Introduction

On 27 October 1947, when the first Indian troops landed at the very basic airfield on the outskirts of Srinagar, they came to the Kashmir Valley with the keen support of the leading Kashmiri political figure of that era. Sheikh Abdullah, a Kashmiri nationalist, was also at this time an Indian nationalist. He endorsed the princely state's hurried accession to India. His supporters organized a volunteer militia to help Indian troops in repulsing an invading force of Pakistani tribesmen. Their presence on the streets of the Kashmiri capital was an emphatic demonstration that the old princely order had been banished. The alliance between Kashmiri and Indian nationalisms was both personal – there was a deep bond of friendship and common purpose between Abdullah and India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – and political, with a shared allegiance to a progressive agenda. Yet, six years later, Nehru oversaw the dismissal and arrest of his old ally because Sheikh Abdullah, as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, was questioning the state's accession to India and talking about the option of independence. The national aspirations and imperatives of Kashmir and of India, as expressed by their political leaders, were in conflict. Competing nationalisms can co-exist within the same nation-state, though only with constant adjustment and compromise. That in turn requires a level of comfort and confidence between political leaderships – something that has not been evident in relations between Delhi and Srinagar.

In a celebrated article published a quarter of a century ago, prompted by the outbreak of a violent separatist insurgency in Kashmir and the determined military response of the Indian Government, the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney described the Kashmir problem as a consequence of three compromised nationalisms (Varshney, 1992). The ‘religious nationalism’ of Pakistan claimed Kashmir because Islam was the basis of its national identity and most Kashmiris were Muslims; the ‘secular nationalism’ of Nehru cleaved to Kashmir because as India's only Muslim-majority state, it was a statement that religion did not define the nation; while Kashmir's ‘ethnic nationalism’ sought a political expression of the Valley's distinct history, culture, traditions and aspirations, which – to an appreciable extent – were common to the Muslim majority and the small but influential Pandit (that is, Kashmiri-speaking high-caste Hindu) minority.