Memory as State Capacity: Terror Victims, Institutional Forgetting, and Democratic Endurance in Jammu and Kashmir

Irshad Ahmad Bhat (Research Scholar, Politics and Governance)

Institutional memory is a fundamental although frequently under-theorized element of state capacity especially in countries characterised by enduring conflict. Institutional memory is more than just a way to store information; it represents the state\’s moral continuity -the ability to remember crises, honour sacrifice, and stay legitimate even when things go wrong. In violence -affected regions, the politics of memory acquire heightened salience, as an act of remembrance becomes inseparable from questions of justice, authority, and democratic endurance. The rise of armed militancy in Jammu & Kashmir in the early 1990s exemplifies the fragmentation of institutional memory resulting from violence and highlights the marginalisation of terror victims\’ families, revealing critical shortcomings in governance, political culture, and ethical accountability.

The rise of militancy after 1989 was not only a breakdown of law and order, but it was also a major political problem. Violence was both a way to force people to do things and a way to communicate that was meant to weaken the power of the Constitution and upset the normal workings of democratic institutions.

 Scholars of political violence emphasize that insurgent strategies frequently target intermediaries between state and society—local political workers, elected representatives, civil servants, educators, and journalists because they embody the symbolic presence of the state at the grassroots (Kalyvas 2006). In J&K, this pattern was acutely visible. Participation in elections, association with mainstream political parties, or even the continuation of routine public service became acts fraught with lethal risk.

Within such an environment, loyalty to the constitutional order was not an abstract ideological stance but an existential commitment. Yet, despite the scale of civilian and political victimization, institutional mechanisms in J&K remained uneven in their ability to preserve the memory of those who stood by the state during its most fragile phase. This disconnect highlights a key distinction in memory studies between lived experience and institutionalized remembrance.

This divergence shows a big difference between remembering things that happened and remembering things that are part of an institution. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) famously said that memory is shaped by society. Without institutional support, memories of individuals and families have a hard time surviving outside of their surrounding communities. In J&K, the pain of families of terror victims was still very real at the personal and community levels, but it rarely became a permanent part of institutional memory. In J&K, while the suffering of terror victim families persisted vividly at the private and communal level, it rarely translated into durable institutional memory. Jan Assmann’s (2011) conceptual separation between communicative memory and cultural memory is particularly instructive in this context. Communicative memory, rooted in oral transmission and lived experience has a limited temporal horizon, typically spanning three to four generations. In contrast, cultural memory needs to be formally recorded by government institutions, laws, public memorials, and school stories. In J&K, the dominance of communicative memory without a systematic rise to cultural memory led to a progressive loss of public recognition for terror victims. With families afflicted by militant violence became footnotes in public discourse, legislative priorities, and the collective imagination.

This erosion was not incidental but rather systematically generated. During the 1990s and early 2000s, governance in J&K was predominantly focused on security, influenced by the necessities of counter-insurgency, territorial integrity and political stabilisation. Although these aims were certainly inevitable, they fostered a technical perspective on violence in which human casualties were subsumed into administrative classifications rather than ethically emphasised and this was more induced by political vocabulary. Hannah Arendt\’s (1963) observations on bureaucratic rationality are pertinent: when violence is managed mostly through administrative frameworks, moral evaluation may be supplanted by procedural regularity. Terror victims became files, not moral subjects.

An additional and critical dimension of institutional forgetting in J&K lies in the evolution of our mainstream political culture. Mainstream regional political parties that governed the region at various points since the 1990s operated under extraordinary constraints, including persistent political crisis and fragmented public opinion. These parties experienced catastrophic losses, with thousands of their grassroots operatives dead due to militant violence. Paradoxically, the overarching political techniques employed during this period frequently led to a reduction in the visibility of those sacrifices.

Political sociology literature suggests that actors operating in violent contexts frequently adopt adaptive strategies aimed at minimizing further destabilization (Mamdani 2001). In J&K, this adaptation sometimes showed itself as vague language about militancy, selective silences about political executions, and a lack of willingness to make strong stories of suffering that were clearly linked to militant violence. At times, political incentives aligned toward appeasing or accommodating radicalized political sentiments within society, even when such ecosystems had historically targeted mainstream political workers themselves. This was not necessarily a deliberate endorsement of violence but a form of pragmatic politics shaped by fear, electoral calculation, and survival. However, the accumulative effect of this political culture was ethically corrosive. Paul Ricoeur (2004) cautions against what he refers to as “institutionalized forgetting,” in which silence is normalised and memory is selectively curated to fulfil contemporary political requirements.

The reluctance to consistently illustrate the suffering of terror victims particularly political workers, has resulted in a distorted moral economy. Violence perpetrated by militant groups was often contextualised within broader political themes, with the commitment and sacrifice of victims insufficiently recognised in institutional narratives.

This disparity has major effects. Transitional justice posits that appreciation is not merely symbolic but vital for dignity and public trust (Teitel 2000). When institutions don\’t recognise people who supported democratic processes in the face of horror, they unintentionally weaken the moral basis of participation.  In J&K, the invisibilization of relatives of terror victims led to what scholars call secondary victimisation which is harm caused not only by the perpetrators, but also by the silence or indifference of institutions that are supposed to protect and remember. Relief and compensation systems, when they exist, often made this problem worse. These processes were often short-lived, bureaucratic, and focused only on money which made it hard for people to recognise them in a meaningful way. Paying someone without remembering them might turn sacrifice into a simple transaction, which would take away its moral value. Over time, this subsequently contributed to the social marginalization of victim families, who found themselves excluded from both political discourse and developmental narratives.

The era following 2019 marks a substantial institutional realignment in this context. The formulation of a Terror Victim Policy by the Office of the Lieutenant Governor signifies a deliberate effort to recover repressed memory and rectify enduring deficiencies in acknowledgement. The policy indicates a transition from discretionary welfare methods to a rights-based and memory-aware framework. By officially recognising terror victims as a separate category of institutional focus, the state aims to incorporate their experiences into the ethical framework of government. This intervention might be seen as an attempt to convert tenuous communication memories into consolidated cultural memory. Documentation, verification, and official acknowledgment function as mechanisms that insulate remembrance from political fluctuation. In doing so, the policy challenges decades of institutional amnesia and political hesitation. It is important because it fixes a historical imbalance in which political pragmatism often got in the way of ethical governmental duties. However, advanced study tells us that policy alone cannot keep institutional memory alive. Paul Connerton says that memory lasts through things we do over and over again, such rituals, school, stories told in public and administrative tasks.For J&K, this implies that terror victim recognition must extend beyond compensation files into school curricula, public memorialization, and sustained civic discourse. Without such integration, the risk of symbolic recognition without structural transformation remains.The experience of J&K thus offers a broader policy insight into the relationship between memory and democratic resilience. Conflict governance that prioritizes stability while neglecting remembrance produces what may be termed administratively managed peace—order without moral closure. Durable legitimacy, by contrast, requires ethical continuity, sustained through institutional memory that honors sacrifice and acknowledges loss.

The disappearance of terror victim families from public memory   vindicates a complex convergence of security governance, political adaptation, and institutional inertia. Mainstream political culture, shaped by fear and pragmatism, inadvertently contributed to this invisibilization, even as it suffered immensely from militant violence itself. This year\’s policy measures are a huge start towards addressing this mistake from the past. They make sure that memory is a basic duty of the state. To be useful to the state, institutions must act in a responsible way through principled institutional agency. LG\’s involvement in the terror victim policy is more than just standard welfare or compensation initiatives. It is a strategic way of remembering that is aimed to fight systemic forgetfulness. The plan looks at a wider \”terror ecosystem\” that includes discursive practices, political socialisation, and legitimising stories that have historically left out and shamed people who are related to the state. By making recognition a part of the system, the state breaks down systems of symbolic violence and moral exclusion, restores normative legitimacy, and reaffirms its duty to protect and remember individuals who were harmed for their loyalty. This means that the power and ethical oversight of institutions will be changed a lot. The case in Jammu and Kashmir strengthens a basic point: institutional memory is not only a nice thing to have; it is necessary for societies that are trying to get over violence. When states recall correctly, democratic legitimacy acquires moral meaning; when they forget, peace stays unachieved.

References:

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.

Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1950)

Kalyvas, S. N. (2006). The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Government of Jammu and Kashmir. (Various years). Relief, Rehabilitation and Compensation Policies for Victims of Militancy. Srinagar: Home Department, J&K Government.

Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. (Annual). Annual Report. New Delhi: MHA.