Reflections on Authoritarian Times

On May 10, 2025, after four terrifying days of shelling and missile and drone attacks along the northern and western border states between India and Pakistan, a ceasefire was ceremonially announced. The US President was among the first to claim credit for it, praising the “common sense and great intelligence” of leaders of both countries¹ —until it became clear that promises of trade deals were what “Trumped” the war.² Closer to home, with the polemics of an unabashed bloodthirst losing immediate relevance, the overwrought nerves of a cheerleading troll army had to be directed elsewhere. Now that the enemy across the border could no longer occasion war mania, guns had to be trained on new enemies. A range of targets was soon conjured, from a diplomat who officially declared the ceasefire³ to a university professor who weighed the value of Muslim soldiers against the lives of Muslim citizens in India.⁴ The former’s family was attacked online; the latter’s online post was made into a case of sedition and summary cause for arrest.

During the “war,” governments of both countries accused each other of carrying out military airstrikes and destroying lives and property on either side of Kashmir’s disputed border territory. The exact extent of deaths and losses was shrouded in government propaganda, even as Indian mainstream media rolled out regular streams of unverified data and doctored footage about the “war on ground.” It was as if a “war” had to be choreographed in television studios first, and a sense of victimhood mobilized as both mass sentiment and national predicament, before patriotic triumphalism could be paraded as citizenly duty. Tests of loyalty were daily invoked and abetted by fake news about India’s capture of Islamabad, the arrest of Pakistan’s army chief, and the bombing of Karachi’s port.⁵ Meanwhile, Kashmiri people in different parts of India—including students, migrant professionals, and family members settled elsewhere—continued to spend nights of tense horror waiting as airports across Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) were shut, their workday lives in mainland cities felt unsafe, and universities carried on with examination schedules with a “war” being waged near some of their homes. My students, enrolled in a Muslim-minority institution in the heart of the nation’s capital, kept asking if they had to prepare for the next day’s examination on sixteenth-century British literature while their loved ones spent hours and days in the middle of enforced military blackouts in their hometowns. Occasionally, when phone and internet networks were suspended across areas in Jammu city or Poonch or Uri, these students were forced to barter peace in the wisdom of Francis Bacon while fearing for the lives of their closest loved ones.

Putting this “war” between two nuclear-armed nations in perspective requires a detour into more than seventy-five years of the history of Kashmir, from around the time of the fabled lease of independence from British colonial rule in 1947. This is a history of promises made and broken, between the Indian state and the people of Kashmir,⁶ the eventual fallout of which saw the rise of what has been termed (in security discourse) the “militancy problem” in Kashmir Valley since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Needless to say, the “problem” summoned specters of state-backed “solutions” in the form of the wholesale militarization of J&K, with everyday life in the Valley suspended between the horrors of armed and army violence, extra-judicial arrests, mass disappearances, prolonged curfews, organized censorship, and pellet-wound scars. Soon after the second Modi government was sworn in, in May 2019, with a brute numerical majority in parliament, one of its first legislative moves consisted in a constitutional voiding of the “special status” of J&K, turning the Muslim-majority state into two separate “union territories” controlled by the federal government in Delhi. This had long been part of the Hindu right-wing agenda, and its election manifestos, which saw Kashmir’s “relative autonomy” in matters of governance as a threat to the territorial integrity of the nation. The voiding of Article 370 elided the entire historical memory of Kashmir’s political betrayals; and another constitutional provision, Article 35A, which protected land and property in the state from being claimed by mainlander Indians, was also scrapped.⁷ This redefinition of who counted as “permanent residents” of Kashmir, entitled to property ownership rights, is a key strategy of settler colonial forms of authoritarian rule. The Modi government has, since then, announced that the Kashmir “issue” has been “resolved.” News of conflicts from the Valley, now puppeteered by the political leadership in Delhi, hardly ever made it into the media – until the ghastly incident of April 22, 2025, in which a group of largely Hindu tourists was shot down by gunmen at the Baisaran Valley in south Kashmir’s Pahalgam. There was mass consternation, even as reports of grave intelligence failures and breaches in security arrangements tore apart the government’s claims that it had restored “normalcy” in Kashmir. There was a resurgence of “war talk” between the governments of India and Pakistan, with the Indian army subsequently launching a series of military strikes on purported “terror bases” across the border.

The point of this post is not to offer journalistic reportage on the “war,” but to analyze the climate of heightened public frenzy in mainland India, which has sought to manufacture “war” as integral to the existential predicament of citizenship. I believe this is a cardinal feature of contemporary authoritarianisms and their strategic molting into fascistic forms. Historically, all authoritarian regimes have relied on metaphors of “war” and figurations of the “enemy,” which could then be conveniently displaced onto communities and populations against which the norm of citizenship is defined. What differs in the current context, however, is the public recognition of “war”–not as a state of exception requiring carceral means of capture and control, but as a permanent possibility that calls forth the citizen’s pre-emptive gesture of surrender to the state. This achieves two things: first, the source of threat and danger can be in(de)finitely shape-shifted, ranging from the “outsider within” to the “cross-border neighbor” to the “disloyal insider”; second, with the need for a consensus on the “enemy” having disappeared, the citizen can be asked to resign themselves to the will of the state as precondition for life itself. Put more pithily, the citizen is deemed non-criminal–and deserving of “security”–only to the extent that they do not question the state’s shifting constructions of “terror.”

The latter is what I call the logic of custodiality, as distinct from structures of carcerality. In the custodial state, the citizen does not need to be interpellated into visions (and representations) of a “common enemy.” Instead, the citizen enters the scene in a mode of resignation–a way of being held in perpetual custody–as the only guarantee of protection both from state power and by it. This creates what I have elsewhere called a form of prostrate subjectivity,⁸which does not need to be ideologized into hegemonic common sense anymore. To this extent, consent becomes immaterial, and theories that seek to account for the legitimation of authoritarian ideology lose their purchase. If the citizen is marked off against the criminal only by being taken into custody by the state, the experience of citizenship itself changes from the ability to make representative rights-claims to a form of supplication, a prayer-making to the protectionist state. Custodiality implies that the state’s offer of citizenship guarantees the protection of life itself, by simultaneously implying that the “criminal” is unworthy of life itself. The citizen-“criminal” binary assumes a degree of immanence, where citizenship becomes increasingly defined as a custodial relation. The subjects of a custodial state must necessarily and preemptively establish citizenship in order to live at all, and the only way to do this is to stake state ideology as existential precondition. A telling demonstration of this can be found in the recent overhaul of penal codes in India, by which the erstwhile Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) has now come to be renamed as Bharatiya Nagarik Surkasha Samhita (Indian Citizen Security Code). The semantic provocations are hard to miss here, in that the “criminal” is both marked as radically other to the “citizen” and therefore absented from questions of juridical “procedure.” The citizen, and civic behaviors, are no longer a product of ideology, but always-already hostage to the state for the security of life itself. In my analysis, this new operation of authoritarian rule cannot be adequately contained in our familiar registers of right-wing “populism,” and accounts for the turn to “fascism.”

When 26 tourists were ruthlessly killed in Pahalgam on April 22, 2025, Hindu India responded in the voice of a “people” in permanent custody. There was no asking how a “normal” Kashmir could break into mainstream prime-time news so violently, how the most militarized region in the world could have “terrorists” roaming around “tourists” with such alacrity, how state-backed discourses of peace are carefully breached only with invocations of Hindu “wounds” and narratives of Muslim “terror.” There was largescale hounding of Muslims and Kashmiris, seen as potential Pakistan supporters, across the country. Threats and instances of public lynching, forced eviction, molestation, and physical harassment converged as the official face of a “war on terror,”⁹ which increasingly took on more military and muscular forms of nationalist retaliation. When the widowed wife of a naval officer killed in the April 22^nd attack appealed to the nation’s masses to not make her grief into a cause for Kashmiri- and Muslim-baiting, she herself came to be trolled and branded as a Pakistan supporter deserving the fate of her husband or even worse.¹⁰  The custodial state responded by naming its military offensive “Operation Sindoor,” where “sindoor” stands for the vermilion red mark of Hindu wife-hood, thus entrenching the patriarchal symbolism of war valor in the “terror-defiled” institution of marriage. It was as if the government only had to take a cue from a public script already in circulation, and a civic Hindu “common sense” had already declared “war” by proxy on behalf of a custodial state apparatus.

The present authoritarian dispensation in India is not an order unto itself, inasmuch as it forms part of a puzzle of ascendant tendencies in South Asian politics. But the parallels might extend even further, especially in the context of Donald Trump’s claim to have brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan after a long night of sleeplessness in the White House. Arbitrating between errant children is most certainly America’s self-appointed historical mission, except that this mission has now become part of US domestic policy as well. Not surprisingly, an overwhelming number of executive orders signed by the peace-brokering President speak of restoring and rescuing the great American nation for its “children.”¹¹It is almost as if the diplomatic subject position of US foreign policy discourse has finally had a homecoming: the “authority vested” in the President “by the Constitution and the laws” of his country must be routed through a performative figuration of citizens-as-children. It is as a bullying parent that Trump speaks to an imagined nation of duped and betrayed parents; and the figure of the citizen and its relationship to the state is transformed into one of juvenile custody. The nation, as an agonized community of misdirected and indoctrinated children, is on course to being redefined as a place of custody—the only means of ensuring security and protection of hapless infantilized Americans. Obedience and submission constitute the sole guarantees of citizenship within a custodial order of fascism. The figurative synonymy between “citizens” and “children” cannot be clinched except through a concerted takeover of the schooling sector—which, in Trump’s order, is decried as a site of “radical indoctrination.” By holding the lowest levels of public education hostage to practices of right-wing ideological audit, the order seeks to damage the minds of a future electorate in anticipation of a time when hegemony itself will become irrelevant. This is both a rite of passage and the moment of apotheosis of fascist rule.

The Indian schooling sector began its training drills in custodiality in the late 1980s with the mass privatization of English-medium institutions of elementary or primary education. By this time government institutions had become the class/caste resort of the working poor. It paved the way for disenfranchised masses to be recruited into Hindutva common sense, in one-teacher schools and seva (social service) camps run in the remotest hinterlands of the country by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The wholesale assault on government schooling coincided with the first spectacular attack on secular constitutional morality in post-liberalization India, in the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. It took us slightly over two decades for this shadow of Hindutva common sense to span the social life of school-going children and consolidate itself as the first-time electorate of a Modi government. And now, eleven years on, even the need for a common sense seems to have been imploded in logics of custodial fascism. Trump’s orders about an imminent overhaul of K-12 schooling could be the delayed signs of lessons already learned in the postcolony.               

1. See “Common Sense, Great Intelligence,” The Times of India, May 11, 2025, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/common-sense-great-intelligence-india-pakistan-have-agreed-to-full-immediate-ceasefire-claims-us-president-donald-trump-on-truth-social/articleshow/121058089.cms. [↩]
2. See Sanstuti Nath, “Donald Trump’s Big Trade Promise To India, Pakistan After Ceasefire Agreement,” NDTV, May 11, 2025, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/donald-trumps-big-trade-promise-to-india-pakistan-after-ceasefire-agreement-8385500. [↩]
3. Vikram Misri, the Foreign Secretary of India who announced the “ceasefire,” was immediately subjected to a vicious troll attack by right-wing cyber armies, which went as far as dragging his family and daughter into a cycle of threats and abuses. See reports and analysis in Sarayu Pani, “The Degradation of Discourse Has Made Indian Online Spaces Fundamentally Unsafe,” The Wire, May 13, 2025, https://thewire.in/rights/india-online-trolling-rightwing-doxxing-vikram-misri); “Vikram Misri Targeted Online: The Troll Army’s Toxic Politics,” The Free Press Journal, May 15, 2025, https://www.freepressjournal.in/analysis/vikram-misri-targeted-online-the-troll-armys-toxic-politics. [↩]
4. Ali Khan Mahmudabad, head of the Department of Political Science in a private liberal arts university near Delhi, was first summoned by the Haryana State Women’s Commission for a rather-lukewarm Facebook post on the communal playbook of the Indian government, and then arrested soon after on the basis of a complaint filed by a BJP youth wing leader. See Mekhala Saran, “Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s Arrest Raises Critical Questions on Free Speech, Liberty and the Law,” The Wire, May 19, 2025, https://thewire.in/law/professor-mahmudabads-arrest-raises-critical-questions-on-free-speech-liberty-and-the-law. [↩]
5. To sample some screenshots from televisual bulletins, see Rokibuz Zaman, “From the Fall of Islamabad to an Attack on Karachi: 5 Fake Stories that Indian TV News Ran With,” Scroll.in, May 9, 2025, https://scroll.in/article/1082189/from-the-fall-of-islamabad-to-an-attack-on-karachi-5-fake-stories-that-indian-tv-news-ran-with. [↩]
6. For an attentive historical outline, see A.G. Noorani, The Kashmir Dispute: 1947-2012, Vols. I-II (Tulika Books, 2013); see also Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Habbah Khatun, Pankaj Mishra, and Arundhati Roy, The Case for Freedom (Verso Books, 2011). [↩]
7. For a breakdown of these constitutional provisions, what was sought through their abrogation, and the repressive measures brought in the wake of its announcement, see “Article 370: What Happened with Kashmir and Why It Matters,” BBC News, August 6, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49234708); “Kashmir Special Status Explained: What Are Articles 370 and 35A?,” Aljazeera, August 5, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/8/5/kashmir-special-status-explained-what-are-articles-370-and-35a); V. Venkatesan, “Abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A: Assault on the Constitution,” Frontline, August 14, 2019, https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article29048647.ece); Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, “The Inheritance of Loss Progression,” The Caravan, August 5, 2020, https://caravanmagazine.in/conflict/one-year-kashmir-370-revoked-india-anuradha-bhasin-jamwal); Praveen Donthi, ‘”One Solution, Gun Solution,”’ The Caravan, August 16, 2019, https://caravanmagazine.in/conflict/one-solution-gun-solution-gun-solution-kashmir-in-shock-and-anger. [↩]
8. See “Dispatches of Authoritarianism,” Emergencies of Authoritarianism, April 30, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVFAIlLMrc4&t=3s. [↩]
9. See Yashraj Sharma, ‘’‘We’re Cursed’: Kashmiris Under Attack Across India After Pahalgam Killings,” Aljazeera, April 25, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/25/were-cursed-kashmiris-under-attack-across-india-after-pahalgam-killings); and Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar, “India’s Muslims Fear a Growing Backlash After Kashmir Attack,” New York Times, April 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/world/asia/india-muslims-detentions-demolitions.html. [↩]
10. Some of the online abuse has been reported by Nikita Yadav, “How Kashmir Attack Victim’s Widow Went from Symbol of Tragedy to Trolling Target,” BBC, May 6, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5dgvmn6y5o. [↩]
11. See, for example, Executive Orders 14160 (“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”), 14190 (“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”), 14191 (“Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families”), 14242 (“Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities”), and 14280 (“Reinstating Commonsense School Discipline Policies”), among others. [↩]