War by other means

Nawaz Gul Qanungo (NGQ): India and Pakistan committed serious ceasefire violations along Kashmir's Line of Control (LoC) in 2013. Given the paucity of media coverage and the absence of independent sources, you've continued to have doubts over what was really happening between the two armies and why. Having spent years near the LoC and witnessed such escalations first hand, what are your impressions, and how do you see the recent escalations?

Mona Bhan (MB): Violent skirmishes are one way borders are made. In Kargil, routinised albeit theatrical events both justify the military's presence on the borders as well as transform spaces and places into national territory. In a region where borders are impossible to define – physically as well as socially and culturally – states resort to violence to 'make' borders. This can include shelling or even beheadings – both overt displays of state power and the ways states assert their sovereignty. So, while the brutality of such incidents is inexplicable, what is clear is the way statist media has used – and continues to use – these events to represent the 'enemy nation' as savage, barbaric and inhuman, characterisations that play a critical role in sustaining institutions of war and violence.

In Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity in India, instead of emphasising the geopolitical triggers behind crossborder 'skirmishes' (a word that I think trivialises the lived experience of crossborder violence), I talk about how village communities in Kargil view crossborder shelling: in their view, the intensive shelling during and after the Kargil war 'brought the border closer' since their access to highland pastures and other resources became severely limited. The border seemed closer in 1999 also because, unlike in previous wars in which technology wasn't as developed, new and sophisticated weaponry had collapsed the distance between 'home' and 'battlefront'. For many who seemed accustomed to such incidents, shelling was also seen as a way soldiers across the border announced their presence in order to prevent 'crossborder infiltrations'. Sometimes, crossborder shelling was seen as a 'play' between men who were excited to use their weapons or were simply bored. In other words, contrary to media representations that use such incidents to shore up nationalist fervour and generate support for aggressive foreign policies, for people on the border, such incidents – to an extent – depict the banality, and the boredom, of serving on the LoC.