Kashmir’s Carceral Colonisation: When prisons become weapon of war

Kashmir’s Carceral Colonisation: When prisons become weapon of war 

By every metric that defines a modern democracy, the Indian state has failed Kashmir. But ‘failure’ is too soft a word. What we witness is a calculated, ideological project in which Hindutva has penetrated every pore of the state—military, police, executive, civil society, and, most tragically, the judiciary—turning Kashmir into the world’s largest prison complex, where surveillance, militarization, and collective punishment are deployed as weapons of war against an entire people.


By Altaf Hussain Wani 

Thousands of Kashmiris—politicians, poets, preachers, even children—languish in jails, from the notorious Tihar Jail to shadowy prison complexes scattered across the Indian mainland. Their crime is not terrorism. Their only crime is speaking truth to power and demanding the right to decide their political future, a right long promised to them in United Nations Security Council resolutions.


The numbers are staggering, but numbers rarely stir consciences. What should haunt the civilized world is the woeful plight of Kashmiri prisoners including men and women who have been forced to spend major portion of their lives in the dark dungeons of Indian prisons for their political beliefs. The world rightly celebrates Nelson Mandela for enduring an imprisonment of 28 years, yet remains silent about Kashmir’s political prisoners many of whom have endured incarceration for over 33 years.


For instance: Masarrat Aalam Butt, Chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference: he has spent twenty-eight of the past thirty-three years behind bars—most of them without trial. Muhammad Yasin Malik, Chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, is serving a life sentence for ‘waging war against India’—a charge that would be laughable. Shabir Ahmed Shah, often called the ‘Nelson Mandela of Kashmir,’ has spent more than half of his life—thirty-six years—in Indian detention centres and torture cells.


Nayeem Ahmed Khan, an engineer by training, has endured repeated detentions and torture, and now faces the same farcical charge of waging war against India. And women like Aasiya Andrabi and Naheeda Nasreen are punished not just for their politics but for being women—their incarceration in distant jails outside the Valley is not only a travesty of justice but also an atrocious assault on Kashmiri motherhood.


Similarly, Kashmir’s noted human rights defender Khurram Parvez—accused of terrorism by the Indian state—has nevertheless earned international recognition as a leading voice for human rights. Today, his name figures prominently among the world’s most respected rights defenders


The legal architecture of this repression, built on a regime of draconian laws, is as sophisticated as it is sinister. Take the Public Safety Act (PSA), AFSPA and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA): they are not laws—they are licenses and instruments of a control—designed to silence dissent without a shred of accountability.


Under the PSA, a person can be jailed for two years without trial, on nothing more than suspicion of being a ‘threat to security.’ The UAPA goes further, criminalizing thought itself: membership in any organization the state bans—even retroactively— can land a person in prison for decades. Together, these laws have created a parallel legal universe where Kashmiri Muslims are guilty by birth, and innocence is not even an option.


But laws are only as brutal as the society that enforces them. In India, the Hindutva has cemented its hold over every arm of the state. The Indian military, once ostensibly neutral, now operates as an RSS shakha in uniform. Soldiers post TikTok videos of themselves torturing Kashmiri youth; generals give interviews calling for the “Israeli model” in Kashmir. The police, long communalized, now function as a Hindu militia with state salaries.


In jails, this extremist ideology has taken a grotesque form. Reports indicate that Hindu inmates—often convicted murderers and rapists—are enlisted by jail authorities to terrorize Kashmiri prisoners. During Ramzan, when prisoners attempt to pray, these criminals are encouraged to desecrate the Quran and hurl slurs. Shabir Ahmed Shah, a 71-year-old leader, was beaten unconscious in Tihar for refusing to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram.


Unfortunately, the Indian judiciary, once the last hope for victims of state repression, has now become Hindutva’s most reliable ally. In Kashmir, courts function as cogs in the machinery of repression. The Supreme Court of India, which rushes to protect the rights of Delhi rioters and Gujarat rioters, has not heard a single habeas corpus petition from Kashmir in five years. When it does, it offers platitudes: “National security” trumps liberty, “terrorism” is whatever the state says it is. In 2020, the court upheld the detention of 4G internet in Kashmir for a year, arguing that “terrorists might misuse faster internet.” This is not law; it is legalized apartheid.


Meanwhile, the country's civil society has been pushed to the margins in a deliberate effort to colonize it. Meanwhile, India’s jails have become crematoria of Kashmiri aspiration. In 2021, 70year-old Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai, a senior Hurriyat leader, died in Jammu jail after being denied medical care, his family barred from seeing his body. In 2022 Mr. Altaf Ahmed Shah a senior leader met the same fate because he was also not provided proper health care at initial stages of cancer.   In 2023, Tabarak Hussain, a mentally ill man from Azad Kashmir, was killed in army custody; his body was returned with organs missing.


This is not just about Kashmir. It is about the future of India itself. When a state can jail thousands simply for demanding that its promises be honored, when courts can legalize indefinite detention, when society cheers the torture of prisoners, the fault lies in a state system that continues to suffer from its colonial hangover. Hindutva’s project in Kashmir is a laboratory for the rest of India. The same laws used to crush Kashmiris are now being deployed against Muslims in Delhi, Christians in Chhattisgarh, and dissenters everywhere in India. 

 

Kashmiris are not the only victims of what can rightly be called a settler-colonial project. Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and farmers—all are targets of Hindutva’s majoritarianism. It is high time to build solidarity across India’s oppressed communities and unite against this relentless onslaught.


No prison, however vast, can silence ideas. As long as mothers in Srinagar sing lullabies of freedom, as long as children in Baramulla and elsewhere in the Valley dream of Azaadi, the struggle endures.


What Kashmiris have endured for decades now serves as a forewarning of what awaits all of us if Hindutva’s march goes on unchecked. What Kashmiri prisoners endure in cells stand as a warning, their silence a deafening scream. The question is no longer whether India will hear—it is whether we have the courage to listen and to say no to the majoritarianism mindset that seeks to forge a homogeneous society under Hindutva.


Author is the chairman of Islamabad based think tank—Kashmir Institute of International Relations—he can be reached via email: saleeemwani@hotmail.com 


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