Double Betrayal Repression and Insurgency in Kashmir Paula R. Newberg. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1995, 77 pp.

Abstract

Since 1989, more Kasluniris have died in the struggle against Indian
rule than the cumulative number of Bosnian casualties of Serb attacks in
Sarajevo and of Palestinians during the intifada. Even so, not many people
are aware of the mass freedom movement that has gripped the northern
Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir for the past six years. Reasons for
such apathy are not hard to gauge: Western stakes in Kashmir are of a different
kind than those in the Balkans or the oil-rich Middle- East
Consequently, the uprising in Kashmir and the massive human rights vio­
lations there have been relegated to the fringe of the Western media. Overburdened
by its post-cold war concerns, the Western conscience seems to
be on recess in Kashmir.

A corollary to the lack of international concern over Kashmir is the
virtual absence of literature on contemporary Kashmiri reality. The study
by Paula Newberg, a senior associate at the Camegie Endowment who
has visited Kashmir several times, is an apt response to this double
deficit. Academically unpretentious and refreshingly free of prescriptive
solutions, Double Betrayal (available from The Brooking Institution in
Washington, DC) etches a disturbing image of mass resistance and insular
mass repression in this land-locked Indian-administered state. The
book encapsulates the nature of the Kashmiri insurgency, Indian repression,
and the agony of an entire population whose suffering the world
refuses to fathom ...