In March 2017, the Indian government decided to “fast-track” hydropower pro- jects worth $15 billion on the rivers of the Indus basin in Kashmir, a territory splintered between India, Pakistan, and China and claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan. 1 The six rivers of the Indus River basin were also divided after India’s partition in 1960 through the Indus Water Treaty, a World Bank- brokered water distribution arrangement that allocated the waters of the Eastern rivers (Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas) to India and those of the Western rivers (Chenab, Jhelum, and the Indus mainstream) to Pakistan. Almost a year before the Indian government’s decision to expedite dam building in Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had threatened Pakistan of unilaterally revoking the Indus Water Treaty after 19 Indian soldiers were killed in the border town of Uri, in an attack India blamed on Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir. Until this attack, dams in India were mostly presented as temples of modernity, as “instruments of democratiza- tion,” or as the country’s sustainable mantra to energy sufciency (Marino 2012). After the Uri attack, dams and the waters of the Indus basin became part of Nar- endra Modi’s new instruments of foreign policy vis-à-vis Pakistan and India’s “diplomatic weapon” 2 to retaliate against a recalcitrant neighbor. To claim waters of the Indus River basin, to use “each drop of water” that belonged to Indians as Modi announced in one of his 2016 speeches, reinforced his government’s bel- ligerent approach toward Pakistan. At the same time, for Modi, strengthening India’s control over Kashmir’s rivers meant sealing Kashmir’s fate as an integral part of India. Although the frenzied construction of dams in Kashmir is by no means new, Modi’s BJP government has shown an “unyielding allegiance to running water” since it assumed power in 2014 (Schneider 2015). Underlying the repeated claims to harness 20,000 MW of untapped energy from Kashmir’s rivers to serve a power-starved country and boost industry and economic growth in Kashmir was the belief that infrastructural development could become a sustained tool to coun- ter anti-India sentiments in Kashmir (Bhan 2014). 3 During his 2014 visit to Kash- mir, Modi called infrastructure, the “mother of development.” 4 In his April 2017 speech to celebrate India’s longest road tunnel connecting Jammu with Kashmir, he foregrounded the “power of stones,” chastising youth who used them as weap- ons against the Indian military, while praising those who used them to build roads 6 Infrastructures of occupation Mobility, immobility, and the politics of integration in Kashmir Mona Bhan