HOW TO SUSTAIN A STRIKE: Rules, Routines, and the Essential in Kashmir

Abstract

This article examines the 2016–2017 general strike (hartal or bandh) in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the site of a nearly eighty-year struggle for self-determination. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2018) conducted in the capital city of Srinagar amid and in the aftermath of the indefinite strike, I show how the strike and the suspension of daily life it entailed was sustained through novel spatiotemporal techniques that coordinated and routinized the actions of the Kashmiri public. Yet sustaining the strike was not only defined by routine and self-restraint. Instead, as the article demonstrates, certain forms of financial labor, too, prolonged the strike—but they did so, counterintuitively, by breaking it. I focus in particular on Kashmiri bank employees, who were at times seen as betraying the strike, but who described their continued work during strike hours as essential for keeping the economy and hence society running. By emphasizing bank employees' liminal position of breaking the strike while supporting the cause of Kashmiri self-determination, I highlight the labor, sacrifice, and ambivalence that sustain—and threaten to unravel—political mobilizations.