Conspiracies & Imaginations of Deep State: Everyday State and Politics ofSurveillance in Kashmir

Abstract

While ‘deep state’ accusations have often been dismissed as mere conspiracy theories in Kashmir, the idea of a ‘clandestine’ has been ubiquitous to politics and political life in Kashmir. The deep state may range from a conspiratorial pejorative label to a clandestine apparatus exercising unrecognized power. In the everyday life in Kashmir valley, people do not necessarily think of deep state as a unified entity. More often than not, deep state is understood to have various factions, sometimes at odds with each other. In that sense, discussions on people’s imagination of the ‘military-corporate-state complex’s, presence of ‘shadow elite’ (c.f. Janine Wedel) i.e., flexible, unaccountable policy advisors, their networks and think tanks who pursue their own hidden agendas merit to be an object of anthropological inquiry. This paper will attempt to open methodological questions on how we make sense of an anthropological object that is not readily available to us but serves as a tool to understand how individual and communities conceptualize the state and its various formations. This paper will focus on the ethnographic notes with Kashmiri journalists who constantly find themselves at the receiving end of deep state. Using the voices of journalists in Srinagar who labor to become the ‘reporters of truth’ in a conflict zone, this paper explores the subversive connections that emerge between bureaucracy, state and conspiracy in the everyday life of people in Kashmir.