Shahla Hussain
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From the venue:
Shahla Hussain, St. John’s University;
“Land Question in Kashmir: Limitations of the Settler - Colonial Framework”
In August 2019, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led Indian government unilaterally abolished Kashmir’s autonomous status, the basis of Kashmir’s provisional accession to India. It ended Kashmir’s special land privileges. Some scholars place Jammu and Kashmir into a settler-colonial model to interpret India’s past integration policies, surveillance, assimilation agenda, and land dispossession. This paper pushes back against this approach, instead placing the land question within Kashmir’s unique regional context and complex dynamics. Drawing from constitutional debates, laws and legislations, court cases, and legal narratives, this paper historicizes India’s territorialization efforts and reveals how the emotional significance of land shaped Kashmiris’ politics of collaboration and resistance. India’s sustained imperial-capitalist strategies to suppress Kashmiri Muslim self-determination and systematically undermine their land rights are distinct from settler-colonialism, making this framework inadequate for understanding the political realities of Kashmir in the post-1947 period.