The Politics of Absence: Women Searching for the Disappeared in Kashmir

Contemporary Kashmir valley is seen in a terminal colonial situation within India. Since the armed movement broke out in 1989, the Indian government has deployed massive number of armed troops and implemented lethal counter-insurgency laws. Human rights groups claim that over 70,000 people have been killed and more than 8000 men have been forcibly disappeared in custody by the Indian army. This study focuses on the women activists of the Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons who organized in 1994 to search for the disappeared men. The everyday gendered politics of mourning emerges as, what I conceptualize as "affective law" which reveals a fine-grained understanding of women's agency that does not appear as only stereotypically confrontational but as nuancedly cultural. I trace the genesis of affective law within the paradigm of hauntology; a spectral space, of departure and return of the disappeared. The hauntological interiorization emerges as mourning, memory, and resistance. The women use performative politics which converges in the spectacle of mourning and allows them to transcend the limitations of the heavily militarized society. The performative politics of mourning makes it possible to resist oppression and through forms memory capture what might be rendered insignificant by hegemonic discourses of the state. The analysis of the work of mourning as a mode of affective politics traces women's social invisibility and how they become visible in the public. The activist-women emerge as agents of change that alter social constructions relating to body, justice, human rights and gender. The single disappearing body becomes a crucial counterpart in the state's political economy. The state's surveillance thinly masked in the disappearance becomes a symbol of panopticism - a theater, symbol, and a ritual. Even though spectacle has been conceptualized as separate, in this dissertation enforced disappearances come closer to the spectacular nature of punishment and become a "staging" visible to thousands of eyes. Thus, the society of surveillance emerges as deeply enmeshed with the spectacle and not as mutually exclusive. The spectacle of gendered activism allows tracing the state of exception that India has created in Kashmir valley. The punitive measures imposed by India, become means of forced assimilation of Kashmir. In this dissertation we see how the state becomes operational through dual modes including punitive measures like enforced disappearances and what is termed as military humanitarianism. The state terror emerges as a part of foundational violence for an ethnonational struggle to consolidate the Indian nation on what were pre-1947 heterogeneous territories