A locked region and its trapped voices

Recalling John Locke's thought experiment of 'Locked Room', imagine a person is sitting in a room with a friend. Unknown to him is that the room is locked. Unaware of his confinement, he continues the conversation freely. But what if he realises that the room is locked, would he prefer to still stay? Locke opined that the person in the room is free as he wants to stay and converse. Therefore, this is freedom, as the person can act according to his will. Other theorists questioned Locke's perception and defined real freedom as the availability of possibilities rather than mere satisfaction. The world is teemed with locked rooms, spaces where, as in Orwell's words, the individuals are free to be drunkards, idlers, cowards, backbiters, fornicators, but not free to think for themselves. The Indian Occupied region of Jammu and Kashmir is analogous to a locked room, where the populace is aware of the locks on their thoughts, speech, expression and assembly.

Kashmir is a place where most of the fiction funnels down into reality. It has become a place where expressing truth is a sin, where there is a constant watch by the 'Big Brother' of the region, where the lie is sold and gaslighted through the big market of Bollywood, so that it lands in the memory as the truth of the valley. There is no space for the permeation of the ideas which counter the dominant narrative. As evident from the list of 25 books banned, inter alia, AG Noorani's The Kashmir Dispute (1947-2012), Anuradha Bhasin's A Dismantled State and Victoria Schofield's Kashmir in Conflict.

This pattern became more pronounced following a condemnable attack on the civilians, which led to 26 deaths in Pahalgam in April 2025. A new wave of restrictions, discrimination and purge was unleashed upon the people of the valley. However, after the attack, the news that recurrently flashed on screens was the four-day eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between India and Pakistan. As Arundhati Roy observes, "On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in another room." While the two states were embroiled in war, there was indeed someone else in the room, silent, unseen, and still being beaten. They were the Kashmiris. It was later revealed in a report by UN experts that the people of the same area (Kashmir) that Delhi used as a raison d'être for the May conflict with Islamabad, were subjected to repression and walloped by the counter-terror laws.

Almost 2,800 individuals, ranging from journalists to human rights activists, were arrested and incarcerated. People were blackmailed, charged, and detained under the Public Safety Act or the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The report also specified the charge-sheeting and indicting of Kashmiris on vague grounds. This punishment came on the heels of demolishing their shelters, displacing them and using their families as a cannon. A communication blackout, suspension of over 8,000 social media accounts, surveillance and restrictions on media already on a ventilator, were also reported. A democracy gone berserk to 'demon-crazy' as the Kashmiris call it.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Kashmiris have lived this truth for decades. Another year has come to an end without any change in the people's conditions. Even the premonitions for the upcoming year by the United States' Council on Foreign Relations project this region as a flashpoint of conflict. While in a world where one can go mad with nomophobia, where if one Insta reel or Snapchat streak is not sent, it can induce anxiety, and where life without internet is now an unimaginable thing. There is a world within us, not far away, where free will is an illusion, assembly is treason and speech is a crime. Oxymoronic realities co-exist, where Orwellian censorship and withheld liberty in Kashmir breathe alongside India's flood of distraction and pleasure, submerging the truth in the sea of irrelevance.