The Indian government, touted as the world's largest democracy, often repeats that Jammu and Kashmir—its only Muslim-majority state—is "an integral part of India." The region, which is disputed between India and Pakistan, and is considered the world's most militarized zone, has been occupied by India for over seventy-five years. In this book, Hafsa Kanjwal interrogates how Kashmir was made "integral" to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi's state-building policies in the context of India's colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir's Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India's occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India's state-formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.

The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and transregional perspective on the Kashmir dispute. Spanning South and Central Asia, Kashmir has been at the center of geopolitical conflicts and rivalries among India, Pakistan and China for decades, with members of heterogeneous local communities negotiating the complexities of regional state formations, national power assertions and geopolitical competitions. Taken together, the chapters in this handbook examine diverse people’s struggles to establish processes of democratic accountability in relation to the colonial-era state consolidations, postcolonial military occupations, interstate wars, intrastate armed conflicts and cold war and post-cold war politics that have shaped and transformed social and political identities in the region. Contributors chart out varied and bold new directions by attending to local constellations of situated knowledges and practices through which people living in different parts of the disputed region make sense of the conditions and contingencies of their political lives. The handbook further initiates a dialogue on the ways in which state power and border regimes have shaped scholarship and undermined the pursuit of shared intellectual and political projects across physical and epistemological boundaries.

India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, left behind a legacy of both great achievements and surprising defeats. Most notably, he failed to resolve the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and the territorial conflict with China. In the fifty years since Nehru's death, much ink has been spilled trying to understand the decisions behind these puzzling foreign policy missteps. Mahesh Shankar cuts through the surrounding debates about nationalism, idealism, power, and security with a compelling and novel answer: reputation. India's investment in its international image powerfully shaped the state's negotiation and bargaining tactics during this period. The Reputational Imperative proves that reputation is not only a significant driver in these conflicts but also that it's about more than simply looking good on the global stage. Considerations such as India's relative position of strength or weakness and the value of demonstrating resolve or generosity also influenced strategy and foreign policy. Shankar answers longstanding questions about Nehru's territorial negotiations while also providing a deeper understanding of how a state's global image works. The Reputational Imperative highlights the pivotal—yet often overlooked—role reputation can play in a broad global security context.

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.

During the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, Kashmir--a Muslim-majority area ruled by a Hindu maharaja--became a hotly disputed territory. Divided between India and Pakistan, the region has been the focus of international wars and the theater of political and military struggles for self-determination. The result has been great human suffering within the state, with political implications extending globally. Imagining Kashmir examines cinematic and literary imaginings of the Kashmir region's conflicts and diverse citizenship, analyzing a wide range of narratives from writers and directors such as Salman Rushdie, Bharat Wakhlu, Mani Ratnam, and Mirza Waheed in conjunction with research in psychology, cognitive science, and social neuroscience. In this innovative study, Patrick Colm Hogan's historical and cultural analysis of Kashmir advances theories of narrative, colonialism, and their corresponding ideologies in relation to the cognitive and affective operations of identity. Hogan considers how narrative organizes people's understanding of, and emotions about, real political situations and the ways in which such situations in turn influence cultural narratives, not only in Kashmir but around the world.

Disputed between India and Pakistan, Kashmir contains a large majority of Muslims subject to the laws of a predominantly Hindu and increasingly "Hinduized" India. How did religion and politics become so enmeshed in defining the protest of Kashmir's Muslims against Hindu rule? This book reaches beyond standard accounts that look to the 1947 partition of India for an explanation. Examining the 100-year period before that landmark event, during which Kashmir was ruled by Hindu Dogra kings under the aegis of the British, Mridu Rai highlights the collusion that shaped a decisively Hindu sovereignty over a subject Muslim populace. Focusing on authority, sovereignty, legitimacy, and community rights, she explains how Kashmir's modern Muslim identity emerged. Rai shows how the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was formed as the East India Company marched into India beginning in the late eighteenth century. After the 1857 rebellion, outright annexation was abandoned as the British Crown took over and princes were incorporated into the imperial framework as junior partners. But, Rai argues, scholarship on other regions of India has led to misconceptions about colonialism, not least that a "hollowing of the crown" occurred throughout as Brahman came to dominate over King. In Kashmir the Dogra kings maintained firm control. They rode roughshod over the interests of the vast majority of their Kashmiri Muslim subjects, planting the seeds of a political movement that remains in thrall to a religiosity thrust upon it for the past 150 years.

Resisting Occupation in Kashmir considers the social and legal dimensions of India's occupation of Kashmir and the ways in which Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region's history of armed rebellion to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century.