ABSTRACT
The Kashmir dispute, we have already taken note of in preceding chapters, involves considerably more than religious identity. Other factors, extending all the way from the imperatives of strategic alliance construction to the banalities of human greed, are clearly involved. Religion has always played a visible role in the dispute, however, and no discussion of it that omitted the religious aspect entirely could be taken seriously. This is so, no matter what the focus of discussion happens to be—whether the dispute's origins, for instance, its impact on the electoral maneuvers and fortunes of regional politicians, or, as has lately become overwhelmingly apparent, its linkages to global terrorism. The dispute was still in its infancy, in fact, when religion took the stage. Religious communal majority was the demographic device explicitly singled out by the British on the eve of partition in 1947 for the fashioning of fresh boundaries between the designated successor states of India and Pakistan and it was the religion-related expectations of the new and already deeply hostile governments of these two states in regard to possession of the Hindu-ruled but Muslim-majority princely state of Jammu and Kashmir that soon boiled over into the first Indo-Pakistan war. From that point on, religion's inclusion among the dispute's staple ingredients was more or less assured. One is not bound to go beyond historical origins, in other words, to justify inclusion of religion's role in the Kashmir dispute in this book's reexamination of it.
