books to read post pahalgam
For an informed and grounded view on how to deal with Pakistan and the scourge of terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir in the longer term, there are a number of books that give a view of policy-making with the added advantage of personal experience, archival documents and research.
Diplomatic archiving
At 90 plus, Avtar Singh Bhasin is a one-man institution on diplomatic archiving. He has compiled official documents into volumes on India's relations with a number of countries, including India's neighbours like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China and Pakistan. His latest work, Negotiating India's Landmark Agreements, stands out as a treasure trove of nuggets. According to his list, the five most important agreements India has signed are the following: the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement between India and China; Indo-Soviet Treaty, 1971; the Simla Pact, 1972; India-Sri Lanka Accord, 1987; and the India-U.S. Civil Nuclear Energy Agreement, 2008.
Those focused on the current situation between India and Pakistan would learn much from Bhasin's painstaking research into how the Simla Accord came about, including the role of the Soviet Union. In a previous book, India and Pakistan: Neighbours at Odds, Bhasin analysed the Indus Waters Treaty at length. Pakistan has threatened to suspend the Simla Pact in response to India's suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty.
The Kashmir angle
Amarjit Singh Dulat, a former Intelligence Bureau officer and adviser to Farooq Abdullah when he was chief minister of J&K, presents a bird's eye view of the policy-making in Delhi and Srinagar during the worst of the Kashmir insurgency in the 1990s and 2000s. The Chief Minister and the Spy: An Unlikely Friendship takes on more importance after the Pahalgam attack, which may portend a new, more brutal turn in the Kashmir insurgency.
Unlike a previous work on the same subject, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, written with Aditya Sinha, which restricts itself to a few years, the new book goes from Sheikh Abdullah's struggle pre-Partition and stretches to Omar Abdullah's election victory in 2024. Dulat attempts to explain events that moulded Dr. Abdullah's personality and his politics that aligned him closely to the idea of a secular India.
What also comes through is Dr. Abdullah's hardline position on militant demands, including a detailed account of the kidnapping of the then Home Minister and later Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's daughter, Rubaiyya Sayeed in 1989. He also writes about the hostage-taking aboard IC-814 in 1999. Dulat recounts Dr. Abdullah's strong opposition to New Delhi's decision to release terrorists in exchange for hostages in both cases. History has proved him correct on this as both decisions gave militancy in J&K a fillip.
A controversy
Ironically, the book that is clearly 'The Spy's' almost-hagiographic tribute to 'The Chief Minister' has led to a controversy for showing Dr. Abdullah in a poor light over his response to the amendments to Article 370. A closer read indicates an unnecessary storm over a few lines, although it does raise questions about the veracity of other quotes in the book, and whether Dulat simply recreated conversations from memory without recourse to more detailed note-taking.
Both Dulat and Bhasin's books remind us that there are very few people left in office with first-hand knowledge of dealing with militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s, and dealing with Pakistan when Delhi and Islamabad still conducted bilateral dialogue. One such person is National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, the man at the centre of today's strategic planning post-Pahalgam.
A number of superbly written accounts from the ground have been penned by diplomats once posted in Islamabad, including Ajay Bisaria's Anger Management with a play-by-play account of the 2019 Pulwama attacks and Balakot strikes. Another good book is Sharat Sabharwal's India's Pakistan Conundrum that deals with the dividends of bringing international pressure on Pakistan post the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Ruchi Ghanashyam's An Indian Woman in Islamabad: 1997-2000 goes into the details of how the 1999 IC-814 crisis was managed with Pakistan. General Musharraf had only just taken over in a military coup. The book also includes a riveting first-person account from her husband and fellow diplomat R. Ghanashyam, the first Indian diplomat on the Kandahar tarmac during the crisis.
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