My contribution to our emerging collective conversation against neocolonialism is through the vantage of Kashmir. Kashmir is often compared to Palestine and sometimes referred to as “another Palestine.” In this essay, I highlight, revisit, and expand on a few aspects of the Kashmiri struggle for azadî (liberation) and suggest the ways that they resonate with the Palestinian struggle. My aim is the same as that of the kindred essays in this series: to fortify a decolonial transnational feminist praxis that dreams and stands vigil for collective liberation from all modes of European imperialism, a decolonial feminist solidarity that becomes evident in all expressions of humanity—poetry to protests, analysis to arguments. That is, a decolonial feminist praxis that makes our existence resistance.
In a world that, post-World War II, was supposed to be “decolonized,” we have witnessed the increasing might of the neocolonial order, evident in brutal militarization, settler colonialism, illegal occupation, ethnic killings, capitalist extraction, ecocide, and growing numbers of human rights violations across the globe. These are also deeply rampant in the space we now know as the USA. The march of neocolonialism–going by other names today–has, to the “never-again” promise, added another “yes, again” milestone–the genocide in Gaza, live-streamed by the Palestinian people.
Kashmiris have always seen their resistance reflected in the Palestinian struggle against a European settler occupation. They have historically been in solidarity with Palestine, organizing passionate demonstrations and rallies. Even being under Indian military occupation did not stop them from marching in the streets, despite their facing disproportionate military force, imprisonment, and maiming. In 2014, the Indian military killed a young teen. Solidarity showed up in vibrant graffiti and slogans. Kashmiris have run the entire gamut in their displays of solidarity. In 2021, an artist was imprisoned for making art proclaiming, “We are Palestine.” A big part of the political culture in Kashmir is public prayers deployed as protest, which resonates with supplications for the freedom of Palestine as much as for Kashmir’s own. Fridays used to be a day of afternoon prayer congregations that mostly ended in protests. Palestine has always been at the top of the supplication list for Kashmiris. Since 2019, after being militarily stripped of their quasi-autonomy and territorial sovereignty by India, Kashmiris have been increasingly silenced. The ever-tightening laws passed by the Indian government have effectively ended public protests and even basic freedom of expression, and they have institutionalized land grabbing and censorship. Despite the extreme restrictions on all modes of expression and an active ban on Palestinian solidarity, there have been sporadic protests, which the administration shut down quickly. Reports commenting on the silencing are rare, given journalists cannot report freely under press laws that are openly called a media gag. The extreme nature of repression even bans mentioning Palestine in Friday sermons or supplicating for Palestine in the Kashmiri language. The Indian administration’s repression effectively thwarts any political mobilization that expresses solidarity with Palestine. Yet despite this curbing of free speech, people have still tried to gather to show their support.
Kashmiris see the Palestinian resistance as a beacon for Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination and azadî. The meaning of the word azadî, for the most part, is liberty or freedom from India, and for some Kashmiris, it stands for joining Pakistan. The ideas Edward Said puts forward in his essay “Intifada and Independence” resonate with the political tragedy of Kashmir and its hapless resistance. As I’ve noted elsewhere, intifada as a movement struck a deep chord with the Kashmiri political resistance. The term was adopted to define their struggle and became particularly prominent in the early 2000s. Supporters of the Kashmiri freedom movement invoked “Kashmiri intifada” to honor and reiterate the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and draw inspiration and momentum for their fight for azadî. I have argued that this is a form of “affective solidarity” from Kashmiris to Palestinians. This mode of solidarity for Palestine simultaneously becomes cathartic and lends value to Kashmir’s resistance movement. A Kashmiri expresses this deep empathy thusly: “their [Palestinians’] wounds are our wounds, we stand for them too, we know what it is to be Maqbooza (occupied).”
In recent years, the struggles in Kashmir and Palestine have increasingly been connected, and these struggles have also been connected with other sites of neocolonial wars from Turtle Island to Afghanistan. Kashmir and Palestine are both remnants of colonial hegemony imposed by the erstwhile classic colonial British order. They have been side by side on the agenda of the United Nations since 1948. Both regions suffer in similar as well as different ways under oppressive and brutal military occupations. The manufactured disputes over the two sites, previously seen through an Orientalist lens, have been replaced by the anti-Islam stereotype of terrorism that negates people’s right to their homelands.
The similarities in history and contemporary everyday life in Kashmir are too many to ignore. The dispossession of the natives, dense militarization, ecocide, brutality of troops, constant checkpoints, crackdowns, raids, encounters, and direct and indirect violence share uncanny similarities. In the 2010s, mass blindings of Kashmiri protesters with pellet guns heightened the violent resonances further. It also brought to the fore the discreet relationships between India and the Israeli settler state in arms trade, business, diplomacy, and surveillance technology. The symbolics of violence overlapped to the extent that a photo of a Palestinian girl’s wounded face was mistaken for a Kashmiri child’s. Of course, the violence in Gaza has now far surpassed any documented conventional and unconventional warfare in modern times.
Kashmiris’ resistance has been influenced by Palestinian literature, especially fiction and poetry. Writers, activists, and resistors such as Ghassan Kanafani were inspired by pithy allegories of resistance—“a conversation between the sword and the neck.” Naji al-Ali’s Handala and Leila Khalid’s brave revolutionary visage became part of the popular imagination in Kashmir. Poetry, in particular, has been a vehicle for resistance. Mahmoud Darwish’s “ID Card,” Rafeef Ziadah’s “We Teach Life, Sir,” and, more recently, Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die” have circulated and resonated in Kashmir, a means of catharsis and solidarity. Kashmir’s tragic bard, the naturalized American citizen Agha Shahid Ali, who died in 2001, engaged as passionately with Palestine in his poems as he did with Kashmir. Edward Said invited him to translate some of Darwish’s work into English, and he dedicated his first published ghazal to Said.
In my own poetic work, Palestine emerges as part of my organic creative process. In 2010, Indian forces killed over 112 people and injured more than two thousand Kashmiris to repress an uprising. I later wrote a poem titled “No Rose Red in Kashmir.” Unbeknownst to my conscious process, the verse would start in Kashmir and stop in Gaza. I have expressed this slippage as subconsciously weighing the pain of Kashmiris on the scale of Palestine. Below is the excerpt from the poem:
there is no rose red in Kashmir
some noise (or quiet) later
come – read the lines
illegible, over me
and you will know
the only rose red in Gaza
oozes from your heart to mine
The invocation to Gaza was not conscious, nor was it an error, but a reflection of the deep psyche that identifies neocolonial violence as a continuum—from Kashmir to Palestine. It is reminiscent of the searing poem by Warsan Shire where the Atlas, when asked where it hurts, replies, “everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”
For most Kashmiris, as for most Palestinians, to feel like an outsider in their homeland is a constant shared pain. Kashmiris face the oppression of Indian military occupation both through military and administrative mechanisms that violate their indigeneity and sovereignty. Based on administrative categories, people are separated for identification, surveillance, and ultimate dispossession. Like for Palestinians, checkpoints, beatings, imprisonment, and killings—and all kinds of other brutal human rights violations—are common realities.
As the ceasefire comes into effect in Gaza, the horrific violence continues even as its aftermath looms over the people and land. We must ask what kind of fire is ceasing. What is being ceased and what continues; why and how? How do we carry the dream and stand vigil to birth a decolonial feminist praxis that can attend to the wounds of neocolonialism? How does intifada in academic spaces remain a call to a just peace and celebration of homelands and avoid being weaponized by neocolonial politics fueled by sanctioned ignorance? Refaat Alareer, Palestinian poet and founder of We Are Not Numbers, in a heartbreaking interview a few weeks before he was assassinated, offered some wise words. He said:
If a soldier enters my house, the only weapon I have is an Expo marker; and if I must, I will throw it at them.
The marker–symbolic of knowledge, writing, and transmission and flagged by Alareer–is at the heart of decolonial feminist praxis. Knowledge is the only weapon needed if it is wielded well. In his tragically famous poem “If I Must Die,” Alareer invites us to build a massive white kite, as the angel of love—one that comforts the wounded and weary—create epistemic solidarity, bridges of knowledge and of love to come, that allows transcending of the horrors of colonial genocide, dispossession, and death.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, feminist solidarity is the Expo marker manifest. Feminist solidarity affirms the radical possibility of speaking and creating community—even as we stand on the wounded soil of Turtle Island and other multiple hurt homelands that our human existence inhabits, all occupied from Falasteen to Kashmir; and also from womanhood to genderhood; from inner ramparts of soul and to the skin and bones that embody humanity—all under siege. As decolonial scholars inhabiting bodies of color, bodies encasing self-reflexive and empathetic souls, we stand our ground together. The Kashmiri people live under a military occupation that is camouflaged in a tool named “democracy”—a Trojan horse, a neocolonial Eurocentric and Westphalian contraption, weaponized as nation-states against organic cultural existence everywhere. This gruesome entity, like in other places where war has a permanent residency, preys on Kashmir’s land, bodies, memories, and history. People are numbed, silenced—made to actively forget and to hold onto bare life. We must seize the radical possibility of speaking and of being heard as we connect the dots.
This essay is part of a larger project, with a few related examples that have already appeared or are forthcoming in other publications. The hyperlinks throughout the paper ensure originality and ethical attribution.
This essay is part of the series “Feminists for a Free Palestine: Voices from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and Beyond.” Read the introduction here. Read Zahra Ali’s essay “Transnational Feminism from Iraq to Palestine” here and Manijeh Moradian’s essay “Iranian Feminist Solidarity with Palestine” here.
Cover image: A mural reading “We Are Palestine,” created by a Kashmiri artist.
