Everyday co-optation: social navigation in Indian-administered Kashmir

How do members of the middle class – who are neither at the margins nor at the top of existing power hierarchies – navigate repressive structures? We answer this question with insights from ethnographic research in Indian-administered Kashmir, which was conducted in person in Srinagar between 2018 and 2019, and remotely via telephone and online conversations between 2020 and 2021. We present, firstly, findings from the full sample of 58 research participants, to illustrate how sex and profession affect differential access to power under Kashmir’s non-democratic regime. Secondly, we share the stories of three middle-class men – two journalists and a businessman, pseudonyms Omar, Asif, and Haji – to highlight the two-tiered pressures of social navigation that they experience due to their particular social status. The first tier involves job-related pressures, where the work as a journalist or businessperson in Kashmir requires compliance with regime rules and government actors. The second tier includes pressures from family members and friends, who have called upon our research participants to help them mitigate the suppression of their freedoms. Through these pressures, Omar, Asif, and Haji become co-opted non-state actors, whose collaboration with agents of the regime makes them both useful and vulnerable to criticism from wider society.