The author is from Kashmir. They want to remain anonymous to protect their privacy.
This is Part 2 of the two-part series on surveillance in Kashmir. You can read the first part here.
Imagine a place where everyone believes they’re being seen, almost all the time. Where it is a commonly held belief that they’re being watched– watched through their devices, watched by uniformed men and women on the street, watched wherever they go.
With their lives intertwined with decades-long conflict, and surveillance on their personal and public lives growing by the day, it is difficult to imagine many scenarios in which it hasn’t fundamentally affected people living amidst it.
Ever since the abrogation of Article 370, there has been an eerie atmosphere of calm, accompanied by paranoia and a general mistrust among people towards one another and the state.
Watched by men in uniforms on the ground, cameras on the streets, drones in the sky, the police and vigilantes on the internet– millions of people under constant watch. Wherever they go, it follows them. The establishment may be getting what they want out of it but the people are losing what they had– the safety and security, even within their homes.
Desensitization To Being Surveilled
When the news of the Pegasus spyware broke out, there was little reaction to it in Kashmir. People tend to get used to what they come across frequently. This familiarity develops in a way that things that could elicit violent surprise or protest earlier become routine matters, with time.
Younger Kashmiris, like me, have spent their entire lives or at least most of it, being under watch. The idea of constant surveillance is the norm for us.
At one point or the other, you get accustomed to being watched everywhere. We can see the cameras, the men and the drones but they’re so commonplace to us that it doesn’t seem as alarming anymore.
What used to provoke fear in people, can do no more than invoking indifference in people who have already grown indifferent to life in conflict.
Suspicion And Paranoia
Constant and consistent mass surveillance has shrunk whatever little trust that existed and not only between the state and its citizens but between people in their many interpersonal relationships. With a surveillance-like mechanism, there is always an increased apprehension in people.
The fear and uncertainty generated by surveillance inhibit activity more than any action by the authorities. People don’t need to act, arrest you, lock you up and put you in jail. If that threat is there, if you feel you’re being watched, you self-police, and this pushes people out of the public space.
In his interview to The Caravan Arshad Hussain, a psychiatrist based in Kashmir, says, “It makes an individual hyper-vigilant, gives rise to mistrust and suspicion and can lead to paranoia.”
Surveillance interferes with one’s regulation of social interaction and one’s regulation of self because it introduces a third party to the fore. Not being able to control who has visual access to themselves or their surroundings interferes with the social and psychological foundation of human beings and can lead to paranoia.
For most people, the atmosphere of watchfulness and control has now become a way of life.
To ‘Trust’ In Kashmir
The panoptic gaze has altered personal relationships for everyone in Kashmir, with young people carefully assessing who their friends were and with whom they talked.
Because, in Kashmir, surveillance does not simply result in hurt feelings or alienation but also constructs its citizens as suspects.
As everyone became a suspect, the stakes of what it means to ‘trust’” someone increased exponentially.
Muzammil Karim, a clinical psychologist, believes increased surveillance can manifest itself in the form of behavioural changes. “Surveillance may lead people to mask real identities in everyday lives, affecting personal and professional relationships and can cause anxiety. Such people think that any information may be used against them,” he saya.
To “trust” the wrong person has become a matter of criminality. The examples of which we have already seen in Kashmir, with the government citing any links with purportedly objectionable persons as reasons for termination from their employment.
In such circumstances, trust has become a lot harder to cultivate. One doesn’t know who they trust, who they can be friends with. You go on with your life as what would be the norm, interact with people as you’re expected to, but through it all, there is almost always a lingering doubt about the people around you. You think twice before saying what you want to. Wherever you go, the feeling of your safety being compromised follows you everywhere. In the growing atmosphere of distrust, safe spaces aren’t safe anymore.
Moreover, in the recent past, the region has witnessed a steep rise in cases of substance abuse, with young adults comprising the majority of users. This, accompanied by a perpetual fear in many parents of their children being misled towards insurgency.
As a result, suspicion and scepticism exist in Kashmiri parents more than they may have, in another place.
The growing culture of surveillance, at the same time, seems to also be contributing to a diminishing trust between the state, the leaders affiliated with it and the people in Kashmir. Recently, political leaders from the state have also complained of the growing mistrust. While the reasons for it are many, research suggests that, in occurrences of constant surveillance, people tend to distrust leaders because of their relationship to the surveillance state.
We’ve ended up in a position where people tend to trust the rumours forwarded on WhatsApp more than the words of their supposed leaders.
The state of mistrust has left nothing untouched.
Curtailed Expression
Many say that the crippling space for dissent in Kashmir has been the dominant reason behind the drastically reduced political expression in Kashmir.
Recent moves by the state’s administration send out a clear implicit message is clear—two years since Article 370 was abrogated, dissent will continue to be suppressed. Barring all protesters from obtaining government jobs, schemes and passports is one more in a string of measures including subduing media freedom, sacking of government employees, and a crackdown on civil rights activists.
By identifying certain forms of speech and some types of associations as suspicious, people learn first-hand what forms of political, social, and cultural engagements are acceptable to the state. Not to say that the state has any place to deem them as such. Research suggests as a result of individualising them, young people need not be watched, for they watch themselves and their peers by eliminating particular forms of engagement out of the public space.
Hence, state surveillance thwarts the possibilities of developing collective critiques, perspectives, and viewpoints, ripping apart the fabric of political mobilization, and repair isn’t easy.
The union government is attempting to restart the political process in the region, but at the same time, the process is underway to continue to brook no dissent among Kashmiris.
Pushed To The Wall
Sources describe the situation in Kashmir as a sense of daily humiliation, sometimes petty and sometimes grave, together with a feeling of suffocation by a conflict that shows no hope of immediate improvement.
Experts have suggested that among the many reasons pushing Kashmiri youth towards militancy could also be that in Kashmir there are fewer and fewer spaces left for political expression each day. Noor A. Baba, a political analyst, says, “In this boiling atmosphere, one can’t expect these educated youth to escape ground realities… They are part of our society and feel choked and humiliated in the prevailing atmosphere and hence the results are for everyone to see.”
Surveillance has fragmented the very relationships that are key in helping young people develop and feel connected with one another, which is the foundation for a broad-based and politically engaged community.
Without one’s right to privacy protected, there is a loss of self-determination as a result of which there is a loss of one’s freedom of thought, speech, association, movement, and various other freedoms.
Kashmir is slowly becoming a place of total surveillance, where the dangers of surveillance are even more menacing. A world of total surveillance is not just science fiction– it is the reality for many. It is the world toward which we are slowly being pushed into, with people watching in the streets, as software is coded, databases are combined, and each CCTV camera is successively added to the network and the sole purpose for it is between people, to watch.
The clashing realms of reality and fiction seem to come together in Kashmir, with Orwellian Big Brother, well and truly alive.
*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals