Kashmiri life is expendable for the Indian state. While the love for the land is close to national imaginaries, the people have been subjected to decades of abuse and violence, and infringement of their basic human rights. In this book, Hafsa Kanjwal delves into the history of Kashmir, tracing the role of two pivotal political figures – Sheikh Abdullah (1947–1953) and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad (1953–1963) – and their relationship with the Indian project of state-building in Kashmir. The author characterizes this as the ‘politics of life’ (9), where the Indian government and client regimes in Kashmir have normalized occupation with the propagation of ‘development, empowerment and progress’ along with bureaucratic integration and the forging of affective intimate relationships with the people of the state. However, the politics of life and appeals to emotions did not mean that there was an absence of coercive measures used by the Indian state to shape conforming and confronting subjectivities.