The Volatile Possibilities and Empty Gestures of Care Under Military Occupation

Abstract

The Occupied Clinic could hardly be any timelier. Kashmir has been under siege by the Indian national government for thirty years, and its residents disenfranchised. In 2019, in part to suppress the region’s independence movement, Narendra Modi and his BJP made international headlines when they stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy. In a land that lives under continuous military occupation and has witnessed countless curfews, Saiba Varma asks, ‘what kind of care leaves people in pieces?’. The Occupied Clinic is the result of arduous fieldwork conducted under occupation in the Kashmir Valley, during the period 2009-2016. In this eloquent ethnography of clinic and its militarization under siege, Varma raises critically, ‘what is possible—clinically, ethically, socially, and politically—under occupation? What forms of care?’ .