Designing a Modern Interactive Website
In August 2019, the Indian government revoked article 370 of the Indian constitution, which granted a special status to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. What followed was heavy militarisation of the state, internet shutdowns, arbitrary arrests and a humanitarian crisis that continues to escalate to date. The Kashmir conflict is as old as India’s independence. It’s an ongoing 75-year-long fight for autonomy and self-governance. The Kashmiri people view Kashmir as a nationality of its own and do not identify as Indians. The conflict began 2 months after India’s independence when Kashmir was invaded by armed tribesmen from Pakistan, later joined by the Pakistani army. In return for protection and support and on the promise of a referendum, the Kashmiri Maharaja decided to join the Republic of India. This is when article 370 was added to the Indian constitution, which guaranteed the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. However, the promised referendum never happened and an armed revolt has been waged in the region against the autocratic rule of the Indian state ever since. Today, Kashmir is dubbed as one of the most militarized places in the world (Outlook web desk, 2022). Since 1989, human rights violations by Indian security forces in Kashmir have escalated dramatically and the condition today is worse than it has ever been.
This project aims to capture the timeline of the Kashmir conflict and highlights the key events in its struggle for autonomy. The project involved the development of a modern website to adapt this timeline as an online interactive news report. This website is intended to be a starting point for anyone who wishes to understand the series of events that have led to its present state.
The website follows the structure of a timeline, chronologically tracing the conflict in Kashmir in a scrollytelling format. Since most websites are scanned and not read, the website is not very text heavy, instead, it relies on visuals like maps, hand-drawn illustrations, photo collages and infographics to convey the story and make it visually engaging. The visual style of the website is modern and contemporary to create a browsable visual feast.
This website is a layman’s guide to understanding the Kashmir conflict, with the opportunity to deep-dive into their chosen time frame and incidents by using the external resources embedded in the website. The website is a visually rich representation of the Kashmir issue to provide the audience with the ‘insider’s view’ and enables them to experience what it would have been like to be a Kashmiri resident in the midst of political instability and insurgency.
