Islam and Identity in South Asia: at the crossroads of confusion and confrontation?

Abstract

In May 2002 Salman Rushdie described the Indian subcontinent as 'the most dangerous place in the world'. 1 This was no overstatement. Having gone to war on three previous occasions - in 1948, 1965 and 1971 - India and Pakistan seemed poised to go to total war over Kashmir. A fierce military skirmish in the mountainous Kargil sector dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir had set the scene for this in 1999. This time they confronted each other not only with conventional armed force, with more than a million troops massing along their joint border, 2 but also with nuclear missiles strategically targeted to inflict maximum destruction. India's Bharitya Janata Party (hereafter BJP) government, which had previously acknowledged an Indian pledge never to be the first to launch an attack, provocatively demanded the right to conduct a 'defensive' pre-emptive strike reminiscent of the doctrine George W. Bush had enunciated justifying unilateral US intervention against regimes it considered hostile. 3 The prospect of the world's first nuclear war loomed large.