Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris
by Christopher Snedden
(Hurst Publishers, £20)

“ONLY Kashmir,” was the dying Mughal emperor Jahangir’s request when was asked if there was anything he wanted on his death bed.

In recent decades, both India and Pakistan would probably have given a similar answer as to the object of their frustrated desires.

Since 1947 onwards, both states have laid claim to Kashmir and the land has been divided into half, with each portion administered by the respective opposing governments.

On the Indian side in particular, there has been a long-running low-level conflict between the army and separatists which the government in New Delhi believes has been supported by the Pakistani military.

Yet, as the neoimperialist powers extend their hegemonic reach in the Middle East and north Africa, the world’s attention has shifted away from Kashmir.

Thus Christopher Snedden’s book is a timely reminder of both the current situation’s intractabilities and human costs and their longstanding causes.

He is at his strongest in explaining the circumstances surrounding the creation of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir (J and K) in the 1840s and especially the geopolitical context, with British paranoia about Russian influence a key driving force.

A week after securing the province from the collapsing Sikh kingdom, the East India Company sold it on to their ally, Gulab Singh.

This asset sale was to have serious ramifications since J and K was therefore not part of British India, rather it was an element in “Princely India.”

In 1947, with partition looming, the various rulers of territories in Princely India were at liberty to decide which country they would accede to.

In British India, by contrast, most of the areas dominated by either Hindus or Muslims were to be transferred to India or Pakistan wholesale.

In the case of the Hindu Hari Singh, in spite of ruling over a Muslim majority population, this meant opting for India. This triggered an invasion by Pukhtoon tribesmen and eventually all-out war between the two new countries’ armies.

Yet despite this wealth of detail, this is a bothersome and uneven book.

Snedden seems to delight in waspish and questionable throwaway comments, mostly barbs at the Indian side of the equation. He takes issue with the description of the 1857 Mutiny as the “first war of independence,” claiming that there was never really a second one.

He hence ignores not only the strikes and armed uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s against British rule but the very existence of the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose.

More seriously, the author fails to contextualise partition as a deliberate strategic aim of the British imperialist administration from the early 1930s, favouring the minority faith population and according Jinnah’s Muslim League an equal status with the Congress Party that it did not merit. And he minimises the role of British officers in advising Pakistani troops and irregulars in the 1947-48 war.

Most importantly, the book doesn’t really deliver on the second half of its title — that of understanding the Kashmiris themselves. I would have hoped to have been given more sociological information as to how ordinary citizens themselves view their own identities and how they have lived their lives on either side of the demarcation line between India and Pakistan.

Snedden’s conclusion, however, is depressingly indisputable — a long-term solution to the Kashmir situation is as far off now as it was in 1947.