Crushing Voices: The Struggle of Kashmiri Youth

2026-03-28 - 00:01

Muhammad Waleed Akhtar In places where power fears scrutiny, even the most ordinary acts are recast as threats. The right to observe, record, and speakbecomes conditional, fragile and easily withdrawn. Nowhere is this more evident than in Indian illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, where everyday life is shaped less by formal legality and more by an atmosphere of control and caution. A young student in Srinagar films a military convoy in his neighbourhood. Within moments, police stop him, seize his phone and take him in for questioning. He has broken no law; he simply pointed a camera at a public street. Yet the message he carries back is clear: “Think twice before speaking.” This is not a classroom lesson, but an unwritten rule of daily life.Control here is rarely dramatic. It works through routine encounters that instill a constant awareness that expression carries consequences many cannot afford. Since 2019, public protests in IIoJKhave been effectively outlawed in practice if not always in statute. Demonstrations against land reform, vigils for slain civilians, student gatherings on university campuses have all been met with batons, tear gas and mass arrest. During 2024 and 2025, police detained hundreds of students and young people following protest activity. In one documented instance, young Kashmiris who participated in a protest over a local grievance were charged with “waging war against the state,” a provision of Indian law that carries a potential death sentence. They had attended a public demonstration. India charged them as combatants. Local lawyer Parvez Imroz, who has spent decades documenting abuses in the valley, stated that the state is arresting noncombatant activists and protesters at an alarming and unprecedented rate. His observation is not rhetorical. In 2025 alone, human rights monitors documented at least 150 Kashmiri youths detained during peaceful shutdowns and vigils. UN experts confirmed that security forces were detaining journalists, students and young protesters under terrorism laws whose application to nonviolent political activity has no basis in any legitimate legal framework. Over half of those arrested remained in custody for months without trial. Shouting “Azadi” at a rally has resulted in anti-terror charges. Distributing leaflets on a college campus has resulted in sedition proceedings. A human rights lawyer who works with detained youth put it plainly: they want to teach these kids a lesson about speaking their mind. The lesson India is teaching a generation of Kashmiris is that their voice is a punishable offence. Beyond the arrests lies a broader and more insidious architecture of intimidation. Security forces conduct random night raids on homes, arriving without explanation and leaving with people. Curfews and mobile internet shutdowns are imposed preemptively whenever rumours of protest circulate, cutting communities off from each other and from the outside world before any demonstration has even begun. The International Federation for Human Rights has documented that India’s preventive detention laws have become, in their assessment, little more than a tool to silence dissent and ensure self-censorship. The goal is not to punish every dissenter. It is to ensure that most Kashmiris punish themselves, internalizing the prohibition before the state ever needs to enforce it. This is the more efficient form of repression. A prison that builds itself inside the mind requires far fewer cells. The CIVICUS Monitor, in its January 2026 assessment, formally classified IIoJKas having a “repressed” civic space, documenting that student protests are met with detentions and criminal charges as standard practice. Rights groups no longer describe Kashmir as a restricted democracy. They describe it as a space where the infrastructure of democratic expression, assembly, speech, protest, petition, has been systematically dismantled and replaced with fear. India justifies this suppression, as it justifies everything in IIoJK, through the language of security. But there is a calculation India is either not making or deliberately ignoring. When an entire generation grows up with the experience that peaceful expression leads to arrest, that a phone camera earns a detention, that the word “freedom” spoken aloud constitutes terrorism, that generation does not become reconciled to the state. It becomes permanently estranged from it. Even former Kashmiri ministers have warned publicly that without legitimate outlets for grievance, anger will seek other means. This is not a prediction from Pakistan. It is an observation from within the Indian political establishment in Kashmir itself. A state that criminalizes peaceful dissent does not eliminate the underlying discontent. It removes every mechanism through which that discontent could be expressed without violence, and then expresses surprise when violence is what remains. India is not suppressing extremism in IIoJK. It is suppressing the alternative to it. Every student charged with waging war for attending a protest, every young man who learns to silence himself before speaking, every generation that grows up understanding that the state views their voice as a threat, is a generation for whom the distance between grievance and something far more dangerous has been shortened, not by militants, but by the state itself. Silence imposed by fear is not peace. It is the pressure that builds before something breaks. [The author is a student of International Relations at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Currently, he is serving as an intern at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad.]