Historical Background of Jammu and Kashmir The Making of the Princely State The state as we know it is a nineteenth-century creation. After the Sikh empire’s defeat by the British, the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846 sold the territory of Kashmir to Gulab Singh, a Dogra general, for a sum of about seventy-five lakh rupees,…
Government Response Having traced the conflict, its cross-border oxygen, its demographic anxieties and its harshest instrument, we now turn to what the state has actually done. The striking feature of the last decade is that the North-East has been managed less by the gun and more by the signature — a deliberate shift from open-ended…
State-wise Status The North-East is often spoken of as a single problem, but that is a beginner’s error. It is really eight distinct problems, each with its own history, its own set of groups, and its own trajectory towards or away from peace. Having understood the region’s common context, history and drivers, we now walk…
India’s internal security map has two theatres that are, at first glance, very different — the misty hills of the North-East and the snow-bound valleys of Jammu and Kashmir — yet both teach the same underlying lesson. When a population’s sense of identity is not woven into the idea of the nation, when geography isolates…
The State Response Fighting Left-Wing Extremism has been, from the start, a problem of division of labour. Under the Constitution, ‘police’ and ‘public order’ are State subjects, so the primary responsibility for law and order lies with the affected State governments. The Union’s role is to coordinate, supplement and fund — supplying central forces, money,…
Organisational Structure To fight the Naxalite movement, one must first understand that it is not a loose band of rebels but a tightly organised, militarised political party built deliberately on the Maoist template of the three magic weapons — the Party, the army and the united front. Everything the movement does flows from this architecture….
Of all the security challenges that press upon the Indian state from within, few have been described in language as stark as this one. For close to two decades the country’s political leadership called it the single gravest threat to India’s internal security — graver, at its height, than cross-border terrorism or insurgency in the…
If the development deficit is the breeding ground, as this chapter has argued, then development is the other half of the state’s answer to extremism, the non-coercive arm that works to drain the reservoir of grievance even as security forces confront the armed organisation. This section surveys the area-based development interventions built for exactly this…
Communal Conflict India is a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society, and its unity amid such diversity is its defining achievement. That unity, however, is periodically tested by communalism, and it is important at the outset to be precise about what the word means. Communalism is not the same as religious devotion. It is the ideology…
The Tribal Question In the previous discussion of the development deficit, land alienation and displacement appeared as drivers of grievance. Here we descend from the abstract to the concrete, to the specific constitutional promises the Republic made to its tribal citizens, and to the manner in which those promises were left largely unkept. This is…
