Historically, the relationship between India and Pakistan has been mired in conflicts, war, and lack of trust. Pakistan has continued to loom large on India’s horizon despite the growing gap between the two countries. This book examines the nature of the Pakistani state, its internal dynamics, and its impact on India. The text looks at key issues of the India-Pakistan relationship, appraises a range of India’s policy options to address the Pakistan conundrum, and proposes a way forward for India’s Pakistan policy. Drawing on the author’s experience of two diplomatic stints in Pakistan, including as the High Commissioner of India, the book offers a unique insider’s perspective on this critical relationship. A crucial intervention in diplomatic history and the analysis of India’s Pakistan policy, the book will be of as much interest to the general reader as to scholars and researchers of foreign policy, strategic studies, international relations, South Asia studies, diplomacy, and political science.

The India-Pakistan rivalry is one of the five percent of international conflicts that has been labeled as intractable. Cohen draws on his varied experiences in South Asia as he develops a comprehensive theory of why the dispute is intractable and suggests ways in which it may be ameliorated.

Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, is a complex region fraught with conflict and hostility, ranging from an enduring insurgency and sectarian violence to terror strikes and appalling human rights violations. In his third book on Pakistan, Tilak Devasher analyses why Balochistan is such a festering sore for Pakistan. With his keen understanding of the region, he traces the roots of the deep-seated Baloch alienation to the princely state of Kalat's forced accession to Pakistan in 1948. This alienation has been further solidified by the state's rampant exploitation of the province, leading to massive socio-economic deprivation. Is the Baloch insurgency threatening the integrity of Pakistan? What is the likelihood of an independent Balochistan? Has the situation in the province become irretrievable for Pakistan? Is there a meeting ground between the mutually opposing narratives of the Pakistan state and the Baloch nationalists?Devasher examines these issues with a clear and objective mind backed by meticulous research that goes to the heart of the Baloch conundrum.

Kashmir has been considered one of the longest-running and most intractable conflicts of the modern world. How does one make sense of the issue and look to the future? In The Kashmir Conundrum, former Indian Army chief General N.C. Vij – who himself hails from the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir – gives the complete picture. Starting with a history of Kashmir and its people, he covers the invasion and accession of the kingdom, the wars India and Pakistan have fought, the Pulwama attack of 2019, India's surgical strike at Balakot, and the various formulae that have been tried to settle the issue, right up to the controversial abrogation of the state's special status. In doing so, he draws on his own experience of dealing with the subject closely – as DGMO during the Kargil war; as vice chief of the army during the Parliament attack of 2001; and then as the chief at a time when Pakistan-sponsored infiltration was at its peak. Informed by a field expert's astute perspective, this is a comprehensive and up-to-date account of Kashmir from an army man who has engaged with it at the highest levels.

Presents an analysis of Pakistan that features five players: the people, the army, the Islamists, the politicians and the Americans. This book explains how a series of alliances borne of political and strategic expediency between the US and the military have continually undermined the state to the extent that its very existence is in jeopardy.

This book brings ethnographies of everyday power and ritual into dialogue with intellectual studies of theology and political theory. It underscores the importance of academic collaboration between scholars of religion, anthropology, and history in uncovering the structures of thinking and action that make politics work. The volume weaves important discussions around sovereignty in modern South Asian history with debates elsewhere on the world map. South Asia’s colonial history – especially India’s twentieth-century emergence as the world’s largest democracy – has made the subcontinent a critical arena for thinking about how transformations and continuities in conceptions of sovereignty provide a vital frame for tracking shifts in political order. The chapters deal with themes such as sovereignty, kingship, democracy, governance, reason, people, nation, colonialism, rule of law, courts, autonomy, and authority, especially within the context of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in politics, ideology, religion, sociology, history, and political culture, as well as the informed reader interested in South Asian studies.

Fascinating vignettes about the men and woman who ruled PakistanWhat did Muhammad Ali Jinnah say when he received a royal salute from the last British regiment about to leave Pakistan? Did Ayub Khan consider turning Pakistan into a monarchy? Why was Yahya Khan so confident that the 1970 elections would return a hung parliament? What did Zulfikar Ali Bhutto say when the Pakistan Army launched a brutal crackdown in March 1971? How did Zia-ul-Haq get Bhutto to appoint him the army chief? In 2007, did Benazir Bhutto misread the extent of American support for her return to Pakistan? Had Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif agreed to a pull-out from Kargil even before the latter went to meet President Clinton in July 1999? Backed by meticulous research, the second book from Tilak Devasher, author of Pakistan: Courting the Abyss, provides enthralling insights into the lives and times of the leaders of Pakistan over the seven decades of the nation's existence. Anecdotal and engrossing, Pakistan: At the Helm presents a human side to the country's political history for anyone who is curious about the inner workings of its corridors of power.

Using a constructivist model, this study brings nuclear arms control and disarmament back into the debates on the future of Indo-Pakistani relations. Constructivism recognizes the independent impact of international norms, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Norm (NNPN), on India and Pakistan’s nuclear behavior. Even though the NNPN does not legally bind them, it is reinforced at the global level, and may lead the South Asian rivals to move in the direction of nuclear arms control and disarmament, thus reducing the costs, dangers, and risks of an eternal strategic rivalry. After examining the main tenets of constructivism in international relations, the works delves into the proliferation debate, discussing nuclear reversal and U.S. policy toward the subcontinent since the G. W. Bush administration. It looks at the prospects for nuclear arms control and disarmament in South Asia after the U.S.-India nuclear deal of 2008, and the nuclear abolitionist wave during the first Obama administration. It concludes with the contribution of social constructivism to understanding how changes in the India-Pakistan nuclear status quo can happen.

Argues that within the seemingly chaotic malaise of Karachi's politics, a form of "manageable violence" exists, on which the functioning of the city is based.