Hydropower(ed) Nation: Ruin and Renewability in Kashmir

With Mona Bhan, Syracuse University

In March 2019, the Indian government declared large hydropower to be a renewable source of energy. The move was designed to boost the industry’s potential while recognizing hydropower’s role in stabilizing an otherwise unstable national power grid. Only months after this decision, the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s autonomous constitutional status, making the militarily occupied region even more vulnerable to massive hydropower investments and to India’s settler extractive logics. This presentation will analyze the political and material logics that co-produce hydropower as India’s “forever asset” and Kashmir as Hindu India’s eternal and timeless part. As claims of hydropower’s foreverness melded with India’s primordial links to Kashmir, the project of re-engineering nation and nature worked in concert to produce India’s contested sovereignty in Kashmir.

Mona Bhan is a professor of anthropology and the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies at Syracuse University. She is a political and environmental anthropologist whose work on Indian-occupied Kashmir explores the role of economic and infrastructural development in counterinsurgency operations and people’s resistance movements to protracted wars and settler occupation. Her areas of specialization include wars, militarism, and counterinsurgency; indigeneity and settler colonialism; race, gender and religion; ecocide and climate change; and military occupation and infrastructural policies. She is the author of “Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? and “Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene” (with Andrew Bauer. With her colleagues from the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective that she helped co-found in 2013, she has co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, and the Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies. She has also co-edited special issues of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law (2017) and Critique of Anthropology (2020). Since 2022, as part of her Lender Fellowship for social justice (2022–2024), Mona has been working with a team of undergraduate and graduate students to examine how Artificial Intelligence is reconfiguring the city of Syracuse, with a special attention on the ways in which AI has shaped surveillance and policing technologies, discourses of securitization, STEM education in city schools, and claims and counterclaims to citizenship.

This event is part of the Demos, Democracy and Democratization: South Asia Lecture Series 2024–25 and the Climate Dystopias in Asia series.