Suchergebnisse

"This book presents a study of the international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan from before its outbreak in October 1947 until the Tashkent Summit in January 1966. By focusing on Kashmir's under-researched transnational dimensions, it represents a different approach to this intractable territorial conflict. Concentrating on the global context(s) in which the dispute unfolded, it argues that the dispute's evolution was determined by international concerns that existed from before and went beyond the Indian subcontinent. Based on new and diverse official and personal papers across four countries, the book foregrounds the Kashmir dispute in a twin setting of Decolonisation and the Cold War, and investigates the international understanding around it within the imperatives of these two processes. In doing so, it traces Kashmir's journey from being a residual irritant of the British Indian Empire, to becoming a Commonwealth embarrassment and its eventual metamorphosis into a security concern in the Cold War climate(s). A princely state of exceptional geo-strategic location, complex religious composition and unique significance in the context of Indian and Pakistani notions of nation and statehood, Kashmir also complicated their relations with Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, China, the Commonwealth countries and the Afro-Arab-Asian world. This book is of interest to scholars in the field of Asian History, Cold War History, Decolonisation and South Asian Studies."--Provided by publisher.

This article is about the afterlife of Dewan Chaman Lall's interwar internationalism. Exploring the trajectory of his public career from 1946, it shows how Lall, an Oxford-educated trade unionist, and an ally of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, took a nationalist turn in his later political interventions on/after (a) Partition of British India, (b) the dispute on the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, and (c) on the government of India's worsening border relations with the People's Republic of China. Simultaneously, his understandings on issues like press freedom/official secrets, evacuee property exchange/sale, Sikh linguistic autonomy and labour/capital equation turned status quo-ist. By putting together his contributions on these national questions and juxtaposing them vis-à-vis his earlier avatar, this article also signifies the shift that took place in the perspectives of those who, like Lall, hitherto enveloped by empire, emerged in nation-statehood post-1945.

This article searches for Dr B. R. Ambedkar (India's first Law Minister) in the pages of The Times of India ( TOI; India's largest-selling English-language newspaper) from December 1956 to April 1990, that is, from Ambedkar's death to his receiving the Bharat Ratna. A lone soldier for his social and political causes, during his life and after his death, Ambedkar's afterlife has recently seen a total transformation in contemporary India. This article looks for Ambedkar before this turn by going through the pages of TOI over a period of thirty-four years, to trace both his representation in and resistance to it, before the current appropriation, on four key themes of religion (neo-Buddhism), region (Bombay/Maharashtra), caste (scheduled/backward) and class (lower-middle/political). Drawing upon 200+ items, the article presents the newspaper's expanding coverage of Ambedkar in Indian politics in a framework of continuum that reconciles its changes, by focussing on the regularity of these reports and analysing their periodicity. Taken together, these details allow us to see the slow switch in the status quo on Ambedkar's iconography, long before the present idolisation, and fill a political vacuum before his present veneration.

AbstractBy looking at the September 1949 devaluation dilemma faced by the governments of Pakistan and India, this article argues that it was an early episode of divergence between them following partition. The reasons why Pakistan did not devalue when India did so have remained largely obscured in the historiography. Deeply contested, the decision was a determining event through which the state staked its claim for economic sovereignty, internally and externally. It led to a 17-month-long official trade deadlock, especially in the eastern region of partitioned Bengal. It ended when the two governments established an exchange ratio for the two rupees, no longer at par with each other. This interactive delinking of currencies was symptomatic of the improvisational decoupling of the colonial subcontinent's post-colonial states. In tracing its trajectory, this article contributes to the inconsiderable literature on why devaluation did not happen in Pakistan, revises the rationale offered, and presents the event as a contingent exercise in economic decolonization, generative of a post-colonial sovereign difference.

This article builds on the correspondence of the prime minister of Pakistan with five political figures from East Bengal who flourished between 1947 and 1951. These were Khwaja Nazimuddin and his brother Shahabuddin, Fazlur Rahman, Nurul Amin and Jogendranath Mandal. Their exchanges with Prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan—at the head of the central government in Karachi—provide a portentous pre-history of the future engagements between the two wings and their states and societies in the lead-up to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. The fragments of these exchanges presented here are an attempt to provide a glimpse into Bengali politicians' manifold activities in Pakistan, which revolved around the minority and refugee question, religious orientation of education, non-devaluation and its impact on trade, a range of administrative issues and party politics. Drawing upon their letters in the Liaquat Ali Khan papers, this article deploys these five themes as entry-points into East–West exchanges before and beneath the conventional coordinates of linguistic provincialism (1948–52), economic instigation (1954–66) and democratic desires (1966–71).

On 1 November 1947, Harekrushna Mahtab, premier of Orissa, British/independent India's youngest province, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. This was in reply to the first of Nehru's famous letters to the provincial chiefs. In it, Nehru had expressed his wish to read similarly from them and Mahtab responded in kind. For the next 2 years, Mahtab wrote to Nehru, before leaving Orissa to become a union minister. These letters, present among the Mahtab Papers (NMML, New Delhi), provide an often-downplayed vantage of the province, to view the concerns of the nation contained in Nehru's letters. Where the latter were meant 'to educate and exhort', the former comprised a return catalogue of official information, societal caution, and the Congress Party's particularities.

Lal Bahadur Shastri has been recently recalled as 'the original accidental Prime Minister' and 'architect of India's real surgical strike'. His sudden death has lately been the subject of a film, The Tashkent Files (2019) and a book, Your Prime Minister is Dead (2018). A memorial to him is the Government of India's National Academy of Administration, named after him since 1972. And yet, there is less written on him directly, as against approaching him indirectly as (a) Jawaharlal Nehru's successor, (b) leader during the 1965 India-Pakistan war amidst a food crisis and (c) peacemaker of the 1966 Tashkent agreement. This article tries to reconstruct, from some of his papers, a slice of Shastri's political life that has either fallen through the crack between the larger preceding period of the Nehruvian 1950s and the larger succeeding period of Indira's India or is resurrected in a reactionary, outsized opposition to these.

This article focuses on unpacking the workings of the independent Indian nation-state in the region of Mewat in the aftermath of Partition violence, particularly the state's rendering of the Meo community there as a minority. This violence has been called a 'rite of political and territorial passage' and 'systemic ethnic cleansing' by scholars Shail Mayaram and Ian Copland, respectively. Building upon their works, this article focuses on state actors and details their 'rule of difference' in the treatment of Meos through the years 1947 to 1949, that is, from their displacement to the conditions of their resettlement. This documentation is done by accessing the hitherto unused files of the Ministry of States, the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Prime Minister's Secretariat at the National Archives, and the post-1947 papers of Jawaharlal Nehru and Pandit Sunder Lal held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

This article presents four episodes from the political period 1969 to 1976 in India, focusing on the views and actions of P. N. Haksar, Principal Secretary and Advisor to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1967–1973). Unlike the 'national/international politics' hitherto under focus from then, that is, the Congress split (1969), birth of Bangladesh (1971) and the JP Movement/Emergency (1974–1975), the aspects under consideration in this article are of subterranean existence. First of these aspects is the provincial reverberations of the Congress split, the case considered here being that of the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee. Second is the attitude of the Congress Party towards left opposition, the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI [M]) in West Bengal, as revealed through the anxieties of Governor Shanti Dhavan. The third aspect under consideration is a glimpse of centre–states relations, as shown through New Delhi's interactions with the EMS Namboodiripad-led and CPI (M)-dominated United Front Government of Kerala. Finally, the article looks at Haksar's attempts at planning and development for the state of Bihar. Each of these four themes was among the 'wider range of functions' that Mrs Gandhi wished to be performed by her Secretariat and to allow us to test how successful each of it was. Each of these provides a context for contemporary issues.

Abstract
This article documents in detail hitherto unavailable what Shail Mayaram called an "onslaught by the modern bureaucracy of the postcolonial state" on the liminally placed Meo community in the Mewat region, comprising the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab. A people well-described as "in-between Hinduism and Islam," the Meo community found itself, at a time of "two-nation" theory and consequent "partition politics," a misfit. This article begins in 1949, when existing accounts of the story of the Meos end and traces the fraught process of their reterritorialization on their own land, now part of a partitioned nation state. Given the current ascendant culturally nationalist Indian state and society, it represents the Mewat of 1949–50 as a community lab of the early Indian nation state; tests its claims of parity, equality, and freedom; and provides a "prehistory" of the contemporary violence there.

This paper is closed access until 3 August 2020. ; This paper is a study of the Interim Government in British India, formed during the penultimate viceroyalty of Archibald Wavell, from September 1946 to March 1947. It tries to throw light on major and minor personalities and micro and macro processes at work in this improbable interlude and, thus, probes an over-shadowed ministerial and bureaucratic set-up in the lead-up to Partition. This under-studied set-up constituted yet another compelling 'space before Partition' activities wherein would continue to affect the Indian state after Partition. Simultaneously, it seeks to complicate the teleology and inevitability of Partition by showing this interim arrangement at work, which belied its name. Bringing together official texts and personal interpretations of many participants, it approaches the period as liminal albeit one with limitless possibilities at this juncture, of which what followed in 1947 was but one.

This book is in closed access. ; This book is about India's Interim Government, in office from 2 September 1946 till August 1947, and some of its provincial counterparts.