Countdown to end of 2025: 19 days
Today was a lapse if compared to the past week or so. I got up at 0745hrs today, 4 hours and 45 minutes behind schedule, having got to sleep at about midnight. It was an eventful day yesterday, with our 1st of 3 #AwaamiAdaalat sessions, ensuring that many a guest continued to visit Maqbool Bhat Martyr's Square throughout the evening.
There can never be any excuses though. One is always responsible for their own actions.
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The concept of geopolitical neutrality vis a vis Jammu Kashmir & Allied (areas) is now seeping into the conversation of intelligentsia in India & Pakistan. We thank Sapan for taking the conversation of #Conflict2Peace in this direction:
Here are some important quotes from the embedded article above:
Indian historian and retired naval officer, Dr Atul Bhardwaj, in his ground-breaking study demonstrates that “non-alignment” was never principled equidistance. It was multi-alignment weighted decisively toward the Anglo-American-dominated liberal international order.
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By 1962 the United States had poured more economic aid into India than the Soviet Union would manage in the entire following decade. In return, Commonwealth membership was retained, and sterling balances kept in London. India quietly cooperated with MI6 and the CIA on Tibet and the North-East.
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That same elite also presided over the violent birth of India and Pakistan in 1947, an trauma episode that continues to dictate the limits of Indian strategic autonomy today. Winston Churchill, who despised Indian independence, privately stated that Britain should quit the subcontinent but “keep a little bit of India” as a strategic buffer against the Soviet Union and to protect Persian Gulf oil routes, as revealed by veteran editor Sandeep Bamzai in his book “PRINCESTAN: How Nehru, Patel and Mountbatten Made India” (Rupa, 2021).
That “little bit” was the North-West, and above all Kashmir: Muslim-majority, Hindu-ruled, controlling the Indus headwaters and the land bridge to Central Asia. The British military’s strategic thinkers saw Kashmir as “the keystone of the strategic arch of the Indian Ocean” after partition.
The Partition was engineered chaos. Cyril Radcliffe, chair of the boundary-drawing committee, drew the borders in five weeks; 14 million people were displaced, up to two million died. Kashmir became the unfinished business of that bloodbath. Pakistani-backed tribesmen invaded in October 1947; Maharajah Hari Singh, the last princely ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, acceded to India four days later; the first war began. The 1949 ceasefire line was drawn by British officers who had served together months earlier. The Anglo-American stake in keeping the subcontinent divided and tense did not end there. Pakistan joined the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in 1954, giving the CIA its U-2 base at Peshawar. India quietly cooperated with Western intelligence agencies.
Kashmir was weaponised as the perfect mechanism for perpetual external patronage.
No more fig leafs
Seventy-eight years later, the prison built in 1947 still holds. Kashmir remains the sticking point that prevents any genuine normalisation with Pakistan, and therefore any genuine strategic autonomy for India. Every trade agreement, every pipeline proposal, every climate initiative on shared rivers is held hostage to the colonial legacy of Kashmir.
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The Anglo-American world that engineered division and dependence has moved on. Britain is a nostalgic middle power; Trump’s America favours immediate transactional gain. Neither will reward eternal hostility toward Pakistan, nor eternal subservience from India.
Real strategic autonomy now lies in jointly escaping the prison that London and Washington built in 1947. It is time to neutralise Kashmir as the poison in India-Pakistan relations. Time to neutralise the reflexive need for Anglo-American approval as the poison in India’s global posture.
Until then, every Indian prime minister will remain trapped in the same reflexive hostility toward Pakistan that Churchill designed. And every embrace from an American president will feel like validation rather than what it actually is: the latest chapter of a tragic strategic surrender.
Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St. George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is author of Foundations of the American Century (2012), among other books.
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Public Finance Update:
Number of co-citizens who have paid their share (over 20 years):
15
Number of co-citizens who have paid a portion to date, since direct public funding began in 2012:
186
Number of co-citizens who have promised to pay:
82
Number of co-citizens I have directly contacted since arriving in Dadyaal (of total 5,000):
459
Cash in Hand: 57,640
Cash Deposits: 0
Immediate Debts: 0
Public funds received so far in Dadyaal (65 days - up to midnight 12/12/2025):
3K (Day 6)
5K (Day 15)
5K (Day 17)
0.2K (Day 20)
1K (Day 21)
1K (Day 22)
0.3K (Day 24)
3K (Day 25)
1K (Day 26)
4K (Day 33)
5K (Day 38)
1K (Day 42)
2K (Day 44)
1K (Day 45)
4K (Day 46)
3.9K (Day 47)
30.2K (Day 49)
15K (Day 51)
20K (Day 53)
1K (Day 54)
1L 39.9K (Day 56)
3.9K (Day 59)
Total received so far: 2,50,400
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