Kashmir Conflict

Introduction

For six decades, a piece of land about the size of Britain between Pakistan and India has been the source of major stress and conflict between the two. But recently, the nature of the protracted conflict has changed. In India-controlled Kashmir, young people inspired by protests across the Middle East have intensified their push for independence - and they want the world to take note. The conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is deep rooted in the past two countries' bilateral relations and structure, raging since 1947. Uninterrupted rivalry, the three conflicts it has caused that have led to freeze the situation on the ground at the expense of the people concern.Discussion

In so far as the border does appear in scholarship on Kashmir, it is in the context of the moment of its emergence in 1947-50, a discussion that largely remains mired in the relative merits of the claims and counter-claims of the Indian and Pakistani states about its legality. Recent historical scholarship on Kashmir has attempted to transcend the moment of India's independence and partition as a de?nite moment in Kashmir's history by focusing on broader themes that governed its history in the longue duree, such as the articulation of religious identities and regional cultures in the context of its changing political economy. This scholarship has been particularly successful in locating the region's history within the larger historical narrative of British India.

However, perhaps in regarding Kashmir solely from the perspective of British imperial policies in the subcontinent, these studies have somewhat downplayed the signi?cance of the region as an arena of multi-religious interactions, composite political practices and multiple imperial influences - in other words, a borderland. This essay suggests that the application of the concept of borderlands to Kashmir's history - in part through a re-reading of recent historical scholarship on Kashmir - has the potential to liberate the region and its inhabitants from the imperatives of national borders that haunt both popular and scholarly perceptions of this at once celebrated and reviled place in the Indian subcontinent (Trofimov, 77).

While for the earlier rulers of Kashmir the region was a constituent part of larger empires, for the Dogra rulers Kashmir itself was the empire that had been awarded to them by their British overlords. Accordingly, they expressed overt loyalty to the British while at the same time undermining their position in the region and extending Dogra control over frontier territories such as Ladakh. Gulab Singh and Ranbir Singh, the first two maharajas of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir who ruled from 1846 to1885, were deeply involved in Central Asian politics, attempting at various junctures to seek friendship with Russia, Afghanistan and Nepal in an effort to put an anti-British front. The British responded by posting a British of?cer in Kashmir beginning in 1852, ostensibly to supervise the conduct of European visitors to the Valley. They also engaged in an offensive against the rulers for ignoring the needs of the people of Kashmir, a fact that would be used later in the century to provide sanction for a permanent residency in Kashmir to 'reform' the Dogra administration.

At Independence, the regions where the ...