This article is part of the FA special series Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons.

“I am waiting for you. In the market, near the main bunker.”
“Go to the gaadiwaajin (fisherwoman) who sits opposite the bunker and buy some fish for the guests.”
“Take a left when you see the bunker; that’s the street where I live.”

In Kashmir, the word ‘bunker’ is often used as a landmark, as every Kashmiri has known bunkers in their daily life. At the bus stop, on the local buses, in the markets, or sitting in a cafe, I have heard – time and again – people say: “Bunkeras nish ha, bunkeras nish.” (Near the bunker, man. Near the bunker.) I use them as landmarks myself. Whenever I imagine my high school, the district hospital, the cricket playground or even my friend’s house, a bunker is always there – a colonial mark on my memory. 

Mostly known as a paradisaic valley nestled between India and Pakistan, Kashmir has a painful history that has shaped its present and cannot be omitted as we imagine its future. The historian Hafsa Kanjwal writes in Colonising Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation that succeeding Mughal and Afghan rule, the British East India Company “sold a cobbled-together territory of Jammu and Kashmir” to a Dogra warlord, Gulab Singh for 75 lakh rupees and an “annual token for recognition of supremacy of ‘one horse, twelve shawl goats of approved breed and three pairs of Cashmere shawls’.” Under the Dogra-British rule, Kashmir was a princely state, and after India’s violent partition in 1947, its last Dogra ruler, Hari Singh, signed an instrument of accession to India. War ensued. In 1948, India and Pakistan fought, and as a result, the former princely state was divided into two parts, two-thirds controlled by India and one-third by Pakistan. 

The parts controlled by India included Jammu, the Ladakh valley and the Kashmir Valley.  Together, these regions got the “status of legal provisionality as an administered but autonomous” state of Jammu and Kashmir, in Kanjwal’s words – with a promised, UN-mandated plebiscite that was never acted on. A state was built, the governments came to power, and promises of food, shelter and employment were made. Kashmir came under occupation, and its geography was injected with military personnel, materials and structures. In 2019, the BJP-led Indian government put Kashmir under lockdown, revoked its autonomous status, and bifurcated the state into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. In 2024, elections were held in Kashmir, with the National Conference gaining the majority of the vote and forming the government. This was one attempt among many to portray Kashmir as a free-willed, democratic and integral part of the Indian nation, where ‘normalcy’ prevails. Kanjwal construes this type of “normalization” as a tool for “colonization, settler-colonialism and occupation” and argues that India’s “oft-repeated ‘Kashmir is normal’ trope belies the immense amount of violence inherent to the production of normalcy…” This trope is used to advertise the colonised territories as ‘normal’ and colonising acts as making peace, maintaining law and order, and serving national security, while they tighten their stranglehold on Kashmir, milk its resources and squash dissenting voices. 

The anthropologist Haley Duschinski (2010) notes that Kashmir has a “massive state-security apparatus” made up of “more than half a million troops, including military and paramilitary personnel of various units including the Indian Army, Border Security Force (BSF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Indo-Tibetan Border Police, and Rashtriya Rifles, the Indian Reserves Police Force (IRPF), the Jammu and Kashmir Police (JKP), as well as other vigilante structures such as the Special Operations Group (SOG) of the police, the reformed militant militia (ikhwan) run by the Rashtriya Rifles, and the armed members of the Village Defense Committees (VDCs).” From mass killings to mass rapes and mass blinding, the Indian armed forces have committed grave crimes against the Kashmiri population. Meanwhile, they enjoy impunity under AFSPA, the 1990 Armed Forces Special Powers Act of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir’s landscape became peppered with army convoys, police jeeps, bullet and pellet guns, barricades, barbed wires, and bunkers – especially with bunkers, as their presence kept growing outside homes, near schools, and on river banks. Everywhere one could see and go, the people were subjected to daily surveillance and fear. Kashmiri journalist Nisar Dharma recalls a time in 1994 when army men “erect[ed] these structures out of nowhere with jute and empty cement bags filled with mud and sand stacked up to form four walls: just enough space to accommodate one or two soldiers.” Decades later, as Dharma pens his parental struggle to explain what a bunker is to his daughter, he shows us that there is not much difference between the Kashmir he saw and what his daughter sees: a bunkered land.

Generally, bunkers are classified as defensive architecture. In Bunker Archaeology, his study of abandoned German bunkers along the French coast, the cultural theorist Paul Virilio describes defensive architecture as “…instrumental, existing less in itself than with a view to ‘doing’ something: waiting, watching, then acting or, rather, reacting.” But in Kashmir, a bunker stands not to defend but to attack. Its operations – waiting, watching, acting, and reacting – are offensive surveillance tactics that commit daily violence against Kashmiri bodies and psyches. The bunker’s main purpose is to keep the colonized under constant threat, fear, and attack. Virilio further states that “these buildings are no longer just receptacles but binnacles,” differentiated from “ordinary architecture” through their anthropomorphic disposition. Likewise, in Kashmir, a bunker operates like a living architecture that not only sees, monitors, controls and records, but – when needed – attacks as well. With only a shadow of a soldier and a protruding gun barrel visible from outside – always seeing, always aiming – a bunker converts into a living construction, claiming the right to surveil and shoot on sight. Meanwhile, bunkers go undocumented due to a law that forbids photos of them, citing ‘safety’ as the reason. Just like the soldiers, the bunkers enjoy impunity, a guaranteed erasure of evidence. 

From sandbags, to steel and iron sheets, to bricks and concrete, the material makeup of bunkers has changed. And these changes signify a gradual yet methodical cementing of militarization in Kashmir. In 2023, as part of the preparations for the G20 summit in Kashmir, the bunkers underwent a makeover. In 2015, the Government of India’s Ministry of Urban Development launched the Smart City Mission, under which Srinagar Smart City Limited, a Special Purpose Vehicle, was set up for “transforming Srinagar into an eco-friendly, resilient and socio-economically vibrant city that celebrates its natural and cultural heritage creating harmony and opportunities for all,” according to the state government. This vehicle was tasked with giving what has been referred to as a “facelift” to existing bunkers in Srinagar, in other words: a ‘smart’ bunkerisation of Kashmir. As reported by Safwat Zargar, the sandbag bunkers were “covered with a structure made out of blue iron sheets, with a wire mesh in front to allow a soldier to look out.” On the front of these smart bunkers, billboards were put up with photographs of Kashmir’s scenic hotspots.

As one looks at these refashioned bunkers, they present a bizarre scene of contradictions. Zooming in, we see a soldier with a gun in his arms surveilling the public through the wire mesh. Zooming out, we realize his head pops out of a photograph of Kashmir’s snow-clad mountains. Barbed wires, barricades, and armed men mark the bunker shed’s boundaries. Beyond routine surveillance, a bunker also works as a space of exhibition for colonial possession. With photographic veneers stuck onto their walls, Kashmir’s bunkers have become projection screens for the colonial-tourist imagination and its desires. 

Last summer, my friends and I were stopped at multiple bunker-cum-checkpoints in Gurez Valley and had to give our identity cards to the Indian soldiers. They told us that photography was prohibited near these bunker-checkpoints. The objective was twofold: first, the continued surveillance of our movements and second, the guarantee that these surveillance operations go unrecorded. In Kashmir, personal memory and official memory of these bunkers are at odds. In his memoir, Curfewed Night, Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer recounts bunkers many times: 

…Hand grenade explosions near the paramilitary bunkers around his father’s office, his learning of new phrases like frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest and torture, setting up of an army camp near his village, soldiers standing in the sandbag bunkers, people walking with raised hands in a queue to a bunker for body checks and identity card inspections, guns sticking out of the sandbag bunkers everywhere, construction of watchtowers and bunkers along the school fence.

His writing, inked by his memory, shows how Kashmiris witness, experience, and remember everyday Kashmir as militarized down to its atoms. It demonstrates that personal memory doesn’t abide by the coloniser’s script. Memory is non-linear and subjective in its expressions. The village one lives in, the language one uses, the scenes that one sees, the checks and inspections that one’s body goes through and the impact of all this on one’s psyche: the act of remembering a bunker as a structure that intrudes on the personal is a decolonizing act. The ubiquitous presence of bunkers causes a paradoxical reaction, as Kashmiris feel both transfixed and anaesthetized by them. With time, a bunker doesn’t become less threatening, but the fear of it becomes normal. The sight of a bunker is regular for a Kashmiri, who is well aware of a soldier’s ever-suspicious eyes, but that awareness is nothing new; it’s banal. Is there a potential for resistance behind this occupation of sights and minds? As a Kashmiri, when you see a bunker and simply walk past it, it might be passive submission or resignation. It might be mere numbness too. But denying a living bunker and its inhabiting soldiers a response can also be understood as a political act, a ‘non-response’ response to subtly and regularly mark one’s opposition to it. 

In 2007, Showkat Kathjoo, a Kashmiri artist, set up a “bunker-turned-viewfinder” installation in Srinagar, Kashmir. The artwork replicated the rectangular skeleton of a bunker with sandbags, tarps and wood logs. In Soz: A Ballad of Melodies, a film on the resistance arts of Kashmir, Kathjoo says that in its final form, the bunker is also draped with a net and has barbed wires laid around it. Inside the bunker, the artist placed a television on the windowsill. The television played a slideshow of photos he had taken from the covers of travelogues and books written by foreigners about Kashmir’s scenic beauty. He emphasises the meaning behind the installation: “This whole work was about the landscape itself… The markings of a landscape, where a bunker becomes a part of it and becomes a part of the memory as well.” Kathjoo remarks that the popular “notions of Kashmir as a beautiful place, as a paradise on earth” is what he “tried to deconstruct” through this work, where a bunker is not only shown as a part of his generation’s memory but also an unignorable component of Kashmir’s landscape. 

As Kathjoo’s viewfinder plays this slideshow, he nudges us to think about what a soldier sees from a bunker, and whether looking and aiming through a bunker’s window limits and alters a soldier’s perspective. Drawing from Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation, Luke Benett writes that the person in the bunker “seeks to perceive the world by whatever feed of data can still reach him” and with time, starts to “believe that image to be reality.” In Kashmir, the Indian soldier begins to think of the limited data he receives as reality and acts. In so doing, he reinforces its falsity to be true. He believes that ‘Kashmir’ is what he can see through a bunker’s window: the land and the ‘human-faced’ bodies that, according to the data, are not only to be possessed, tamed and surveilled but also controlled, killed and erased. But even after coming out of the bunker, the soldier does not look beyond his believed reality because he never exists independently; he is always a part of the bunker. His body is the bunker’s extended limb, functioning much like its rotating armed camera. He sees and acts for the bunker. The bunker dehumanizes him. It turns him into a device, trained to carry out specific tasks and report back. 

In January 2025, a three-decade-old bunker was dismantled in Srinagar. It was reported that the locals appreciated the move. But what caught my attention were the words of an anonymous senior security official: “If a bunker is needed, we will construct it. If an existing bunker is no longer needed, we will remove it.” So, this bunker was not being removed but relocated – whether the next day, week or year – whenever and wherever it would eventually be needed to carry out the occupying state’s agenda. In Kashmir, the construction, destruction and reconstruction of bunkers can happen anytime, anywhere, and always with the excuse of ‘security.’ A bunker might rise near or around our homes, schools, playgrounds, hospitals or markets. With ever-evolving form and materiality, Kashmir’s bunkers reflect India’s colonial-military architects’ eagerness to experiment with different design skins, making the bunker aesthetically pleasant and at the same time, highly productive and efficient in its operations.