For seven decades, the world has only thrown passing glances at Kashmir even as the people of the Muslim-majority region face death and dismemberment on an unprecedented scale.
For years, Kashmir’s slow suffering has simmered below the surface of global awareness, only to gush out episodically to prick the world’s conscience when it bleeds dramatically enough to grab headlines.
It took the recent killings of 26 civilians in a terror attack at a popular tourist resort and a near-war between two nuclear-armed neighbours – India and Pakistan – for the region to get noticed internationally once again.
Like the sudden eruption of a dormant volcano, the evolving situation shatters the illusion of normalcy, once again highlighting the fragility of the region and the centrality of Kashmir in the long-drawn India-Pakistan conflict.
These interlinked conflicts are a colonial legacy born during India’s independence from the British Empire, at the cost of being severed into two nations – India and Pakistan.
Since the bitter and bloody partition, Kashmir and its unsettled question have been both a cause and consequence of the bitter India-Pakistan rivalry, leading to three wars, frequent skirmishes and insurgencies, and resultant human devastation.
The Kashmir conflict is almost as old as the Palestine conflict, and while some scholars find Kashmir’s resonance with the Palestinian struggle, the histories of the two regions, the nature of their conflicts, and the politics of resistance are distinct.
So are the scales and frequency of the intensity.
This may be one of the several reasons why Kashmir rarely draws the kind of international attention as Palestine.
Even by modest estimates, nearly 53,000 people have been killed since October 7, 2023, in Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians. The death toll in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is said to be higher.
In Muslim-majority Kashmir, rough estimates put the number of dead – including civilians, soldiers and militants – between 40,000 to 70,000 people in the last 35 years.
In a world beset by multiple crises—climate crisis, refugee emergencies, pandemic recovery, and active conflicts across several continents—public attention is limited and often marked by fatigue.
The intermittent nature of violence in Kashmir, punctuated by periods of relative calm, fails to generate the sustained headlines that international conflicts with clear turning points and dramatic escalations do.
Without the spark of major escalation or dramatic new developments, longstanding conflicts like Kashmir fade into the background of global consciousness.
Conventional metrics invisibilise trauma
In over seven decades, the Kashmir conflict has inflicted profound and multigenerational trauma upon inhabitants caught between competing nationalist ambitions.
Families have been brutally severed by arbitrary borders, with hundreds and thousands of people displaced across decades of intermittent warfare, military standoffs, and insurgent violence.
The region’s population endure a harrowing existence marked by constant surveillance, midnight raids, enforced disappearances, and systemic curtailment of basic liberties while living in one of the most militarised regions in the world, which is also a nuclear flashpoint.
Still, it is less newsworthy.
The world tends to measure conflicts by their casualties. Beyond body counts, what goes mostly ignored are the millions suffering under daily oppression.
The true scale of human suffering remains invisible when there is a fixation solely on death tolls. This hardly ever takes into account the silent trauma: families displaced for generations, children growing up knowing only uncertainty, communities living under constant surveillance and fear.
These are not mere footnotes to conflict. They are its enduring legacy.
Even as democratic erosion and physical suppression extinguish hopes far more effectively than bullets, they do not produce dramatic headlines because conventional metrics fail to capture the collective and enduring trauma.
The newsworthiness of wars is also often determined by geopolitical shifts.
Even as Kashmir – standing at the crossroads of India, Pakistan, China and Central Asia – is an important part of the larger geopolitical strategic interest, it often gets noticed less because of changing equations.
The US-USSR rivalry during the Cold War influenced India-Pakistan relations over Kashmir.
While in recent decades, Pakistan has inched closer to China, it has drifted away from the US. At the same time, India’s rising position as a global power has effectively insulated it from significant international pressure regarding Kashmir.
As the world’s largest democracy and an increasingly vital economic and diplomatic partner to Western nations, India has successfully framed the Kashmir issue as an internal matter – a narrative that has been largely accepted by the West, particularly the US, which is eager to maintain strategic relationships with India as a counterbalance to China.
International organisations have similarly found themselves constrained.
The UN Security Council, where meaningful action would require consensus, remains blocked by geopolitical interests.
India’s diplomatic heft has effectively neutralised potential international interventions, while its narrative of fighting terrorism has resonated with Western security concerns.
Faltering media spotlight
The Kashmir conflict suffers from media under-representation.
For decades, the dominant mainstream media in both India and Pakistan have viewed Kashmir from an ultra-nationalist lens. And coverage is focused more on the New Delhi and Islamabad statist narratives, even as their wars and hostilities are played out on the bodies of the people of Kashmir on both sides of the border.
The local media in the two Kashmirs have been less powerful and more or less suppressed.
On the Indian side, since Kashmir’s autonomy was revoked in 2019 and the region brought under direct Indian rule, the media freedoms have been crushed to the extent that there has been a near total erasure of Kashmir – other than the official narrative which offers a rosy picture that papers over the daily oppression of the public.
The Indian media’s coverage reduces Kashmir to a tourist spot, and the local newspapers, under unprecedented suppression, have turned into virtual advertisement pamphlets amplifying government propaganda.
While foreign media is barred from Kashmir, Indian national and local Kashmir media has completely blacked out first-hand accounts of communities, and layered narratives are missing.
The situation on the Pakistani side is more or less similar. Such information vacuums prevent compelling human stories from reaching a global audience.
Kashmir is home to 20 million people, straddling both sides of the Line of Control, divided into India- and Pakistan-administered territories and further divided into Azaad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan (on the Pakistan side) and Jammu Kashmir and Ladakh (on the Indian side).
The size of the population that lives in perpetual uncertainty, impacted directly or indirectly by the seven-decade-long conflict, is far bigger than many other protracted regions in the world.
The conflict is also worrying because it is a bone of contention between two nuclear neighbours, and the present situation highlights the perils to which the region can push the world.
As long as the moral compass of the world acts in accordance with temporary strategic interests, the body counts and the information deserts created under suppression, Kashmir will continue to figure as a momentary headline, once in a while.
Content retrieved from: https://trt.global/world/article/2d7c57cba123.