Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition
by Dr Shahla Hussain
Cambridge University Press 2021, 392pp
Reviewed by: Dr Hafsa Kanjwal, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania
 23 August 2024
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Shahla Hussain’s Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition is a comprehensive and accessible account of Kashmir’s modern history. Situating Kashmir(i) not just as a “cultural identity” or a “territorial space,” in this text, Kashmir “is a site for Kashmiris to assert and contest their rights and culture” (p. 353). Hussain aims to move beyond nationalist discourses that center concepts of “territoriality,” “state sovereignty,” and “national security” (p. 3). While the book is commendable in challenging such tropes, it could benefit from a more theoretically rigorous approach to the question of the role of Islam and secularism with relation to Kashmir.

Although the bulk of the book focuses on the period after the 1947 Partition, the first chapter, “Meanings of Freedom in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir,” foregrounds the many meanings associated with freedom in the context of the late 19th and early 20th century, when the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was under the rule of the Dogra dynasty. While this chapter sets the stage for the political, economic and social developments that would take place after 1947, it also incorporates a range of Kashmiri voices, including those who migrated to Punjab, to consider what freedom entailed for the diverse inhabitants of a princely state.

Chapter two, “Freedom, Loyalty, Belonging: Kashmir After Decolonisation,” turns to the aftermath of Partition, when political elites in both India and Pakistan sought to “legitimatise their rule over their respective sides of Kashmir” (p. 77). This chapter details the authoritarianism of the Sheikh Abdullah government, as it sought and struggled to carve an autonomous status for Kashmir within the Indian Union. It details in particular the challenges of family members who found themselves on different sides of the ceasefire line, and the difficulties faced by Kashmiri Muslim artisans, traders, businessmen, and government servants whose economic and social ties were now disrupted due to an artificial boundary.

One of the main strengths of this book is the due attention that it gives to the political economy of Kashmir, both in the feudal context of the Dogra princely state but also in the immediate post-Partition period. In particular, Chapter three, “Puppet Regimes: Collaboration and the Political Economy of Kashmiri Resistance,” explores how certain groups benefited from a series of “unrepresentative and corrupt administrations” (p. 132). In particular, “the economic status of certain sections of agrarian Kashmir improved, yet a new class of rural elites retained land privileges, ensuring that the now well-to-do peasants remained closely aligned with existing power structures” (p. 133). Economic development via grants and subsidies caused income inequality and social segregation, limiting Kashmir’s economic freedom. As the shifts in economic structures facilitated greater inequality, Hussain argues that it led to greater assertion amongst the excluded Muslim majority “to condemn the ideologies of secularism and socialism propagated by the ruling elite” (p. 134).

Chapter four, “The Idea of Plebiscite: Discontent and Regional Dissidence,” traces the appeal of the plebiscite demand, especially amongst Kashmiri Muslims. It explores how concepts of self-determination led to the rise of groups like the Plebiscite Front as well as student mobilisations in the 1960s, before Sheikh Abdullah signed an unpopular accord with Indira Gandhi in 1975. It also discusses how this concept was challenged in Jammu and Ladakh, the other regions of the state. In this chapter, it would have been useful to note the particular terms that Kashmiris used for self-determination in Kashmiri or Urdu, and what, if any, longer genealogies such terms have.

There remains a tension in the text between situating Kashmiri resistance to Indian rule as a result of material forces (for example, on p. 184, Hussain argues that “the concept of plebiscite caught the imagination of Kashmiri Muslims living under oppressive state regimes and excluded from the networks of patronage by the Kashmiri political elites who collaborated to integrate Jammu and Kashmir with India”) or those who were later disillusioned with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India (although these concerns existed in the Kashmiri Muslim psyche much earlier). More analysis on the interplay between both the material and ideational logics that ground the Kashmir tehreek, or movement, would challenge the idea of Kashmiris “becoming alienated” from or “disillusioned” with India, as Hussain often notes. This framing is especially fraught when, as Hussain details, there was never really a time when Kashmiris had collectively accepted Indian sovereignty.

Another main strength of the book is that it engages with perspectives of Kashmiris from across the line of control, and also in the diaspora, specifically amongst Kashmiri communities in the United Kingdom, based in cities like Birmingham, who in many ways situated the Kashmir struggle as an anti-colonial one. Chapter five, “Mapping Kashmiri Imaginings of Freedom in the Inter-regional and Global Arenas,” focuses on “two other key spaces where a postcolonial Kashmiri nationalist identity developed and where new ideas about what freedom would look like, and how best to obtain it, were propagated” (p. 238). In this chapter, Hussain relies on a number of private archives of members of the Kashmir intelligentsia on the Pakistan-administered side as well as in the diaspora. This chapter is fascinating for its account of the intrigues within Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and the formation of groups like the Kashmir Liberation Movement, Jammu Kashmir Liberation League, Plebiscite Front AJK (Azad Jammu and Kashmir), and the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front, which modeled itself after the Algerian revolutionary group, FLN. This chapter also explores the rise of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which mobilised the movement for an independent Kashmir, and eventually pushed for an armed struggle in Kashmir.

While discussions of the role of Islam and secularism exist in the earlier chapters, the last chapter, “Jang-i-Azadi (War for Freedom): Religion, Politics and Resistance,” seeks to “unravel the complex ways religion and politics intertwined within Kashmiri discourse, differentiating between Kashmiri Muslim attachment to their religious and regional identity and the articulation of Islamist ideology by political groups that aimed to transform Kashmir into an Islamic state” (p. 293). In this chapter, Islamism is a response to the “disillusionment” that Kashmiri Muslims felt with the compromise politics of “their mainstream political leaders” and provided “new Islamic frames of reference to construct and internalise political identity.” In this chapter especially, but in other sections that discuss “religion” and ‘secularism,” the book could have benefited from a deeper engagement with the scholarship on Islam, Islamism, and secularism.

For example, the book takes for granted a normative understanding of secularism as being separate from the category of religion. On p. 14, Hussain asserts that in South Asia, “secularism refers primarily to a political ideology,” but does not detail what that entails. More recent scholarship on secularism, especially its relationship with Islam, has shown how it is less about the separation of religion from public life, and more about the regulation and management of religious life (while also problematising the understanding of Islam as a ‘religion’). In the book, Indian secularism is positioned as an ideal that the Indian state never manages to reach, and which Kashmiris come to resent given that “in Kashmir the secularism of the modern nation-state is a closed ideology imposed from above to bring Kashmiris into the national mainstream whether they want to be there or not” (p. 15). As a result, the book argues that “religious identity remained an important identification marker for Kashmiri Muslims, especially as independent India embraced ‘secular nationalism” both to define itself and to manage diversity and difference within the country” (p. 14). Yet, even as Hussain identifies the importance of “religious identity,” it largely plays an instrumental role in her analysis. When Kashmiri political figures deploy the use of religion and religious imagery, it is always “instrumental” to “popularise ‘self-determination’” (p. 197). If it is indeed instrumental, what does it mean for Kashmiri self-determination to be popularised through an Islamic framework?

In another section, Hussain states that “Kashmiri Muslims’ growing awareness of religious identity was a reaction to the activities of Hindu right-wing groups in the state and the Hindu-majority politics of the Congress” in the late 1980s (p. 304). Here, the turn to “religious identity” is only in response to Hindu nationalism, despite the persistence of such a turn throughout Kashmir’s history. What does it mean, then, for Kashmiri Muslims to rely on “religious identity” both in response to Indian secular nationalism and Hindu nationalism? The book would have benefited from a deeper engagement with scholarship that moves beyond seeing Islam as simply a “religious identity,” which brings it into Eurocentric notions of religion being ontologically separate from the realm of politics. Rather, it is a core reality that deeply informs the ideas that Hussain foregrounds—ideas of (haq) rights, (insaf) justice and (izzat) dignity.

If part of the aim of the book is to move beyond territorial nationalism and securitised discourse, then the use of terms like “foreign fighters” (p. 328) to describe the fighters from Pakistan or Afghanistan who came to Kashmir during the height of the armed rebellion and “extraterritorial affiliations” (p. 204), when describing Kashmiri Muslim support for Pakistan, reinscribes this territorial nationalism. What territorial logics are at play when these fighters are deemed “foreign,” especially when Kashmiris would throng to their funeral processions, as they would of Kashmiri fighters? How can Islamic forms of solidarity be reconceptualised beyond these securitised tropes? Here, the work of Cabeiri Robinson and Darryl Li might be useful to engage with to complicate the figure of the “foreign fighter.” The analysis for this section would benefit from actual Kashmiri perspectives from figures like Syed Ali Shah Geelani or Mohammad Qasim Faktoo on Islamic solidarities that transcend national borders, as well as their challenges. Similarly, this section perpetuates a problematic binary between local (Sufi, “good Muslim”) Islam and foreign (Wahhabi, “bad Muslim”) Islam. Part of what the analysis on the role of Islam could also situate is how India has used various Muslim movements within Kashmir against each other. Those who are “good” are less likely to challenge its sovereignty, whereas those who are “bad” contest it.

In a similar vein, while many Kashmiris did envision the concept of “Kashmir” to imagine a “homeland free from the territorial control of India and Pakistan,” not all did (p. 350). Some Kashmiris desired for the state to merge with Pakistan; for them, Pakistan was not simply a nation-state, like any other nation-state, but an idea, or a solution for the Muslims of the subcontinent. With more attention to how these logics were constituted, , the book’s primary argument about the limitations of thinking within the territorial logics of the nation-state would have been nuanced, and strengthened. To only see this desire for Pakistan as “an expression of desperation by an excluded majority struggling against an oppressive environment” (p. 208), simplifies a rich body of work by those Kashmiris for whom such a desire had its own internal logics that were not simply reactive. This is true of the diaspora too; in addition to the left-leaning pro-independence groups in the UK, there are a number of Kashmiris from both sides of the line of control that continued to situate the struggle through an Islamic framework who are not discussed.

Overall, this book is an important contribution to the history of modern Kashmir; it will be a crucial resource to those interested in the excavation of Kashmiri voices in that history.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2024

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