This is the most apt book to read at present, with the faceoff between India and Pakistan over Kashmir at a dangerous new level. This conflict-ridden tale has been playing out since insurgency started 30 years ago, or perhaps since Kashmir was first invaded by Pakistan 71 years ago. As the oldest unresolved issue on the UN statute book, the Kashmir story is narrated with precision by Radha Kumar; she calls it a “labour of pain as much as of love”.
The Kashmir dispute has two intertwined strands: internal and external. As an academic and practitioner of conflict resolution, Kumar covers the full spectrum of the Kashmir imbroglio, encompassing its historical roots, troubled legacy and convoluted internal politics, couched in evolving geopolitics and marked by the failure to find any durable meeting points between New Delhi and Srinagar and New Delhi and Rawalpindi. Except, as Kumar points out, in late 2006, with a Musharraf-led government in Pakistan and UPA government in India, when the Lambah-Aziz backchannel produced the 4/5...
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