Kashmir

Kashmir has been in the news almost constantly since 1989. Local militants, foreign fighters and Indian security forces have fought across a region that was long praised as an earthly paradise. Coverage tends to run on propaganda, casualty figures, accounts of attacks and counter-insurgency operations, and arguments about outside interference. The people who live through it get lost along the way.

Journalist Humra Quraishi sets out to recover them. Over twenty years she travelled repeatedly through the Valley and talked with ordinary Kashmiris, trying to understand what the prolonged conflict has done to their lives. The book is built from what they told her rather than from official versions of events.

The accounts are painful. Mothers keep waiting for sons who vanished years ago, taken away by the army or by militants. People are worn down by constant fear, uncertainty and near-daily humiliation. Old bonds between neighbours and communities have frayed under widespread suspicion. A whole generation of young Kashmiris has grown up never knowing what safety feels like. Taken together, the stories show families, and a society, strained close to breaking by a conflict that seems to have no end.