See-curitization: Seeing the Kashmir Conflict through the Lens of the Individual
According to G.H. Mead, the psychology of
an individual is made of the ‘me’ i.e., the socially constructed element of
society and the ‘I’, i.e., the element that enacts the social role assigned to the
individual. Ken Booth believes that these elements of the individual
colour their interpretation of reality, and by extension, security. As an Indian upper-caste cis-het male, my
privileged upbringing largely influenced my worldview. Being the son of an
officer of the Indian Air Force also adds a dimension to my perceptions of national security. The self-identity has very well been central to my view of security over the years, as proponents
of the Aberystwyth School would argue. I recognize 2019 as a tipping point in
this sense, where I moved to college and my immediate social environment vastly
changed, and along with it came a transformation of my political conscience. Past
that point, ‘I’ struggled heavily with revelations that came as I met individuals
whose lived experiences differed so vastly from mine. They led to me to the epiphany
that certain assumptions I considered natural were a mere construction. These revelations came as a threat to ‘me’ and all my privilege, and henceforth
manifest as guilt.
Kenneth Waltz employs three levels of analysis in his influential work Man, the State and War. In his paper, Booth uses this Waltzian level of analysis to reflect on how specific individuals influenced his departure from realism and altered his analysis of these three levels. My own narrative is very similar to Booth's in the sense that it was through a conversation with two Kashmiri women that the foundations of my knowledge had been challenged. In fact, the changes in my own understandings could largely be organized into these very three dimensions. In the centre of it all, lies the case of the Kashmir conflict. My conversation was situated around the time of the abrogation of article 370 of the Indian constitution in 2019 by the BJP-led Indian government.
Man
It was
in that conversation that I came to know of instances where soldiers would act
not as means of security but as men who would commit atrocities against women. The
surprise was not just the existence of these crimes but moreover how concealed
they had been throughout my life. I was faced with the reality of being
embedded inside a system that inherently threatens the lives of women. Such an
essentialist narrative instilled within me an uneasiness that would later intensify
on gaining a constructivist understanding of men and their socialization as instruments
of the patriarchy, a role that ‘I’, too, was enacting. Women cannot find solace
in their own community either. They are oppressed by patriarchs of their
households, and can be dragged into the war as decoys by militants in order to
dodge the scrutiny of the soldiers who would disengage on seeing unarmed non-combatants
(Note that this is not to negate the (often voluntary) participation of some
women as active combatants in the war). In response, the military would be
forced to view these non-combatant women as potential hostiles involved in the
war. Placed in a political conundrum with their community being at a de facto
war with the state leaves little room for their gendered insecurity to come to
the fore in popular narratives. Lene Hansen terms this ‘subsuming
of security’ and argues it to be an inherent flaw of the Copenhagen school’s securitization
framework.
State
My interpretation
of the situation in Kashmir was to view the militants as proxy soldiers of the
Pakistani state, inciting ruckus in would have been a peaceful land. Seeing the conflict as the Indian state’s struggle for
territorial sovereignty. These understandings were a product of my consumption
of mainstream Indian media. My conversation with the two women made me realize
that, at the heart of it, there is a dissonance between the aspirations of the
state and the people. Their view antagonizes the Indian state and sees the
military as perpetrators of threat, with the ability to rummage through their
homes at will. Keeping the referent object as the embedded individual, shifting
focus from the realist analysis of the states being the centre of things allows
for analysis of their actions in response to the military as a political act of
resistance and struggle for their emancipation. The militancy and the state-mandated
militarisation stands in the way of their emancipation. The clampdown imposed
on the population of J&K in 2019 could be seen as further deprivation of their
emancipation as individuals.
War
The
conflict here is multifaceted and cannot be subjected to the limited analysis of
a state resisting a separatist movement. In fact, the women I talked with had
malice for the military and the state, but not for India. These militants are perceived
as terrorists in the rest of India but to them, they are “brave warriors” who
fight for their community. Thus, one may see this movement as a collective political
resistance for the emancipation of these embedded individuals. The emancipatory
struggle continues for generations as a response to a constant state of control
imposed on the people of Kashmir. An inquiry into individuals’ own
motivations to take up arms offer greater scope to the securitizing actor i.e.,
the Indian state.
To that end, we are faced with a ‘chicken and egg problem’. The military intervention in the state (now UT) perpetuates the struggle it aims to silence. Soldiers protecting a community that they are also at war with. The disdain for the military cannot be seen as a “lack of respect and gratitude for the forces”, it is a force of habit and is justified on account of years of conflict.
The fight for this territory has come at a cost
that is being borne not just by the state, but by individuals – by individuals
on either side fighting in the name of their motherland. As Booth argues, my
understanding of what is happening ‘out there’ was truly a result of the being
situated far away from home, the times of heightened discourse in the context
of the abrogation of article 370 and first-hand accounts of two individuals.
References
Booth, Ken. 1994. “Security and Self Reflections of a Fallen Realist,” YCISS Occasional Paper Paper 26: October 1994
Hansen, Lene. 2000. ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School’. Millennium 29 (2): 285–306.
Hi Jyotir,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your personal experiences and perspectives on an organization that I’m sure is of immense importance to you, as the child of an officer, as is to me, a civilian with deep respect. I was particularly moved by the section ‘Man’ where you detail the perpetuation of sexual violence by the soldiers of the Indian army against civilian women in Kashmir. I wanted to add a small part to your analysis, something I learnt in my last semester’s gender course; ‘sexual violence is also a weapon of war’. It is not just a consequence of soldiers ‘being men’, but is a strategy often employed by organizations that are fueled by nationalistic interests. While rape is often justified through the tone deaf argument of ‘male libido’, the act of raping a civilian Kashmiri is also an expression of rage and dominance. The domination of the Indian man over the Kashmiri woman is reflective of the symbolic angle i.e. the Indian state dominates Kashmiri resistance. Since the woman’s body is not just ‘hers’ but is also unfortunately answerable to culture and society, the rape of the Kashmiri woman is equivalent to the loss of dignity of the Kashmiri man and the culture at large. Cynthia Enloe formulates three kinds of rape, two of which are important to this discussion: ‘national security rape and mass rape’. These, as Enloe elaborates, are tools used by armies worldwide to use women's bodies to humiliate and diminish the value of the male in society by extreme acts of violence against ‘his women’. Taken through this lens, we can once again identify the state as a security threat that tries to pass of sexual violence by soldiers as random acts by rogue elements. It is a systematic problem that is oftentimes encouraged and utilized as a military strategy.
Reference:
Enloe Cynthia. 2000. Manoeuvres: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press.