Caste Minoritization and the Politics of Settler Colonialism in Kashmir
mona Bhan
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
Introduction
In a 15-minute Hindi documentary, Justice Delayed but Delivered, Radhika Gill, a young Dalit-Valmiki athlete, recounts her struggles to secure citizenship rights in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K)—a region under India’s military control since 1947 and the United Nation’s longest-standing unresolved territorial dispute. Amid a long strike by safai karamcharis (sanitation workers) in the Jammu municipality in 1957, Radhika’s grandfather, along with other members of the Dalit Valmiki community from Punjab, India, was brought to J&K as replacement for the striking workers by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, then chief minister of J&K. The documentary claims that despite being promised citizenship rights, Radhika and other Valmiki Dalits were given no such rights until August 2019 when the Hindu rightwing Indian government abrogated constitutional provisions that maintained Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status and legally prevented non-Kashmiris from buying land and property in Kashmir.
The J&K’s special constitutional status in India, codified through Articles 370 and 35A, granted the territorially disputed region –- and India’s only Muslim-majority state –- a measure of autonomy, including the power to grant permanent residency rights. Indian rightwing politicians criticized Article 370 for denying minorities in Jammu and Kashmir, including Valmiki Dalits and Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Pakistan, access to basic social and political rights that caste-oppressed communities enjoyed elsewhere in India. Originating in the 1920s, the movement for permanent residency laws was initially spearheaded by Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) who rallied against the settlement of Punjabi Hindu migrants by Dogra rulers in Kashmir. Over time, these laws protected Kashmiri land, identity, and property rights while shielding Kashmir from demographic change amid disputed sovereignty claims.
In 2019, the Indian government’s unilateral abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A was widely celebrated in the Indian mainstream media as the end of Muslim terror and hegemony in Kashmir and the onset of a new age in which minorities could finally access previously denied citizenship rights and privileges. Based on several media reports, it seemed Radhika’s fate as a safai karamchari was no longer sealed. Media channels highlighted her story, celebrating Modi’s historic move as realizing “Ambedkar’s dream of [an] inclusive India” that had been “shattered in J&K.” Becoming part of the Indian common-sense quickly, Kashmiri’s special constitutional status was blamed for the systemic marginalization of Dalits – particularly Valmikis—as well as West Pakistan Refugees (WPR), mostly lower-caste Hindu migrants who had settled in Jammu in 1947. According to the dominant discourse in India, Modi became the messiah for the caste-oppressed communities in J&K, promising them the right to vote, buy land, and apply for employment opportunities –- legal provisions that would transform J&K into a truly inclusive and plural region. Yet, as I argue below, the Indian media’s celebratory narratives obscured the broader context of such interventions, including India’s settler imperatives in Kashmir and the region’s decades-long struggles for sovereignty and self-determination.
In this essay, I examine how Modi’s Hindu-supremacist government instrumentalized caste at a critical time to erase India’s settler colonial interventions in Kashmir. The settler project in Kashmir, I argue, relies on identitarian logics that pit differently minoritized communities against each other “so that survival of one [comes] at the detriment of the other” (Pankhuree 2023:98). Mainstream political discourse attributes Valmiki and WPR marginality to Kashmiri Muslim exceptionalism rather than to entrenched Hindu caste hierarchies or the unresolved political dispute in Kashmir, which has resulted in the brutal suppression of Kashmiri political and economic rights. These discourses position caste-oppressed Hindu communities with no ancestral claims to the land -- because of historic circumstances and political expediency –- as fuller citizens at a time when Muslims in Kashmir with historic claims to land face evictions, dispossessions, and elimination through settler colonialism. I argue that “Hindu” inclusion in J&K in the service of a Hindu settler state is fundamentally opposed to the welfare of caste-oppressed and Muslim communities in Kashmir and throughout India.
Situating “Minorities” in J&K
J&K’s heterogenous Dalit populations are mostly located in the Jammu province, a predominantly Hindu region with a population of around 5.38 million, of which 17. 44% are Scheduled Castes (see Bhatia 2014). My focus is on two non-permanent resident communities: Dalit Valmikis, whose population is estimated between 10,000 and 12,000 voting members and who were not entitled to SC benefits until 2019, and the WPR population, numbering around 2,00,000. Until the abrogation, the Valmiki community’s struggles mostly focused on acquiring permanent resident certificates that would make them eligible to participate in state assembly elections and apply for a range of government jobs other than as safai karamcharis. Despite the promises made by Bakshi and J&K’s successive governments, Valmikis never acquired permanent residency rights in the state. Articles 370 and 35A made laws such as the 1989 Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act inapplicable in J&K, making it difficult for Valmikis “to seek justice.” WPRs migrated from the Sialkot region of Pakistan to Jammu at the time of partition and, as non-Kashmiris, they too were excluded from Kashmir’s permanent residency benefits, severely curtailing their socioeconomic mobility (see Slathia).
In the context of India’s settler interventions in Kashmir, regional and religious divisions have positioned Jammu’s caste minorities as vanguards of Hindu nationalist politics. Mohita Bhatia, who has worked extensively on Dalit communities in Jammu, shows how despite the absence of a “homogenous or absolute ‘Dalit’ identity,” regional hostilities between Jammu and Kashmir have deeply influenced Dalit political mobilizations (2018:197). Even though these communities resist everyday forms of caste marginalization, their political proximity with caste dominant groups is visible –- particularly their alignment on anti-Kashmir views. Indeed, “nationalist” and pro-India politics in Jammu, she argues, have overshadowed critical engagement with caste marginality in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region. While this might be true mostly for “native” SC communities, Valmikis, too, have privileged their struggle for citizenship rights over “issues of caste oppression” (Bhatia 2018: 208). In many discussions about Valmiki rights thus, Kashmir’s special constitutional provisions are often invoked as a convenient pretext to shift blame for caste oppression away from entrenched Hindu caste hierarchies in Jammu onto Kashmiri Muslim ethnonationalist politics, bolstered by Articles 370 and 35A. Consequently, in the Indian public sphere Kashmir’s sovereignty struggles are sidelined and reframed as inherently anti-Hindu and caste oppressive.
Over the years, many popular and political forums have raised the issue of Valmiki and WPR rights, primarily villainizing Kashmir’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population. A 2017 India Defense review essay on WPRs, for instance, claims that abuses against minorities in the state persisted because previous “State and Central governments succumbed to pressure tactics and violence unleashed by [the Kashmiri Muslim] separatists” who demand separation from India.
Even academic scholarship on these communities, though more grounded, positions itself as a corrective to what is described as the conflict-centered discourse on Kashmir – one that privileges Kashmir’s “ethnonationalist” struggle for self-determination while sidelining caste and class inequities (Bhatia 2014: 943). Furthermore, given its religious and political differences from Kashmir –- particularly its pro-India, Hindu-majoritarian politics –- Jammu often emerges as a victim of Kashmir politics, or, at best, as a passive political entity vis-à-vis Kashmir. Consider this statement by Mohita Bhatia (2014: 942, 943):
Before focusing specifically on the Jammu sub-region, it may be mentioned that the conflict referred to above involves the Kashmir region and its contested relationship with India. Other parts of the state such as Jammu and Ladakh are not directly involved in this conflict.
Although the struggle for self-determination has been most visible in the Kashmir Valley—particularly in the massive armed uprising of the 1990s — the accession of the entire former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir remains disputed under international law. Overlooking this history reduces Kashmir to a domestic “conflict” and undermines its long-recognized international status as a disputed territory. Additionally, the claim that Jammu was not directly involved in the conflict erases a key event in the history of demographic shifts in the region: a 1947 massacre targeting the Muslim population that transformed a predominantly Muslim region into a Hindu-majority one. As a result, such accounts minimize Jammu’s role as an active vector in regional politics and portray Kashmiri anxieties about demographic change as an outcome of Kashmir’s ethnonationalist politics.
On Massacres and Demographic Shifts
The Jammu massacre in the aftermath of India’s partition was orchestrated by the Hindu Maharaja and his army, resulting in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and the displacement of 200,000 others. Many displaced Muslims at the time claimed that it was a “post-partition ploy to eliminate them” (Snedden 2007: 122), an event that substantially altered the region’s demography. Kashmiri historian Iffat Rashid notes that “while the ‘tribal invasion’ of Kashmir has become the primary Indian nationalist trope in writing histories of the violence of 1947, the ‘communal violence’ which engulfed Jammu province has been treated as ‘someone else’s history — or even, not history at all.”
To dismiss fears of demographic engineering and view these as an outcome of “a perceived fear of demographic change” erases the necessity of situating caste exclusions in J&K within the larger imperatives of India’s settler aspirations in Kashmir–- particularly now that caste has been weaponized by the Hindu state. The emphasis on caste minoritization, while pertinent for addressing their long-term exclusion from citizenship rights, have become a pretext to derail questions of Kashmiri sovereignty and contribute to the project of settler worlding. Demographic shifts created through new domicile laws meant to alter the state’s population contravene key provisions of international human rights and humanitarian law (Lone 2023). The demographic restructuring of the state is therefore not simply a xenophobic fear born of ethnonationalist exclusions or irrational sentimentalism but a violation of international law in an occupied territory. Acknowledging Kashmir’s disputed status in international law can shift the terms of the debate by treating the abrogation as an attempt to illegally seize a disputed territory rather than as a liberatory move. In this context, granting citizenship rights to caste-oppressed communities becomes part of India’s settler colonial politics designed to reclaim Kashmir as a primordial Hindu territory.
Instead of addressing the complexities arising from Kashmir’s disputed sovereignty, Modi’s intent was to legitimize the abrogation by blaming Kashmiri Muslim political exceptionalism for the plight of caste-oppressed, non-permanent minorities. Recent news reports, however, suggest that harassment of Dalit residents in Jammu has increased in recent years since the 2019 abrogation. It is also unclear whether WPRs’ access to domicile certificates has automatically made them eligible to buy property or be included in the region’s voters’ list. Indeed, it could be the case that even prior to the abrogation the few privileged members from the WPR community had already purchased property and exercised citizenship rights in the state. The hyped-up discourses of rights and inclusion for minoritized communities therefore did not necessarily correspond with people’s everyday lives nor did they address deep-seated caste prejudices against Dalit communities.
An exclusive focus on Hindu communities in Jammu ignores another key issue, namely the 2019 abrogation of the Jammu Kashmir Resettlement Act of 1982. This act would have allowed the return of displaced Muslim Kashmiris, most of whom were forcibly expelled to Pakistan. Under the bill’s provisions, any person who was a state subject of J&K before May 14th, 1954, and had been displaced to Pakistan after 1947 could be recommended for resettlement in Kashmir. The bill gave at least half-a-million displaced Kashmiri Muslims the hope and opportunity to return. For Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who was J&K’s chief minister in 1982, the bill was imperative to secure Kashmiris’ rights and allow them to “return home any time.” However, not everyone agreed. In the 1980s, when the BJP was still a minority party, its leaders called the bill a "mischievous piece of legislation." WPRs worried that the act could end up displacing them from the "Muslim refugee" property they now occupied. The act was never implemented under the pretext that it would encourage the entry of "anti-national infiltrators" from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir into Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Conclusion
Amid hyperpoliticized claims that Valmikis and WPRs have been granted citizenship rights in the now-declared Union Territory of J&K, Kashmiri Muslim homes are being bulldozed and they face evictions, incarceration, and repression of their rights to free speech and expression. Bringing caste-oppressed communities into the wider “Hindu” fold, and “uniting all Hindus, across caste and class lines, on a saffron populist-fascist Hindutva platform,” is a commonly used strategy in the BJP’s anti-Muslim toolkit (Lerche 2025). In Kashmir, however, such a move is motivated by the BJP’s agenda to hinduize the predominantly Muslim region and use caste-oppressed communities to rewrite the region’s history and geography.
My essay shows how the politics of minoritization can obscure settler visions–particularly at a time when Kashmir faces the full brunt of India’s eliminatory politics. At the same time, caste-oppressed communities can be deployed as tokens of inclusion for a Hindu state that, despite its contempt for Dalit rights, advances a vision of “subaltern Hindutva” –- one that assimilates Dalits, Bahujans, and Adivasis into the larger Hindu fold and presents the BJP as an “umbrella Hindu Party.” While such claims of caste inclusion by a party dominated by upper castes remain fleeting at best, it is imperative to ask if claims of caste inclusion in Kashmir are simply a “humanitarian” ruse to hide what is truly the intent of the Indian government –- to open the floodgates of India’s extractive economy in Kashmir to corporate investors, predominantly from upper castes –- and leverage caste as Hindutva’s critical weapon. As India’s settler violence unfolds, and more and more land is seized for military and infrastructural investments in Kashmir, what futures can we envision for both Kashmiri Muslims and caste-oppressed communities, whose lives under India’s Hindu fascist regime will be rendered even more disposable?
Notes
[1] Most Valmiki communities in Jammu are Hindu, but some have converted to Christianity. Mohita Bhatia claims that internal religious and denominational divisions among Valmikis (Balmikis) – who are primarily Hindus but also include Christians and Sikhs—complicates their struggles to demand collective rights (see Bhatia, Mohita. 2018. Beyond the Kashmir Metanarrative: Caste, Identity, and the Politics of Conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. In Zutshi, Chitralekha ed.., Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation. Cambridge University Press).
[2] Valmiki Hindu leader, Guruji Raju Chandel, recently described the Valmiki community in Jammu as protectors of the Sanatan Dharma (or Hindu dharma)— which in political Hindutva discourse is envisioned as the exclusive foundation for India’s cultural, moral, spiritual, and national order.
[3] Estimates of those killed in the Jammu massacres of 1947 range from tens of thousands to between 200,000 and 500,000 Muslims. For more details on Kashmiri refugees and the series of displacements that Kashmiri Muslims experienced after 1947, see Robinson, Cabeiri. For instance, she argues that by 1949, the number of Kashmiri refugees to Pakistan and to Pakistan-administered Kashmir had increased to 725,000.
Mona Bhan is a professor of Anthropology and the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies at Syracuse University. She is also the Director of the South Asia Center at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Policy. Bhan is a political and environmental anthropologist whose work on Indian-occupied Kashmir explores the role of economic and infrastructural development in counterinsurgency operations and people's resistance movements to protracted wars and settler occupation. She is the author of Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (2014), Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (with Andrew Bauer 2018). She has co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies (2022), and the Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies (2023). Her current manuscript entitled Hydropower(ed) Nation: Clean Energy and India’s Dirty Wars in Kashmir examines the intersections between India’s environmental and territorial violence in Kashmir. Her writings and interviews have appeared in several media and print outlets such as the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, TRT, Kindle, Open Democracy and Outlook.
Thumbnail credit: A scene from the 15-minute Hindi documentary, Justice Delayed but Delivered
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.