No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation will focus on the history of bilateral relations between India and Pakistan. It looks at how the process of dealing with issues thrown up in the aftermath of partition shaped relations between the two countries. I focus on the debates around the immediate aftermath of partition, evacuee property disputes, border and water disputes, minorities and migration, trade between the two countries, which shaped the canvas in which the India- Pakistan relationship took shape. This is an institution-focussed history to some extent, although I shall also argue that the foreign policy establishments of both countries were also responding to the compulsions of internal politics; and the policies they advocated were also shaped by domestic political positions of the day. In the immediate months and years following partition, the suggestions of a lastingly adversarial relationship were already visible. This could be seen from not only in the eruption of the Kashmir dispute, but also in often bitter wrang ling over the division of assets, over water, numerous border disputes, as well as in accusations exchanged over migration of minorities. Much of the discussion on Indo-Pakistan relations was couched in adversarial and often vitriolic terms, both within the structures of government and in the press. Yet, given this context, there was also a substantial amount of space for cooperation between the two governments, and a closer scrutiny reveals that this space was explored by both sides. The logic of this cooperation was to find means of trying to ‘finalise’ the partition of India, and avoid prolonging its consequences. This deep seated drive to establish the legitimacy of both new state structures compelled a substantial degree of bilateral cooperation even in the face of daunting odds which favoured a violently hostile relationship. Thus, I argue that bilateral responses and mutually adversarial positions, were not inevitable or even unavoidable, but were in fact more contingent, and often taken despite the presence and articulation of a viable alternative.

This thesis is a study of the international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan from before its outbreak in October 1947 till the Tashkent Summit in January 1966. By focusing on Kashmir’s under-researched transnational dimensions, it represents a different approach to this intractable territorial conflict. Concentrating on the global context(s) in which the dispute unfolded, it argues that the dispute’s evolution was determined by international concerns that existed from before and went beyond the Indian subcontinent. Based on new and diverse official and personal papers across four countries, it foregrounds the Kashmir dispute in a twin setting of Decolonisation and the Cold War and investigates the international understanding around it within the imperatives of these two processes. In doing so, it traces Kashmir’s journey from being a residual irritant of the British Indian Empire, to becoming a Commonwealth embarrassment and its eventual metamorphosis into a security concern in the Cold War climate(s). A princely state of exceptional geo-strategic location, complex religious composition and unique significance in the context of Indian and Pakistani notions of nation and statehood, Kashmir also complicated their relations with Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, China, the Commonwealth countries and the Afro-Arab-Asian world. The thesis begins with British anxieties regarding independent India’s international identity that arose in 1945-47 and covers the international involvement in the first Kashmir conflict (1947-49). Next, it undertakes a survey of the initial American attitude to India (1945-47) and situates the early American approach to Kashmir (1947-49) in that light. The thesis then shows the transformation of Kashmir from being a Commonwealth concern to becoming an American affair (1949-53). Further, it traces the dispute’s transition from the prism of Western pact-politics to that of Subcontinental package proposal (1953-61). The thesis ends with comparing the last Anglo-American intervention in Kashmir (1962-63) with its Soviet counterpart (1965-66).

On 15 August 1947, the British government withdrew from India and partitioned the subcontinent to create two new nation-states: India and Pakistan. The Partition of India and Pakistan has been studied chiefly as a historical phenomenon with legacies that reach into the present. Questions of geography and space are crucial to this history, yet have hitherto received scant attention. This dissertation is a historical geography of Partition that probes the interplay of temporality and spatiality, and the historical and geographical layering, at work in the making of India and Pakistan. It treats Partition as both an event and a process, examining how the 1947 borders were rooted in a set of imaginative geographies and material geographical practices that were fashioned for and applied to the purpose of refashioning territory as part of a transfer of colonial power to independent postcolonial states and the making of new (national, religious) identities. The dissertation teases out the constitutive role of ideals and practices of territorial and cultural imagining, classification, mapping and boundary-making in this historical geography, but also highlights their contingent and contested qualities. It critically analyses and reframes Partition historiography using a range of theoretical literatures (especially critical geographical work on empire and strands of postcolonial and subaltern theory) that foster a sensitivity to the entanglements of power, knowledge, geography, expertise in the context of Partition, and draws on an eclectic range of primary sources, including the hitherto unused papers of the geographer Oskar Spate. Parts I and II trace strands of geographical and cartographic representations of ‘India' and ‘Pakistan' before 1947. Part III examines the geographies and spaces of the Punjab Boundary Commission of July 1947, in which Spate participated as an advisor to the Muslim League. Part IV points to the continued relevance of these geographies of Partition and their critical framing in this dissertation as lines of power.

This thesis aims to understand the political sociology of Maoist insurgency in India using a combination of disaggregated statistics and qualitative data. The vast majority of insurgent leaders are from dominant or upper caste, middle class backgrounds. Their participation in the insurgency can be understood in terms of ideology and short-term processes of mobilization. The Maoist insurgents provide a unified organizational structure for two separate sections of society. On the one hand, are untouchable or dalit landless laborers who suffer economic exploitation at the hands of higher caste landowners. On the hand are tribal or adivasi landowning cultivators whose relative autonomy has come under increasing pressure over the past two centuries as the state has established control over natural resources in their area. Their support for the insurgents does not just manifest itself from exploited untouchables’ and oppressed tribals’ positions in the social structure as structural theories would assume. Rather, the insurgents provide them with collective incentives in order to encourage their support. The actors at the macro and micro levels have very different reasons for participating in the insurgency. The insurgent leaders aim to capture state power through a Protracted People’s War, while the objectives of supporters at the micro-level tend to be more concerned with local and short-term issues. The insurgency should be conceptualised as a state building enterprise in which the interests of supporters at all levels are served by seizing local political power and the building of a base area. The thesis demonstrates that the insurgency is expanding most rapidly in the central Indian tribal belt. I use a case study to show that not all tribal communities support the insurgents. Some oppose them, either because their interests have been harmed by the presence of the insurgents, or as a result of a variety of endogenous mechanisms. This indicates that insurgency is a more dynamic and complex process than structural and rational actor theories allow for. The thesis finishes by placing the subject of indigenous communities and insurgency in the global context. It demonstrates that, while so-called indigenous communities listed by the Minorities at Risk project amount to 4.8% of the world’s population, they were involved in 43% of the intra-state conflict years listed by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Armed Conflict Dataset between 1946 and 2010.