Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir effectively charts gendered exclusions in the armed struggle for independence in Indian-controlled Kashmir (1988–2003) and in the field of international relations more broadly. In viewing the Kashmir conflict from a “gender prism” (p. vii), Seema Shekhawat “locate[s] Kashmiri women in militancy beyond victimization, as agents … to make a case for their due place in the peace process” (p. viii).
The book's six chapters range from a critique of international relations and a call for feminist analyses (chapter 1), to a comparison of women's roles in the Kashmir conflict against other regional conflicts in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (chapter 2), to interviews with Kashmiri women who were involved in the armed struggle (chapters 4, 5, and 6). These latter chapters are wonderfully detailed. Women describe how they participated in the movement (tehreek) by skillfully performing femininity—by crying or pleading with Indian security forces, and offering cover to militants—in order to aid the armed struggle. Through inventive acts, Kashmiri women “appealed to a widely held belief about motherhood” (p. 86) shared by both Indian soldiers and Kashmiri fighters as a way of garnering widespread support for the armed struggle and as a tactic of negotiation with security forces. These vignettes illustrate one of Shekhawat's main claims about the limits of patriarchal norms by showing how women themselves played with gendered norms that construct them as peaceful and passive.
Although women were active, public presences during the early years of the movement, over time, their roles changed: “in the end, it was the male leadership that decided and the female followers abided” (p. viii). Shekhawat points to women's exclusion from militant organizations, political parties, and post-ceasefire discussions between the Indian state and Kashmiri stakeholders. During several round table discussions held in 2006 and 2007, for example, “core gender issues did not figure in the deliberations of any of the working groups…. There was not a single woman member in the working group assigned the task of studying the problems of widows and orphans and providing recommendations” (p. 127). She concludes that Kashmiri women's participation has shrunk “to the confines of the private sphere” (p. 149) and women's roles have been reduced to those of victims: as victims of sexual violence or as widows or half-widows.
While Shekhawat makes a compelling case for how women have been made invisible over time or reduced to victims, the way she defines participation restricts action to that which is public and directly related to militancy. As such, radical, militant organizations such as the Dukhtaran-e-Millat receive disproportionate attention despite representing only a fraction of Kashmiri women. Perhaps due to the ways that political science as a discipline defines participation, her analysis excludes women who may participate spontaneously or in more informal ways in politics. Kashmiri women have pelted stones at security forces, and have been agitating as human rights lawyers, doctors, scholars, and as members of civil society movements. Activists like Anjum Zamarud Habib, a former courier for a militant organization and herself a vocal critic of the patriarchal structure of Kashmiri political organizations, are given short shrift, although Habib has written extensively about her experiences as a political prisoner in her memoir, Prisoner No. 100.Footnote 22 Engaging anthropological and feminist scholarship on agency might have led Shekhawat to a different conclusion, other than one in which women's exclusions are ever more complete and encompassing.
Finally, there is a notable elision of the continued militarization of the region and the ways this might impede women's participation and agency. Shekhawat assumes that there has been a transition from “conflict” to “peace” because of the restoration of the electoral process. However, people's attention to everyday questions, such as electricity and garbage collection, does not mean that underlying questions of political freedoms are forgotten (p. 122). In this sense, the book could have benefited from a more in-depth discussion of how politics in Kashmir has changed post-2008, away from an armed struggle to the return of popular, largely peaceful demonstrations, and how these changes might shape, and be shaped by, women's participation.
Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir sits well with a number of recent studies of the role of women in the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, including the work of Rita Manchanda, Seema Kazi, and Urvashi Butalia.Footnote 23 It is an important read for scholars of gender and conflict in Kashmir studies, South Asian studies, and beyond. While Shekhawat is right in calling for the greater representation of women and gendered issues in politics, ultimately her analysis does not escape the victimization narrative that she seeks to undo. This is a missed opportunity, since this book can broaden scholarly understandings of what counts as participation by showing us glimpses of the everyday, quiet, and powerful ways in which Kashmiri women have agency. Even if official stakeholders do not recognize these acts, as feminist scholars, we have a responsibility to legitimize these in our own work.
