KashmirConnected - Publications, News

J&K's elections and their historical context

9/1/2024

The coming assembly elections in what is now the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir have prompted several excellent pieces with a keen awareness of the history of electoral politics in the Valley.

Rekha Chowdhary has written in the Kashmir Times on Jamaat-e-Islami's decision to field independent candidates

Luv Puri has written in The Hindu of how the past is shaping the current elections.

Sameer Arshad Khatlani explains in The Pluralist why he believes the history of the National Conference may give the party the edge in the Valley.

And Bashaarat Masood, in the Indian Express, looks at the significance of Ghulam Nabi Azad's decision to neither contest nor campaign.

Kashmiri poet Nadim features in India's budget speech

2/1/2020

The budget speech on 1st February by India's finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, attracted comment for a number of reasons. It's gone down as the longest ever budget speech - 2 hours and 41 minutes. And it included a snatch of verse in Kashmiri! Take a look -

The poet, as the finance minister acknowledges, was Dina Nath Kaul, more generally known as 'Nadim'. What Nirmala Sitharaman probably didn't realise is that when Nadim was writing of his 'pyara watan' or beloved homeland, that homeland was Kashmir not India. In the 1940s, Nadim was a leftist and an ally of Sheikh Abdullah, and one of his most renowned poems was a tribute to Sheikh Abdullah on his release from the maharajah's jail.

At the time of the budget speech, Sheikh Abdullah's son and grandson - both former chief ministers of Jammu & Kashmir and one of them the duly elected MP for Srinagar - have been under detention for six months.

LATER: It's been suggested that the Nadim poem from which the finance minister quoted was written in the 1950s for Republic Day, in which case the 'watan' in the poet's mind could have been India rather than Kashmir.

27 October 1947

10/27/2019

Indian troops landing at the airstrip at Srinagar

On the anniversary of the beginning of the airlift of Indian troops to Srinagar - an operation which began at first light on October 27, 1947 - here are links to first-hand accounts of the events of that time.

The poet Rafiq Kathwari has posted fascinating extracts from his father's diary of those days - his father was in Srinagar and a supporter of accession to Pakistan:
https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/11/pages-from-my-fathers-diary.html

Rafiq Kathwari's father was Khawja Gulam Mohammed Kathwari - another extract from the diary that has been posted recounts the scene in Srinagar on 14 August 1947, when Pakistan celebrated its independence:
https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/08/on-the-66th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-pakistan-pages-from-my-fathers-diary.html

Kashmir Life tells the story of a clash at the village of Gogo close to Srinagar airport as the airlift of Indian soldiers was getting underway:
https://kashmirlife.net/1947first-blood-issue-33-vol-07-88609/

And below we're posting the audio of interviews which touch on the events of 27 October 1947

Child Soldiers in Kashmir

1/23/2019

Khalid Shah has written a well researched and argued article 'Children as combatants and the failure of state and society: the case of the Kashmir conflict' - here's the link. It's been posted by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. Here's the abstract:

At the forefront of the new militancy in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) are children. This brief builds on a United Nations (UN) 2018 report highlighting the recruitment of juveniles by militant groups in Kashmir, and explores the issue using data and case studies. The brief discusses the factors and conditions that encourage minors in J&K to join such groups, in the context of the weaknesses of the existing juvenile justice system in the country and the excesses employed by security forces.

'Silent Narrative' - bringing Kashmir to CP

1/21/2019

Public History Review, based in Australia, has published an article entitled 'Silent Narrative' by Rishabh Bajoria - an account of a project designed to influence perceptions in Delhi of the Kashmir conflict. Here's the link - and I am posting below an abstract of the article:

In this article, I describe my public history project seeking to transform a street in Connaught Place, New Delhi, into a militarised Srinagar marketplace. Through this phenomenological project, I aim to make Hindu, middle- class, upper-middle-caste Indians realise that the Indian presence in the Kashmir Valley is a colonial, military occupation. Through this, I want them to reconsider India’s claims of being a secular, liberal-democracy. To contextualise my intervention, I briefly represent the mainstream Indian narrative on Kashmir, both in academia and the wider public space, in the first section of this article. Thus, by highlighting the ‘silences’ in the general understanding of Kashmir, I will demonstrate my project’s contribution to Kashmir’s historiography.

Khache and Kashmir - an article by Anisa Bhutia

1/5/2019

Anisa Bhutia has written an excellent article about the Khache, the small Tibetan Muslim community many of whom now live in Kashmir, the region where their forbears came from. 'Longing, Belonging and the Politics of Naming: the case of the Khache' appears in Himalaya, and it's accessible online:

https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol38/iss2/8/

Here's the abstract of Bhutia's article:

In Tibet, Muslim traders and subsequent settlers from Kashmir were called Khache. Over the years, this term has come to acquire multiple significations. By engaging with the complex history of the group and their eventual return to Kashmir, this paper tries to uncover these very significations and how the idea of Khache represents a coming together of the Himalayan region (Tibet, Nepal, Kashmir, Darjeeling, Kalimpong). In their multi-layered notion of belonging, there is a strong sense of attachment to the imagined Tibet, reflecting a harmoniously lived life, while further complexities emerge from their repatriation to the ancestral land of Kashmir. Referred to as Kashmiri Muslims (loosely, Khache) in Tibet, and now as Tibetan Muslims in Kashmir, the confusion in identity is as much linguistic as political. We should also note that regional prefixes such as ‘Tibetan’ or ‘Kashmiri’ don’t just fixate associations with regions, but also with regimes of power and powerful agents. As such, through this article, I am trying to argue for a geographically and politically neutral or at least less problematic term Khache. Finally, this paper is an ethnographic examination of how different representations and regional influences can be witnessed in everyday life performances for this group, and how these ultimately shape their sense of being. In the same vein, we will locate Islam emerging as a constant and source of justification to life's trials and tribulations – as often portrayed by the analogy to hijrat – the journey to save one's religion.

'The New Kashmiri Woman'

12/15/2018

Economic & Political Weekly has published an important article by Hafsa Kanjwal entitled 'The New Kashmiri Woman: state-led feminism in Naya Kashmir'. Here's the link:

https://www.epw.in/node/153204/pdf

Kanjwal looks at the gender aspect of the National Conference's landmark 1944 'Naya Kashmir' ('New Kashmir') manifesto and further interrogates the advocacy of women's issues by looking at the autobiography of a prominent educationist, Shamla Mufti.

She argues in part:

Mufti’s autobiography is structured alongside three important moments in the history of modern Kashmir. The first, which encompasses the final two decades of the repressive monarchical rule of the Dogras in the state, describes her family background, childhood, and early marital and home life, and speaks to the multiple ways in which she, as a young Muslim female, was restricted both in relation to the Dogras as well as the prevailing conservative norms of the emerging urban, middle-class Kashmiri Muslim society at the time. Mufti was married at an early age, before she completed her schooling, and much of her narrative revolves around how she continued her education and gained employment, despite criticism from her family and her in-laws. The second moment, which arises in the immediate aftermath of partition and Kashmir’s disputed accession to India, as well as the rise of the Kashmiri-led National Conference (NC) government, narrates her experiences of obtaining higher education and working in a number of schools and colleges. It traces an “opening” that existed for a number of Kashmiri women, who were able to leave the confines of their homes under the new policies of the state government. Finally, the third moment, which is not covered as much in depth as the other two, provides a brief overview of increasing political instability in the state and its implications for everyday life, including the closures that it enforced on the period of “opening.”

While I will briefly address the first and the third moment, it is the second moment—the construction of the new NC state government and its policies for female empowerment—that will be the focus of this article. In doing so, it is argued that state sponsored feminism—while providing an upwardly socially mobile group of Kashmiri women opportunities for education, employment, and mobility—was paternalistic and ideologically motivated in its vision. As a result, no indigenous, independent women’s movement emerged in the state, and women’s issues became contested and linked to what was increasingly seen by them as an illegitimate rule.

It's an article which merits careful consideration and an important contribution towards a more gendered discussion of modern Kashmir.

State Violence and Youth Resistance in Kashmir

11/29/2018

Just published by Routledge - Political Violence in South Asia, edited by Ali Riaz, Zobaida Nasreen and Fahmida Zaman. It's available as a paperback as well as hardback and on Kindle.

The book includes an article by Hafsa Kanjwal on 'State Violence and Youth Resistance: perspectives from Indian-held Kashmir' as well as contributions on Maoism in Nepal, Sinhalese Buddhist majoritarianism in Sri Lanka and communal violence in India. More details here.

Downtown Srinagar in the 1990s

10/23/2018

Last week, shots rang out in downtown Srinagar again. At Fateh Kadal on October 17, two militants, a civilian and a policemen were killed in a gunfight, the first that downtown Srinagar has seen in years. Scores of demonstrators both old and young ended up in hospital with pellet injuries. At the peripheries of the gunfight, journalists were reportedly beaten up.

Watching the situation unfold, my mind’s eye hovered back to the downtown of the 1990s.

That's how Mir Khalid begins an article on Scroll which looks back on the violence he witnessed in Srinagar's old city in the 1990s. Here's the link: scroll.in/article/898969/the-battles-of-downtown-srinagar-a-resident-looks-back-on-a-decade-of-bloodshed

Mridu Rai on India's Constituent Assembly and Article 370

7/4/2018

Mridu Rai - author of the acclaimed Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir - has published an important article about the discussions on Jammu & Kashmir in India's constituent assembly and the genesis of Article 370. It appears in the latest issue of Asian Affairs and, with the author's permission, I'm posting an abstract of the article - and here's a link to it:

'Article 370 of the Indian constitution gives the northern province of Jammu and Kashmir special status within the union. Today that provision forms a nucleus of fierce political contention between secularists and religious nationalists in India, despite the manifest whittling down of the article's most significant aspects. This development is counterintuitive: the original intent of the article's introduction had no relation to questions of religion. This essay attempts to understand this unanticipated role, as a marker of the state's secularity or lack thereof, the article has come to play in Indian politics. It contends that the seeds were sown even at the time of shaping the Indian constitution of a perspective that viewed the people of Jammu and Kashmir according to their religious affiliations.'

The full citation details are:
Mridu Rai (2018) THE INDIAN CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY AND THE MAKING OF HINDUS AND MUSLIMS IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR, Asian Affairs, 49:2, 205-221, DOI: 10.1080/03068374.2018.1468659