Containing Contagion in a Garrison State: Field Notes from Kashmir.

States across the globe have used war metaphors to respond to the pandemic and consequently have imposed warlike emergency lockdowns, suspended freedoms, denounced accountability, bypassed democratic procedures, and further marginalized minorities. Kashmir and Kashmiris were always the proverbial source of contagion for the Indian body politic - the virus that polluted its sacred geography, threatening its territory, delegitimizing its secular claims. In Kashmir, a stringent and impermeable lockdown had been in place since August 2019 to crush popular anger at the Indian government's divestment of Jammu and Kashmir's special constitutional status that offered nominal political autonomy to the disputed state ([11]). [Extracted from the article]