Murphy’s Law victim: Paradise at war

Paradise at war: A political history of Kashmir, Radha Kumar, Aleph Book Company; Rs.799; 416 pp Radha Kumar’s Paradise At War is yet another addition to the large corpus of scholarship on politics. As is par for the course with much of this literature, starting from a discussion on Kashmiri self-understanding of being unique and exceptional, stemming from the region’s geographical peripherality and its relatively unbroken tradition, history, and mythology, the book moves to post-1947 events that led to the rise of insurgency in Kashmir in the late 1980s. Although the speed at which the pre-insurgency political history of Kashmir is traced is breakneck, it manages to encapsulate a lot: pre-Partition politics of the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K); the circumstances around the controversial accession to India of Maharaja Hari Singh; the Indo-Pak conflict over J&K; the influence of Cold War politics and the role of big powers like the US, UK, Russia and China; the inter-regional politics of the state, and the politics of the region administered by Pakistan. Indeed, Kumar is one of the rare Indian scholars to engage non-polemically with the last — the politics of Gilgit-Baltistan, a mountainous region that constitutes what Pakistan calls Azad Kashmir. Untangling the various threads that have created and fostered the conflict in Kashmir is a challenge. Commendably, Kumar has been able to throw light on many of them. Expectedly, the most informative and interesting part of Paradise at war is where Kumar uses her own experience as a policy wonk and practitioner to focus attention on the contemporary history of the state starting from 2001. Her initial engagement with Kashmir was with Indian policy circles working on Kashmir-related peace processes underway since 2002. Over time, it led to a deeper involvement resulting in her eventual appointment to the government of India’s Group of Interlocutors for Jammu & Kashmir following resurgence of insurgency in the Kashmir Valley in 2010. In the interests of full disclosure, I have known Kumar for nearly two decades having worked with her on a project on peace processes, and extensively interacted with all members of the group of interlocutors — the late Dileep Padgaonkar, M.M. Ansari and Kumar — during their numerous visits to the state. The networks built during their earlier work on Kashmir-related matters with policy-makers and civil society facilitated their interactions and resulted in the report they wrote up, somewhat hurriedly, in 2011. The interlocutors’ report argued for retaining Article 370 as a guarantee to maintain the state’s autonomy within the Indian Union, and for regional autonomy to assuage the fears of Valley dominance of non-Kashmiri regions. They suggested that Article 370 should be made permanent rather than remain ‘temporary’ as it is presently in the Indian Constitution; recommended stronger cross-border CBMs (confidence-building measures); a relook at the application of AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) 1958 and its reform; and argued for a three-tiered system of devolution of powers from the Union to the state to its provinces to districts to…