Straight out of the Israeli settler colonial playbook, the Indian government has unleashed bulldozers on the houses and businesses of the Kashmiri people in Kashmir. The government claims that the land which is being cleared is state land encroached upon by the owners. In the same breath, the government claims that it is only influential people who are being targeted. It claims that Kashmir-based politicians had encroached on the state land during their rule in Kashmir. The government had assured that poor people would not be touched by the eviction drive. However, the claim is far from the truth as common masses have also been evicted.
Using these claims, earlier the government was evicting people arbitrarily. There were some instances where some shops were sealed in Srinagar even though the property belonged to the shopkeepers and not the state. Some people had requested the government to make the eviction drive transparent. The government later released a list of thousands of people who have supposedly encroached on the state land. Contrary to the Indian government’s claims, the list does not discriminate between the poor and the rich influential people.
Hopelessness and Helplessness in Kashmir
Even though the eviction drive threatens to make thousands of people in Kashmir homeless, the Kashmiri people have not yet resisted the move publicly. There have been no protests in Kashmir. However, there have been protests by Muslims in the Hindu-majority Jammu region. The eerie silence of the Kashmiri people on this matter gives a sense of hopelessness and helplessness to the Kashmiri people.
The Indian government has so intimidated Kashmiri people that there is no resistance to the government’s eviction drive. The current Modi-led regime in India is ruling in Kashmir through fear and intimidation.
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Kashmir’s Civil Society Crushed
The Indian government has crushed the civil society in Kashmir that would work as a buffer between the state and the people. Most of the civil society members are incarcerated in different jails across Kashmir. Similarly, Kashmiri human rights activists have also been jailed for one or the other pretext.
Therefore, there is really no one in Kashmir who would talk to the government on behalf of the Kashmiri people to stop this eviction drive. The leadership that would steer Kashmir through this difficult drive is in Indian jails.
Indian Civil Society Not Forthcoming
The Modi-led Indian government has also silenced civil society and human rights organizations in India. Members of Indian civil society that were sympathetic to Kashmiri people and human rights organizations in India have been silenced. Amnesty International’s Indian branch was also shut down after the government went after it for receiving alleged illegal foreign funding.
This has left Kashmiris without any allies in India. Nobody now talks about the Indian government’s wrongdoings in India.
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The media in Kashmir does not really report anything beyond what the government tells them to report. Kashmiri media outlets and journalists have been reduced to stenographers who just parrot the sentences that the government’s public relations department feeds them. There have been no independent reports on the eviction drive by any media outlet in Kashmir.
It must be mentioned that the government successfully silenced the media in Kashmir after it jailed many journalists for reporting anti-national news. The jailed journalists have been upheld as an example by the government for other journalists in Kashmir.
Similarly, the media in India has been silent on the eviction drive in Kashmir. All the media outlets except a few independent outlets have defected to the government’s side. The independent media outlets are very cautious with their news reports as the government has filed many against all of them.
The state of media in India as well as Kashmir has made it impossible to get any news on Kashmir that is critical of the government.
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Digitization and Privacy
Interestingly, the eviction drive came after the government digitized the land records. Nobody had thought the digitization of land records would be used to evict Kashmiri people from their homes. Now the government has said that it intends to give every family in Kashmir a unique number to identify it. The purpose of such an exercise is supposed to provide services in a hassle-free manner. However, the Kashmiri people cannot believe any such word from the government. It would interfere with the privacy of the people and would lead to dislodging of the Kashmiri people.
The eviction drive is one of the many inhuman policies that the Indian government has implemented in Kashmir. Before the eviction drive, the government brought a media policy in order to silence the media. Similarly, the properties of people who are supposedly anti-nationals were seized earlier by the government. Many people are in jail for alleged anti-national activities. The Indian government is not going to stop here and will come up with other policies in future to make sure Kashmiri people are completely disempowered.
