The grid of indefinite incarceration: Everyday legality and paperwork warfare in Indian-controlled Kashmir

Abstract

This article analyzes the everyday legality of the preventive detention regime in Kashmir as a means of waging war against political dissidents. We follow the circulation of detainees and their files across multiple legal venues and regimes to show how the counterinsurgency state reinscribes spectacular and terrifying forms of violence through modalities of banal paperwork and iterative performances of the rule of law. Drawing on ethnographic and textual interpretation of legal documents, including police dossiers, detention orders, and police complaints, we argue that the permanent emergency in Kashmir operates through an everyday hyperlegality of indefinite incarceration that intermingles the systems, techniques, and jurisdictions of colonial policing, bureaucratic paperwork, and military warfare. Further, we demonstrate how this grid of indefinite detention manifests through a temporality of deferral and delay that comes to characterize everyday life for its subjects.

Keywords

Kashmir legality occupation preventive detention sovereignty war

Introduction

Suhail, a 17-year-old boy from the garrison town of Baramulla, is what police authorities regularly refer to as a “stone pelter,” a young male who engages in street protests, raises slogans, and throws taunts, brickbats, and stones at police and military barricades in the highly militarized Kashmir Valley.¹ He was among the more than 500 individuals, including street protesters, political leaders, and human rights defenders, detained under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act 1978 (PSA) between September 2016 and December 2016, a period of intense and massive public mobilizations against Indian rule in Kashmir. The PSA is a preventive detention law allowing for detention without trial or charge of individuals to prevent them from acting against “the security of the state” or “the maintenance of public order.” As a powerful legal instrument of India’s counterinsurgency war, the PSA is often deployed as a key component of the state repertoire of legal and illegal instruments of collective punishment to produce a revolving-door detention system designed to keep individuals categorized as troublemakers – activists, suspected members, former members, or sympathizers of armed rebel groups, lawyers, human rights defenders, journalists, and protesters, including children – permanently “out of circulation” (Amnesty International, 2011: 3). Although official documents indicate that Suhail was arrested on 16 September 2016, he was actually picked up and illegally detained without paperwork at a protest site a week prior. The District Magistrate signed a PSA detention order outlining the grounds of detention on 17 September directing the police to detain Suhail “with a view to preventing you from acting in any manner which is a threat to the maintenance of public order.” With no knowledge that such order had been passed, and no warning to his family, Suhail was bundled onto a bus in the middle of the night along with several other boys and transported to specially designated barracks in a jail in Jammu – a harrowing 165-mile journey, fraught with frequent road closures and delays due to avalanches and landslides, across the high-altitude Banihal Pass through the Himalayan Mountains. With this, Suhail entered into Kashmir’s grid of indefinite detention: a mode of political containment structured through documentary production and circulation involving multiple interconnected cases, playing out across interlocking regimes of administrative and criminal detentions in a context of permanent emergency and perpetual war.

This article analyzes India’s deployment of this grid of indefinite detention as a means of waging war against the population in Kashmir. Focusing on the use of preventive detention as an enduring and everyday technique of political containment, we map the circulation of detainees and their files across multiple legal venues and regimes to show how the counterinsurgency state reinscribes spectacular and terrifying forms of violence through modalities of banal paperwork and iterative performances of the rule of law. We argue that the conditions of permanent emergency in Kashmir produce an everyday condition of indefinite incarceration that intermingles the systems, techniques, and jurisdictions of criminal process, administrative detention, and military warfare. Materialized through excessive legalism and the denial and proliferation of documentation, India’s counterinsurgency governance in Kashmir constitutes a form of paperwork warfare that operates through a lawless yet legally saturated system that aims to keep political dissidents permanently out of circulation even as it continually moves them into new itineraries of carceral circulation across the shifting and unpredictable grid of indefinite incarceration. As Darryl Li (2018: 461) notes in the context of the global carceral circulations, the “capacious logic” of the production, circulation, and control of bodies and files across regimes and locales of law reveals the diffuse, disaggregated, and relational power of sovereignty, creating conditions of limbo for those trapped in it and blurring the distinction between exceptional and ordinary law.

Based on an ethnography of documents and files in cases involving PSA detainees, this article builds on our prior work detailing the ways in which the Indian state has mobilized constitutional arrangements and preventive detention laws to constitute J&K as an occupation, where its historical legal sovereignty has been erased and a new form of state power – occupation through permanent emergency – has been legitimized through its inscription in law and Indian constitutionalism (Duschinski and Ghosh, 2017). In this article, we push this argument further into the realms of everyday legality to show how the occupational and people-centric logic of counterinsurgency warfare, aimed at political containment of all forms of dissent and rebellion, is enacted through a complex interplay of documents and jurisdictions in preventive detention cases. Framed by the languages of public order and national security, India’s preventive detention regime operates through surveillance-based policing, criminal complaints, and the prison infrastructure, and subverts the evidentiary requirements of criminal law and constitutional safeguards of life and liberty, even as it deploys them. In this context, preventive detention does not operate as a discrete or extraordinary legal mechanism but rather through a complex grid consisting of fluid and densely interlocking relations among bureaucrats, police, intelligence agents, prison authorities, and the judiciary. This grid, located in a context of counterinsurgency war and grounded in the multiple jurisdictions of administrative discretion and the criminal and constitutional courts, is based in banal modalities and circulating materialities of everyday legality that blur boundaries between the sovereign and exceptional, documented and undocumented, and due process and executive discretion, embodying the violence and terror of law that is neither suspended nor firmly in place (Li, 2018; see Raman, 2017 on colonial India).

Legal and bureaucratic paperwork, and the ideologies of inscription and encryption that produce them, bear a constitutive and sustaining relationship to forms and techniques of sovereign violence and the everyday state in South Asia (Chatterjee, 2017; Das, 2007; Gupta, 2012; Hull, 2008; Mathur, 2015; Sriraman, 2018; Tarlo, 2003). We show how the denial and proliferation of documents and files produce “dangerous populations” (Berda, 2018: 15) caught up in the perpetual cycle of “the fear and uncertainties” of legal documentation as an “unpredictable and unstable techniques of governance” (Kelly, 2006). The legal and political infrastructure of this graded classificatory system of dangerous populations in Kashmir is built and sustained through “graphic artifacts,” such as police complaints, files, dossiers and executive orders that act as “crucial mediators of the engagement of the government and populace” (Hull, 2012: 170), becoming the enduring material infrastructure of state power (Hull, 2012; see also Hull, 2008). The penetrative yet contingent nature of such documentation creates seemingly endless oscillations between “legibility and illegibility, stability and instability, coherence and incoherence” (Kelly, 2006: 90) through circuits of illegal detention, intermittent release, and indefinite incarceration that characterize everyday life in the permanent emergency. As Cheesman (2019: 15) argues in relation to the Myanmar Court, such bureaucratic banality appeals to institutions working in conditions of authoritarian inequality, “not just because they connote particular bureaucratic values, but also because they make brutality a possibility while depersonalizing it utterly.”

The article is based on our long-standing fieldwork as legal and political anthropologists focusing on questions of justice and rights and forms of state power and militarized violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Ghosh conducted the ethnographic research for this analysis through watching courtroom proceedings, collecting documents, and conducting interviews with detainees, their families, and their lawyers during a period of upheaval and crackdown in the Kashmir Valley across six months in 2016–17. Our analytic focus on documents, files, and dossiers as ethnographic objects allows us to trace the socio-legal contours of the grid of indefinite incarceration without compromising individuals whose lives are already and always shaped by regimes of surveillance, detention, and threat. We have adopted a methodological approach of “collaboration at a distance” for the duration of the project through virtual modes of synchronous and asynchronous communication, document sharing, and write-up. This approach aligns with our broader ethos of scholarly collaboration, participation, and engagement given our multifaceted roles as public-facing scholars conducting politically engaged and critical empirical research on occupation, sovereignty, and self-determination in Kashmir.

Hyperlegality, counterinsurgency, and paperwork warfare

India’s contemporary counterinsurgency war in Jammu and Kashmir traces back to the contested sovereignty of the region, which was claimed by both India and Pakistan at the time of the decolonization on the subcontinent. Concluding the India-Pakistan war over Kashmir in 1949, the United Nations (UN) negotiated a ceasefire and issued a series of resolutions in the late 1940s and 1950s aiming to establish a plebiscite to determine the status of the divided territory. Until August 2019, India referred to the portion of disputed Kashmir under its control as the State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and asserted that it was a state like any other, fully integrated into the Indian Union’s polity, territory and jurisdiction. In August 2019, this territory was bifurcated into two federally ruled Union Territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. For decades, Kashmiris have demanded a UN-administered plebiscite and resisted Indian control of the region through a long-standing popular movement for self-determination, which has taken the form of youth-led street uprisings and stone peltings since 2008 (Duschinski et al., 2018; Ganie, 2019; Sharma, 2020). The Indian military establishment views the situation in Kashmir as a sub-conventional, hybrid, or asymmetric war, which includes elements of insurgency, terrorism, proxy war, and border skirmishes (Indian Army, 2006; for critique see Navlakha, 2007). The densely militarized counterinsurgency context in Kashmir involves a complex array of military, police and intelligence agencies deployed on counterterrorism or counterinsurgency duties. Over 700,000 Indian armed forces, including regular army, border security, armed police, paramilitary and other uniformed and undercover counterinsurgency personnel, are currently deployed in Kashmir under the counterinsurgency doctrine of “force saturation” and “area domination” to control the territory and the population, making it the most densely militarized conflict zone in the world (IPTK and APDP, 2015). The nature of India’s counterinsurgency war in Kashmir demonstrates how the British colonial-era consolidation of imperial policing tactics and population-control strategies have traveled across time and territory, crystallizing a “focus on civilians, not only as collateral to the actual fighting but also as the principal focus of warfare” (Khalili, 2010: 415).

The military actions of Indian soldiers deployed on population-centric counterinsurgency duties in the cities and villages of Kashmir are authorized by Indian constitutional and legal provisions that permit the deployment of armed forces in any part of its territory to “aid civil power” in “maintaining public order.” Armed forces personnel and police are officially empowered to arrest, detain, and question civilians, search and destroy property, and use lethal force against public assemblies with little or no accountability. International human rights agencies and organizations have detailed widespread and systematic patterns of human rights violations and war crimes including extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and sexual violence by state forces, enabled by this climate of pervasive, legally sanctioned impunity (UN OHCHR, 2018, 2019).

Despite the existence of a border war and the active deployment of armed forces on combat duties both at the borders and the interiors of Kashmir, India’s political establishment, regardless of political party affiliation, denies the internationally disputed status of the region, maintaining that its military forces are only deployed on internal, law and order, and counterterrorism duties, and operating at the request of and under the command of J&K’s civilian provincial government (IPTK and APDP, 2015: 10–17). Yet martial laws such as the Army Act 1950, Border Security Force (BSF) Act 1968, and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Act 1949 govern the functioning of the Indian armed forces while deployed on counterinsurgency duties. These laws and Supreme Court judgments rendered under them provide that military courts can try all acts of military indiscipline and all crimes committed by armed personnel, committed while both on and off duty, through closed-door court martial proceedings initiated at the option of military authorities. The question of police powers to register criminal complaints against armed forces is currently being litigated in the Supreme Court of India, and police are injuncted from filing any such complaints in the interim.² Jurisdiction of civilian courts over crimes by military personnel is further proscribed through legal immunity provisions of extraordinary laws such as the Armed Forces J&K (Special Powers) Act 1990. In Kashmir, unlike in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, crimes by both combatants and civilians committed against the armed forces – for instance, “terror offences” such as carrying out attacks on military establishments and targets, “infiltrating” across the disputed border as an “enemy agent,” and rioting, causing hurt, and destroying property during street protests – are tried in civilian courts of criminal law rather than through military tribunals or martial laws, despite official Indian claims that the offenders are Pakistan-sponsored or Pakistani combatants. Concurrently, preventive detention laws are used to intern political dissidents for prolonged periods stretching into decades, including those accused of criminal offences at violent street protests or of aiding militants, denying their constitutional right to due process and legal representation. These detentions occur through administrative orders, subject to minimal judicial review, passed by bureaucrats in the absence of any declaration of war-time or other constitutional emergency. This multi-layered system premised on the indistinction between war and peace, the oscillations between ordinary and special laws, and the interdependencies of military, judicial, and executive jurisdictions, enables the conflation of political and security threats (Berda, 2020) and is characterized by the pervasive use of modalities of suspicion, pre-emption, and collective punishment, rather than rule of law standards of individual proof and culpability.

In his discussion of anti-terror legislation, Nasser Hussain (2007) develops the concept of “hyperlegality” to describe the “structural and permanent” shift from a liberal mode of governance in which emergency is conceived as the withdrawal of law and the institution of temporary rule by executive power without judicial or legislative checks in response to a specific crisis, to a distinctive mode of governance that is triggered by “inchoate determinations of danger” and draws upon the racial legacies and generalized anxieties of British colonial governmentality (2007: 514). “Hyperlegality” is characterized, not by the suspension of law but rather by the development of complex and multiple bodies of legal authority, special venues, and bureaucratic classifications involving a “predictive quality” based on profiling individuals on the basis of “who they are and what they are likely to do” (Hussain, 2007: 516). Applying Hussain’s concept of hyperlegality to the 19th-century colonial pacification of insurgency in Wayanad in southern India, Bhavani Raman (2017: 122) describes how this was achieved through the fragmentation of legal process associated with “the intensified use of classifications, special jurisdictions, and the installation of tribunals and commissions that targeted specific threats and suspects in parallel to the ordinary courts of law.” The field of counterinsurgency laws was thus constituted as a legal jurisdiction premised on the political imperatives of punishment and persuasion of dissidents, “where the law was splintered – neither suspended, nor firmly in place” (Raman, 2017: 123).

Since the UN-mediated ceasefire in 1949, India has applied its repertoire of colonial-era security laws and constitutional provisions, especially preventive detention, as critical legal instruments for producing a dense and shifting carceral grid that enables the indefinite incarceration of political prisoners and, in the process, extends and entrenches its coercive control over Indian-administered Kashmir (Duschinski and Ghosh, 2017; Noorani, 2011). The deployment of preventive detention “can be distinguished from other contexts of general policing [in India] by its rationale, severity, systemic and pervasive nature and the governing legal regimes” (APDP and JKCCS, 2019b: 23). While scholars of the Indian legal system have suggested that preventive detention generally functions as an extraordinary means to circumvent the ordinary criminal law requirements of indictment, proof, and trial,³ in Kashmir, the systems of criminal justice and preventive detention operate not as separate systems, but contingently and concurrently, such that multiple and repeated police complaints and criminal cases form the basis of police dossiers and executive detention orders, and preventive detention simultaneously disrupts and delays criminal trials that inevitably result in acquittals due to lack of evidence. In 2014, the J&K State Home Department, in response to a Right to Information (RTI) application, disclosed that 16,329 people were detained in administrative detention under the PSA at various times since 1988 (Amnesty International, 2015: 15). From March 2016 to August 2017, more than 1000 Kashmiris were detained under the PSA (Amnesty International, 2019: 5). The state’s strategic and political use of preventive detention and arbitrary undocumented detention intensifies, not just during periods of political protest⁴ but also around Indian national holidays such as Republic Day as well as during widely boycotted Indian elections (Kak, 2018), highlighting the extent to which symbols of national identity and processes of electoral democracy have become compromised under conditions of military occupation and counterinsurgency warfare. In the counterinsurgency war in Kashmir, Indian authorities have for decades used preventive detention as what one detainee described as “the ultimate weapon” – a technique for the management of an insurgent population through mass incarceration, and the collective punishment of civilian dissent and popular rebellion.

In India as elsewhere in the postcolonial world, contemporary laws of preventive detention are informed by the historical connections among colonial policing, surveillance, and the punitive containment of dissent, rebellion, and vagrancy (Berda, 2018; Khalili, 2010). In her analysis of colonial debates over the codification of preventive detention provisions in British India, Radhika Singha (2015) outlines the development of a “striated jurisdictional topography,” where classificatory logics and executive powers to preventively detain ever-increasing classes of “suspicious” or “dangerous” types steadily expanded and proliferated. This rationale of preventive policing permeates the permanent emergency legal regime of Kashmir, where the dense interdependencies of the criminal justice and administrative detention systems form a complex grid of permanent incarceration and control based on shared secret evidence, classificatory logics, circulating paperwork, and striated and interlocking jurisdictional topographies. As we demonstrate in the next section, the Indian state, like other counterinsurgency states, operationalizes this preventive detention regime by drawing on and combining elements from a repertoire of colonial-era legal practices and juridical strategies for the policing of political dissidents and the neutralization of armed rebels in counterinsurgency wars.

The PSA file as an archive of hyperlegality

Ghosh first met Suhail in late 2016 in the office of his lawyer in the Baramulla court complex shortly after his release from illegal preventive detention. In her fieldnotes, she described him as “a shy 16-year-old, with gelled hair, a slight stubble and a cheeky smile […] dressed in the standard issue adolescent uniform of rolled up skinny jeans, fashionable jacket and bright red sneakers.” She further wrote:

Suhail’s PSA order was recently quashed on 6 December after two and a half months of hearings, as he was a minor and could not be legally detained under the PSA. He was, as is usual, not released immediately but taken to the Joint Interrogation Centre at Jammu. He was fingerprinted, photographed and questioned (but not “slapped” he says), then sent back to the Baramulla police lines, where he discovered he is now “wanted” as a suspect in investigations of ten FIRs [First Information Reports],⁵ though only four had been initially mentioned in his PSA order. The process of bailing him out in these ten criminal cases is ongoing. It involves multiple trips to the criminal courts and police stations, recording his appearance in “interim bails,” and has been punctuated by two further short stints at the juvenile home between the granting of bails. But Suhail was not at the lawyer’s office to discuss his own cases as I had first assumed, but that of his father Muzaffar.

Suhail entered the lawyer’s office carrying two sets of overflowing files. The papers were all mixed up. Ghosh watched as the lawyer pored over the paperwork, trying to separate the documents into distinct piles, each including both criminal and preventive detention paperwork. The files included ten FIRs and bail orders and a PSA order for Suhail, and two successive PSA orders for Muzaffar. Both files were partial and fragmentary, missing paperwork and with many gaps. The law and the files were mutually constitutive, with law operating “as a repository of forms of authoritarian and administrative acts that assume concrete shape in files” (Vismann, 2008: xiii). Rather than constituting stable and fixed collections of documents of events, these PSA files unfolded as archives, revealing the nested relationship among the overlapping jurisdictions of administrative detaining authorities, counterinsurgency policing, and intelligence profiling, with the power to trap detainees in the grid of indefinite incarceration.

A PSA file handled by the detainee, his lawyer, or the prosecutor may consist of several components, including the PSA detention order and grounds of detention signed by the District Magistrate, the police dossier, and copies of FIRs involving the detainee. These files build and circulate over time, with the police supplying FIRs and the police dossier to the District Magistrate to support the request for the PSA detention order, and the police dossier building on the Interrogation Report, local police station-based databases, history sheets, and indexes of habitual offenders that detail information collected through surveillance and intelligence inputs about the detainee’s family genealogy, political affiliations, work history, criminal records, and other activities (see Satish, 2011 on the constitutionality of police databases). The FIRs, police dossiers, and other materials that the state deems “confidential materials” are supplied to the District Magistrate but are routinely not handed over to the detainee and his lawyer, making it impossible for the detainee to make a representation against the order or to challenge the detention in the High Court. The detainee has a right to these materials under both constitutional law and the PSA, except such materials which may be withheld on grounds of “public interest.” In these circumstances, the detainee’s family must build the record of his detention, one fragmentary piece at a time, by submitting applications to various authorities and relying on bribes, goodwill, and family connections at prisons, jails, and courts, sometimes only procuring a copy of the crucial PSA grounds of detention when the state files its reply in the High Court.

The District Magistrate prepares the grounds of detention – the key document providing legal justification for the preventive detention order and warrant for arrest – on the basis of the police dossier, using frames of national security and public order. The grounds of detention and the police dossier are couched in the language of the apprehension of an ominous but inchoate and generalized danger posed by the individual based on membership in a suspect community such as “stone pelters,” “secessionist camp,” “separatists,” “Pakistani agents,” and “cross-border terrorist groups.” While using vague, formulaic, and repetitive quasi-legal language, the grounds of detention are undergirded by a typology of secretive calibrations that have no basis in law but have evolved through counterinsurgency policing techniques of intelligence and surveillance. This typology grades suspects according to their security profiles and draws on encryptions of coded profiling (for discussion of rigid military-intelligence typologies of combatants, see Berda, 2020 and Chubatila, 2014 on the north-east of India). These patterns of classificatory language show striking similarities across very different types of detainees. For example, the grounds of detention for Suhail show similarities to the grounds of detention for Khurram Parvez, an internationally recognized human rights defender who was detained under PSA for 75 days in 2016. Their initial PSA detentions occurred just days apart.

Grounds of detention, Suhail, 18 September 2016

You are an incorrigible anti social element who has been coming to the adverse notice of Police for pelting stones and leading unlawful demonstrations & instigating the youth to pelt stones upon police/security forces since long … . Your aim and objective is to disturb the public order and to create an atmosphere of fear and chaos among the people … . You develop contacts with the like-minded elements and has formed a group of miscreants which at every available opportunity have been found resorting to stone pelting upon police/security forces and disturbing the public order in [neighborhood] and its surroundings during the current unrest.

You have been found implementing the secessionist programs on the ground by forcing the general public to observe strikes called by the separatists of various outfits and instigating the gullible youth to resort to stone pelting upon police/security forces deployed for maintaining law and order duty on National Highway at [location redacted by authors] and its adjacent area.

Grounds of detention, Khurram Parvez, 21 September 2016

Whereas … you have achieved a prominent position in the separatist camps under a hidden cover of being a human rights activist. In the ongoing unrest you have been found instigating and advocating the disgruntled elements to resort to illegal activities.

Whereas, you have a long history of affiliation with secessionist organizations who advocates the secession of the state of J&K from the Union of India and to achieve this goal you have been found resorting to illegal/unlawful activities since long, be it utilizing the youth to resort to violence or gathering so called Human Rights activists.

Whereas you having secessionist ideology and inclination towards secessionism, during the present unrest have remained instrumental in instigating disgruntled elements to resort to violence by indulging in stone pelting upon security personnel which in turn disrupts public order.

The parallel language indicates the typology’s clear equation between political threat and security threat. Individuals who are suspected of prior or current affiliation with pro-freedom political or armed groups are often identified as “Over Ground Workers” (OGWs), “anti-national elements” (ANEs), and “militant sympathisers.” Distinctions are made between “Locally Trained Militants” (LTM) and “Pakistan Trained Militants” (PTM), while “Stone Pelters,” typically youth, are referred to as “anti-social,” “unruly,” “disgruntled elements,” “miscreants,” and “agitational terrorists”; they are described as “incorrigible” and “habitual” offenders, with “tendencies” and long histories of “instigation” and “incitement” to violence in order to establish the necessity for detaining them under the preventive detention regime, “since the ordinary law of crimes is not adequate to deal with them.” Grounds of detention include vague and unsourced allegations replete with references to “inputs” from “discreet agencies,” collected through intelligence methods and surveillance tactics that remain necessarily outside of judicial review.

The longevity and persistence of such dossiers and blacklisting are illustrated by the example of an elderly man whom Ghosh encountered in the corridors of the Lower Court in Srinagar in February 2017. When he had recently submitted a passport application for a hajj pilgrimage, his mandatory police background check showed that he was a suspect in an open FIR from the early 1990s, from a police station several hours journey from his home. He was one of thousands who had been illegally detained and served jail time without charge or trial in the early 1990s. He had no recollection or knowledge of ever having been implicated in or investigated in this particular case; he had never been summoned to court or been served with any detention orders or warrant. Having petitioned his local police station and the Criminal Investigations Department in vain, he was now seeking a lawyer to have the FIR quashed, since there appeared to have been no proceedings under it for over 25 years. A lawyer practicing in the court commented that such permanently indelible yet secretive records were routine among the families she encountered in her practice, who belonged to profiled communities among whom particulars of “geographic area, family ties, age or participation in social, cultural or political affairs” functioned as a standardized template forming a constantly changing yet homogenized “index of tendencies” of the security threat (Berda, 2018: 50).

A legally valid detention order must only show the “subjective satisfaction of the detaining authority” based on an “application of mind” to the materials before them to determine that the detainees’ activities are a threat to the “maintenance of public order” or “security of state,” and that the “ordinary criminal law is not sufficient” to deter him from such “prejudicial activities.” Grounds of detention therefore routinely contain standardized phrases and language to this effect, even as they exhibit routine factual errors, oversights, and clerical mistakes such as failing to fully change the third-person language of the police dossier to the second-person language of the PSA grounds of detention. The language of the detention order is always nearly identical to the language of the police dossier, sometimes simply a verbatim copy of several sentences at a time, reproducing stock phrases as well as errors. As the PSA grounds display every indication of being mechanically reproduced through careless clerical labor and signed without any “application of mind,” PSA orders are almost always set aside by the High Court for these reasons. The errors relating to basic biographical details, dates, and events do not, however, indicate the lack of surveillance or information gathering, but rather the absence of need for accuracy or accountability since a successful challenge can be overcome by simply holding the individual, either illegally or under an open FIR, and reproducing another similar or identical order when needed.

The same language often appears in multiple PSA orders against a single detainee. This is illustrated in the case of Suhail’s father Muzaffar, who was taken into illegal custody on the highway while traveling to Jammu to serve his son’s transfer order on prison authorities. He was illegally detained without any records for nine days, tortured for information about the whereabouts of Suhail’s brother (also profiled as a “stone pelter”), and then formally held for criminal activity on a FIR. Muzaffar’s first PSA order, dated 19 October 2016, contained nearly identical grounds of detention to his second PSA order, dated 19 June 2017. The only new charges pertained to criminal activities that he apparently instigated while actually in prison under his first PSA or his subsequent unrecorded illegal detention. The new additional paragraph reads:

The reports of discreet agencies are also suggestive of the fact that during your custody in Central Jail Kotebhulwal [sic], you have not shown any decline as you are still nurturing the secessionist ideology and in fact is motivating others to follow the cause of secessionists. Your activities referred to above are highly prejudicial to the maintenance of public order in [location redacted by authors] and its adjacent areas and also will affect adversely on the efforts undertaken by the law enforcing agencies for maintaining peace and harmony at [place name redacted by authors]. but [sic] you are planning to recycle your self into anti social activities to disturb the public peace and tranquility in the area by sponsoring subversive agenda and since the normal law has not deterred you from indulging in anti people activities, as such there are compelling reasons to invoke the preventive detention against you.

When the case was heard for quashing in the J&K High Court, Muzaffar’s lawyer successfully argued that the identical grounds of detention provided proof of non-application of mind by the detaining authority.

As in Muzaffar’s case, the J&K High Court routinely quashes almost all preventive detention orders brought before it for failing to satisfy the constitutional tests of reasonableness and non-arbitrariness of state actions.⁶ In J&K, these quashings typically take place 6 to 12 months after the initial detention, after routinized delays and deferrals granted by the writ court, despite laws and rules of case flow management stating that “matters of liberty” must be expeditiously disposed of by the court within 15 days of the filing of the habeas corpus plea. In a recent analysis of 210 case studies of PSA detentions between 2012 and 2018, Amnesty International (2019) found that the J&K High Court most often found PSA detentions to be unconstitutional because of several repeated patterns of illegality including: procedural and technical lapses in the drafting of PSA orders, including vague and unsubstantiated charges and detention of minors; repeat orders, illegal and revolving-door detentions; evidence of non-application of mind by detaining authorities; and fundamental errors of fact. Following the High Court’s orders for release, authorities consistently circumvent judicial processes by re-arresting the individual, often as they leave the court complex or prison, on pre-existing or pending criminal charges, a fresh police complaint, or a new PSA detention order. The detainee is transported from the prison to interrogation facilities for a “debrief” or “counselling session” and then processed for the next detention. This sequence produces an infinite loop of revolving-door detentions. The act of the High Court quashing an illegal order based on technical grounds serves to obscure how the detained subject at the heart of habeas corpus is held in permanent limbo through deferrals (denials of copies and materials, adjournments for “completion of the record,” failures to file replies by the state, and delays in handing over the release order), proliferations (fabrications of new FIRs and new PSAs), repetitive circulations of the illegally detained body (among police station, interrogation facilities, and jails), and circulations of the file (among local police, intelligence, police headquarters, District Magistrate, state government, Administrative Review Board, and High Court). Such material practices and constitutional discourses normalize the systematic use of law as a “weapon of war” (Berda, 2018: 31) even as the court declares individual infractions unlawful based on faulty procedure or incomplete paperwork. These temporalities of infinite deferral and delay convert PSA into the “ultimate weapon” in the state’s arsenal of lawfare.

In a conversation in November 2017 with two young criminal lawyers from Baramulla, Ghosh heard about the case of Tanveer Ahmed War (his real name), who had been served with three back-to-back PSA orders. Tanveer was easily identifiable at protests because he walked on crutches due to a disability. The first lawyer said, “He has polio, but the police have claimed he is a ringleader of the stone pelters.” His colleague intervened to say that the police video evidence showed that he did in fact participate in protests by leading chants and slogans, but that he did not throw stones, explaining that he was “not athletic like the other boys, and he can’t run from the police because of his leg.” The first lawyer responded:

They implicated him in 14 FIRs. He got bailed out on all of them [after his first PSA was quashed] on one day. The judge was sympathetic, so the lawyers asked for “bail on surrender” in all the FIRs they had mentioned. It is a strategy lawyers sometimes use. We say that he is surrendering in all the FIRs, and if you have a good judge he will bail him out on all of them, without waiting for separate police reports, objections, etc. The police were angry that he got bailed out in one day, so they arrested him on a fresh PSA on identical grounds the next day. This is very common. Absolutely identical grounds, the very next day. The clerk just changes the dates, that is all. It is exactly the same file. The [District Magistrate] doesn’t even look at what is placed before him. He agrees to everything the police say and signs it.

The grounds of detention, prepared in the office of the District Magistrate through routinized clerical labor that reproduces languages and classifications drawn from secretive surveillance and preventive policing archives, is the central documentary artefact in the scaffolding of indefinite incarceration. The PSA file develops and expands through integration and aggregation, as the grounds of detention for successive PSA orders inform and are informed by the police dossier, a secret record of the detainee’s criminality. The secret, uncorroborated evidence is rendered legible in the public police record through a list of FIRs. Registered on various dates against unnamed suspects for crowd offences such as rioting, incitement, and conspiracy and attempt to commit murder, these FIRs, when included in a police dossier, index the individual as a suspect in a particular incident of “mob violence” with no further investigative materials, proof, or witnesses provided or required. Hundreds of such FIRs remain perpetually “open” and “under investigation” in police files at every police jurisdiction, for years, and the same FIR may be deployed multiple times against numerous suspects, becoming uncertain yet remarkably persistent documentary markers, drawing dozens of boys into their criminalizing ambit, who must nonetheless fight individual criminal cases that stretch on for years.

The grounds of detention for Khurram Parvez indexed four open FIRs, mostly relating to stone pelting with one for attempted murder. In the stylized and fictionalized nature of the genre convention, these FIRs all used standard language to describe similar scenarios of processions, police intervention, unruly mob activity, stone pelting, and rioting, all dated July 2016. The registration of criminal cases through open FIRs operates, not as a mechanism for the investigation, trial, and conviction of individuals for specific offences, but rather as a weapon of war to authenticate secret, inadmissible, and unverified intelligence information, performatively signifying the individual’s criminality and perpetuating the grid of indefinite incarceration. They serve as powerful and ominous signifiers that circulate across files to establish why individuals cannot be contained using the normal criminal process.⁷

As deployed in Kashmir, the hyperlegal jurisdiction of suspicion and permanent emergency produces a grid of indefinite detention that encompasses entangled yet splintered regimes of administrative law, constitutionalism, and the criminal justice system, identifying and permanently incarcerating dangerous populations using logics of law and order and national security. This represents not “lawless law” or the abdication of law⁸ but rather the judicialization of the political through the emergence of a legally saturated form of governance marked by a proliferation of paperwork, jurisdictional complexity, and excessive legalism. This grid of indefinite detention is structured through the paperwork of open FIRs and repeat PSA orders, which legitimize and fictionalize the detention once the detained body is demanded in court through habeas corpus or bail. The production and circulation of this paperwork is determined, not by traditional policing procedural methodologies and archives, but rather by the fluctuating intensities of the state’s will to continue the indefinite detention. The logic of hyperlegal modes of counterinsurgency overturns the conventional idea that police procedural paperwork is produced to record the occurrence of a crime and investigative trajectories in particular cases, and that the absence of justificatory paperwork renders detention of a suspect illegal. In the counterinsurgency logic of permanent emergency and political containment, the criminality of the custodial body is materialized and produced through the repetitive cycles of paperwork, such that undocumented police abduction, when challenged, produces hyperdocumentation in the form of PSA orders and multiple FIRs, while the absence of the file signifies that “the incarcerated body” is not in custody at all, and can be released at the will of the police. The proliferation of paperwork signals the profile of the detainee, such that the more an individual contests by fighting, either in the courts of law or the courts of public opinion among a local, national, or international audience, the denser the paperwork becomes, producing a devastating mesh of nested criminal and PSA cases, given form through paper in the archives of the state.

Conclusion: legal terror

As this article goes to press, India is managing one of the most significant legal and political transitions in modern South Asian history through the precise methods of counterinsurgency governance that we detail in this article, using techniques of paperwork lawfare to control Kashmiri populations with terrorizing results. On 5 August 2019, the Indian government abrogated J&K’s “special status” under the Indian Constitution that had provided attenuated legislative sovereignty and protected rights to land and employment within the Indian constitutional scheme. India also enacted the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019, which dissolved and partitioned the state of J&K and replaced it with two centrally governed Union Territories (J&K and Ladakh) directly ruled by the federal government in New Delhi. Although the state government’s power over police and public order has been transferred to the federal government, the J&K PSA 1978 is a specified state law that continues to remain in force in both Union Territories. In addition, the National Security Act 1980, a federal security law, also now applies to the region.

As these massive legal transformations are under way, the federal government is repressing popular dissent by instituting a complete media blackout, imposing a stringent curfew, and deploying an additional 300,000 armed forces in the region (for details, see APDP and JKCCS, 2019b; Desai et al., 2019). Across the Kashmir Valley, armed security forces personnel have detained political leaders, lawyers, journalists, civil society activists, trade unionists, community mobilizers, and juveniles through night-time raids, holding an estimated 4000 people in preventive detention in specially designated detention facilities such as guesthouses, conference centers, and hotels, as well as regular prisons. Many PSA detainees have been transported to jails in Uttar Pradesh, a thousand miles away from J&K. Civil society fact-finding missions and human rights activists have documented torture of civilians and children in villages as well as abductions and enforced disappearances. India is managing the population through undocumented and “revolving-door” detentions, with an estimated 13,000 people, many of them children, held for periods of time without any records and then released, and in some cases re-detained arbitrarily. Police officials have described their use of forms of collective punishment through preventive detention, including the use of illegal “community bonds,” where village elders secure the release of detained individuals, mainly minors, by providing sureties that such profiled individuals, held under preventive detention offences, will not “re-offend.” With communications blackouts and curfews, many families are unaware of the whereabouts of their arbitrarily detained family members and children, lack the resources to visit family members detained outside of Kashmir, and are unable to access legal remedies.

In his socio-historical examination of “permanent emergencies” in modern history, John Reynolds traces the normalization of special powers over time and across legal systems, showing how “emergency doctrine and the language of crisis have been purposefully deployed by the security state to whittle away civil rights protections, to shrink the space for political dissent and to erode anti-discriminatory norms” (Reynolds, 2017: 13). Drawing on Leonard Feldman’s (2010) analysis of the quotidian ways in which regulatory and administrative authorities anticipate, respond to, and pre-empt emergencies, Reynolds moves beyond the intractable oppositional conceptions of legal norm and exception, writing that “in models of emergency that demonstrate the normalization of special powers over time through ongoing and proliferating lawmaking processes – as opposed to sporadic sovereign suspensions of law – we come to see the ‘prosaic politics of emergency’ and the ‘banality of emergency’” (Reynolds, 2017: 13).

Describing the conditions of destabilizing uncertainty and unease that prevailed in the shifting geographies of the “razor-wire city” of Srinagar during the initial weeks of the post-abrogation siege, anthropologist Saiba Varma (2019) writes that “in an undeclared curfew […] freedom is tightened or relaxed unpredictably. It is only taking bodily risks and testing the will of soldiers that determines the curfew’s status.” The razor-wire barricades that proliferate and shift unpredictably across the city depending on the contingencies of the political situation at a given time and space produce and normalize the conditions that Varma (2019) describes as “permanent, limitless war.” The unofficially curfewed city serves as a telling metaphor for the impenetrable yet deeply intrusive logic of the grid of indefinite incarceration and punitive containment, reproducing conditions of collective punishment. As tens of thousands of individuals face illegal and undocumented detention as well as arbitrary administrative detention, legal challenges risk materializing and formalizing the incarceration, and making it indefinite in the form of the PSA case, depending upon the political will and necessity of the counterinsurgency state. In Kashmir, the banality of emergency (Feldman, 2010) is grounded in the hyperlegality of indefinite incarceration and waged through the dense yet fluctuating infrastructure of paperwork warfare, materialized and circulated through graphic artefacts such as PSA detention orders, open FIRs, high court petitions, and police dossiers.

Through this article we have argued that proliferating jurisdictions and repetitive, seemingly banal bureaucratic operations lie at the heart of the normalization of a permanent condition of crisis and danger to the state. Analyzing the material qualities of judicial files in Myanmar’s Supreme Court, Cheesman (2019, 15) suggests that through these depersonalized aesthetics, “[t]he files invite the court to be willfully ignorant of its objects, yet on the pretense of knowledge encourage it to intervene into their lives routinely,” and “convey to the reader a sense of naturalness and inevitability of the state and its forms of violence.” In the arena of counterinsurgency lawfare in Kashmir, spectacular and terrifying modes of state brutality – secret evidence gathered through surveillance, police abductions, nocturnal raids, enforced disappearances, custodial torture, and the identification and disfigurement of children marked as “habitual” protesters using crowd-control technologies such as pellet shotguns – are reinscribed through modalities of routinized paperwork and courtroom performances.

The workings of this legal regime based on suspicion, terror, provisionality, and secret evidence are rationalized through juridical documentation in the criminal justice and administrative detention system such as open FIRs and PSA orders that intersect with and reinforce one another. This mesh of documentation – the concatenated chains of the identically worded open FIRs, the copy-and-paste aesthetics of the police dossier, and the mechanically reproduced PSA detention orders – serves to create a depersonalized yet individualized system that is opaque to substantive judicial review as a whole, though individual cases repeatedly fail to meet the tests of constitutional law on the standardized grounds of clerical error or non-application of mind. The terrifying violence of indefinite detentions lies in the everyday uncertainty of not knowing what may happen next, since law and paperwork can be crafted as required to trap a detainee interminably. The custodial body circulates between successive hyperdocumented and undocumented detentions, as its release is held in abeyance through the alternation between the denial and proliferation of paperwork. The undocumented and illegally detained body is the central unchanging fact, while legality, whether through the production and fabrications of the PSA paperwork or the creation of new classificatory and legal dragnets to detain political prisoners, serves only to indefinitely defer its release.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Haley Duschinski

Notes

Author Biographies

Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh is an Assistant Professor at Centre for Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University, Begaluru. She is a lawyer and legal anthropologist, whose work focuses on questions of the law's relationship with militarisation, bureaucratic authority, paperwork and state violence. She has worked with local coalitions and organisations on a number of human rights documentation and litigation efforts in Kashmir and India. Her scholarly work has appeared in Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, Contributions to Indian Sociology and other academic journals. She is a member of LASSNET (Law and Social Sciences Network), the Critical Kashmir Studies scholarly collective and the Kashmir Scholars Advocacy and Consultative Network (KSCAN). She has a B.A LLB (2003) from National Law School of India University, Bengaluru; a Masters in Research (2006) from Birbeck School of Law, London and a Ph D (2017) from the Centre for Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has been the recipient of a Yale-Fox International Fellowship for her doctoral studies.

Haley Duschinski is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and power; occupation and resistance; and human rights and international justice in Kashmir. Duschinski co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) as well as special issues of Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law on comparative studies of occupation (2018) and HIMALAYA on war and suffering in Kashmir (2020). Her research has appeared in academic journals such as Social & Legal Studies, Political & Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today, Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly, among others. She is a member of the Critical Kashmir Studies scholarly collective and an active member of the Kashmir Scholars Advocacy and Consultative Network (KSCAN). She presented expert testimony on Kashmir at the US congressional hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in November 2019.

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