It is not until the second half of Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas’s short book that they reveal the meaning of their titular Pleasure Gardens.

The first half of their text, subtitled Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir and illustrated with photographs by Kashmiri artists Nawal Ali, Ufaq Fatima and Zainab, is a razor-sharp ‘log of fifteen days’ in August 2019, when India’s government fabricated, and thus provoked a crisis on the Pakistani border, which they used to revoke the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir.

The second opens in the mountain city of Srinagar, with its brutally contrasting natural beauty and its army camp, at which soldiers kill themselves, Kashmiri women allege sexual assault, and young Kashmiri men are taken for interrogation before disappearing. This gives context to Scott and Thomas’ intense, matter-of-fact account of the parliament’s repeal of Article 370 — passed in 1949, giving Jammu and Kashmir their own flag, state constitution and internal administration — and outlines Narendra Modi’s subsequent land grab, using techniques and technology borrowed from, and shared with the Israeli government since relations were normalised during the 1990s.

Both parts of Pleasure Gardens provide terrifying insight into how nationalist parties, who are nominally democratic but in practice anything but, use manipulative language and manage the public discourse to push through severe violations of human rights and international law. They learn from each other: Scott and Thomas flesh out Modi and Netanyahu’s meetings, as they became the public face of India and Israel sharing weapons, surveillance technology and settler tactics, with India’s ruling BJP also facilitating ‘Tibet-style populations transfers’ of the Hindu majority who make up their base into the predominately Muslim border territory. The authors focus on the BJP’s communications blackouts in August 2019, as the government warned of mounting local tension, introducing a piecemeal lockdown, not calling their orders for citizens to stay indoors a ‘curfew’ for legal reasons, ordering their soldiers to open fire on ‘stone-pelters’ and telling national and international media that their military was operating in self-defence. The daily diary of this choreographed escalation is chilling: Scott and Thomas never tell you what to think, spelling out the chronology in detail, making connections between the BJP’s military and media management strategies, with carefully chosen quotes from journalists and factfinders undercutting the propaganda.

The few individual stories they include — a boy killed while playing cricket, unaware of the danger due to the blackout, or a mother trying to find her son who disappeared in 1990 — do more than enough to convey the very human costs.

The military strategies, justified by a constant state of emergency, feel akin to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s reaction to the abortive Turkish coup of 2016, and to the IDF’s endless provocation of Palestinians in the West Bank, with their summary executions of children who throw rocks at them in response. The media strategy should be recognisable to readers in the UK, where the maintenance of the neoliberal order has relied on close coordination between legacy media and the rightmost factions of the two main parties, to ensure any voices who meaningfully challenge the status quo are systematically drowned out, while sustaining the illusion of democracy. One of the most shocking things here is the BJP’s rhetoric, in which loaded words are used, amidst the communications blackout, to impose a reality opposite to that which exists. ‘One of the biggest achievements of the state,’ says a governor in Srinagar, ‘has been the empowerment of people through grass-roots democracy,’ after the Article 370 repeal has been rushed through parliament and thousands have been arrested without charge under the Public Safety Act.

Pleasure Gardens is not offering solutions — rather, it is trying to make readers aware of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, and in India more broadly, making implicit and explicit links with various managed democracies to highlight its severity. The only note of consolation is that none of the tourists will be able to enjoy the Indira Gandhi Memorial Tulip Garden built on the mountain border in 2007 ‘without thinking about the thousands of missing bodies’ and ‘the murderous secrets that lie beneath it’ — a point made in Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries about Chile’s sweeping landscapes and the Pinochet regime, as well as by anyone who imagines how the post-genocidal settlements that Israel will likely set up in Gaza might feel. The images of barbed wire in the forest, and of snow shot through with blood, reinforce this point: haunting future generations of settlers is not a Pyrrhic victory, but an after-effect of a horrifying defeat. This short, sharp publication is a useful reminder that we are not at such a point yet, in Jammu and Kashmir or even in Gaza, and that we should not let large-scale misinformation campaigns distract us from the need to resist it.