As we undertook this review of Muhammad el Kurd’s Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, the Pahalgam attack brought Kashmir back into global consciousness. In a familiar choreography, world leaders rushed to condemn an act of “terror” in a “paradise” built on unmarked graves. Online Hindutva warriors, like their Zionist counterparts, turned grief into genocidal bloodlust, invoking Israel’s solution to Palestine. Candlelight vigils, both spontaneous and orchestrated, asked Kashmiris to abrogate their suffering to qualify for innocence. Inside the world’s most militarised region, as the two nuclear powers inched towards war, these rituals of condemnation turned into a condition for existence. 

The Pahalgam attack itself existed within strategic ambiguity. Twenty-six people, predominantly tourists, were killed on April 22 in Baisaran Valley, a meadow encircled by pine forests, accessible only by foot or horseback, in a region where there is one soldier for every thirty civilians.

What followed exposed the fraught politics of attribution in occupied territories. The Resistance Front initially claimed responsibility via Telegram, then four days later issued a categorical denial, stating “The Resistance Front (TRF) unequivocally denies any involvement in the Pahalgam incident.” Their internal investigation reportedly confirmed that “unauthorised” posts had been published through what they identified as “a coordinated cyber intrusion,” a tactic they described as signature to “Indian cyber-intelligence operatives.” Pakistan also denied its involvement, while analysts cited a dearth of evidence.

While it remains unclear whether or to what extent there was local and Pakistani involvement in the attack, for many Kashmiris, these contestations also evoked a long history of staged encounters, “false flag operations,” and murky evidence, from Chattsingphora 2000 to Machil 2010 — each as a pretext for the Occupation to unleash spectacular forms of collective punishment in the Valley.

Meanwhile, as the chorus of condemnation continued — forming the pretext for India’s expansionist war in the region — India’s settler colonial machinery also accelerated. Indian security forces detained more than 1,500 Kashmiris as elusive “suspects” in sweeping crackdowns and placed the entire region under heightened surveillance. Unable to apprehend the culprits, they used explosives to demolish homes, including family residences of named “suspects” whose family members claim they hadn’t seen or heard from in years.

In the midst of this rubble, only a still, silent picture of an elderly woman interrupted the noise. She is seen standing among the broken bricks of her home, her gaze fixed on nothing, hands resting on knees, back curved from the weight of what could not be named. She is not a symbol, not a metaphor — just a person who stood while walls did not.

The image cut through spectacle and explanation. The subject was neither performing grief nor resistance — simply persisting. And in this bare persistence lays everything about Azadi (freedom) that matters.

This quiet image not only recalled the Sumud — the steadfastness of Palestinians on their lands — but also evoked Israel’s harrowing settler colonial violence in Gaza and the West Bank. Where it was denied that a demolished hospital was a hospital, or that a refugee camp was a refugee camp, or that an ambulance was an ambulance. Even a calendar was not a calendar, but a Hamas roster. The clear handwritten Arabic on it, (yaum-al-Sabt, Saturday), was not the name of a day, but the name of a Hamas commander. And a child’s bedroom? A child’s bedroom in Gaza, where IDF soldiers apparently found a copy of Mein Kampf, was also not a child’s bedroom, but a rationale for why Israel could commit a Holocaust against Palestinians in the present to prevent a hypothetical Holocaust of Jews in the future.

What was the purpose of these lies that denied our own sense of sight? El Kurd responds to this question in Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by describing how lies function as one facet of the coloniser’s strategy to distract and change the terms of discourse for the colonised. The purpose of this is to displace — even if momentarily — the coloniser’s violence as the object of critique; to render it indeterminate and in the passive voice, as it were. But lies, with the epistemic fog they create, work in simultaneity with rituals of condemnation forced upon the colonised. Latching onto factual as well as hypothetical violence of the colonised, the condemnation ritual works similar to lies in adding yet another hoop to jump — a caveat, a qualification, or an admission of colonised guilt — before entertaining the coloniser’s culpability.

Unlike the coloniser’s recognisably absurd lies, whose function is to exhaust the audience, the imperative to condemn not only displaces critique away from the coloniser’s violence; it not only seeks to place the coloniser’s violence on the same level as the violent reactions of the colonised; but it also “defangs” the colonised. It dehumanises the colonised by robbing them of the “right to complexity, to contradictory feelings, to contain multitudes.” It subjugates them by disallowing the range of sentiments intrinsic to any human being — of anger in the face of annihilation, of irreverence for the coloniser, of ambition or cunningness, of a desire for vengeance, even if in thought rather than practice.

El-Kurd cites an example of this imperative, when Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the UK (a political opponent of Hamas) was called on BBC six hours after an Israeli strike killed six of his family members. “Sorry for your personal loss,” the host cut him short curtly, “but can I just be clear though — you cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you?”

In this moment, the colossal loss of Palestinian life is reduced to background noise, naturalised as an unfortunate outcome of fate and, at best, only grievable as a “personal” disaster. All whilst the Israeli loss becomes a primal violation of the human condition, worthy of collective horror and outrage. This subjugation, or dehumanisation as el-Kurd calls it, is central to the politics of appeal in which the colonised are expected to perform a “perfect victimhood,” to “demonstrate their worthiness of liberty and dignity,” to “respond like automatons” to the psychological cues of colonial logic, and to continually anticipate their shortcomings, which can never really be bridged.

This racialised dehumanisation — where the colonised subject is presumed guilty of thought crimes — can’t be countered with humanisation, either. Rather, when allies and skeptics attempt to do so, they keep the colonised in a double bind in which their humanity can only be configured through “proximity to innocence: whiteness, civility, wealth, compromise, collaboration, non-alignment, non-violence, helplessness, and future lessness.” This unwittingly reproduces that which the colonised seeks to subvert, fragmenting the collective with a constant impulse to self-censor, to self-reproach, and talk as if with a “sniper standing over one’s shoulder.”

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Kashmir and Palestine are conjoined not merely by the shared ethnonationalist foundations of Zionism and Hindutva but also by a liberal disavowal of violence that places the burden firmly on the colonised, the occupied and the oppressed. This disavowal operates within a larger imperial framework — from Washington and Tel Aviv to New Delhi — in which the empire’s status quo masquerades as peace, and its violence transforms into “security” against “terror.” It works through a carefully constructed image of India and Israel’s supposedly “secular-democratic” credentials (always in contradistinction to its neighbours), which secures Western alliance whilst obscuring their colonial subjugations and expansionist aspirations. It also demands that the colonised routinely perform their non-violence, and it is this liberal disavowal of violence to which el Kurd’s work responds. 

El Kurd is no Fanon in making a case for the necessity of revolutionary anti-colonial violence, though he expresses his doubts on the efficacy of purely discursive resistance in the face of genocidal violence. He also questions cynically “what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun,”  conceding that literature, for all its merits, has still made little dent in the material status quo of the Israeli occupation. Still, in choosing to resist in the genre of prose (and poetry), he nevertheless foregrounds speech acts (and the sentiments that underpin them) as the turf for his battle. In doing so, he overturns a fundamental premise of liberal non-violence which, alone, grants any actor a political status worthy of recognition, and which alone merits third party deliberation, and which alone differentiates “animal noise” from political speech (Ranciere, 1999). 

Whilst such liberal disavowals of violence are relevant for deliberative democratic processes, el-Kurd’s work casts doubt on the applicability of this framework in colonial contexts in relation to the reactions of the occupied. In this sense, his work also serves as a rejoinder to Judith Butler’s ruminations on the ethic of non-violence, which they reiterated after October 7 in defense of condemning Hamas (albeit with due contextualisation) and against the assertion of the Harvard’s Students for Justice in Palestine that the moral onus of the October violence rested on the apartheid regime alone. While Butler’s argument emphasised a wider compass of mourning that could make all lives equal and ultimately grievable, it quickly became evident even to them, in a subsequent piece, that the Palestinian and his ally could neither mourn nor speak. In this absence, Butler’s critique unwittingly reinforced Global North imaginaries of peace as non-violence, but also — as many of her critics noted —  exposed BIPOC Harvard students to further imperial scrutiny and surveillance for unequivocally naming the coloniser and its violence.

When equivalence between the violence of the coloniser and the colonised becomes the very ideological practice to displace critique, el-Kurd offers a treatise that reclaims the right of the colonised to refuse condemnation. He also insists on the inevitability of the colonised to feel a range of emotions natural to humans — rage, irreverence or even vengeance towards their occupiers and oppressors, without such emotions disqualifying their collective right for freedom. Through it, he also exposes how the language of liberal disavowal can be complicit in upholding the colonial status quo, and in fashioning perfect victims who would perpetually condemn themselves to “dance on land mines;” to stand trial for their thoughts, their anger and even impudence, in order to be worthy of life.

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In Kashmir, as in Palestine, the snipers — the dehumanisers — are everywhere. They are “not only the vulgar right-wingers and the brutal policemen but the most politically correct of killers who deny us even eye contact before they pull the trigger.” They are in the state apparatus that orchestrates violence, the media that obfuscates it, and the liberal discourse that redirects it, and demands Kashmiris condemn what they did not commit. On social media, many Indians also take the garb of benevolent dehumanisers, seeking to rescue their “brethren” from the scourge of Hindutva fascism only to rob them of their political existence as a sovereign people. 

This dynamic is also evident in how Indian Muslims position themselves in relation to Kashmir. Indian Muslims (who face their own vulnerability under Hindu nationalism) rush to insist that “Kashmir is an integral part of India.” This performance of national loyalty comes with an emphatic anti-Pakistan posturing, framing the conflict through terrorism narratives rather than occupation. By repositioning Kashmir’s political struggle as merely another instance of religious communalism within India’s borders, they prevent themselves from naming the Indian occupation as the primary culprit. This disavowal of Kashmiri resistance in response to a military occupation explains the efficiency of colonial fragmentation: Indian Muslims minoritise Kashmiris in their own image hoping to secure their own tenuous position within the Indian state, not recognizing that this performance only reinforces the hierarchies that render them vulnerable in the first place.

The “Kashmiriyat” discourse represents perhaps the most insidious form of this subjugation. This essentializing narrative championed by Indian liberals and Indian Muslims alike, reduces Kashmiris to their hospitality, warmth, and supposed inherent peacefulness. This strips them of political agency and historical grievance. It then becomes a discourse of possessive acceptance that appears appreciative but functions as erasure, that at once celebrates Kashmiri culture but denies Kashmiri political existence outside the framework of Indian statehood. 

The Kashmir situation here is distinguished by how tourism has been weaponised as a deliberate colonial apparatus. Specifically, since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, the Indian state has systematically restructured Kashmir’s economy around tourism, creating an economic dependency that functions as sophisticated social control. This calculated creation of a “tourism dependent” economy serves multiple colonial objectives simultaneously. It normalizes occupation by transforming Kashmir into a picturesque destination rather than a contested territory. It facilitates land acquisition through special tourism zones that dispossess locals while enabling outside investment. It disciplines Kashmiri bodies and speech through economic necessity. And it creates material conditions that necessitate the performance of docility and hospitality even in moments of crisis. 

When Kashmiris plead “please still visit, we are peaceful, we need your business” in the aftermath of the attack, they are enacting a form of political subjugation where their very survival depends on performing innocence for the occupier’s gaze. The tourist economy becomes counterinsurgency by other means. It transforms Kashmiris from political subjects with legitimate opposition to the Indian occupation into service providers whose primary value lies in their hospitality. Beneath this apparent economic logic lies a very brutal political calculation: a people dependent on pleasing visitors have little space to articulate resistance.

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The imperative to condemn, as we have seen with the Pahalgam attack, also severes present violence from the historical continuum. It renders the occupation itself invisible while hyperfocusing on isolated incidents that can be used to pathologise all forms of Kashmiri resistance. This temporal strategy is effective when applied to potentially staged incidents: whether real or not, incidents like Pahalgam serve to retroactively reframe legitimate historical resistance as inherently terroristic, constrain present political expression through forced condemnation rituals, and preemptively delegitimise future assertions of sovereignty as inevitably violent. 

The possibility of state-orchestrated violence thus becomes a comprehensive tool for erasing the political character of resistance across all temporal dimensions. When the occupation controls both events and their interpretation, every aspect of resistance becomes suspect. While the occupation’s claims receive minimal scrutiny, it is the occupied who bear the brunt of providing conclusive evidence for their innocence. The tens of thousands of lives violently taken over decades of occupation also become unspeakable, a grief that cannot be articulated alongside condemnations of present violence without being accused of justification or whataboutism.

This decontextualisation represents a hollowing epistemological violence. In both Palestine and Kashmir, a perpetual state of trial exists where the colonised must constantly perform their perfect victimhood — a process that fragments solidarity. And in both places, the politics of appeal depoliticises historical resistance through a language of terror. This depoliticisation becomes the most devastating effect of the politics of appeal, engulfing and victimising more than just the immediate subjects of the occupation. In a world order after the genocide in Gaza, this language gives impunity to imperial belligerence, allowing civilians and densely civilian areas to be targeted under the guise of dismantling “terrorist infrastructure.” This depoliticisation also portrays historical resistance motivated by political grievances as irrational and pathological, rather than inevitable consequences of systemic violence. Or as el-Kurd would put it, it “evacuates” the militant “outside of the context that gave rise to him or her in the first place.” 

This evacuation also forms the foundation of a transnational Islamophobic discourse where white supremacists and Hindutva nationalists converge in their characterisation of Muslim political demands as inherently extremist. To refute this argument with the assertion that Islam opposes such terror also proves futile, placing the colonised in a double bind where their Occupation is erased as the primary condition for all violent conditions. Occupation narratives in Kashmir and Palestine supply the material for global campaigns that render all Muslims perpetually suspect. The demand that Muslims in Sydney or London or New York condemn attacks in Pahalgam or Gaza follows the same logic that subjects Kashmiris and Palestinians to constant interrogation about their political loyalties.

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In this context, el-Kurd’s logic of “even if” becomes a potentially revolutionary stance for Palestinians and Kashmiris alike. Rather than bowing to the demand for performative condemnation, el-Kurd proposes the revolutionary power of irreverence — a refusal that reclaims the colonised subject’s full humanity beyond the coloniser’s moral scrutiny. Even if a teenager shot by Israeli forces had thrown a Molotov cocktail, who wouldn’t? So what if a Palestinian father did actually hate those who killed his daughters? So what if he then possessed an irrational hatred for all Israeli Jews living in the settler colony? “Even if that pristine copy of Mein Kampf was found in a children’s playroom where it was read like a bedtime story,” he argues, “that does not give the Zionist regime, which occupies and colonizes our lands, the permission to exterminate us.”

Thus, subverting the logic of condemnation, el-Kurd reclaims the right for the colonised to politically exist against genocidal annihilation — without being subjected to emotional regulation and thought trials. It is this claim that is the most radical aspect of el-Kurd’s work.

To apply his logic, as in the Palestinian context then, what would it mean to insist that even if some Kashmiris did take up arms against a state that has systematically brutalised them, assuming that the encounter was not staged, and that even if some individuals breached the higher moral ground (of not targeting civilians) that Kashmiris expect of their resistance, this does not negate Kashmir’s collective aspirations for self-determination? To refuse the framework that demands all Kashmiris prove their innocence before their suffering can be acknowledged? Such a refusal would challenge the fundamental premise of colonial discourse: that the occupied must demonstrate their worthiness before their subjugation can be recognised as unjust. 

The colonial logic of perfect victimhood systematically excludes Kashmir’s history of suffering from acceptable discourse, treating memory itself as a form of resistance that must be suppressed. The condemnation ritual demands that Kashmiris separate their present from their past, their speech from their memory, their hospitality from their history. But this very separation is itself a colonial fiction. 

Liberation for Kashmiris, as with Palestinians, can only come through reclaiming the right to a political existence that encompasses the full spectrum of human response to oppression. This includes memory, grief, rage, and the refusal to perform docility. Their future depends not on proving their worth to the coloniser but on the recognition that their humanity exists independent of and prior to any performance, with all the dignity and right to self-determination that entails

The authors would like to thank emerging Kashmiri scholars, some of whom were consulted in writing this article, for their intellectual labour and their contribution in decolonising South Asian Studies from the margins.

References:

El-Kurd, Muhammad. Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. New York: Haymarket Books, 2024.

Essa, Azad. Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel. Pluto Press, 2023.

Kanjwal, Hafsa. Colonizing Kashmir: Statebuilding Under Indian Occupation. Stanford University Press, 2023.

Ranciere, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Image: protest in India-occupied Kashmir, Wikimedia Commons