Ethics in Crisis: Understanding Moral Dilemma’s in Kashmir’s Political Landscape

Abstract

The relation between morality and violence has been the subject of contentious debate over the last couple of decades. This debate has become more pressing in recent times as political violence has come to mark the lives of people across the globe. This paper uses a specific incident of Pahalgam attack on innocent tourists in Jammu and Kashmir (India) to analyze the moral reactions of the people in the face of colossal loss of lives and how that bears on the dominant moral frames in a political crisis of Kashmir. The paper engages Judith Butler’s concept of frames of war in order to understand the reaction of people in Kashmir in the wake of the Pahalgam attack. It posits that when political unrest leads to large-scale loss of life, like the Pahalgam attack, our deep moral instincts are awakened. This, in turn, destabilizes the interpretive and moral frameworks that usually organize our moral responses in a strife-ridden environment to begin with. The more specific argument this paper makes is that this moral reaction is not just a gut feeling but involves an implicit acknowledgment of the value of other people’s lives. In what follows, we shall explore how this specific moral reaction to the attack implicates the fundamental question of our status as human beings in a society shaped by enduring political strife; and how the rupture caused by the reaction to this tragic attack in the “frames of war” or moral frameworks can throw up possibilities for retrieving our universal moral sense of the recognition of the value of the other people’s lives; and thereby opening the pathways for reimagining politics in complex contexts like Kashmir.