‘A Fate Written on Matchboxes’: How Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s ten-year rule changed Kashmir

In a 2017 essay, Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon drew upon the phrase “politics of life” to define the contradictions inherent in the modalities of Israeli control over Palestine. After grabbing more territory following the Six Day War, Israel pushed for development-oriented policies in Gaza to normalise its takeover of the strife-ridden land, even as it suppressed the broader calls for political resolution; it improved agriculture, permitted Palestinians to build colleges, and even boasted of having raised the calorie intake among Gazans.

But this model imploded with the eruption of the First Intifada as Palestinians came to terms with the realities of “politics of life”, and how it became a stepping stone for forfeiture of their political rights.

Kashmiri scholar Hafsa Kanjwal’s A Fate Written on Matchboxes builds on Gordon’s cerebral formulation to shed new light on the complicated ways in which the Indian government consolidated its sovereign control over Jammu and Kashmir after the accession in 1947. And far from harmonising the two entities into one national whole, the contradictions intrinsic to this model only succeeded in catalysing more political unrest.

Kanjwal takes a noticeable departure from the traditional historiography concerning Kashmir where much scholarly attention has been lavished on Sheikh Abdullah....

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