On August 4 2019, the Magistrate of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state, enacted an information block – data, mobile signal, WiFi, landlines, internet, broadband – that plunged the state’s 12 million residents into a total communication blackout. Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas’ Pleasure Gardens (Mack, 2024) is a two-part project that investigates the military occupation, land appropriation and communication blackouts in Kashmir, a region whose heavily militarised borders have frequently been a site of conflict between India and Pakistan. In the book’s first part, Scott and Thomas create a unique log of 15 days in 2019 in which Kashmiri constitutional rights were revoked, the state partitioned, and stripped of its statehood. In the second part, the authors examine how India’s infrastructure of surveillance and occupation of Kashmir is borrowed from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The book includes three beautiful photo essays by Ufaq Fatima, Nawal Ali and Zainab, the founders of a photo collective in Kashmir, Her Pixel Story.

Izabella Scott The first section of Pleasure Gardens concerns a communication blackout in Kashmir, which began in August 2019. The blackout was state-wide. Kashmir is one of the most militarised places in the world and has seen decades of unrest, and brutal “administration” by Indian officials. This blackout began around 9pm on 4 August and lasted over 200 days. A blackout means cell phones stop working: you can’t get data or any signal. The internet stops working. Landlines stop working too. With this blackout, 12 million people were cut off from the world. In the book, we follow the first 15 days of the blackout in a detailed log, which has an awful drama to it, a dreadful plot. I remember reading about the blackout at the time in the international news (I’m based in London). It was by no means the first blackout in the state, but it made headlines because of what happened under its cover. As Kashmiris were prevented from getting online, the Modi government changed Kashmir’s legal status overnight, swiping away its statehood. To do so, the Indian constitution itself had to be amended. This is a huge thing for a nation-state to do, and very difficult to justify. I remember reading that the Indian government had “gone rogue”.

Skye Arundhati Thomas Writing in and from the Indian newsfeed is an an intense exercise: it’s a noisy, frenzied place full of terrible violence and, well, honestly, a lot of lies. I think the log was an important thing to do if only to try and find some order in the chaos. The blackout was not only a mechanism by which to silence a whole population and to stop information from coming out. It also stopped news from reaching people in Kashmir: people there didn’t know what laws were being used against them. This is a tried and tested strategy, as occupying forces learn from each other, and exchange resources. Izabella, you sent me a screenshot, during the early days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on 23 October 2023, of a message sent out by the Palestinian Mobile Company: “The intense bombing in the last hour caused the destruction of all the remaining international routes linking Gaza to the outside world, in addition to the routes previously destroyed during the aggression, which led to a complete interruption of communication services from the beloved Gaza Strip. May God protect you and protect our country.” The first telecommunications blackout (as we understand it) was in Palestine, when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) entered the offices of Palnet, the Palestinian Internet service provider, and shut down. They cut cables and trashed hardware. This was in 2002, when the world wide web was barely a decade old. Israel’s early raids of internet and media communications infrastructure were a gear shift: cellular communications introduced a new territory as a site of control. We were in the final proofing stages of Pleasure Gardens when Israel began its genocide in Gaza, and rereading the log especially was highly charged, as we saw even more intensely how India has learned from Israel, and how Israel clears space in the mainstream imagination for new brutalities, a sense of permission that is eventually exported worldwide. Now, the two nations are even co-producing weapons and surveillance technology.

IS As part of our research, we dug into the relationship between India and Israel, tracing the way the two military occupations learn from each other, as you say, and exchange resources. So India learns from Israel, but also – importantly – has been buying from Israel, spending immense amounts of money on weapons over the last decade ($2.9 billion at the last count). I keep returning to a statistic from a report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: since Modi took office in 2014, nearly 42% of all Israeli arms exports have been to India. That’s a huge percentage. This includes armed drones, surface-to-air missiles and radar equipment. Part of the story we tell in the book is of Israel becoming one of the main arms exporters in the world. By the 1980s, a tenth of the Israeli workforce was employed by the arms industry. This only escalated in the 1990s with the founding of companies like Elbit Systems, which manufactures drones. What hit hard during this research was understanding how the arms industry and IDF military operations in Gaza go hand in hand. Across the 2000s and 2010s, Gaza became a testing ground: military operations were an opportunity to pilot new weapons. Indeed, in 2018, a former Elbit executive described Gaza as a “showroom” for the company’s products; he went on, “customers appreciate that the products are battle-tested.” We first went to Kashmir in 2017, to the capital, Srinagar. It’s a disconcerting place to visit because it has retained a booming tourist industry (there are bus-loads of sightseers visiting the famous Mughal pleasure gardens, and honeymooners shopping from boats in the floating market on Dal Lake) and yet the occupation is so visible – soldiers everywhere, concertina wire, concrete barricades.

SAT Yes, and as we found out, during the 2019 blackout, the city was further divided by paramilitary police. For this, Israeli army contractors were consulted (if Gaza is the showroom for weapons, it’s the West Bank for barricades). Often, writing about Kashmir tends to focus on the capital, but so much of the military tension plays out on the Line of Control (LoC). This is the 740km-long militarised border with Pakistan. It’s a de facto border, in that it’s not legally recognised. It can be hard to visualise, even though it’s constantly in the Indian newsfeed, drumming up fear and a sense of crisis through stories of “infiltration”, the terrorist threat. It was the LoC that brought us directly to Israel. I travelled to Gurez Valley in 2022 with one of three photographers we worked with on the book, Nawal Ali, who is doing some very important research and writing on those caught in the interstices of the armed fences and the political border. People are forced to orient their lives around the movements of the army. The army’s presence is cannibalistic: eating up large swatches of the land to make their camps, allegedly via vast underground networks. The border is also entirely absurd, given the landscape of the Himalayas: those jagged peaks and treeless, rocky mountains. I noticed several different types of barbed wire, and someone told me: be careful, the Israeli wire can cut off a finger. And I guess that’s where it began, tracking the relationship between the two. Born a year apart in the 1940s, India and Israel were initially ideologically opposed. India only normalised relations with Israel in 2001, right after the Kargil War. Kargil is in the northern region of Kashmir, one of the most dramatic of the Himalayan valleys. In the summer of 1999, Indian military and intelligence agencies in Kargil reported several breaches along the LoC, which escalated tensions between India and Pakistan. The Indian army had to reckon with a flaw in its arsenal: it was not entirely able to surveil the LoC; the landscape was too severe. It needed new tech, and so its decades of back-room deals with Israel were formalised. By 2003, India had handed over $130 million to Israel Aerospace Industries for drones and laser-guided missiles.

Images right and previous, by Zainab, from the series The Weight of Snow on Her Chest (2019 – ongoing)

IS And now, India and Israel co-produce the Hermes drones that rain death over Gaza. In writing this book, we relied on the work of several research and advocacy organisations, including the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), and the related Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). For two decades, the JKCCS has tirelessly published reports on subjects including mass graves found near the LoC, the militarisation of Hindu pilgrimages, and communication blackouts. Their work is astounding, and it continues under enormous duress; in recent years, its members have been targeted, some held in Indian prisons for years, in pre-trial detention. During the 2019 blackout, journalists working for the Wire, the Caravan and other news sites, were able to file reports; some had to fly out of Kashmir (and thus out of the blackout) to do so. These reports could not be read by many people in Kashmir, but they were so crucial – both in the aftermath and in the stream of time. By way of example, there were large protests against the legal changes on 9 August 2019. Government officials vehemently denied these protests had taken place, insisting that video footage (which leaked out) was fake. By accessing hospital records on pellet-gun injuries, journalists were able to find evidence of the protests, and the state’s response (firing bullets) – and finally, some days later, officials were forced to back down. It felt powerful tracing this process, sometimes hour by hour, in parts of the log. Skye, as you said earlier, the log was an attempt to find some order in the chaos. I think it was also an attempt to push back against the “myth” of the blackout: the idea (useful to oppressors) that it’s an information void which can never be restored. And that’s not true: there are lots of records, but the problem is that they exist in fragments. So part of our task in the aftermath was pulling together these fragments, trawling through newsfeeds, and X accounts, hunting down memos, petitions and amendments. Both of us often turn to the law. Elsewhere, I study and write about criminal trials. You have been writing critically about the Modi government for many years; some of this thinking came together in your book Remember the Details (2021) on protests against citizenship laws, which played out across India in 2019. It was exciting to combine our knowledge and research to write this. We have studied and worked together for many years, including co-editing a magazine. But writing collaboratively was new. I loved the process of passing ideas, and eventually a text, back and forth.

Ufaq Fatima, from the series Fragments of Siege (2019)

SAT We energised each other, drafted and swapped sections, and I think between us devised a special tool for clarifying, streamlining and sharpening language and storytelling. I wrote a couple of pieces in 2019, just as the blackouts became evident, as did the quick changes in the law. The task for me has always been to try and make the news cycle as clear, simple, and readable as possible – a news cycle that has been designed to confuse its viewers. The Modi government, especially, has invented a terrifying set of technologies to do this, which it has refined over its successive years in government. The log is our attempt to reach a kind of distillation, a clear record. We killed our darlings, we whittled language down to the barest set of details and narrative devices. It was also an experiment, I guess, although it did feel like something both of us had been building toward in our writing practices, which then came to this elegant function when we brought the two together. The log is the bare bones, the essay is where we begin to hold the reader’s hand a little more and offer a kind of map, a bird’s eye view.

IS The spirit of collaboration extended to the three photographers we worked with for the book, who we met in Srinagar. Skye, you mentioned Nawal earlier, and we also worked with Ufaq Fatima and Zainab. These three photographers are founders of the state’s first women-led photo collective, called Her Pixel Story. Each contributed a photo essay to the book. Nawal’s images are from a series called Left in Isolation, which includes photographs she took of and around the LoC, documenting people living in the borderlands. Ufaq’s images are from a series called Fragments of Siege (2019), and many were taken during the 2019 blackout. Zainab’s photographs are from an ongoing series, The Weight of Snow on Her Chest (2018 –), many taken in her family home.

SAT The photographers are as much authors of this book as us. In a visual landscape that is dominated by images of outright violence and confrontation, what is so special about them is how they make more gentle images, which are more powerful somehow. They show us how an occupation is not just comprised of moments of exceptional conflict, but of cruelty that presses upon the everyday, inflecting every aspect of daily life. There is a logic of crisis that necessitates the occupation’s presence, as we come to in the book (a sentiment reflected in the subtitle), but beyond that rhetoric of emergency is the evil of the everyday. We need to start having a more sophisticated conversation about visual languages of violence, and how they prepare us for certain cruelties. Over the last eight years, the Indian newsfeed has been almost entirely defined by its proliferation of the violent image; the Indian viewer, in turn, has become addicted to it, and has desensitised. The more violent the image, the more the viewer normalises the violent act. Now, in 2024, this is a global concern. Images from Gaza, almost every day, upturn and redefine our capacity to process and register brutality and violence. When it comes to evidencing the genocide, the burden of proof rests squarely on Palestinians. So now we participate in a skewed political culture where these violent images have become necessary to elicit political action from taxpayers implicated in the bombardment. But it’s a cruel relation; the more we see, the more we consider permissible, the more room is created in the imagination for acts we previously found unimaginable. .

Left, Zainab, from the series The Weight of Snow on Her Chest (2019 – ongoing)