Kashmir

Kashmir
Author: Sumantra Bose
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674028555

In 2002, nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan mobilized for war over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, sparking panic around the world. Drawing on extensive firsthand experience in the contested region, Sumantra Bose reveals how the conflict became a grave threat to South Asia and the world and suggests feasible steps toward peace. Though the roots of conflict lie in the end of empire and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the contemporary problem owes more to subsequent developments, particularly the severe authoritarianism of Indian rule. Deadly dimensions have been added since 1990 with the rise of a Kashmiri independence movement and guerrilla war waged by Islamist groups. Bose explains the intricate mix of regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities that populate Kashmir, and emphasizes that a viable framework for peace must take into account the sovereignty concerns of India and Pakistan and popular aspirations to self-rule as well as conflicting loyalties within Kashmir. He calls for the establishment of inclusive, representative political structures in Indian Kashmir, and cross-border links between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. Bose also invokes compelling comparisons to other cases, particularly the peace-building framework in Northern Ireland, which offers important lessons for a settlement in Kashmir. The Western world has not fully appreciated the desperate tragedy of Kashmir: between 1989 and 2003 violence claimed up to 80,000 lives. Informative, balanced, and accessible, Kashmir is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand one of the world's most dangerous conflicts.

Kashmir at the Crossroads

Kashmir at the Crossroads
Author: Sumantra Bose
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300256876

An authoritative, fresh, and vividly written account of the Kashmir conflict--from 1947 to the present The India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir is one of the world's incendiary conflicts. Since 1990, at least 60,000 people have been killed--insurgents, civilians, and military and police personnel. In 2019, the conflict entered a dangerous new phase. India's Hindu nationalist government, under Narendra Modi, repealed Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir's autonomous status and divided it into two territories subject to New Delhi's direct rule. The drastic move was accompanied by mass arrests and lengthy suspension of mobile and internet services. In this definitive account, Sumantra Bose examines the conflict in Kashmir from its origins to the present volatile juncture. He explores the global context of the current situation, including China's growing role, as well as the human tragedy of the people caught in the bitter dispute. Drawing on three decades of field experience in Kashmir, Bose asks whether a compromise settlement is still possible given the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India and the complex geopolitical context.

Of Gardens and Graves

Of Gardens and Graves
Author: Suvir Kaul
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2017-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822373505

In Of Gardens and Graves Suvir Kaul examines the disruption of everyday life in Kashmir in the years following the region's pervasive militarization in 1990. Kaul's autobiographical and analytical essays, which were prompted by his yearly visits to Kashmir, are a combination of political analysis, literary criticism, memoir, and journalistic observation. In them he explores Kashmir's pre- and post-Partition history, the effects of militarization, state repression, the suspension of civil rights on Kashmiris, and the challenge Kashmir represents to the practice of democracy in India. The volume also features translations of Kashmiri poetry written in these years of conflict. These poems constitute an archive of heightened feelings and desires that affectively interrogate official accounts of Kashmir while telling us much about those who face extraordinary political turbulence and violence. Of Gardens and Graves also contains a photo essay by Javed Dar, whose photographs work together with Kaul's essays and the poems to represent the interweaving of ordinary life, civic strife, and spectacular violence in Kashmir.

Internal Displacement and Conflict

Internal Displacement and Conflict
Author: Sudha Rajput
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429764626

Grounded in multidisciplinary research, this book presents a methodical understanding of those displaced within their national borders, the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The IDP phenomenon remains less understood than that of refugees due to the "internal" nature of the crisis, linked to a nation’s sovereignty, which assigns the responsibility for care to the national actors as opposed to an international body. However, the IDP phenomenon poses an international humanitarian challenge, with upwards of 40 million people currently in internal displacement across the globe. This book helps answer the most perplexing questions surrounding conflict-induced protracted displacements: namely, how do positions embraced by key actors inform/influence IDP policies, and why, despite the promise of robust return packages, do families remain reluctant to return to home communities and equally reluctant to embrace new host communities? Capitalizing on the diagnostic tool kit known as Dugan’s Nested Model, uniquely adapted to the Kashmiri Pandit displacement, this book also analyzes issues of the similarly displaced communities of Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Kosovo, and Darfur regions. This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, humanitarianism, Asian politics, and International Law in general.

The Exiled Pandits of Kashmir

The Exiled Pandits of Kashmir
Author: Bill K. Koul
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-09-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9811565376

This book discusses all the questions related to Kashmiri Pandits and their relation and current issues regarding their return to Kashmir. The book explores the importance of return of Kashmiri Pandits for Kashmir and both major Kashmiri communities, especially those who really want to return home, out of their own volition and for all right reasons. The book shows how to bring about a reasonable and realistic degree of practical and sustainable reconciliation between the two communities, whilst trying to make them stand in each other’s shoes, understand each other’s perspective and pain and then self-introspect sincerely, so that a bridge of mutual trust and acceptance is rebuilt between the two communities, which can then allow those Pandits who genuinely want to return cross over and be home.

Kashmir

Kashmir
Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2019-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190990465

Since 1947-48, when India and Pakistan fought their first war over Kashmir, it has been reduced to an endlessly disputed territory. As a result, the people of this region and its rich history are often forgotten. This short introduction untangles the complex issue of Kashmir to help readers understand not just its past, present, and future, but also the sources of the existing misconceptions about it. In lucidly written prose, the author presents a range of ways in which Kashmir has been imagined by its inhabitants and outsiders over the centuries—a sacred space, homeland, nation, secular symbol, and a zone of conflict. Kashmir thus emerges in this account as a geographic entity as well as a composite of multiple ideas and shifting boundaries that were produced in specific historical and political contexts.

Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir

Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir
Author: Amya Agarwal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2022-07-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786612402

What is the significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict? Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, this book explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women’s agency through its engagement with the construction, performance, and interplay of masculinities in the conflict. Combining existing elements of both feminist research and critical scholarship on men and masculinities, the book highlights the significance of foregrounding the interplay of men’s identities in conflicts to understand agency in a meaningful way. Through the focus on the simultaneous play of multiple masculinities, the book also questions the oversimplified and monolithic usage of masculinity being associated only with violence in conflicts. The empirical data in the book includes interviews and narratives of multiple stakeholders belonging to diverse vantage points in the Kashmir conflict. Some of these include activists, widows, wives of the disappeared, ex-militants, surrendered militants, participants of the stone-pelting movement, mothers of sons killed in the conflict, women representatives of the village Halqa Panchayats, and army personnel. The book also draws from alternative material in the form of graffiti, folk songs, poetry on graves, and slogans. Through anecdotal reminiscence, the author reflects on the challenges of field research in Kashmir that served as an opportunity for self-contemplation.

The Night of Broken Glass

The Night of Broken Glass
Author: Feroz Rather
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9352641620

Over the last three decades, Kashmir has been ravaged by insurgency. While reams have been written on it - in human rights documents, academic theses, non-fiction accounts of the turmoil, and government and military reports - the effects of the violence on its inhabitants have rarely been rendered in fiction. Feroz Rather's The Night of Broken Glass corrects that anomaly. Through a series of interconnected stories, within which the same characters move in and out, the author weaves a tapestry of the horror Kashmir has come to represent. His visceral imagery explores the psychological impact of the turmoil on its natives - Showkat, who is made to wipe off graffiti on the wall of his shop with his tongue; Rosy, a progressive, jeans-wearing 'upper-caste' girl who is in love with 'lower-caste' Jamshid; Jamshid's father Gulam, a cobbler by profession who never finds his son's bullet-riddled body; the ineffectual Nadim 'Pasture', who proclaims himself a full-fledged rebel; even the barbaric and tyrannical Major S, who has to contend with his own nightmares. Grappling with a society brutalized by the oppression of the state, and fissured by the tensions of caste and gender, Feroz Rather's remarkable debut is as much a paean to the beauty of Kashmir and the courage of its people as it is a dirge to a paradise lost.

Danger in Kashmir

Danger in Kashmir
Author: Josef Korbel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400875234

An excellent presentation of the many complex factors which stem from the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. The author as the original Czech member of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan, brings to his narrative first-hand experience. Originally published in 1954. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Limits of Influence

The Limits of Influence
Author: Howard B. Schaffer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2009-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815703708

This is the first systematic history of U.S. efforts to help forge a settlement between India and Pakistan on the "Kashmir question." Former ambassador Howard B. Schaffer draws on interviews with senior American officials, historical research, and his decades of experience in South Asia to explain and evaluate three generations of U.S. activities and policies toward the volatile region. The Limits of Influence chronicles America's views on—and involvement in—the long-standing struggle waged between India and Pakistan over Kashmir since their independence in 1947. He brings the discussion up to the current day, concluding with recommendations on the role Washington might usefully play in resolving the long-simmering dispute, thus reducing the dangerous tensions between two nuclear-armed archrivals in a region of great importance. His book is a fascinating piece of diplomatic history as well as an instructive look at the present and future of the Kashmir dilemma and its impact on vital U.S. concerns. "Indian and Pakistani positions on the terms of a settlement have grown closer over the past few years. A quiet shove by Washington may be more likely than before to help push the two governments over the elusive finish line they have never been able to cross on their own. And the critical part Pakistan plays in the war on terrorism has added to the importance of a Kashmir settlement to major American interests in South Asia and beyond...." —From the Introduction