Designing Occupation: After Pahalgam, an Architect Reflects on Kashmir
Krittika , May30,2025
Like most middle-class Indians, I grew up with a vague discomfort around Kashmir, one that was easy to push aside. In textbooks, it was a “disputed territory.” On Instagram, a backdrop for snowy honeymoons. On the news, always “volatile” or “under control”, but never occupied.
As an architect, I was trained to read space, how design encodes power, how materials signal belonging, how cities are shaped by who is allowed to stay and who is forced to leave. But nowhere in my education did Kashmir appear – not in a lecture, not in a case study, not even in passing
And that, I now realize, is by design.
Kashmir isn’t just politically suppressed. It’s spatially curated, selectively shown and strategically silenced. Every drone shot of the Himalayas. Every tourism ad promises “heaven on earth.” Every photo op from Pahalgam. They’re all part of the same interface: one that sells peace while masking occupation.
After the recent attack near Pahalgam, the Indian state immediately activated its most rehearsed blueprint, reducing the event to religious violence. It’s a narrative that flattens history, erases power structures, and conveniently hides the fact that India is implementing a settler colonial project in Kashmir.
Forensic Architecture describes settler colonialism as a spatial and political process, one in which a state displaces Indigenous populations and replaces them with its own, using tools like law, infrastructure, and architecture to make that displacement feel permanent. Kashmir isn’t a metaphor. It’s a site where this is actively unfolding.
And design is central to it.
At the same time, social media carries on. Photogenic landscapes circulated widely, trekking trails, cafés, snow-capped peaks. These aren’t inherently wrong, but when presented without context, they serve a larger agenda: the normalization of occupation through aesthetic distraction. Tourism has become a soft weapon, and beauty has become a shield.
Our tools – drawing, mapping, they aren’t neutral. They can be used to build homes or hide displacement. They can visualize justice, or quietly deny it.
As architects, we need to be asking: What are we complicit in designing? What systems do we reinforce through silence, aesthetics, or abstraction?
Because if we don’t look closely, we risk mistaking occupation for landscape.
And we become part of the machinery that makes it look normal
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