Collection of papers read in a seminar held from March 15-16, 2005 in Islamabad.

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.

'Since the partition of India in 1947, Jammu & Kashmir has been a site of frequent unrest and violence. In Unravelling the Kashmir Knot, author and senior advocate Aman Hingorani applies a legal lens to ongoing debates surrounding the national identity of the region and its people, recounting how decades of misconceived policies have culminated in its current state of affairs. The book decrypts major milestones in the history of J&K, from the signing of the Instrument of Accession in 1947 and the Reference to the United Nations in 1948 to the Abrogation of Article 370 in 2023, critically examining their stipulations and impact on global opinion on the Kashmir issue. Drawing from personal correspondences and official documentation, Hingorani explores the role that larger-than-life figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Louis Mountbatten played in shaping the Kashmir policies of their nations. He discusses the influence of Pakistan and China in J&K in the context of geo-political and strategic realities, and the possible depoliticization of the Kashmir issue through the International Court of Justice. Comprehensive yet accessible, Unravelling the Kashmir Knot plucks lesser-known details about J&K’s history from obscurity and emphasizes the importance of charting a realistic path forward to resolve the Kashmir issue.

Solving Kashmir is a treatise on the Kashmir imbroglio that gives a deep insight into the myriad facets of the dispute in the State of JandK. It brings into focus the historical perspective, the geo-strategic and geo-political imperatives, as also the interests of the world powers and other regional players especially Pakistan and to an extent China. This vital piece of real estate located in the under belly of the CARS and Russia gives access to Tibet, Afghanistan and Pakistan. JandK is strategically significant to India's existence as a nation. Historically, Kashmir has been an important gateway for marauders entering the country. Losing control of JandK would open up the floodgates again. Kashmir gives India access to the strategically significant countries around JandK. It is our jewel in the crown. The main players in the dispute namely, India and Pakistan have gone to war four times over the issue with Pakistan enduring humiliating defeats, including its partition with the creation of Bangladesh. Having failed in its conventional attempts to wrest Kashmir and still in search of its identity, Pakistan has exercised the low cost/ no cost proxy war option, exploiting the ethnic and religious sentiments of the local Kashmiris, as also drumming up support from religious fundamentalists internationally. The nuclear dimension adding to the tinder box forces the international community of nations to concentrate efforts to bring the two nations to the negotiating table and resolve the problem bilaterally in accordance with the Shimla Agreement, however, with no significant success. How long will India continue to bleed? and "Where do you go from here?" are questions that willcontinue to haunt India for years to come.

This study is primarily meant for readers outside India, and that explains the lengthy background which it provides. Although literature on the issue is growing daily, each work is written from a certain angle, and that is quite understandable. Every mind has a particular drawing bias; the information supplied is therefore necessarily coloured by tpe views a writer holds. There are to the author's mind two ways of approaching a subject: One would attempt to fit the facts into the value system of the writer, the other would try to draw values from the mass of materials under study. In either case there is no escaping the subjective evaluation of the narrator; and the present writer does not claim any immunity from the process. Kashmir's present history has two aspects. One of them is international, and here the ups and downs in the fortunes of the two States are to be seen against the complexity of power relations in the multinational world body. The other is the internal dynamics, which have their own compelling logic. An attempt has been made in this study to correlate the two into some sort of unity, but it is not for the writer to evaluate its success.

Forgotten Kashmir examines the evolution of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) over the past seven decades. It includes major milestones like the 'tribal' invasion in 1947-48, the Sudhan revolt in the 1950s, the Ayub era, the Simla Agreement, the adoption of an 'Interim Constitution of 1974' and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). It is not simply a historical account but one that analyses the events in POK against the background of developments in Pakistan's polity to better understand Pakistan's motivations for its policies in the region. The book delves into contentious issues such as the right of self-determination - that is distinct from the concept of plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir which was debated in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). More recently, the Chinese presence in the region has been considered, which is bound to grow with the development of CPEC, which runs through the Northern Areas. The book covers internal developments in that remote area. The author, a seasoned diplomat, provides a wealth of information that comes from his stint in Karachi, involvement in the Jammu and Kashmir issue at the Ministry of External Affairs, discussions in the United Nations, and as a member of bilateral working groups to counter-terrorism with the US, EU, UK, and Canada.

Blending analyses with anecdotes, Kashmir: Rage and Reason is the Valley's new-age writing, which traces, in lucid language, the region's tortured history, the many facets of Kashmiri nationalism, and the betrayals. The author has woven together his anecdotes and people's narratives from ground zero to give us the real picture in all its starkness, minus any journalistic dressing.

In Pakistan at the Crossroads, top international scholars assess Pakistan's politics and economics and the challenges faced by its civil and military leaders domestically and diplomatically. Contributors examine the state's handling of internal threats, tensions between civilians and the military, strategies of political parties, police and law enforcement reform, trends in judicial activism, the rise of border conflicts, economic challenges, financial entanglements with foreign powers, and diplomatic relations with India, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the United States. In addition to ethnic strife in Baluchistan and Karachi, terrorist violence in Pakistan in response to the American-led military intervention in Afghanistan and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by means of drones, as well as to Pakistani army operations in the Pashtun area, has reached an unprecedented level. There is a growing consensus among state leaders that the nation's main security threats may come not from India but from its spiraling internal conflicts, though this realization may not sufficiently dissuade the Pakistani army from targeting the country's largest neighbor. This volume is therefore critical to grasping the sophisticated interplay of internal and external forces complicating the country's recent trajectory.

Srinagar in the winter of 1989 was an eerie ghost town witnessing the beginnings of a war dance. The dam burst the night boys from the separatist JKLF group were freed in exchange for the release of Rubaiya Sayeed, the Union home minister's daughter. As Farooq Abdullah had predicted, the government's caving in emboldened many Kashmiris into thinking that azaadi was possible. It was a long, slow haul to regaining control. From then to now, A.S. Dulat has had a continuous engagement with Kashmir in various capacities. The initiatives launched by the Vajpayee government, in power from 1998 to 2004, were the high point of this constant effort to keep balance in a delicate state. In this extraordinary memoir, Dulat gives a sweeping account of the difficulties, successes and near triumphs in the effort to bring back Kashmir from the brink. He shows the players, the politics, the strategies and the true intent and sheer ruthlessness of the meddlers from across the border. Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years paints an unforgettable portrait of politics in India's most beautiful but troubled state.