A version of this essay appeared in the Kashmir Reader, 10 December 2013

Guest Post by Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh

On the road to the city from Srinagar Airport, I recently saw a billboard. Beneath the radiantly beaming faces of Manmohan Singh, and Sonia Gandhi, it bore the declaration ‘One Nation. One Card. AADHAR.’ Public Service advertisements in the same cheery vein have been airing on Radio Kashmir, and the state owned TV station Doordarshan- Kashir. Its critics assert that the AADHAR (‘its not a card, just a number!’) scheme exemplifies the financialisation of citizenship (each AADHAR number will require a corresponding bank account), a regime of biometric surveillance, the creation of a database nation and an expansion of the global corporate- military-intelligence empire. But AADHAR is only the latest chapter in the largely undocumented history of India’s intimate stranglehold over Kashmir through identity documents. It is a history told anecdotally, through stories about the sinking feeling of being stopped at a barricade and rifling through empty pockets, of cold hours spent pleading on a street or at a police station, of late night rescues of hapless friends from lonely check points, of miraculously narrow escapes despite having left home without it.

Though no Kashmiri adult I know leaves home without their ID, no one can seem to pin point exactly when the carrying of a photo-identity card became mandatory. Trying to understand the basis for the practice, I asked a friend under what law it was required that every person be able to prove their identity at all times. ‘Under the gun law!’ he replied succinctly. While its legal origins are uncertain, what is quite clear is that by the early 1990s no Kashmiri male could afford to be, quite literally, caught dead without one. As my plain speaking friend explained, “the most important reason for carrying one was if you were killed, somebody would hopefully find your card and inform your family.” The ID card was the tenuous piece of laminated paper that stood between him and an unmarked grave, an unmourned death.

Anthropologist Haley Duschinski, who has examined what she calls ‘identity encounters’ in the ‘bunkered territory’ of Kashmir, writes, ‘Th[e] demand for identification that opens possibilities of sanction and prohibition, even life and death, is the moment at which state power is practiced and state subjecthood is formed.’ Duschinski relies on recent scholarship that has argued that identity documents are unpredictable and unstable enactments of state power, constantly oscillating between being a ‘threat’ and ‘a guarantee’ to their bearers, and traversing the uncertain geographies between arbitrary violence and the sanctity of law.  What Duschinski characterises as the ‘destiny effect’ of identity documents in Kashmir, ‘through which state agents emerge as arbiters of fates and determiners of futures’ is chillingly illustrated by two (of several) identity encounters documented in the human rights report, Alleged Perpetrators (IPTK-APDP 2012. Case no.  5, tells us that on 17 August 1990, Mushtaq Ahmad Hajam was returning from his evening prayers, when personnel of the CRPF fired upon him. A witness Abdul Rehman, aged 80, who was walking with Hajam at the time told the family that after being stopped and while trying to show his identity card to the CRPF personnel, Hajam was shot on the front part of his head, thereby discounting any chance of him being shot while he was being chased as later claimed by CRPF. Case no 162, relates that on 30 January 2001, a car driven by Khaleel Ahmad Choudhary, a judicial magistrate was stopped near the Kunzer market by an army patrol. His vehicle was searched. Judge Choudhary showed the personnel his High Court of Jammu and Kashmir issued identity card. They threw it away and said that they had seen enough of courts. Choudhary protested asserting that they should only limit themselves to a search and that their behavior was contemptuous of the judiciary. At this, a soldier cocked his gun threatening to fire at Choudhary.  Ironically, while in the first case, it was the failure to instantly produce an identity card that resulted in a shot fired at point blank range, in the second it was precisely the highly official nature of the document that was the cause of the threat to kill.

This life and death ‘destiny effect’ makes the ID card an object marked by fear, desperation and disenfranchisement in Kashmir. It has been repeatedly documented in election monitoring reports (Voting at the Point of a Gun, APCLC et al, 1996; Independent Election Observers Report, JKCCS 2004, 2008) that security forces routinely coerce participation in elections by confiscating ID cards on the eve of voting, informing their owners that they can collect them at the local army camp after displaying the indelible ink mark of having exercised their franchise, knowing that no Kashmiri can risk being without their card for long. The quest for the return of a confiscated card can lead a Kashmiri into the heart of the enemy’s camp. Case no 92, of the Alleged Perpetrators report tells us that in December 1999, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Ismaiel and Jalal-ud-din Tass, of Uri were picked up by the 9th Rajput Rifles and their identity cards confiscated by a Major Sharma. On 28 December 1999, at around 4:00 am, two persons in plain clothes, accompanied by soldiers in uniform, came to their house and told them that they were required at the camp to collect their identity cards. They visited the Choolan Camp at 6:00 am. They were seen entering by witnesses. They never returned.

It is a public secret that the desperate demand for identity cards has led to the proliferation of a booming cottage economy in the manufacture of ‘official documentation’. Stationery shops in Srinagar still stock blank ‘ID Cards’, complete with the official insignia and Indian flag, bearing the words ‘Government of India’, which are individually filled in by the purchaser, and then stamped by a local public official, neighbourhood police man or obliging gazetted officer. The Indian Election Commission’s attempts to ‘ban’ such disparate and decentralized identity documentation in 2002 by insisting on the Election ID Card, had to be withdrawn, after widespread complaints of intimidation and public protests in Sopore and Baramulla, where people refused to give up their other identity cards. The Chief Electoral Officer, J &K issued a statement, clarifying that the Election ID card was ‘optional’, and the government was only attempting to ‘streamline’ the identity card system, and other cards, would also be considered valid. [Informative Missive, August 2002].

‘Identity cards’ issued by trade and professional associations, employers, and of course purchased at stationery shops continue to be valid to this day, though the Election ID is most widely prevalent. I was even shown a crumpled visiting card, whose back bore the stamp of the local police station. ‘I used to live abroad in the nineties’, its owner informed me, ‘so I couldn’t get an official ID. This worked for many years, whenever I visited Srinagar, before I finally got my card.I still keep it.’ Any piece of paper with an official stamp, can be as good a talisman as another, in circumstances where the official demand for such documents is itself premised in arbitrariness, and the claims to citizenship they underwrite are counterfeit.  As another friend put it, ‘they can’t make us carry the Indian flag in our hearts, so they make us carry it in our pockets.’ It seems unlikely that the 12 digit AADHAR number, no matter how all-purpose and technologically marvelous will be able to fix this particular ‘problem’.

References:

•    Duschinski Haley, Destiny Effects: Militarization, State Power, and Punitive Containment in Kashmir Valley, Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 3, Summer 2009,  691-717

•    International Peoples‘ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir, Alleged Perpetrators: Stories of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, 2012. Available at http://kafila.org/2012/12/06/full-report-alleged-perpetrators-stories-of-impunity-in-jammu-kashmir/

•    Public Commission on Human Rights, Informative Missive -A Monthly Newsletter, August 2002