Download Free Sheikh Mohammad Abdullahs Reflections On Kashmir Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Sheikh Mohammad Abdullahs Reflections On Kashmir and write the review.

This book is a compendium of the speeches and interviews of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953, and who was a large presence on the political landscape of India for fifty years. The volume is designed to enable a student of South Asian politics, and the politics of Kashmir in particular, to analyze the ways in which experiences have been constructed historically and have changed overtime.
Many disenchanted Kashmiris continue to demand independence or freedom from India. Written by a leading authority on Kashmir’s troubled past, this book revisits the topic of independence for the region (also known as Jammu and Kashmir, or J&K), and explores exactly why this aspiration has never been fulfilled. In a rare India-Pakistan agreement, they concur that neither J&K, nor any part of it, can be independent. Charting a complex history and intense geo-political rivalry from Maharaja Hari Singh’s leadership in the mid-1920s to the present, this book offers an essential insight into the disputes that have shaped the region. As tensions continue to rise following government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, Snedden asks a vital question: what might independence look like and just how realistic is this aspiration?
This book is a compendium of the speeches and interviews of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953, and who was a large presence on the political landscape of India for fifty years. The volume is designed to enable a student of South Asian politics, and the politics of Kashmir in particular, to analyze the ways in which experiences have been constructed historically and have changed overtime
Sheikh Abdullah: Tragic Hero of Kashmir is the first comprehensive, well-documented account of the life of the charismatic leader, the Lion of Kashmir, who contributed crucially to the making of modern India in terms of territory and more importantly to its founding ideology of secularism. The story begins well before independence. Kashmir was the scene of a distinctive political transformation in the late 1930s. In contrast to rise of the Muslim League in much of the subcontinent - which was to lead to partition - the most popular party in the valley turned away from communal politics and embraced secularism. On 11 June 1939, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was successful in changing the name of the party he was leading from Kashmir Muslim Conference to National Conference, and invited all to join it. Backed by Nehru's friendship, Abdullah rose to become the first popular Prime Minister of the State, but also the target of conservative and communal forces in India. His demand that the pledge of special status for the State in the accession documents be honoured was described as anti-national, even pro-Pakistani. As revealed in the book, Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel offered to resign on the issue. The letters he and Nehru wrote to Gandhi explaining their differences make fascinating reading. The intrigue that led to Abdullah's downfall and arrest on 8 August 1953, is well documented as is the role of the Home Ministry's Intelligence Bureau. The elaborate conspiracy case it built up was belatedly rejected by Nehru himself. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, the author takes us through Abdullah's long, tragic periods of detention until he was persuaded to return to Jammu and Kashmir as Chief Minister. He demonstrated his continuing popularity by winning an election before his death in 1982.
A compelling biography of Sheikh Abdullah, the charismatic, combative, and controversial Kashmiri politician Written by the leading historian of modern Kashmir, this is a comprehensive portrayal of one of the most enigmatic politicians in modern South Asia, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, known as the Lion of Kashmir. Abdullah (1905–1982) devoted much of his life to mobilizing Kashmiris to assert their rights, to trying to achieve a fair resolution for their politically contested state, to shaping its turbulent relationship with India, and to bridging the divide between India and Pakistan. Although he forged ties with the Indian National Congress, Abdullah’s support for Kashmir’s accession to India and his advocacy for a more autonomous position for the state within the Indian Union complicated his relationship with India and led to his fall from grace, arrest, and imprisonment. In 1975 he reached a compromise with India that alienated generations of Kashmiris for whose self-determination he had long fought. The people of Kashmir, India, and Pakistan continue to grapple with and contest his legacy. Zutshi’s rigorously researched and elegantly crafted biography brings this complex figure to life and offers a window onto the political fissures of twentieth-century South Asia more broadly.
What Happened to Governance in Kashmir? examines the policies, strategies, and tactics followed by the Indian state and the ‘client’ governments in Srinagar to manage the conflicted state of Jammu and Kashmir during 1948–89 . It shows how the policies deployed to ‘create order in disorder’ functioned inversely and turned Kashmir into a smoldering volcano which erupted in 1989–90. The author argues that as the issue of dispute and policy framework has been constant, the clash between the status quoist state and the society was inevitable. The crisis deepened along with technological, economic, cultural, and social changes. Based on a variety of contemporary sources, this book deals with many aspects of Kashmir’s governance through different political phases. It shows how the personal proclivities and decisions of each prime minister/chief minister played a role in determining the pattern of rule and the course of history with consequences felt many miles downstream.
This book traces the roots of modern-day Kashmir and the role of Sheikh Abdullah in its making. As the most influential political figurehead in twentieth-century Kashmir, he played a crucial role in its transformation from a kingdom to a state in independent India. He was enigmatic and complex, to say the least. Following his meteoric rise, he dominated the political scene for more than 50 years, with enduring impact. The volume presents a keen analysis of pre-Independence events which led to the emergence of a controversial and confused identity of the region. It also looks at other major themes in the political life of Kashmir, including the formation of the Muslim Conference, the plebiscite movement and the Kashmir Accord. A major intervention in the political life of South Asia, this book presents an inside-view of the history of modern Kashmir through the life and times of Sheikh Abdullah. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, history, and modern South Asia.
Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. The Muslim Secular complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri politician Sheikh Abdullah, and the nonviolent Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Revising the common view that they were mere acolytes of their celebrated Hindu colleagues M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, this book argues that these three men collectively produced a distinct Muslim secularity from within the grander family of secular Indian nationalism; an intellectual tradition that has retained religion within the public space while nevertheless preventing it from defining either national membership or the state. At a time when many across the decolonising world believed that identity-based majorities and minorities were incompatible and had to be separated out into sovereign equals, Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan thought differently about the problem of religious pluralism in a postcolonial democracy. The minority, they contended, could conceive of the majority not just as an antagonistic entity that is set against it, but to which it can belong and uniquely complete. Premising its claim to a single, united India upon the universalism of Islam, champions of the Muslim secular mobilised notions of federation and popular sovereignty to replace older monarchical and communitarian forms of power. But to finally jettison the demographic inequality between Hindus and Muslims, these thinkers redefined equality itself. Rejecting its liberal definition for being too abstract and thus prone to majoritarian assimilation, they replaced it with their own rendition of Indian parity to simultaneously evoke commonality and distinction between Hindu and Muslim peers. Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan achieved this by deploying a range of concepts from profane inheritance and theological autonomy to linguistic diversity and ethical pledges. Retaining their Muslimness and Indian nationality in full, this crowning notion of equality-as-parity challenged both Gandhi and Nehru's abstractions and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's supposedly dangerous demand for Pakistan.
Kashmir is one of the longest-standing conflicts yet to be resolved by the international community. In 2000, Bill Clinton declared it the most dangerous place in the world and since then the situation continues to escalate. Positioned between India, Pakistan and China – three nuclear powers – Kashmir is the most militarized zone on the planet. Against this backdrop, the urgency to understand what Jammu and Kashmir means to those who actually belong to its territory has increased. This book not only helps readers navigate subtleties in a complex part of the world but is the first of its kind – written for a global audience from local perspectives, which to date have been sorely lacking.