Those Who Remain

ABSTRACT

Kashmiri Pandits are a minority ethnic group from the Kashmir Valley in northern India. In 1989, the separatist movement to free Kashmir from India culminated in widespread violence against members of all communities, and initially against Kashmiri Pandits in particular. There was a mass exodus of nearly 95% of the Kashmiri Pandit community during the early 1990s. Sixteen years later, there are approximately 7,000 Kashmiri Pandits who permanently reside in Kashmir. These “non-migrants” have remained in Kashmir due to economic constraints, familial circumstances, and/or a deep attachment to the land, to name a few reasons. They face grave problems today, including lack of employment opportunities, government corruption and complacency, and inadequate monetary and moral support from the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora.     

The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.     

A Review of: “Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Uwe Steinhoff. On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. Seth G. Jones. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Ekaterina Stepanova. Terrorism in Asymmetrical Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects. Laura K. Donohue. The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power,Politics and Liberty.”

Approaches to terrorism and peacebuilding have a complex relationship with each other, which may be explained according to four categories outlined in this article. These range from blocking each others’ aims, nullifying terrorism, supporting a very limited, or a broader peace process. Each of these categories has implications for the inclusion and reconciliation of a wide range of actors and the hybrid nature of the emerging peace. This relates to the critical approach of using theory to create emancipatory forms of peace, which is used as a basis for the examination of the production of hybridity via the interaction of approaches to terrorism and peacebuilding in five cases in this article. These include Sri Lanka, Kashmir, the Middle East, Nepal, and Northern Ireland. We argue that “post-liberal” possibilities for a hybrid form of peace (which are inherent in such conflicts) offer a “post-terrorist” potential for peace processes.     

Peacebuilding think tanks,Indian foreign policy and the Kashmir conflict

Abstract

Foreign policy making in India is typically viewed as highly centralised and dominated by the Prime Minister’s Office and bureaucracy. Yet in 2004, the Congress-Party-led United Progressive Alliance government launched a Composite Dialogue with Pakistan which included a place for Indian think tanks in the Kashmir dispute. We suggest that as India liberalised its economy amidst domestic political upheaval, think tanks were given greater access to domestic and foreign funding and adopted new roles in foreign policy making. In the case of the Kashmir conflict, peacebuilding think tanks were encouraged by the government to engage in cross-border activities that would build constituencies for peace with Pakistan and promote economic cooperation as an incentive for peace. While the government aimed to depoliticise the conflict, these think tanks used this opportunity to draw attention to marginalised perspectives and issues. Peacebuilding think tanks nonetheless faced significant challenges in shaping the peace process because of structural constraints regarding access to resources and lack of autonomy to further their agendas. This reflected resistance within the state to depoliticising a conflict that has long been India’s central national security issue.