Content area
Full Text
Sumantra Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, Self-Determination and a Just Peace (New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications in association with the Book Review Literary Trust, 1997), 211 pp., Rs.125, ISBN 81 7036 592 9/0 8039 9350 1.
Bose opens his monograph with a pertinent question: `Why another book on the conflict in and over Kashmir?' It is pertinent because, since 1989, writers in their droves have fastened, sometimes quite voyeuristically, on the tragedy that is the (as yet inconclusive) Kashmir revolt. In fact, no other single state in India has received, in the last decade, quite so much attention as Jammu and Kashmir. Broadly, the story of the revolt is well known, while the larger issue of who 'owns' Kashmir has been wrangled over by Indian, Pakistani and foreign writers at even greater length. What more, then, needs to be said?
Bose answers his own question handsomely by giving us an account that at once brings the narrative up to date (as...