ABSTRACT
Since December 1989, India’s government has been involved in a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir (Ganguly 1997; Marks 2004). The insurgency stemmed from a process of political mobilization against a backdrop of institutional decay. Ironically, the investments of the Indian state in education, health care, and mass media designed to win the sympathies of Kashmiris contributed to the political awakening in Kashmir. Young, politically conscious Kashmiris realized that they had few institutional channels of political dissent available to them, and, lacking a viable model of civil disobedience, they resorted to violence. The insurgency’s immediate precipitant was the flawed state election of
1987. For this election, the local Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) party entered into an alliance of convenience with the Indian National Congress (INC) party. These elections, unlike the mostly free and fair elections of 1977 and 1983, were marked by allegations of intimidation of political opponents, voter fraud, and ballot irregularities. The Muslim United Front, an agglomeration of local political parties, opposed the JKNC-INC alliance at the polls. When a number of their members realized that the electoral process had been compromised, they resorted to public protests, strikes, demonstrations, and ultimately violence. Once the insurgency erupted, Pakistan entered the fray and turned a local
uprising into a well-financed, carefully orchestrated, and ideologically charged extortion racket (Schofield 2003; Swami 2007). Pakistan became involved in the Kashmir insurgency because of its irredentist claim to the state of Jammu and Kashmir (Ganguly 2001). This chapter provides a synoptic account of the Kashmiri insurgency’s ori-
gins, evolution, and current status to illuminate key organizational, tactical, and civil-military efforts undertaken to contain the insurgency. Some of these endeavors have been innovative. However, only a few of them can be applied to other contexts for complex reasons related to geography, history, terrain, and demography.
