Advertising as Activism: Exploring an Aesthetics of Debility in Kashmiri Human Rights Campaigns

Civil society collectives such as Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) created digital advertising campaigns to raise awareness internationally about human rights violations caused by coercive occupation in the Kashmir region. Pellet-emitting shotguns were introduced in 2010 as a non-lethal method of controlling aazadi (autonomy in Urdu) seeking Kashmiris, and were used with renewed vigour since 2016, resulting in disabling injuries to civilians. Protestors gathering peacefully to resist the Indian administration's militarization of Kashmir and other ordinary citizens acquired injuries that made them visually impaired or facially disfigured. Activism via digital advertising campaigns enabled civil society groups to notify the world beyond the Kashmir region of the human rights violations and to demand justice in the form of international condemnation of the militarization. The article reads the imagery of blindness and sight that dominated two such campaigns, #KashmirBlindSpot (JKCCS) and #IndiaCan'tSee (Never Forget Pakistan), as inaugurating an aesthetics of debility (Puar). Two constituent aspects of debility aesthetics emerge through the analysis: the use of disability metaphors to raise awareness about injustice is inextricably related to contextual conditions of disablement. The second feature is that the aesthetics of such advertisements expose the problem of enforcing impairment as punishment for seeking emancipation from state control.