Kashmir has been a protracted international dispute seen in overwhelmingly bilateral terms between India and Pakistan. It is the world’s most militarised conflict and the territory continues to be divided by a Line of Control, referred to as Asia’s Berlin Wall. Dr Nitasha Kaul’s work is globally prominent in challenging the standard understanding of this conflict and in making the international community aware of the missing party to the dispute framing – the Kashmiris themselves.
Summary of the impact
Kaul’s academic research along with her prominent public interventions in media, governmental forums, and public policy making bodies, have broken through conventional perceptions of Kashmir as a solely India/Pakistan or Hindu/Muslim conflict. Kaul has a longstanding profile of work that draws attention to how democratic commitment requires us to interrogate growing Islamophobia and push back against authoritarianism in India. Her analyses of the rise of the right-wing in India and of the complex relationship between gender and the Kashmir conflict have been significant in propelling her public interventions.
Moving beyond a communalised and real-estate view of the Kashmir conflict, Kaul centralises the experience of Kashmiris themselves, asking for truths and reconciliations that allow us to perceive all Kashmiris (whether Hindu or Muslim or any other) as continuing to suffer due to this protracted conflict between post-colonial India and Pakistan. Kaul’s academic work brings to light the conditions that lead to the oppression of stateless people, in the face of enforced silencing, censorship, and apathy in the international community.
Kaul’s research is particularly innovative in articulating a postcolonial and feminist discourse that has been silent on Kashmiri women. Kaul has also developed an important critical perspective on the rise of ideology and practices of Indian right-wing nationalism: postcolonial neoliberal nationalism. Kaul has used her research expertise on the oppression of Kashmiris to push for accountability against repression of political and democratic rights. Kaul provided the evidence base for a US Congress Resolution that significantly increased international pressure on the Indian government’s siege of Kashmir. She has also raised the profile of Kashmiris in Indian public discourse, making their struggle visible, inspiring Kashmiris to use their voice and Indians to question the injustices committed in their name. In the face of severe personal threats and misogynist social media trolling, she has persisted in speaking out for rights and against injustices.
Increasing international pressure on India’s siege of Kashmir
Kaul was invited to provide a written and oral submission as an Expert Witness to the Congressional Hearing on “Human Rights in South Asia”, hosted by the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and Nonproliferation (Committee on Foreign Affairs) in 2019. This was the first such hearing that ever covered Kashmir and Kaul’s testimony at the US Congress and was widely praised and covered in critical and mainstream Indian media (albeit in predictably different ways). Her submissions to this hearing provided an evidence base used by US Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal to put forward House Resolution 745. The immediate and medium-term recommendations proposed in Kaul’s submissions – relating to lifting communications restrictions, freedom of travel, safe working environment for journalists and human rights observers, and the end of arbitrary detentions and violence – are reflected in the 3rd and 4th Resolutions introduced to the House.
The release of several political detainees, including Farooq Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, after his 222-day long detention has been attributed to pressure arising from the Resolution, which has received bipartisan support from a number of significant Democratic and Republican Congressional Representatives.
Stand With Kashmir, an international advocacy organisation, states that Kaul’s “powerful statement at a US Congressional Hearing… has centered the Kashmiri people, their struggles, and their political aspirations”.
For this reason, prominent Kashmiri film-maker Sanjay Kak states that Kaul’s “expert testimony in the US Senate… was an excellent example of the value of her powerful voice on the global stage”.
Bringing a critical perspective on Kashmir into public discourse
Kaul engages extensively with the media in India, the UK and beyond as a way of making visible the lack of public debate on the historical and contemporary injustices faced by Kashmiris, which have been exacerbated by the ongoing rise of authoritarian and Islamophobic forces in India. Her interventions feature in mainstream outlets in India, the UK, the US, and Europe.
The critical importance of Kaul’s media interventions is highlighted by Amjad Majid, editor and founder of the Kashmiri Inverse Journal, who states Kaul has
“dedicat[ed] herself to bringing about a much-needed understanding of Kashmir and Kashmiris within the domain of contemporary culture, beyond her extensive academic work … Dr. Kaul is considered one of the key academic and intellectual figures whose work permeates into the indigenous Kashmiri press and multiple cultural spaces within Kashmir, the diaspora and a global audience, within and beyond traditional academic circles and spaces while maintaining a clear focus on the struggles of the people of Kashmir”.
One prominent example that demonstrates the significance of Kaul’s far-reaching media activism is her role as an invited expert on the Al Jazeera show Head-to-Head in December 2015, during which she directly challenged Ram Madhav, the National General Secretary of India’s ruling party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), and head of its ideological parent the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) on the ruling Indian government’s Kashmir policy. This was a rare occasion in which a government spokesperson was placed under consistent pressure in the public debate on India’s nationalist policies. With over 1.84 million views (as of February 2022), it is the third most watched episode of Head-to-Head on Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel, and the 86th most watched video on this channel that has 70,000+ uploaded videos spanning the past 13 years. Further, edited versions of the video that focus on Kaul’s interventions have been shared widely across social media platforms globally.
The traction of Kaul’s intervention is demonstrated by both the praise and abuse that followed. The show’s host Mehdi Hasan tweeted: “I’ve done 30 odd @AJHeadtoHead interviews with guests from around the world over the past three years. But never had a Twitter response like this. […] I guess the interview must really have hurt”. Her appearance led to a lengthy profile in Kashmir Life that describes Kaul as “a reckoning Kashmiri voice” and details the arguments she had put forward, demonstrating how her research-based media interventions feed back into discourse within Kashmir itself and enable members of its community to develop their political positions.
As Kak puts it, echoing Majid, by having “chosen to speak widely, well, and consistently, about the long-standing dispute in Kashmir, which is probably the single-most contentious issue to talk about in India”, Kaul has become “an influential figure amongst a younger generation of Kashmiris”.
This media activism comes at high personal cost. Kaul regularly experiences extensive and deplorable social media abuse. Through her work, she specifically highlights the role of misogyny in contemporary politics as a strategy used by authoritarians seeking to subvert democracy in multiple countries across the globe (her analysis on this was recently quoted in the influential US magazine Foreign Affairs). It is well-established that female academics are exposed to structural and symbolic violence on social media, however such ad hominem attacks are intensified because of her position as a non-Muslim Kashmiri woman who speaks in non-communal terms. Former BBC India correspondent Dr Andrew Whitehead states:
“I admire her advocacy on Kashmir, pursued in spite of deplorable online trolling… No scholar has done more to bring attention to – and promote understanding of – the situation in the Kashmir Valley”.
Kaul continues to research, write, and speak truth to power, within and outside academia, serving to highlight the interconnected nature of multiple injustices.
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