Dr Nyla Ali Khan

The various communities of the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) — Muslims, Pandits, Dogras and Ladakhis — have time and again tried to forge a national consciousness. The notion of ‘Kashmiriyat’, with its syncretic cultural ethos, put forth by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his comrades had similarly involved culling selected cultural fragments from an […]

  It was a long and hard struggle for Kashmiris to come out of the quagmire of illiteracy, political marginalisation, cultural sterility, and social decrepitude and into an era that promised enlightening institutions of public education, spaces of democratic debate, political enfranchisement, cultural revitalisation, and social progressivism. For a long time, Kashmir remained a source […]

My maternal grandmother, Akbar Jehan, and her children were subjected to hardship in my maternal grandfather Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s long absence after his ouster from power and arrest in 1953. The family was condemned to isolation, but Akbar Jehan did not cringe. I still see vestiges of the distrust of statist versions of history and […]

The State of Jammu and Kashmir is like a palimpsest that has been inscribed upon two or three times but the previous texts have been imperfectly erased and, therefore, remain partially visible. A history of unfulfilled pledges, broken promises, political deception, military oppression, illegal political detentions, human rights abuse, sterile political alliances, mass exodus, and […]

Unlike many political actors in Jammu and Kashmir, my work is not based on hearsay. So here is my response to all those, including jingoistic media persons, who assume that the pre-1953 position is impractical and completely nullifies the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India over Jammu and Kashmir. The achievable solutions are relegated […]

    The growth of nationalism or an autonomous Kashmiri identity doesn’t necessarily have to be pursued through a politics that supports obscurantism or deliberately prevents spread of knowledge and information. The identity of a state or a nation cannot be built just on an unquenchable hatred towards the other and should, certainly, not be […]

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh has recently claimed that Kashmir will be a changed place within a year. The presence of several mainstream political organisations is a hallmark of politics in the Sub-continent. Similarly in conflict zones, there are several separatist organisations, attempting to outdo one another in taking the moral high ground and adopting […]

I am writing this article in wake of the Nuclear Disarmament Conference being held at the United Nations (UN). My friends at the United Nations Association of Oklahoma (UNAO) are hopeful that a treaty would be presented to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) later this year. During the 1990s, each military crisis between India and […]

The election of Donald Trump as the next US president has generated stimulating and vibrant debates across the country, particularly regarding the treatment of minorities.  My attempt is to analyse the intersection of law and race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and national origin within the current political context. In the post-9/11 world, political and […]

Do women’s multiple narratives reveal a capacity for alternative ways of negotiating the construction of conflictual identities? Does the assumption of agential roles by traditional women in a patriarchal culture cause an identity conflict crisis which can be resolved through a firm commitment to specific values and goals? Women, as evidenced by the work of […]