When crimson rivers ran through Jammu in 1947, a tide of violence redrew its demography, massacring over 500,000 Muslims and displacing many more. Around the same time, ancient olive groves in Palestine began to bleed their own stories of rupture with the Nakba of 1948.

Two geographies — Kashmir and Palestine became sites of enduring exile and resilience bound by a shared sanitised facade: displacement, denial, demographic engineering and legal erasure.

On May 7, 2025, India launched missile strikes on three regions of Pakistan, including Pakistan-administered Kashmir, resulting in civilian casualties. The attack, following unsubstantiated claims linking Pakistan to the Pahalgam tourist killings, highlights how the unresolved Kashmir dispute continues to pull the region to the brink of a full-scale war, with both states having already fought three major battles over the territory.

‘Settler violence’

More than seventy years later, the settler-colonial machinery rolls on this time in the obfuscatory language of law. Since India abrogated Article 370 on August 5, 2019, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its limited autonomy, it has quietly deployed a legal architecture designed not to protect rights but to dissolve them.

In April 2025, in response to a query by opposition leaders, the Revenue Department of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) revealed that over 84,000 domicile certificates had been granted to non-Kashmiris within just two years with no prior claim to residency. Significantly, it said that the term state-subjects referred to permanent residents in J&K, as the previous definition in the Constitution of J&K is no longer applicable.

Under the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, a citizen of India was a permanent resident of the erstwhile state under two conditions: if on May 14, 1954, they were a state subject of class I or of class II, they lawfully acquired immovable property in the state and were ordinarily resident in the state for not less than 10 years before that date, or people who had migrated to areas that later became Pakistan but had returned to the state "under a permit for resettlement or for permanent return issued by or under the authority of any law made by the state legislature".

Class I state subjects included those born in the region and residing there before the Dogra monarchy began under Maharaja Gulab Singh in 1846, as well as those permanently residing in the region before the Hindu calendar year Samvat 1942, which corresponds to 1885 CE.

Class II covered those who migrated to J&K from outside but had settled and acquired property before Samvat 1968, or 1911 CE, during the reign of Maharaja Pratap Singh.

This is not mere administrative reform. It is lawfare: the strategic use of domestic law to institutionalise settler rule, reconfigure demographics, and erase Indigenous sovereignty.

This blueprint replicates legal techniques long used by Israel in occupied Palestine, legalising land seizure, extending settler entitlements, and dismantling local protections under the guise of governance. It transforms political questions of occupation and sovereignty into bureaucratic processes of documentation and displacement. 

From state subjects to domiciles

The Jammu & Kashmir Grant of Domicile Certificate Rules, 2020—introduced during India's nationwide COVID-19 lockdown redefined eligibility to include those who had studied, lived, or served in the region. Under the cover of a public health emergency, this expansion quietly widened the legal net for non-residents. An Indian Administrative Service officer from the Indian state of Bihar became one of the first outsiders to receive a certificate, an act both symbolic and strategic.

This legal manoeuvre mirrors Israel's policies in occupied East Jerusalem, where Israel enacted its Nationality law and repealed the Palestine Citizenship Order of 1925. Residency revocations, discriminatory permitting systems, and manipulations of citizenship law have entrenched settler advantage.

These tactics, repeatedly condemned by the International Court of Justice and in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, are not irregularities; they are legal templates in a settler-colonial playbook.

Not coincidentally, the ideological and tactical alignment between India and Israel is reinforced by the warm personal rapport between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leaders who share not only a friendship but a commitment to a supremacist political model, digital surveillance, and militarised control over Indigenous populations.

Much like Israel, India has adopted an overt disregard for international legal norms and scrutiny. Israel shelters its settler-colonial expansion behind the veil of US veto power and exceptionalism; India, meanwhile, weaponises its growing economic leverage and geopolitical partnerships to mute global censure. Both states invoke sovereignty as an instrument of impunity, not responsibility, shielding systemic violations of international humanitarian law and UN resolutions under nationalist pretexts. 

In redefining sovereignty as insulation from accountability, they reject the core premise of international law: that the rights of Indigenous and occupied peoples are not subordinate to the ambitions of occupying powers.

Militarising everyday life

But the laws alone do not conquer people; they must be enforced with fear. Following the revocation of Article 370, Kashmir was subjected to the most prolonged communication blackout ever imposed in a so-called democracy. Internet shutdowns, media bans, and movement restrictions crippled public life.

The cost of resistance was criminalised through militarised counterinsurgency. Dissenters were imprisoned under draconian laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, often without trial. Lawyers, journalists, political leaders, even grieving families, were surveilled, arrested, or silenced

In Kashmir, civilian properties were confiscated or attached, lands were grabbed, and homes of those accused of dissent were bulldozed with impunity. Funerals were banned, social media expression criminalised, and public employees were dismissed—often without charges.

This was not governance but counterinsurgency dressed as administration, a form of collective punishment normalised through law.

Settler colonialism in disguise

What is unfolding in Kashmir is not an internal policy shift or security reform but a transformation of a UN-recognised dispute into a demographic solution. This is settler colonialism cloaked in the rhetoric of national integration and legal development.

Under international law, the illegality is plain. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. UN Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 47, affirm the disputed status of Kashmir and call for a plebiscite on self-determination.

India’s actions not only violate these obligations, they expose the structural incapacity of international law to restrain regimes that manipulate legality itself to entrench domination.

Lawfare or justice?

Here, the law is not neutral. It is deployed to blur the line between settler and native and erase the very category of "Kashmiri state subject." Where the law once recorded presence, it now records erasure. This is the jurisprudence of disappearance, where legality does not kill bodies but obliterates political identity.

These are not merely legal violations; they are epistemic assaults on memory, belonging, and Indigenous identity itself. In India, this transformation is celebrated as bureaucratic progress. But for Kashmiris, it marks a settler-colonial metamorphosis, one that mirrors the Israeli occupation not just in tactics but in legal logic.

The question is not whether these acts are legal but whether the law, co-opted and contorted, can still serve justice. Can international law restrain the states that master its vocabulary to carry out their ambitions? Or is legality now just a toolkit for domination?

As the anti-colonial scholar Frantz Fanon warned, the settler knows how to write laws. The dispossessed are left to write history in exile. In Kashmir—as in Palestine and other theatres of legal violence, the world must reckon with how colonisers use legality to displace, dispossess, and disappear Indigenous peoples, one domicile certificate at a time.