ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Bound Spaces: Of Papier Mch Boxes and Legal

Documents

As the tourist season begins anew, visitors to Kashmir will continue to consume things Kashmiri and
things legal will continue to consume Kashmiris themselves. It would seem that while the attribution
of a context of beauty to things comes easy, for things do not speak, the same cannot be said of
Kashmiris, whose chorus for azadi reverberates in the streets every week.

Before I knew much about where I had grown up, I knew it was a paradise on earth. It is hard to
say exactly when that notion took hold of the minds of people, though the exact words rdous
baroye zameen are attributed to a Mughal king of the 17th century. That is how Kashmir has been
broadcast in the imagination of both natives and Indians it is lush with bounties to be consumed,
from the cool of the mountain air, the green of the orchards, the water in its rivers to things like
famed shawls, saron and apples... But, each of them is not merely a thing for the act of
consumption goes beyond the materiality of every consumable in the immediate sense.

Amongst the most iconic things Kashmir ki, the papier mch box, is one which embodies the
contradictions of a place, which is a disputed territory between India and Pakistan, the worlds most
ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

heavily militarised zone and yet a paradise at the same time. Kashmir is projected as a place
where Indians could go to relax, to get away from the summer heat and engage in the therapeutic
purchase of beautiful things mentioned in souvenirs which could be placed in the showcases of ones
house or perhaps could be given to friends as memoirs of a tour, as a reminder of the time spent on
a shikara in the Dal Lake, or riding horses in Gulmarg or Pahalgam. It is suggested that in
peacetime Kashmir is as normal as any other place tourists may visit and if there is any doubt that
it is not, visitors should construe the presence of several hundred thousand army personnel as a
conrmation of having been secured.

Deplorable Protectiveness

Previously, I had spent hours perfecting miniature daodils, tulips and begonias, while learning the
craft of traditional drawing from a master-artisan, but with that papier mch box, matters legal
came to me, while I was working for the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a civil
liberties organisation based in Srinagar. A case that I assisted in litigation and that received much
media attention was that of an alleged sexual assault of a minor girl in Handwara by the Indian army
personnel on 12 April 2016. Following this incident, four young men and one woman were killed in
army and police ring (Masood and Jaleel 2016). The case began when the girls mother led a
habeas corpus petition at the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir on 16 April 2016 on grounds that
she was not aware of the whereabouts of her daughter and her husband for four days after both of
them were taken into police detention. More worryingly, while they were in custody, the police had
even recorded a video of her minor daughter without her consent, that too, in the absence of her
family members. Later, the video was circulated in the social media and her identity was revealed.

In response to her petition, the court chose to direct the police to le the grounds on which the
daughter and her husband had been held, instead of following the usual procedure in habeas corpus
petitions, that is, directing the police to bring the person(s) under custody to the court within 24 to
48 hours. Again, despite the girl being in police custody for a whole month, the court in its judgment,
while directing the police to end its custody, ruled that there was no question of illegal detention or
connement of the daughter and her husband, terming the custody as protective. The family had
sought numerous times, through various state agencies, to be able to move about freely without
police surveillance. Further, the court made no mention of the deplorable video taken under custody
or the fact that the daughter and her father had submitted that the police had forced them to sign
applications requesting custody.

An Idealism Far from Reality

While the Indian intellectual elite insists that what, is in fact structural violence needed to sustain
military occupation, exemplied in cases including those of mass rape and torture in Kunan-
Poshpora, fake encounters in Pathribal and massacres in Gawkadal and Chittisinghpora are
aberrations, criminal acts most certainly, perhaps, even exceptionally violent in many ways. But
according to them, such violence is hardly symptomatic of the everyday condition of life in Kashmir
for anyone may commit a criminal act on any day but this may be remedied though the legal
process, which is available to everyone, everyday. Yet, civil rights associations such as JKCCS, who
have fought cases in the courts, say that there is not a single case in which army personnel have
been prosecuted and punished in a court of law, despite decade-long trials in some cases (Kazi
2011). The lawyers here fail again and again, slowly exhausting every process via which success
may be achieved. It is not just special laws such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA)
under which sanction must be granted by the Ministry of Home Aairs in New Delhi for prosecution
of army personnel in a court of law (Kazi 2012) the factorall judicial interpretation necessarily
ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

occurs within the limits of a normative framework at the level of ideas and is in return dened by
such limits (Cover 1986).

During the two years of my association with JKCCS, I have observed that when Kashmiris approach
the court in such matters, the presence of what can perhaps be described as judicial interpretation,
was bounded by the realities of sustaining military occupation. This is an unspoken truth to be
expected in a place like Kashmir. On the contrary, an expectation for judicial interpretation to make
sense of violations of civil and political libertiessuch as in the case of alleged sexual assault I
mentioned earlierin a reasonable manner, not to speak of so-called judicial activism, is thought of
as based on an idealism that is far from reality. As aptly narrated to me by a survivor of one mass
crime, when I asked him why he had not preserved a court judgment (I paraphrase), We ght for
the memory of our loved ones, but we know that the judgment is no taveez (amulet for protection).

As those who access arena of the law in their professional practice or who approach the court here
know that judicial interpretation is not an abstract process, for it occurs within the realm of culture
as a whole and material things in particular (Derrida 2005) myriad processes relating to the
interactions with things like paper are as integral to the legal process as any kind of strategy
building. The ling of adavits, rst information reports (FIRs), status reports, writing of petitions,
judgments, orders as well as processes such as indexing, stamping, photocopying and scanning
simultaneously create a vast world of material culture within which the words of the law sit. It is
nearly impossible to obtain a judicial paper without a stamp from a notary. It is marked with the
seals of the state and its agenciesan acknowledgement of the transformative power of violence
vested in the law and used legitimately by the state (Derrida 2002).

I understood the importance of such paper objects when I was researching ve cases of mass crime
that our oce had been litigating for a comprehensive report on militarisation (presented before the
United Nations Human Rights Council in September 2015). During the eldwork, I found instances in
which the only material memory of a person killed or tortured in a case might be the photocopy of an
FIR in tatters, obtained by the family from the police after much hassle. The document lay in some
corner of the house, forgotten in the everyday life, but remembered when asked for, as if recalled
from a museum of lost time. In the cases where the families decide to use the legal process their
thumbprints, the turmeric stain from what they perhaps ate on the day of the hearing, the
impressions of the drawer in which it sits, mark the paper.

Bound Spaces and a Symbolic Journey

The world of paper is also that of chewed paperthat of papier mch. Papier mch boxes are of
course bound spaces, opaque to what is inside them, accessible most easily on the surface-level. In
papier mch, the box is created from newsprint, used books and copies; the outside of the box is
hand-painted with highly stylised motifs, outlined in gold leaf while the inside part is most often
simply painted black. The box is complete in itself, it is not intended for keeping something. The
gilded exterior is topped with layers of varnish until it acquires a mirror-like sheen of the kind where
one can see ones face become part of a kingsher-and-lotus-leaf design.

The occupation of Kashmir is not only about the much talked about culture of impunity (Allard K
Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic 2009), the inhuman and draconian (HRW 2006)
laws such the AFSPA, Public Safety Act, the scores of documented cases of disappearances,
extrajudicial killings, torture and sexual violence, but also about a certain set of ideas implemented
through a sociopolitical process (Enloe 2014) in which the trope of nationalism is tied to the
consumption of things Kashmir ki without seeking to be reexive about the experiences of the
ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

people who produce such things or the role of such a consumption in providing a lter through which
to tour a place with the proverbial rose-tinted glasses. It would seem that while the attribution of a
context of beauty to things comes easy, for things do not speak, but the same cannot be said of
Kashmiris, whose chorus for azadi reverberates in the streets every week.

What is apparent is that the Indian tourist is not distant from this scene, neither is she neutrally
placed, in fact, her assumptions and ideas form a part of the economy of which papier mch boxes
are a part (Copley 1994). Touring Kashmir is, in this context, a symbolic journey (Hunt 1992)
delineated by ideas of nationalism which when pursued by the millions, can be thought of as an act
of advancing, exploring possibilities for movement, for paradigms of nationalism in a certain
landscape, possibilities that the next year can become precedent, in ve a custom, in fty a map.

In the context of bound spaces, it is also relevant to ask, if judicial interpretations reect only the
norm, can we then take the law to be a voice of reason, of principle or morality? Are there parallels
between ideas that encourage a fetish-like consumption of things Kashmir ki and those that suggest
a reasonable legal interpretation by is in fact possible in place of military occupation? What is it to
engage with a legal system when one knows that the hope for reasonable remedy may be an
unreasonable hope?

Meanwhile, newer violations emerge every day. In 2016, in the months-long curfew that followed the
killing of rebel leader Burhan Wani, more than 90 protestors were killed and more than 17,000
injured. Eight hundred have had their sight aected including a hundred who have been blinded
completely (Waheed 2016). Any sense of urgency in how the law may oer reparation for injury is
rendered meaningless as the present is subsumed under the weight of the past, possibilities for the
future are pre-empted, time is attened and remedies perverted beyond recognition.

As the tourist season begins anew, visitors to Kashmir will continue to consume things Kashmir ki
and things legal will continue to consume Kashmiris themselves.

There is chewed paper, and then there are chewed people.

References

Allard K Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic (2009): The Myth of Normalcy: Impunity and
the Judiciary in Kashmir, Allard K Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School,
New Haven Connecticut.

Copley, Stephen (1994): William Gilpin and the Black-lead Mine, The Politics of the Picturesque:
Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cover, Robert M (1986): Violence and the Word, 95 Yale Law Journal 1601.

Derrida, Jacques (2002): Acts of Religion, New York: London: Routledge.

(2005): Paper Machine, California: Stanford University Press.

Enloe, Cynthia (2014): Understanding Militarism, Militarization and the Linkages with Globalization
using a Feminist Curiosity, The Hague, The Netherlands: Women Peacemakers Program.

HRW (2006): Everyone Lives in Fear: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, Human Rights
Watch, 12 September, http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11179/section/1.
ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Hunt, John Dixon (1992): Verbal and Visual Meanings in Garden History: The Case of Rousham,
Georgetown (Washington D C): Dumbarton Oaks Colloquia on the History of Landscape Architecture.

Kazi, Seema (2011): Between Democracy and Nation: Gender and Militarization in Kashmir, Brooklyn,
New York: South End Press.

(2012): Law Governance and Gender in Indian Administered Kashmir, Working Paper Series,
Centre for Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Masood, Bashaarat and Muzanil Jaleel (2016): Handwara Protests: Girl, Father in Custody, Kin
Demand Release, Indian Express, 15 April,
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/handwara-killings-molested-minor-girl-in-j-k-p
olice-custody-2754220/.

Waheed, Mirza (2016): Indias Crackdown in Kashmir: Is This The Worlds First Mass Blinding?
Guardian, 8 November,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/india-crackdown-in-kashmir-is-this-worlds-rst-mas
s-blinding.