By Haris Qadeer, former JKNSF Central Spokesperson
This article was first published in Jeddojehad.
From ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome to the slave economies established across the Atlantic, slavery stands among the darkest chapters of human history. Enslaved people were not merely a source of labor, but the very foundation upon which wealth, power, and political authority were built. Yet one of the least discussed features of slavery is that slaves themselves were often used to control other slaves.
From the slave societies of the ancient Mediterranean to the plantations of the New World, systems of control were built into slavery itself. In the United States, beneath the white overseer stood slave drivers, headmen, and foremen, positions often held by enslaved people. Their task was to drive other slaves to work, keep order, prevent escapes and revolts, and help carry out punishment whenever necessary.
In return, they received small privileges such as better food, better living quarters, or relief from the hardest physical labor. Those modest rewards were often enough to make them oppress people who shared their own condition. Many became harsher than their masters, eager to prove where their loyalty lay.
That loyalty, however, had its limits. Whenever these privileged slaves failed to keep order or fell short of their masters’ expectations, the slaveholders took up the whip themselves. Rebellious slaves were publicly subjected to brutal punishment before the foremen, reminding them who truly held power. Those who had begun to think of themselves as close to, or even equal with, their masters were quickly put back in their place. The price of disobedience could be flogging, sale, a lifetime of hard labor, or death.
Over time, slavery changed its outward form. With the rise of feudalism and later capitalism, the traditional institutions of slavery gradually weakened, but the logic of power and capital did not disappear. Driven by the search for new markets, raw materials, and strategic advantage, the imperial powers replaced direct slavery with colonial rule.
Behind the lofty language of democracy, civilization, progress, human rights, and reform, vast stretches of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia were turned into colonies. The French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires all followed the same rule, a small foreign power could govern millions only by drawing sections of the local elite into its system of power, privilege, and status.
The British Raj was among the clearest examples. British rule did not rest on a few thousand British soldiers or civil servants alone. It rested on the millions of locally recruited soldiers, police officers, bureaucrats, landlords, princely rulers, and loyal elites who administered the country in return for protecting the interests of the Crown. A small imperial power ruled hundreds of millions because it created classes within the colonized society whose interests became tied to imperial rule rather than to the people among whom they lived.
This is where history becomes a mirror of the present. In Jammu and Kashmir, the same relationship between power, loyalty, and privilege survives in different forms to this day. Under ordinary circumstances, these ties remain hidden behind the formal machinery of the state. But when the state turns to open force, the veil begins to lift. The events that unfolded after June 2026 exposed this reality once again. The real centers of power stepped into the open, while the politically and administratively privileged classes appeared largely as silent spectators, willing helpers, or eager defenders of what was taking place.
A large part of the mainstream media also took up the task of carrying the state’s message. Those who spoke out were routinely branded traitors, troublemakers, or blasphemers. At the same time, much of the privileged class came to see silence, or outright support for the authorities, as the safest way to protect its own standing.
The display of force in the streets is intended not only to subdue bodies but also to discipline minds. People are encouraged to believe that their rights are gifts granted by authority rather than rights they possess by birth. Stopping people at checkpoints, subjecting them to searches, humiliating them in public, and using fear to enforce silence all form part of this political psychology.
Some of these privileged representatives now speak to their own people with visible embarrassment, urging patience, silence, and obedience. A much larger number, however, remain occupied with strengthening their own standing through demonstrations of loyalty. Compiling lists of “offenders,” proving their usefulness to those in power, and helping to punish their own people appear to them as investments in future privilege.
History has never abandoned one fundamental rule. Every age of power comes to an end, and every system of repression eventually creates its own witnesses against it. This dark night, too, will one day pass. Those who today administer privilege may once again return to air-conditioned offices, occupy positions of authority, and, for a while, imagine themselves rulers. Yet they may never again be able to meet the eyes of the young people who, in the earliest years of their lives, watched them bow before the power imposed upon their own society, defend its actions, and prove their loyalty to it.
The memory of those who wield power may be short, but the collective memory of the subjugated people is remarkably long. Time’s greatest tragedy is not simply that it changes, it is that it strips away disguises and reveals people for who they truly are and when history turns once more, today’s foremen may still hold the whip in their hands, but the fear that once gave that whip its power may no longer remain.