The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Jammu and Kashmir

Abstract

Why did democracy in Jammu and give way to armed struggle? What looked like the democratization of India's northernmost state in the late 1970s had become a small-scale civil war by the end of the 1980s. Since then, the conflict has brought indescribable suffering and resulted in possibly 25,000 casualties or more.' What gave rise to violent separatism in Jammu and Kashmir, and could it have been avoided? Indian, Kashmiri, and Pakistani nationalists have portrayed this tragedy as the inevitable result of trying to merge incompatible identities. In India, Pakistan is frequently denounced as the orchestrator of the insurgency movement, while the Pakistani side describes the uprising in Indian-occupied Kashmir (10K) as a reaction against the suppression of the Kashmiri's wish to join Pakistan. In the West the conflict is often vaguely described as a part of the spread of ethnic conflict around the globe. However, I argue here that the emergence of incompatible identities should be regarded as an outcome of a prior and distinctly political conflict in Jammu and Kashmir-a struggle for power between state and central government elites. Viewing events from this perspective involves looking beyond ethnicity as an explanatory factor and focusing more closely on the development of political institutions and the decisions made by the political elite in Jammu and and New Delhi