Sidharth Shankar
In the aftermath of the heinous attack on the tourists in Pahalgam, there has been a unanimous demand for the preservation and restoration of tourism in the valley. Atul Kulkarni, a mainstream Bollywood and Marathi actor, made a visit to Pahalgam, made social media posts and shot news interviews there in his bid to urge tourists to not bow down before the threat and keep coming to Kashmir for their vacations. The call he gave came with a proclamation – “Kashmir humara hai!” (Kashmir is ours). And therein lies the rub! Tourism in the valley has long been sold as a way for peace and economic growth. However this has more to it than meets the eyes.
Tourism in Kashmir is deeply political. It is not a barometer of peace; it is a tool of narrative warfare. Kashmir, long subjected to control through military, media, and legislative means, has been sold — quite literally — as a destination, while the people who live there are asked to either put up a performance for the non-Kashmiris’ leisurely pleasures or disappear behind the performance.
Tourism is a system of gazes, permissions, and silences — and in colonized or politically subjugated territories, it becomes a potent weapon. This is not new. Colonial regimes have used tourism for centuries to pacify public perception, assert ownership, and convert land and culture into commodities. In French Algeria, colonial officials created desert circuits for tourists, offering up landscapes cleansed of anti-colonial struggle. In the United States, Native American lands were transformed into “untouched” wilderness zones, expelling Indigenous communities to make way for national parks. In Palestine, Israel has built tourist circuits that actively bypass or erase Palestinian presence — the beaches of Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea resorts in the West Bank — a curated geography that hides occupation behind resort brochures.
Tourism has long been used to sanitise imperialism — a process in which postcolonial states remain dependent on global tourism economies that replicate colonial hierarchies, while rendering local populations passive hosts to the leisure of wealthier outsiders. It is this dependency that often prevents genuine liberation: tourism is not built for equity; it is built for consumption. And what is consumed is not just place, but silence.
This logic has long been applied in Kashmir. As early as the 19th century, the British viewed Kashmir as a retreat. Because British officers were barred from owning land under Dogra rule, they invented the iconic houseboat as a legal loophole — floating property, unrestricted by law. It wasn’t just a tourism innovation. It was spatial colonization. Kashmir was reimagined as a site of imperial leisure, accessible to colonial subjects but alien to its own people.
Post-independence, the Indian state inherited and intensified this framework. Bollywood films of the ’60s and ’70s — Kashmir Ki Kali, Junglee, Jab Jab Phool Khile — cemented the valley in the Indian imagination not as a space of lived complexity, but as a pristine backdrop for heterosexual romance and patriotic fantasy. Kashmiris, if shown at all, were cast as exotic guides or threats to be overcome. The region’s political demands — for autonomy, for self-determination — were scrubbed out of frame. This cinematic erasure served a political purpose: Kashmir was beautiful, hence it was India.
In his interview with Jewish Current, author of the book Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation, Hafsa Kanjwal says “In the 1950s and ’60s, Kashmir started being positioned as India’s most desirable tourist destination. But what does it mean for a colonized territory to be a tourist attraction? It means the colonial power is creating a desire for the place and its people while also defining the place on its own terms. In venues ranging from Indian tourism manuals to Bollywood cinema, Kashmir was shown as a getaway from metropolitan urban life in Delhi or Bombay, as a land of mountains, lakes, houseboats, and so on. Kashmir was where the heroine and the hero went to fall in love in the movies. The constant repetition of such depictions helped Indians identify strongly with and eventually claim Kashmir. It was one of the ways in which Kashmir became what the scholar Ananya Jahanara Kabir calls the “territory of desire.””
The contemporary iteration of tourism in Kashmir is far more engineered. Following the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 — which stripped the region of its semi-autonomous status — the Indian government imposed a communications blackout, jailed political leaders, and flooded the valley with additional military forces. But as the world began questioning the repression, the government launched a new campaign: tourism as image management.
State-backed events like the Tulip Festival in Srinagar were amplified with military precision. Bollywood returned with drone shots and nationalist soundtracks. Influencers were flown in. G20 meetings were staged. In April 2023, pop icon Diljit Dosanjh posted curated reels from Kashmir in traditional attire, smiling in front of manicured gardens. What didn’t make it to the reels: the civilians booked under UAPA for social media posts, or the daily crackdowns in downtown Srinagar, or the clampdown on Kashmir’s media.
This is not benign. This is narrative warfare.
Tourism becomes a mechanism for “normalcy” production. It tells the national audience — and international observers — that all is well. That there is no conflict, only culture. No siege, only saffron. No disenfranchised citizens, only grateful hosts. It creates what scholar Rafiq Ahmad, in his ethnographic study of tourism in Pahalgam (2022), calls a “field of symbolic violence” — where Kashmiris are not merely economically marginalized but structurally silenced. Tour operators, hotel licenses, and regulatory permissions disproportionately benefit outsiders, while locals are often reduced to low-wage labor roles. Tourism is not generating equity. It is reproducing hierarchy.
Ahmad’s findings are not anecdotal. They mirror the larger economic reality of post-2019 Kashmir. While tourism numbers have hit record highs — with over 2 million visitors in 2022 — unemployment in the region has remained among the highest in India. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) reported J&K’s unemployment rate at 23.1% in March 2023 — almost triple the national average. A large-scale land reallocations and investment policy change has taken place post-Article 370 to attract and prioritize non-local investors, often at the cost of local ownership. This exposes the whole charade that the abrogation of Article 370 was done in the interest of Kashmir and Kashmiris.
Moreover, the state’s fixation on tourism eclipses deeper structural needs. While hotel infrastructure booms, basic civil liberties remain under siege. Civil society is muzzled. Journalists are routinely detained. Internet shutdowns continue to be used as a governance tool. In this context, the image of a bustling shikara ride is not progress — it is distraction. Aesthetic beautification replaces political resolution.
What makes tourism in Kashmir especially insidious is that it erases the very existence of resistance. In areas frequented by tourists — Nishat Bagh, Gulmarg, Sonamarg — you rarely encounter political graffiti, dissenting art, or even critical conversation. These spaces are carefully sanitized — by force or fear. Even residents learn to perform cheerfulness. It is a survival strategy. Locals feel compelled to “act welcoming” to avoid suspicion, harassment, or economic loss. The unemployment forces youth to fall back on tourism related work which requires them to set aside their political aspiration for their land and instead be caught up in the efforts to please the outsiders. The tourist gaze, in other words, is both an expectation and a form of soft surveillance.
It has been seen all over the world how indigenous tourism under settler regimes often serves to erase original populations by commodifying their identities, while solidifying outsider claims to space. This is not tourism as collaboration — it is tourism as occupation, rebranded. The region becomes profitable only once it is made politically docile, its people culturally ornamental. Kashmir is a textbook example of this.
What, then, is the function of tourism in Kashmir? It is not economic revival — the data disproves that. It is not cultural exchange — the politics of suppression make that impossible. It is not peacemaking — real peace requires justice, not hashtags. Tourism functions instead as a soft weapon of the state. A visual narrative. A diplomatic cover. A performative sovereignty.
Step outside the curated zones — into downtown Srinagar, Anantnag, or Sopore — and the illusion collapses. There, the conflict is not abstract. It is visible in the military checkpoints, the silences, the absence of economic opportunity. Tourists rarely go there. The state prefers it that way.
India’s insistence on tourism in Kashmir is not about opportunity. It is about optics. It is about international perception, internal propaganda, and territorial control. The tulips are in bloom. The influencers are back. But so is the military. So are the silences. So is the unresolved question of who gets to define what Kashmir is — and who it belongs to.
C. Counter Currents
