreign policy of a right-wing movement that has made its peace with empire, ethnic supremacy, the punishment of Muslims everywhere—and in doing so, has left India isolated, diminished, and morally unrecognizable.

The post From Bandung to Bibi: How Modi’s India Abandoned Non-Alignment for Ethnonationalism appeared first on Untold.

For a fleeting moment, it felt like homecoming. Then the stillness was shattered. Police vehicles rumbled in, officers fanned out, and the temporary shelters were pulled down. What began as a quiet meal in the forest was now a flashpoint in one of India’s longest and most contentious struggles – the fight over who truly belongs in its protected jungles.

Between tigers and the state

The Jenu Kurubas, whose name literally means “honey gatherers,” have lived in the forests of Karnataka for centuries. For them, honey collection, bamboo cutting, shifting cultivation, and medicinal foraging are not merely economic activities but cultural traditions passed down through generations. 

Families have shared the forest with its fiercest inhabitants, including tigers, elephants, leopards, and bears. After all, the animals and trees are their chief deities.

But beginning in the 1970s, as Nagarhole was declared a wildlife sanctuary and later a protected tiger reserve, this coexistence came under threat. Hundreds of Jenu Kuruba families were displaced, some for the creation of the Kabini Reservoir, others for the state’s expanding conservation ambitions in the following decade. 

Many were moved into resettlement colonies at the forest’s edge. And several other families ended up as bonded labourers in the nearby coffee plantations.

What they gained in tin-roofed housing, they lost in autonomy and subsistence. Agriculture proved difficult, and wage labour precarious. Cut off from the forest, their diets changed, livelihoods shrank, and social bonds frayed.

Jenu Kuruba’s is part of a larger problem when the Indian government scaled up its tiger conservation efforts in the past decades and designated wildlife parks under strict regulations. Either through negotiations or by force in some cases, they’ve been evicting the forest-dwelling tribes.

“There was an orchestrated effort in portraying us, villagers and tribals, as poachers,” said J C Thimma, a Jenu Kuruba tribal leader who has been at the forefront of the resettlement campaign.

“On the other hand, we have seen plenty of episodes where poaching has significantly increased as soon as the tribals move out of their lands in this region. There’s a clear-cut nexus between wildlife poachers and the state’s forces,” added Thimma.

The irony is not lost on the tribes. While they were pushed out of their ancestral lands in the name of conservation, luxury resorts, safari tracks and tourist infrastructure sprouted inside the same reserves. For the Jenu Kuruba, this reinforced the sense that their exclusion was less about ecology than about who gets to profit from the forest.

A violation of laws

A senior forest officer based in Nagarhole told UntoldMag on condition of anonymity that the tribe’s resettlement campaign is gravely misplaced, assuming that they will win.

“I do have a lot of sympathy for the Jenu Kuruba. I try to help them in whatever way possible. But I can’t see how they can win this fight of resettlement. In simpler words, they’re fighting against the might of the entire Indian state, judiciary, and forest departments from the local level to the national stage. It’s a fight they can’t win, for sure,” said the government official.

“The colonial forest regime was dismantled with the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in 2006. The new act overrides older laws like the Indian Forest Act of 1927 and even parts of the Wildlife Protection Act. Legally, tribal rights are protected – the real problem is not the law, but the state’s persistent disregard for it, and the lack of judicial oversight,” said CR Bijoy, an expert in natural resources conflict and governance issues.

“There are several cases in various courts where the courts have shown immense concern for clearing the forest encroachments without questioning whether the data on encroachment has been generated only after completion of the FRA implementation,” Bijoy added. “In Tamil Nadu, the Madras High Court had actually revised its earlier order banning grazing in forests to limit the ban to Protected Areas, when grazing is a specific right under the FRA.”

“What we see in Nagarhole is not mere high-handedness but gross violation of laws. State forces are enforcing eviction in direct contravention of the FRA,” said Bijoy.

Theoretical rights and practical struggles

India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 was meant to undo the injustices meted out to tribals by recognising the rights of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. It explicitly protects them from eviction until their claims are processed while allowing both individual and community ownership of forest land.

On paper, the FRA is a landmark legislation. However, in practice, its implementation has been fraught with resistance from forest departments and conservation lobbies. Of the five million claims filed nationwide, about half have been rejected or remain pending. Karnataka’s record is no better. Thousands of Jenu Kuruba claims are stuck in bureaucratic limbo.

The May incident in Nagarhole was, therefore, not just a symbolic return but a test of the FRA itself. By setting up shelters inside the forest, the community sought to enforce what they believe is already legally theirs. The police dismantling of those shelters laid bare the gap between statutory rights and state practice.

The Jenu Kuruba story is part of a larger nationwide struggle to balance conservation with justice.

This tension is playing out across India. In 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of tribal families whose FRA claims were rejected, sparking uproar until the order was stayed. In the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, communities are waging similar battles to remain on ancestral land inside tiger reserves. 

Meanwhile, the federal government showcases ambitious tribal welfare programmes. The Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan, launched in 2024 with a ₹790 billion (USD 9billion) budget, promises infrastructure and livelihoods in 63,000 villages. Initiatives like Eklavya Model Residential Schools seek to bring modern education to tribal children. Yet, as activists note, these schemes rarely address the fundamental issue: the right to live in forests. Without that, development projects risk becoming hollow gestures.

What is at stake?

The confrontation in Nagarhole has implications that extend far beyond the forest’s borders. For the Jenu Kuruba, it is about survival, dignity, and cultural continuity. For the state, it is about defending a conservation model rooted in the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, which empowers relocations for the sake of intact habitats. For India more broadly, it raises questions about whose vision of nature prevails.

Conservationists argue that human habitation in tiger reserves leads to deforestation, poaching risks and animal conflict. But a growing body of research suggests otherwise. Indigenous communities often act as stewards of biodiversity. Honey collection, fire management and sustainable harvesting practices of groups like the Jenu Kuruba may, in fact, strengthen forest resilience.

If the community succeeds in asserting its place within Nagarhole, it could inspire similar acts of reclamation across the country. If it fails,  through evictions or police crackdowns or other judicial letdown, the message to millions of forest-dependent people will be clear. Their rights will exist only on paper that does not translate into reality.

Political stakes are also rising. With nearly 300 million Indians dependent on forests for their livelihoods, any move perceived as trampling tribal rights risks fuelling unrest. Past interventions by bodies like the federally empowered National Human Rights Commission have shown that the government can be compelled to provide rehabilitation and redress. Whether such accountability emerges again in Nagarhole remains uncertain.

For now, the Jenu Kuruba continue to return to the forest, however precariously. Shivu Jenukuruba Appu, 29, a thin-framed, long-haired leader, told UntoldMag that the community is determined to fight until their campaign reaches its logical conclusion.

Even as the police dismantled their shelters, Shivu said: “The authorities are not even allowing us to bury the dead bodies of deceased Jenu Kurubas in our ancestral funeral grounds. This is our basic right. Still, we’re not abandoning this fight at any point. We are not going anywhere.”

At dusk in Nagarhole, the forest quiets, and the outlines of abandoned shelters blend into the trees. The Jenu Kuruba may have fewer roofs over their heads at night, but their resolve remains unbroken. Their fight is not only for land but for recognition. The acknowledgement that India’s forests are living homes, where people and wildlife have coexisted for generations.

The struggle, decades in the making, is far from over. And what happens here, in the shadow of the tiger, may determine not just the fate of one tribe but the future of India’s conservation story itself.

The post Whose Forests? Jenu Kuruba Tribes Fight for Ancestral Land and Forest Rights in India appeared first on Untold.

As he was tracing the sky, a shell struck his home in Salamabad, a village close to the de facto Uri border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan. “The blast occurred at around 2:30 AM. Luckily my family were outside,” Yunus recalled. 

Such horror is no rare sight in Kashmir’s border villages especially in Uri, Poonch, Rajouri and Kupwara, where millions of residents live under constant fear of becoming collateral damage in the unending hostilities between two neighbours. 

The picturesque Himalayan Kashmir region has been a major bone of contention and flashpoint between the two nuclear-armed states. Both countries have nearly fought four wars (beginning in 1948, 1965, 1999 and 2025) since the princely state’s accession to India in 1947. 

The renewed crisis intensified on April 22, when unidentified militants killed at least 26 Indian tourists in Pahalgam, a valley in South Kashmir known for its Alpine meadows. India blamed Pakistan for carrying out the brutal attack, a claim vehemently denied by the latter.

On May 7, India conducted offensive military airstrikes (Operation Sindoor) across Pakistan territory, claiming to target “terrorist camps” at nine different locations. The airstrikes plunged the entire South Asia in war hysteria. What followed was two nights of intense shelling along the borders, the worst the villagers of Uri, Poonch and Rajouri had seen in decades.

Three days later, India and Pakistan agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire. For villagers living in northern Kashmir the ceasefire is a “silence before the looming storm”. Referring to countless times ceasefire violations occurred since a peace agreement was signed in 2003. 

Intergenerational trauma

In the recent exchange of fire, India has reported that at least 21 civilians lost their lives while Pakistan reported 40 lost their lives across border areas. 

“In a war we did not start and cannot control, we are mere numbers. Generations have endured the trauma of internal displacement and destruction. It is the poor people like us, who face the brunt of the violence,” Badruddin, a 37-year-old resident of Uri, feared. 

Dozens of houses and other infrastructure were destroyed in northern Kashmir’s Uri, Gingal, Lagama, Salamabad, Charankot and Dardkhote. 

The unpredictability of conflict has led to political instability and overwhelming collective trauma across Kashmir. 45% of Kashmir’s adult population (1.8 million) suffers from mental distress, one study revealed. 

The apparent signs of intergenerational trauma has led to higher suicide rates and reportedly increased substance usage among Kashmiri youth, according to another study.

Of the 7 million population of Kashmir, the majority of people have been impacted by violence. Forced relocation (internal displacement) of families living in a state of “perpetual insecurity” impacts their economic prospects.

The violence have a lasting impact on survivors, especially children who become traumatized. 

Eleven-year-old Bisma Firoz, wounded in the shelling, remains visibly shaken. Her father, 44-year-old Firoz-ud-din, recalls how he felt devastated to witness her suffering, comparing the latest escalation to the Kargil conflict of 1999, he narrates. “Back then, fire was exchanged at the border. But unfortunately this time, the Pakistani side’s artillery hit our cities and towns.”

For Saima Jan, 28, who was soon to be married in northern Kashmir, her dreams have been buried in the shelling. Standing in front of the ruins of her home, she has lost the dowry her mother had spent years collecting.

In the Nowpora area, just 14 kilometers from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, villagers including Talib Hussain described the dreadful night devastation for their children.

 “Eight of my family members narrowly escaped death. Walah (by God) it was a miracle,” Talib sighed, while lamenting in front of a house that was razed to the ground. “I lost consciousness. My three children are traumatised to see their house reduced to rubble.”

At least one million people reside along the Indian side of the LoC, most of whom are pastoralists, daily wage workers and heavily dependent on agriculture for livelihood. 

Many villagers complained there were no emergency warnings issued by authorities. “We have no bunkers either,” Yunus emphasised. 

Some villagers embraced their children in their arms, while others dragged the elderly through fields, praying for another two hours the artillery would not find them. Scores of vulnerable families had to flee towards the forest in the dark, they recalled. 

Researcher and decolonial ethnographer Omer Aijazi explains that the situation showcases how the violence is becoming an instrument for erasure: “It is normalised by virtue of being in the vicinity of the bordering area.”

Following the airstrikes, Indian authorities announced paltry compensation—INR 130,000 (USD 1,500) for fully destroyed homes, and INR 6,000 (USD 70) for partially damaged ones. 

Villagers of Uri, however, complain that their lives and memories lie buried beneath collapsed homes, and these “superficial gestures” by the state only add to the wounds. 

“Our homes are shattered in a war we never asked for,” said 43-year-old Shameem Ahmad, a resident of Salamabad. “Now the government expects us to accept some rupees and move on, as if we are beggars?”

Decades of war

Since 1947, the disputed Kashmir valley has been claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan. India administers around 48 percent of the region, while the remaining 52 percent of territory is under the control of Pakistan and China.

In August 2019, India unilaterally abrogated the status quo of the disputed region by downgrading the state into two union territories, which South Asian expert Dr. Wang Shida argued “forced China into the Kashmir dispute”. 

New Delhi made these changes after placing the region under a military siege, communication lockdown of 172 days was imposed, besides other coercive measures (including mass arrest) to strip the region of any remaining autonomous status. 

The United Nations is credited to have brokered a ceasefire in 1949 and the formation of the de facto LoC border in the 1970s. Over the years, the Indian side has maintained an enormous military presence (roughly around 700,000 soldiers) in its controlled region, making it the most densely militarized zone of the world. 

Since 1989, when the armed rebellion erupted against Indian rule, the Himalayan Kashmir region has remained politically fragile. The Indian state has used different coercive strategies to suppress the demand for self-determination, starting from counter-insurgency operations which led to the death of over 70,000 people, mostly civilians, rebel fighters and Indian troops.

Battles of dispossession

“Over the last five years, Indian authorities have unilaterally made new laws entrenching dispossession, imprisonment, criminalization of dissent or resistance to New Delhi rule,” Kashmiri political anthropologist Athar Zia explains.

Between 2020 to 2023 alone, over 2700 individuals have been detained under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Public Safety Act. This “collective punishment” has reportedly intensified in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, with over “3,000 arrests and 100 Public Safety Act (PSA) detentions.”  

Following the downgrading of the state into two union territories in August 2019, most of the political activities that used to take place across social media platforms, streets, and other private spaces have been halted or structurally suppressed. 

Locals fear that authorities are increasing land acquisition exponentially by changing land ownership laws, enabling widespread evictions, demolitions and confiscation of properties.

Political observers caution these legal changes are focused on promoting settlements and demographic changes in the region. The Indian government has been accused of conducting a sweeping campaign against the families of accused militants which critics described as a form of “collective punishment” against the local population.

Human rights organisations have cautioned that Indian authorities have heavily relied on digital surveillance and other advanced CCTV cameras installed in urban settings to keep a tight grip on dissent. Indian newspaper, The Hindu quoted an intelligence official acknowledging that in 2014 alone, the security apparatus was tapping one million phones in Kashmir. 

These staggering figures illustrate the underlying level of state scrutiny and reliance on new technologies like biometrics and military drones in the process of intense surveillance in a militarized location where the ratio between civilian and military personnel is already 1:14.

“Today, the word used most often in Kashmir is dispossession. Kashmiris invariably perceive India as strengthening its colonial control, facilitating troops movement, demographic shift and final push for the settler expansion,” Athar argued.

Collective punishment

Following the Pahalgam attack, a series of massive blasts reportedly resonated across Pulwama, Shopian, Kulgam and Anantnag. The explosions were conducted by Indian forces. At least nine civilian houses belonging to the families of accused militants were reduced to rubble. 

Yasmeena, the sister of one of the accused militants, saw her ancestral house being demolished with explosives in Anantnag: “what is our sin and why are my parents, my sister being punished for the actions of my brother?” she asks. 

At least 105 homes were destroyed following gunfights between 2015 and March 2018 in southern Kashmir’s Pulwama district, India Spend reported. Over 114 homes were destroyed during military operations in 2020. 

The presence of controversial laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and other similar provisions has granted additional impunity to security forces, enabling them to operate without accountability for human rights abuses. 

For Kakhmiris, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is not only legislation—it is the silence after a raid, the knock at midnight, and the courtroom doors that remain shut.

This is what Mohammad Ashraf Mattoo, 62, has endured for 15 years, seeking justice for his teenage son, Tufail, killed by Indian forces in 2010 from a close range with a tear gas canister that struck his head from behind. 

His cold-blooded-murder sparked protests that lasted several months resulting in over 100 Kashmiris, mostly youths, losing their lives as police were accused of using excessive force against protestors.

In 2012, the case was quietly shut, the file closed. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, called on the authorities to reopen the investigation and bring the perpetrators to justice. But nothing moved. No names emerged. No arrests were made. 

Fifteen years down the line, aging lines have manifested deep into his face. Like so many bereaved parents before him, he gathers his resolve: “I tell you, I am not losing heart. My son is alive in the hearts of his friends, his well-wishers. I take my strength from them.”

Mattoo’s story is not an exception—it is the rule in Kashmir. His pursuit of justice for his son, echoes the anguish of thousands whose lives have been shattered by state violence, legal impunity, and institutional silence. 

From border villages razed by artillery to courtrooms where killers remain “untraceable,” Kashmiris navigate a landscape where the violence is both physical and bureaucratic, relentless and routine. In a place where memory itself becomes resistance, Mattoo’s refusal to surrender speaks to a collective struggle: not just to survive, but to be heard in a system built to erase them.

The post Living Between Shells and Silence: How Kashmiris Endure a War Without End appeared first on Untold.

Ahmad is most known for his 1994 book In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures which some on the left consider one of the most theoretically important Marxist responses to the rise of post-colonial theory in the Euro-American academy. In this book Ahmad notably targets foundational theorists such as Edward Said and Ranajit Guha, arguing that their theoretical positions arising from their vantage points of exile in the West do not adequately account for the social realities of the regions they supposedly represent, and that their eager reception in the West and in elite circles in the Global South align with an overall neoliberal attack on the Leftist social project of ‘radical equality’ more generally.

Ahmad’s vast oeuvre speaks for itself. However, what may be of interest to readers here are the social conditions that led to his critiques and gestures toward a postcolonial Leftist imagination in which the ‘West’ was not the point of reference for a comparative, social and cultural analysis between different regions of the world, including SWANA.

As we today are witnessing the continued suffering of Palestinians, as a result of one ‘partition’, and as genocidal bombs continue to drop over Gaza killing tens of thousands of innocents, the story of Ahmad’s own exile begins in the aftermath of another Partition which served as the bloody template for the current situation in Palestine, which is the partition of British India. We do not know exactly how many people perished in what is now recognized as the bloodiest population transfer the world had ever seen, but most estimates suggest that it was well over one million. The irony of the fact that two ‘secular’ states–both India and Pakistan were officially secular in their founding constitutions–were formed on the basis of a partition dividing communities on religious lines, India for ‘Hindus’ and Pakistan for ‘Muslims’ never escaped Ahmad, and likely informed his future work which complicated the idea of secularism and fascism in the postcolonial world.

Ahmad was born to a well off Muslim family in the state of Uttar Pradesh in what is now India. He moved with his family shortly after Partition to Pakistan where he completed his studies. Like many intellectuals, he went abroad, in this case to the United States, to complete his further studies. For many postcolonial intellectuals, this initial step of moving to the West for higher education, inaugurated their careers as academics in exile, and as Ahmad argues, has helped shape their theoretical and political trajectories.

Ahmad however chose a different route, deciding to return not to his ‘home’ country Pakistan, which had experienced a military dictatorship under General Zia-ul-Haq and was officially declared an Islamic Republic, but to India, the land from where he and his family had fled. Despite the various obstacles that he faced as a ‘foreigner’ in the land of his birth, the academic conditions nurtured by Nehruvian socialism in India allowed Ahmad to continue to work in and around New Delhi for most of his career, where he produced most of his major writings.

Yet in a story that many contemporary SWANA intellectuals would find familiar, the conditions in India worsened significantly, as Nehruvian socialism slowly gave way to the rise of Hindu ‘fascism’ and the right wing government started to tighten its grip over intellectual spaces. Ahmad was forced to flee again at the twilight of his career as his right to work was denied.  In a tragic twist, he underwent a second, or perhaps even third exile, where he begrudgingly found refuge as a visiting professor at the University of California-Irvine, before passing away on 9 March 2022 in a place that he never considered home.

Exile, decolonization, secularism

This question of exile is important because it directly shaped Ahmad’s vision for a postcolonial Left.  Most of the dominant visions of ‘postcoloniality’ that have gained global currency stem from the postcolonial intellectual’s position within the western academy, and therefore the question of what is the ‘West’ in relation to the ‘Third World,’ or what we now call the ‘Global South’, always looms large in such discussions. This is related to similar discussions, most of which are happening today in the academies of Europe and the US, on the ‘decolonization’ of certain disciplinary fields. In In Theory, Ahmad traces this tendency back to the publication of Said’s Orientalism and the rise of ‘Third World Literature’ in the western, particularly North American, academy.  Said’s work and its aftermath, Ahmad writes in his book, stems from the “social self-consciousness and professional assertion of the middle-class immigrant and the ‘ethnic intellectual” which allows one to unproblematically assert the “imperial oppression” of all European knowledge and then declare the liberatory potential in any narrative either from the Third World or from its representatives in the West.

Marx, because he is European, therefore can become dismissed as an ‘Orientalist’ while Said, though he comes from an elite background and spent most of his time in the West, can be seen to be a liberator for not just Palestinians, but for all of the ‘Orient’. According to Ahmad, Said offers a racialized vision of a ‘decolonial’ thinking in which the Palestinian, qua Palestinian, or any Third World subject could be seen as naturally representing the oppressed in relation to the bogeyman of the ‘West.’

One can look at In Theory to gain a more complex understanding of Ahmad’s work and can agree or disagree with his criticisms of Said, who, as he mentions, as a supporter of the Palestinian cause for self-determination he had great respect for. However, Ahmad’s work points us up in another direction in which we can start to think about how we may ‘reframe’ the work of comparative, cultural, and political analysis beyond the framework that the ‘West’ offers us, which includes the heuristics of concepts like ‘Global South’, ‘Third World’, provincializing ‘Europe,’ etc. Ahmad experimented with this method in his various writings on fascism and secularism where he explored more deeply what these terms, inherited from the European political experience, could mean if we explain it in terms of contemporaneous developments in South Asia and SWANA.

Ahmad famously said that “every country gets the fascism they deserve.”  The groups currently labeled as ‘Islamist’ and ‘fascist,’ that is non-liberal, Ahmad argues, are historically a product of the ‘weak’ liberalism in which a political ‘majority’ was developed through violent religious-cultural hegemony.  In many cases, such as in India and Turkey, these organizations took advantage of the liberal (i.e. colonial) mechanisms of governance to embed themselves in the state structure and state institutions, even under regimes that are nominally secular.  In other cases, such as in the case of Syria and Egypt, the state could not assert itself over these groups through liberal mechanisms, therefore suspending the liberal structure of governance entirely and perpetuating extended states of emergencies.

These multifaceted notions of fascism, present in both SWANA and in South Asia, require an in-depth study of the conditions of post-colonial liberalism and a comparative outlook that does not intuitively take Europe as a frame of reference.  “All the studies of Nazism,” Ahmad says in an interview, “will not tell you much about the RSS brand of fascism if you do not accord primacy to the political, religious, and social conditions specific to Hindu India”, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right wing Hindu majoritarian organization whose political wing, the Bharatiya Janta Party, currently rules India.  In fact, if one wants to know about the RSS in India, Ahmad writes, it would be better to study Rashid Rida and the ideologies leading to Salafism, Ikhwan-al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) of Al-Banna, al-Nahda, and Hamas.

The other interesting concept Ahmad discussed at some length is the idea of ‘secularism’ as it appeared in concrete instances of deployment in South Asia and SWANA.  Scholars such as Talal Asad or Saba Mahmood have discussed religious alternatives to the idea of the secular, but Ahmad is not interested in secularism in relation to the ‘religious,’ again seeing this as a debate emerging from a primarily European debates. He is rather more concerned with why, at the point of decolonisation, the idea of ‘secular’ was so important for nationalist movements at the time. Both in British India and in what he calls the ‘cosmopolitan’ areas of SWANA, that is the states located around the Mediterranean and along the Tigris and Euphrates, secularism was more of a compromise ideology to wed diverse groups to a national project.

Ahmad wrote extensively about how this idea of ‘secularism’ was wielded both by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru in India in similar ways, and explains how the ideological contradictions in their respective ‘secular projects’, wedded as it was to the British colonial inheritance, could not withstand, in the case of the former, the Zionist defeat, and in the case of the latter, the phenomenal rise of Hindu right.

While in both Egypt and India many young scholars are critiquing the legacies of Nasser and Nehru, and exploring how their ideas of ‘secularism’ have created the conditions for dictatorship and the ascendancy of the right wing, there is very little awareness of the shared political and social dynamics in both regions, the legacy of over a millennia of shared history. Leftist thought from the region continues to be mired in predominantly local concerns, Ahmad noted, whereas ‘cosmopolitan’ thought by necessity has been wedded to the European experience.

Radical equality and its controversies

Ahmad wore many hats, he was a poet himself in the Urdu language and a translator of the poet Ghalib’s works, a literary theorist, journalist, political commentator, and cultural critic.  However, one hat he never took off was his commitment to Marxism and his belief that “radical equality” in the postcolonial world could never come through a politics of secular liberalism, which did not, he argued, “have enough justice in it not to invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane”. In the end, radical equality could only emerge through class struggle, and for the establishment of a regionally attuned idea of communism that does not dispense with so-called ‘European’ thought, but that does not base itself on Europe as a frame of reference. Sometimes this unwavering commitment could run him into controversy, for instance his qualified support of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, which he describes as one of the secular and quasi-socialist Arab nationalist bulwarks against Islamist takeover, something readers may find particularly problematic.

Here is also the question of what is the value of the Left right now, as the Left orthodoxy in South Asia and SWANA seems out of step with dominant trends in progressive social justice mobilization, and often is seen to oppose the assertion of feminist, queer, anti-caste, and other forms of social movements. Ahmad, as one of the last representatives of mostly male postcolonial left intellectuals could be seen as representing this orthodox tendency. Yet the questions his life and work raise are still important even though what we may expect or imagine out of politics may have changed.

Many of us continue to work from positions of exile as the conditions in our countries of origin become even much more suffocating than it was during Ahmad’s time. Leftist thought becomes stranded in between the twin poles of an unbending orthodoxy on the one hand and the abyss of identity politics on the other, unable to adequately counter the rising authoritarianism and ‘God’s justice.’ Revisiting Ahmad’s work may help us try to productively use our condition of exile to think anew the project of a non-liberal ‘radical equality’ that is cosmopolitan and internationalist in outlook and at the same time rooted in the concrete social conditions of our lands.

Other selected books by Aijaz Ahmad:

Ahmad, Aijaz. Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia. New York: Verso, 2002.

Ahmad, Aijaz. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of our times. New Delhi: LeftWord. 2004.

Ahmad, Aijaz. On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2016.

Ahmad, Aijaz. India: Liberal Democracy and the Extreme Right. Hyderabad: Navatelengana Publishing House.

Prashad Vijay and Aijaz Ahmad. The Political Marx: Aijaz Ahmad in conversation with Vijay Prashad. New Delhi: LeftWord. 2023.

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