Serving the Militant’s Cause: The Role of Indo-Pak State Policies in Sustaining Militancy in Kashmir

The essay explores three recently published books on the origins of militancy in Kashmir. In short, they all find that two causal factors are responsible for the insurgency’s ability to endure. First, the unending muscular security policy of India coupled with its explicit integrationist approach that triggered alienation by squeezing the democratic space of Kashmiris. Second, the role played by Pakistan in strongly backing the menagerie of militant groups for weakening political and territorial control of India over Kashmir. These books rely on a series of case studies of the different militant groups that have operated in Kashmir: most notably, Al-Fatah, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Hizbul Mujahedeen (HM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The emergence of Al-Fatah and JKLF was an offshoot of New Delhi’s iron-fist approach compounded with the dwindling of democratic space. Pakistan played a major role in the creation of HM and LeT by invoking Islam and Muslim identity as mobilising factors. These books, in their own different ways, identify a teleological shift in the thinking, strategies and operations of the militant groups, and this essay tries to extrapolate this by outlining the key markers of distinction between the old and new militancy.