The Limits of the Settler Colonial Analogy in South Asia
Is India’s role in Kashmir “settler colonial” or part of a shared legacy of internal colonialism across South Asia?
Illustration by Jamhoor, created using publicly available images
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel in February 2026 marks a decisive rupture in India’s foreign policy. India, once one of Palestine’s most vocal supporters, has turned its back on them. The symbolism was unmistakable: New Delhi was no longer trying to balance its support for Palestinian statehood with strategic engagement with Israel. It had chosen a side.
In recent years, commentators have asked: is India now South Asia’s “Israel”? Or is Kashmir India’s Palestine? Kashmir remains one of the most militarized regions in the world: marked by grave human rights violations and the erosion of democratic autonomy. However, it is worth asking if the popular invocation of the India-Israel and Kashmir-Palestine equivalence offers more to our progressive analysis than it takes away.
If India=Israel, Pakistan=?
On April 22, 2025, a brutal attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir left 26 dead, with responsibility claimed by The Resistance Front—an organization India alleges is a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. In response, the Indian government launched Operation Sindoor, targeting what it described as terror infrastructure in Murdike and Bahawalpur, deep within Pakistani territory. Pakistan retaliated, and the skirmishes ended only in mid-May.
In the days that followed, several commentators, echoing a now-familiar refrain, likened India’s actions to those of Israel in Gaza or the West Bank. India, they argued, was fast becoming a Zionist state in South Asia—an occupying force seeking regional hegemony through violence, demographic change, and militarized control.
“The India–Israel analogy, particularly in relation to Kashmir, is deeply flawed—not because India is innocent, but because its form of domination structurally differs from that of a settler colonial state. ”
However, India is not a settler-colonial state by origin, nor is Pakistan a stateless, disenfranchised entity like Palestine. Pakistan is a sovereign state with one of the world’s largest standing armies, a robust intelligence infrastructure, and nuclear weapons. It has initiated wars with India, harbored non-state actors, and shaped insurgencies across the region. The comparison collapses especially when one considers the deterrent structure of nuclear parity. India and Pakistan are not in an occupation-resistance dynamic, but in a mutual deterrence relationship shaped by doctrines of escalation control and war avoidance.
The logic of India's limited strikes, although disproportionate —be it Balakot in 2019 or Operation Sindoor in 2025—is to signal capability without triggering a full-scale war and driven by posturing for consumption of a domestic audience for electoral gains, not permanent occupation of sovereign territory.
Government supporters celebrate in Uttar Pradesh, India, marking ‘Operation Sindoor’ on Wednesday, May 7, 2025. Image: Press Trust of India (PTI).
Framing India as Israel and Pakistan as Palestine ignores the complex regional balance of South Asia, and instead replaces it with an incorrect moral binary. It positions Pakistan as a victim while absolving its colonial violence in Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan. It also erases the agency and suffering of Kashmiris, who are neither extensions of Pakistan nor India, but people with their own political aspirations—repeatedly silenced by both India and Pakistan.
The India-Israel analogy is now commonly invoked in international activist and academic spaces in relation to India’s occupation of Kashmir. Works like Azad Essa’s Hostile Homelands draw on powerful imagery: Kashmir as India’s Palestine, a besieged land stripped of autonomy, flooded with soldiers, and reengineered demographically. While emotionally evocative, this comparison obscures more than it reveals. It collapses two vastly different political histories, legal frameworks, and strategic realities into a moral shorthand that fails both as analysis and critique. [Essa has contested this claim. –Ed.]
The India–Israel analogy, particularly in relation to Kashmir, is deeply flawed—not because India is innocent, but because its form of domination structurally differs from that of a settler colonial state. Instead, India's repression of Kashmir must be seen in the context of postcolonial centralization, internal colonialism, and an authoritarian shift that extends across other marginalized regions such as the Northeast and Adivasi heartlands. To truly understand and challenge the violence in Kashmir, we must step beyond simplistic analogies and confront the specificity of India’s own colonial legacies and its present trajectory.
Foundational Disanalogy: Settler Colonialism vs Postcolonial Nationhood
To liken India to Israel is to misunderstand the historical genesis of the Indian state. Israel was founded as a settler-colonial project—a homeland for Jews established through the displacement of Palestinians, justified through the logic of return and maintained through systems of apartheid and occupation. Its very foundation rests on what Patrick Wolfe termed the “logic of elimination:” the removal or erasure of the indigenous population to make way for a settler nation.
India’s state formation was the result of anti-colonial struggle, not settler conquest or displacement of populations. The Indian state was a successor to the British colonial state. The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, like Hyderabad and Junagadh, acceded to India through a contested and coercive process—not dissimilar to Pakistan’s annexation of Balochistan in 1948. These were integrationist moves, not settler-colonial ventures. They reflected the logic of coercive nation-state consolidation, not demographic engineering.
Even the demand for “Akhand Bharat,” often cited as India’s Zionist parallel, lacks a settler-colonial infrastructure. Unlike Zionism’s materialization in Israeli settlements, Hindutva remains largely ideological and majoritarian, not territorial in the same settler sense—at least until recent policies bordering on demographic transformation.
India’s postcolonial nationalism has been violent and coercive toward its peripheries. However, coercion in the service of integration is not the same as colonization in the service of population replacement. India’s violence in Kashmir must be understood through its own authoritarian and centralizing tendencies—not through borrowed frameworks that obscure more than they illuminate.
Amid rebellions in Poonch and fearing Pakistani-backed tribal militias, Maharaja Hari Singh acceded Kashmir to India on October 27, 1947, in return for military assistance, with a plebiscite promised once order was restored. Image: The Daily Star.
How Kashmir Differs from Palestine: The Autonomy Framework Pre-2019—Article 370 & 35A
Unlike occupied Palestinian territories being governed by Israeli military law, Kashmir—at least until 2019—was formally part of the Indian Union, with constitutional protections, civil courts, and state institutions (however compromised). India did not have unilateral, unchallenged domination vis à vis Kashmir. Instead, India’s sovereignty over Kashmir has been contested by Pakistan consistently, to the detriment of the aspirations of the heavily repressed population caught in between.
Before the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A in August 2019, Jammu and Kashmir occupied a unique constitutional position within the Indian Union. The region enjoyed a special status in India that granted it its own Constitution, a separate flag, and significant autonomy in all matters except foreign affairs, defense, and communications. Article 35A, since 1954, allowed the Kashmiri state to define “permanent residents” and provide them exclusive rights in land ownership, state employment, and welfare.
These provisions functioned, albeit imperfectly, as constitutional safeguards against demographic transformation and cultural assimilation. Far from embodying a settler-colonial logic, Article 35A explicitly protected Kashmir from the influx of non-locals, preventing the kind of demographic reshaping characteristic of settler colonialism.
In contrast, no such legal framework of autonomy exists in the occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinians live under Israeli military law, without citizenship, and with no right to determine the legal conditions of land ownership or political representation. The Indian Constitution, even in its distorted execution, granted Kashmiris a set of legal rights that Palestinians have never possessed under Israeli occupation.
The repeal of Article 370 and 35A in August 2019 marks a dramatic rupture—but until that moment, Kashmir’s relationship with India was at least legally federal, rooted in a constitutional compact. To compare this to Israel’s governance of Gaza or the West Bank is to flatten history and law into metaphor, losing sight of the actual political architecture that existed for seven decades.
Aug 11, 2019: Kashmiri women protest the revocation of Articles 370 and 35a by the Indian government. Image: Danish Siddiqui via Wall Street Journal
Internal Colonialism: Kashmir, the Northeast and Adivasis
While rejecting the India–Israel settler-colonial analogy, it is important not to sanitize the Indian state’s conduct in Kashmir. The story of Kashmir within India is one of progressive erosion of autonomy, political repression, and militarized governance. A similar trajectory is visible in other peripheral regions like the Northeast and Adivasi territories, which can be better understood through the lens of internal colonialism.
Since the 1990s, Kashmir has been one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world. The imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has granted Indian security forces near-total legal immunity, with widespread allegations of torture, rape, disappearances, and fake encounters. The Kunan Poshpora mass rape case (1991) and the Pathribal fake encounter killings (2000) remain haunting examples of impunity under military rule. Civil society organizations like the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society have documented thousands of enforced disappearances and mass graves, with little to no legal redress.
“In Nagaland, Manipur, and Assam, dissent has been historically met with counterinsurgency, not dialogue. These are not anomalies—they are signs of a centralizing postcolonial state managing its “frontiers” through coercion, much like its colonial predecessor.”
This pattern is not confined to Kashmir. In the Northeast, similar arrangements under Article 371 allowed for conditional accession, yet were also accompanied by AFSPA and political marginalization. In Nagaland, Manipur, and Assam, dissent has been historically met with counterinsurgency, not dialogue. These are not anomalies—they are signs of a centralizing postcolonial state managing its “frontiers” through coercion, much like its colonial predecessor.
Unlike Israel, India does not legally segregate populations through separate citizenship regimes. But it functionally produces second-class citizenship in regions it deems “sensitive” or “exceptional.” The framework here is not of elimination or ethnic cleansing, but of incorporation without equality—a project of national integration enforced at gunpoint.
In this light, Kashmir’s predicament is not an outlier but a symptom of a deeper crisis in Indian federalism and democracy. To compare it with Palestine is not only analytically imprecise—it risks obscuring the specific forms of repression that define India’s own political geography.
The Post-2019 Shift: Demographic Engineering?
The abrogation of Article 370 and Article 35A in August 2019 marked a paradigmatic shift in India’s approach to Kashmir. With the dismantling of constitutional safeguards, Kashmir was stripped of its statehood, bifurcated into two Union Territories, and placed under direct rule from New Delhi. The government claimed this would usher in development and integration; in reality, it marked the suspension of democratic rights and the reconfiguration of Kashmir’s legal and demographic fabric.
Since 2019, India has granted domicile status to over 85,000 non-resident individuals, including security personnel, bureaucrats, and migrant workers. This change, previously barred under Article 35A, has raised serious concerns about demographic engineering—the slow, bureaucratic transformation of the region’s Muslim-majority character without the need to create settlements or military colonization.
This move echoes settler-colonial strategies. While there are no formal state-sponsored settlements, the infrastructure is being laid for a structural alteration of Kashmir’s identity through legal manipulation, resource reallocation, and engineered migration. The state has moved from internal colonial control to a form of postcolonial demographic reordering, where the territory is rendered governable by diluting the political weight of its native population.
“To claim India has become Israel is to foreclose critical distinctions that help us understand this dangerous new trajectory—one that must be condemned in its own right, not merely because it resembles Zionist practice.”
Still, it is important to recognize that this shift is recent and emergent, not foundational. India was not built as a settler-colonial state, and Kashmir was not historically managed as one. What we are witnessing post-2019 is a convergence of methods, not of origins. To claim India has become Israel is to foreclose critical distinctions that help us understand this dangerous new trajectory—one that must be condemned in its own right, not merely because it resembles Zionist practice.
The recent push toward demographic change in Kashmir is not entirely without precedent. As early as 1947–48, during the Poonch massacre, thousands of Muslims were killed or displaced from Jammu, with the complicity of the Dogra regime, the RSS and Indian forces. This reengineered the demography of the Jammu region, transforming it into a Hindu-majority space more loyal to the Indian Union. While this violence predates the current era, it reveals that the logic of demographic disciplining—especially through force—has long existed within India’s nation-building project. What distinguishes the post-2019 moment is the transition from episodic violence to bureaucratized, legal mechanisms—from mass expulsion to state-sanctioned domicile laws and land access for outsiders. It denotes a critical rupture from a flawed, alienating democratic process to outright colonization.
Yet this demographic logic is not exclusive to India. In Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan abolished the State Subject Rule in the 1970s—akin to India’s removal of Article 35A—and has since facilitated the settlement of Sunni Punjabis and Pashtuns in a historically Shia-majority region. These policies have been accompanied by sectarian violence, including attacks by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a state-backed Sunni extremist group, on Shia civilians. Land reform bills now permit non-locals to own property, raising legitimate fears of a sectarian settler project aimed at diluting Shia political power. Pakistan thus mirrors the very settler-colonial logics it accuses India of employing—through military presence, demographic manipulation, and religious homogenization.
Both post-colonial states have deployed population engineering, resource control, and military dominance to redraw the ethnic and political landscape of their borderlands.
“Pakistan’s Kashmir”: Balochistan’s Missing Analogy
If Kashmir is to be framed as “India’s Palestine,” then Balochistan must surely be considered “Pakistan’s Kashmir.”
Balochistan was annexed by Pakistan in 1948, despite the Baloch Khanate’s brief declaration of independence and calls for a referendum. Since then, the province has seen multiple insurgencies, each met with military repression. Thousands of Baloch activists, students, and civilians have been forcibly disappeared, often found tortured or killed. Reports by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and international watchdogs point to mass graves, extra-judicial killings, and systemic silencing of dissent.
The strategies of control in Balochistan mirror those used by India in Kashmir: militarization, enforced disappearances, denial of autonomy, and resource extraction. Baloch nationalists, like Kashmiri separatists, have demanded self-determination; in both cases, the central state has responded with coercion rather than consent, practicing internal domination over their own peripheries.
To ignore Balochistan while invoking Kashmir is to moralize one state's violence while sanitizing another’s. If the goal is solidarity against oppression, it must be principled and consistent—not contingent on the geopolitical narratives of postcolonial nation-states.
Sit-ins demanding justice for forcibly disappeared Baloch have become a recurring form of protest in Pakistan. Image: Hazaran Rahim Dad.
The Forgotten Front: Adivasis, Land, and the Logic of Elimination
While Kashmir commands global attention and is increasingly framed through the Israel–Palestine lens, a more direct and longstanding instance of the logic of elimination exists within India itself—its relationship with Adivasi (indigenous tribal) communities. Spread across central and eastern India, these populations face systemic displacement, militarized violence, and cultural erasure at the hands of the Indian state. Yet, this reality is rarely framed in settler-colonial terms.
The displacement of Adivasis is not metaphorical—it is material, extractive, and violent. Across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, and Madhya Pradesh, vast tracts of forest land have been seized for mining, dams, industrial corridors, and so-called development projects. The beneficiaries are not settlers but corporate entities like Adani, Vedanta, and POSCO, backed by state power. The victims are tribal communities who are evicted, incarcerated, or killed, often without compensation or rehabilitation.
When resistance emerges—especially through Maoist-aligned movements—it is met with brutal counterinsurgency campaigns, like Operation Green Hunt, involving fake encounters, mass arrests, and violations of international humanitarian norms. The Forest Rights Act, meant to safeguard tribal land, is routinely bypassed. Indigenous cultures are reduced to tourism, their sacred lands to resource frontiers.
This is, in many ways, a textbook case of internal settler logic—the displacement of indigenous peoples to make way for extractive capitalist expansion. And yet, it is not recognized as such, either within India or globally. Compared to Kashmir, there is little international solidarity movement for Adivasis, drawing analogy to apartheid followed by hashtags or global outcry. It is seen as India’s internal matter, despite being an instance of ongoing, violent dispossession.
This selective application of the settler-colonial lens reveals a troubling truth: the framework is often deployed not where the logic is most visible, but where it is most politically expedient. Kashmir is thus foregrounded, while Adivasi suffering is invisibilized—a blind spot that any serious decolonial critique must urgently confront.
Colonial Continuities and the Settler-Native Binary: A Mamdanian Reconsideration
What binds the cases of Kashmir, the Northeast, Balochistan, Adivasi lands, and Gilgit-Baltistan is not settler colonialism, but the postcolonial state’s continuation of colonial strategies. Both India and Pakistan inherited the legal, institutional, and ideological architecture of the British Raj—one built around centralization, militarized frontier governance, racialized surveillance, and the management of difference through law.
This is especially visible in the legal and administrative regimes these states deploy: AFSPA in Kashmir and the Northeast, the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in FATA, and the extensive use of emergency powers and military rule in Balochistan. These are not aberrations. They are mechanisms of a postcolonial state that never decolonized, but instead repurposed colonial technologies of control to govern internal “others.” The Indian and Pakistani states do not seek to eliminate their peripheries, but to discipline, incorporate, and extract from them—whether through resource grabs, land expropriation, or political marginalization.
This argument finds powerful theoretical support in Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native, where he critiques the settler-colonial framework not for its inaccuracy in specific cases, but for its analytical rigidity. For Mamdani, the core feature of modern state violence is not physical elimination alone, but the institutionalization of permanent political identities—settler and native—as legal constructs. These identities become the basis of governance, exclusion, and domination.
Mamdani urges us to shift focus from moral binaries toward how states manufacture majority-minority distinctions and reproduce political inequality through law and bureaucracy. In this sense, India’s repression in Kashmir, or Pakistan’s actions in Gilgit-Baltistan, are not about displacing people for settlers, but about governing through the logic of difference—where access to rights, land, and representation is contingent upon loyalty, religious identity, or ethnic subordination.
Applying Mamdani’s lens helps clarify why the India–Israel analogy misleads. India's violence in Kashmir is not the result of a Zionist import, but of a postcolonial state logic that mirrors colonial rule in form and substance. The challenge, then, is not simply to name India a settler-colonial state, but to confront how postcolonial sovereignty produces and governs “permanent minorities” within its own borders, often under the guise of national unity or security.
The task ahead is to transcend these state-produced identities, and imagine political communities where neither “settler” nor “native” are categories of governance. As Mamdani argues, liberation requires dismantling the political distinction itself, not reversing who holds power within it.
Conclusion
The analogy between India and Israel, though rhetorically compelling, ultimately falters under critical scrutiny. It obscures the specific historical trajectories and legal architectures that shape the Indian state, reducing Kashmir’s complex and painful realities to a borrowed script. India is not a settler-colonial state by origin, nor is Pakistan a stateless entity like Palestine. Rather, both India and Pakistan are postcolonial nation-states that have inherited—and internalized—the logic of their colonial predecessor.
Their respective strategies in Kashmir, Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, the Northeast, and Adivasi territories reveal a shared repertoire of authoritarian governance: centralization, demographic engineering, military exceptionalism, and the denial of meaningful self-determination. These are not anomalies; they are systemic features of how postcolonial states have managed pluralism and dissent—not by decolonizing their institutions, but by repurposing colonial structures of control.
Rather than relying on externally derived frameworks like settler colonialism, which do not capture the historical and structural specificities of South Asia, we must examine postcolonial nation-states like India and Pakistan as ideological and institutional successors of the colonial state.
“Both India and Pakistan have inherited and perpetuated the logic of the colonial state: centralization, militarized frontier governance, legal exceptionalism, and the management of difference through coercion”
Both India and Pakistan have inherited and perpetuated the logic of the colonial state: centralization, militarized frontier governance, legal exceptionalism (e.g. AFSPA, FCR), and the management of difference through coercion. Their projects of nation-building have involved internal colonization of peripheries like Kashmir, Balochistan, the Northeast, and Adivasi regions—not to replace native populations, but to discipline, assimilate, extract from, or sideline them.
While some recent developments in India—such as domicile laws in Kashmir—increasingly resemble settler-colonial methods, the foundational character of the Indian state remains that of a centralized postcolonial successor to empire, not a settler regime. Similarly, Pakistan’s actions in Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan exhibit sectarian demographic engineering, but within a postcolonial frame rooted in majoritarian nationalism and territorial consolidation, not settler expansion.
To understand and challenge these forms of state violence, whether in Kashmir, or Gilgit, or Bastar, South Asia needs a framework that emerges from its own history—one that recognizes how postcolonial sovereignty often reproduces colonial modes of domination in the name of unity, development, or national security.
Only by confronting this shared legacy of violence can we begin to imagine alternative futures for the region—ones rooted not in analogy, but in accountability, history, and decolonial possibility.
Anubhav Singh is a scholar of South Asia and a graduate of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His work examines caste, nationalism, and the reconfiguration of sovereignty in contemporary India, with particular focus on Hindutva.