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Vision is always a question of the power. This article seeks to investigate the radically different distribution of vision and the violence implicit in everyday visualizing practices in Kashmir by analysing the pellet gun injuries. The use of pellet guns is indicative of the incipient hegemony of the maiming regime with an unequal power relationship between the Indian soldier, the owner of the gaze and the gazed on Kashmiri bodies. Thus, visual impairment produces Kashmiri bodies as sheer biology, captured in non-human economies of control.  Building on the analytical vocabulary of ‘right to maim’, it illustrates that the ‘blindings’ due to pellet gun injuries are indicative of visual sovereignty that distinguishes Kashmiris as lacking visual rights. The first section looks at the linkages between violence, vision and disability dealing with questions regarding politics of sight and disability and how rethinking forms of sovereign power through visual sovereignty can be a useful tool for understanding contemporary forms of militarism. The second section develops the history of unequal relationship between India and Kashmir by focusing on the 2016 summer uprisings post the killing of Burhan Wani and illuminates the visual dimension of occupation. The last section develops on the complementary logic to the presence of Indian forces and the manifestation of settler colonialism which thrives on creating and maintaining the population of Kashmir as ‘permanently impaired’ yet simultaneously ‘living’ for exercising state control. 

Darkness is my world: Disability and Sovereign Power

Disability has been understood as a biologically produced condition rather than a socially induced reality. This presciently maps the liberal defence of disability as an exceptional accident.  Disability studies scholars have long insisted that the field needs to turn to the global south to disrupt the conventionally normative understanding of the subjects that have historically dominate the field (Chouinard 2014; Connell 2011; Meekosha and Soldatic 2011). The distinction between abled and disabled bodies has varied historically as what is valued in bodies today is based on hyper capitalist modes of surplus accumulation and advent of the neoliberal subject. The usefulness or uselessness of bodies is tied to the specificity of their location and how these bodies exceed or defy national identities and subject hood.State sanctioned debility adds a novel, discrete element to the life-death pendulum. These injuries are reported as part of the mundane existence in a conflict zone, rationalised through the idea of collateral damage. Mbembe discusses injury as an integral element of enslavement, the slave is kept alive but in state of injury (2003, 63). Disability is a status that triangulates the hierarchies of living and dying that are generally deployed in theorizing biopolitics. The populations available for injury overlap with the targeted populations to be injured. As Puar rightfully mentions there is a complementarity between the right to kill along with the ‘right to maim’- creating perpetually debilitated yet alive Kashmiri populations who can be controlled. This ostensible use of pellet guns by a democratic country led to many civilians ‘permanently disabled’ in a place with lack of proper medical infrastructure and rationed livelihood supplies.

The overlapping between the sovereign and the biopolitical power can be further understood through the ‘right to maim’. Puar while focusing on Palestine, highlights that the oscillation between right to kill and right to maim isn’t contingent or arbitrary but has deep seared biopolitical ramifications that can be explained through the idea of ‘will not let die’ (Puar 2017). She uses debility as a triangulation between ability/disability binary. Puar also maintains the distinction between debilitation from disability as it focusses on the gradual wearing down of populations instead of a singular event of becoming disabled (Puar 2017, 6-7). She identifies debility not as an identity marker but as a form of massification, as a practice that renders populations available for injury (ibid: 16-17).  Debilitation sustains itself through foreclosing any social, political and larger cultural translation into disability. 

The idea of targeting to debilitate finds legitimization within the state narrative as the bodies posing ‘risk’ to the national integrity and security. The biopolitics of debilitation is embedded in the larger calculus of distribution of risk to mainstream imaginaries of sovereignty of the state. The state also controls the regimes of visibility, shrouding the disabilities and effacing the quotidian wide scale violence subjected to these bodies. The right to maim epitomizes the terrible intensive practice of the ‘biopolitical state’ justified by refuting humanity of these victims and camouflaging violence for justifying preservation of integrity of the nation.

Pellet guns and Visibilized Invisibility: The 2016 Protests and the Visual (Hi)Story

The summer of 2016 saw violence erupt in various parts of Kashmir valley as a reaction to the killing of a 21 year old ‘new age’ militant Burhan Wani by the Indian army.The death of Burhan Wani shifted the visual landscape of resistance in significant ways. Unlike the secrecy that shrouded earlier counter cultures, Wani was a folk hero and engaged in ‘performative militancy’ by using social media platforms (Junaid 2016; Shah 2015b).  There were huge numbers of attendees as part of the funeral procession expressing grief over his death which also represented growing resentment against the Indian state. This was followed by demonstrations and protests that were met with heavy handedness by the Indian forces, with thousands of protesters injured by the use of pellet guns which brought the entire valley to a standstill as cycles of curfews as strikes became a regular feature of the everyday existence (The Wire 2016). This violence can be contextualised and traced through a long history of mobilisation for independence (Azadi) in Kashmir. The Indian state responded to the interruption of protests in July 2016 by launching ‘Operation Calm down’ in September 2016, which deployed pellet guns as a response to crowd control and management. Army and police instituted a state of siege by using 12-gauge shotguns against funeral processions, street protests and public gatherings. The cartridges of these........

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