Wreckage as Punishment: Demolitions in Pahalgam and the Long History of Erasure in Kashmir

(with a timeline of destruction from the 1990s to the present)

Suchitra Vijayan

30 April 2025

Bulldozers and Fire: The Long History of Demolitions

In one minute, the whole life of a house ends.

The house murdered is also mass murder, even if vacant of its residents. — Mahmoud Darwish

Since the beginning of the resistance movement in Kashmir, India has used the destruction of civilian property as a brutal tool to suppress dissent. While mass demolitions are not new, under the Modi regime since 2014, the scale and systematic nature of this violence have accelerated sharply. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, 1,983 incidents of property destruction were reported, with 14,306 structures destroyed — homes, shops, schools, hospitals, and bridges. (Sources: JKCCS; Washington Post, 1990.)

In recent years, the pattern has shifted to targeted punitive demolitions: the homes of suspected militants’ families, the properties of alleged dissidents, and entire neighbourhoods suspected of sympathy with resistance.

The aim is collective punishment: to make belonging itself a punishable offense.

Today, demolitions fall broadly into two categories:

In almost every instance, there is no court oversight, compensation, or due process.

Borrowed Repression: Demolitions and the Israeli Template

The strategy of house demolitions in Kashmir closely mirrors Israeli practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel justifies these demolitions using British colonial regulations from 1945, allowing property seizure and destruction without judicial process. International humanitarian law, through the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions, explicitly prohibits collective punishment.

Yet Israel’s Supreme Court has sanctioned punitive demolitions under the justification of deterrence.

Deterrence is not the absence of law; it is the perversion of law, transforming the destruction of homes, lives, and communities into a legal ritual of punishment. In the name of deterrence, suspicion is codified into guilt, violence is rendered procedural, and the very framework of justice is weaponised against those it claims to protect.

Israel’s unpunished violence and impunity have enabled its replication of these elsewhere, including in India. Impunity becomes a blueprint: violence, once left unchecked, travels, mutates, and entrenches itself in new and other geographies. India’s adaptation of these tactics in Kashmir reflects the normalisation of extrajudicial punishment, the use of demolition as both spectacle and deterrent, and the systematic erasure of communities through engineered homelessness.

Conclusion: The Story Beneath the Rubble

In Kashmir, it is not just homes that are demolished. It is history. It is the fragile scaffolding of ordinary life, swept away in smoke and shattered glass. Each blast that brings down a house tries to bring down a memory. Each bulldozer blade aims to unwrite a family’s claim to a land that has resisted forgetting. The official justifications remain the same: military necessity, counterinsurgency, and security operations. But the truth is older than this demolition act: to destroy a home is to destroy the idea that a people belong. Across the world, from Gaza to Kashmir, demolition becomes a strategy of occupation — an ancient tactic reborn for modern authoritarianism.

In the end, the question Kashmir forces us to ask is not just:

Who destroyed these homes? but Who profits from their ruins?

An Incomplete and Ongoing Archive of Ruins

This is not a complete record. No archive could ever contain all that was burned, shattered, or buried. What follows are only fragments — signposts of a slow violence that began long before Baisaran and will outlast the latest bulldozer. From the fires that swallowed Lal Chowk to the rubble of Murran, Pulwama, the demolition of Kashmiri homes is more than destruction: it is a ritual of forgetting. Each stone toppled is an attempt to unwrite memory, to exile a people not just from their land, but from history itself.

And yet, among the ruins, something endures: an incomplete and ongoing defiance, a memory that refuses to be bulldozed.

Sources: Al Jazeera, ThePrint, Scroll.in, IndiaSpend, JKCCS Reports, Washington Post, Anadolu Agency, Eyewitness Testimonies, Mahmoud Darwish (Memory for Forgetfulness; On This Earth).

© 2025 Suchitra Vijayan

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