Seema Kazi

This article addresses the question of minority differences within modern nation-states with reference to Indian Muslims, especially Muslim women. Using a cross-comparative historical lens the parallels between minority exclusion in Europe and in post-colonial India, and the limits of legal equality as a sufficient protection for minorities, are highlighted. Partition's lasting influence on the Othering of Indian Muslims in modern India is emphasised as is the elision of Muslim women's histories of struggle and achievement during the colonial period. In conclusion, this article suggests that India's history of diversity and difference could possibly form the basis of a new historically anchored national imagination wherein the modern principle of Constitutional equality coexists with the right to historically inherited difference.

This article focuses on Kashmiri women and the gender politics underpinning the August 5, 2019 revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir. Reclaiming Kashmiri women’s property rights was among the justifications cited by the state for revoking Kashmir’s autonomy. Paradoxically, however, most analyses centered on its political implications. Kashmiri women’s opinions regarding the revocation, the state’s use of the women’s rights argument to justify the same, or Kashmiri women’s rights and experiences in the wake of the revocation were seldom the subjects of discussion or analysis. Beginning with a brief overview of Kashmiri women’s role in the Kashmiri struggle, I juxtapose the State’s claim as defender of Kashmiri women’s property rights against the legal and factual position of women’s property rights in Kashmir prior to the revocation, demonstrating the contradiction between the two. I subsequently foreground the gendered, misogynist sub-text of nationalist rhetoric unleashed in the wak...

Purpose This paper aims to focus on the conflict in the Indian states of Kashmir and Manipur. It situates both conflicts within a historical frame to underscore their origins in history. Using a comparative, inter-disciplinary lens, the paper foregrounds the political, empirical and gendered similarities in both conflict zones. The human cost of modern India’s project of integrating historically autonomous, ethnically distinct and geographically disparate regions of Kashmir and Manipur is illustrated. By way of conclusion, the paper suggests institutional respect for, and accommodation of, ethnic minority history, identity and aspiration, as an ethical, democratic way forward towards conflict resolution. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a relatively lesser used comparative, critical inter-disciplinary approach towards examining ethnic conflict. Contrary to ahistorical normative approaches focused on individual ethnic conflict, or the conventional assumption that the ethnic...

... Seema Kazi ... The spate of recent killings in the Valley has made citi-zens fear a return of the mid-1990s “reign of terror” by the SOG.13 After an investiga-tion, the police indicted troops from 18 RR for the arbitrary killing of Fayaz Ahmed Mir, a tailor from Kupwara. ...

This thesis focuses on the militarisation of a secessionist movement involving Kashmiri militants and Indian military forces in the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The term militarisation in this thesis connotes the militarised state and, more primarily, the growing influence of the military within the state that has profound implications for state and society. In contrast to conventional approaches that distinguish between inter and intra-state military conflict, this thesis analyses India's external and domestic crises of militarisation within a single analytic frame to argue that both dimensions are not mutually exclusive but have common political origins. Kashmir, this thesis further argues, exemplifies the intersection between militarisation's external and domestic dimensions. Focusing on the intersection between both dimensions of militarisation in Kashmir, this thesis illustrates that the greatest and most grievous price of using the military for domestic rep...