Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation

The book "Making Kashmir Integral to India: Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad's State-Building Policies and the Emotional Integration of a Disputed Region" explores how Kashmir became integral to India through the rule of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad from 1953-1963. It examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of his policies, highlighting inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging triumphalist narratives, the book historicizes India's occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment, urging us to question sovereignty claims and power hierarchies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 25 July 2023
Publisher: Stanford University Press

The Indian government, often hailed as the world's largest democracy, asserts that Jammu and Kashmir, its sole Muslim-majority state, holds an integral place within India. This region, which is subject to dispute between India and Pakistan and is widely recognized as the most militarized zone globally, has been under Indian occupation for over seventy-five years. In her book, Hafsa Kanjwal delves into the process by which Kashmir became seamlessly integrated into India, focusing on the decade-long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Through a comprehensive examination of a diverse range of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews conducted in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal explores the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi's state-building policies within the framework of India's colonial occupation. She uncovers how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to accommodate the Muslim population while simultaneously grappling with inter-religious tensions, corruption, and political repression.

Challenging the conventional binaries of colonialism and postcolonialism, Kanjwal historicizes India's occupation of Kashmir by examining processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment. By doing so, she sheds light on the emergence of new power hierarchies and dominance that took shape in the aftermath of decolonization. Kanjwal urges readers to critically interrogate triumphalist narratives of India's state-formation and the sovereignty claims of modern nation-states. Through her meticulous research and insightful analysis, she provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complex and multifaceted history of Kashmir and its ongoing implications for regional and global politics.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781503635388