Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India–Pakistan Escalation Dynamics
Happymon Jacob
Oxford University Press
The India–Pakistan border in Jammu & Kashmir has witnessed repeated ceasefire violations (CFVs) over the past decade. As relations between India and Pakistan have deteriorated, CFVs have increased exponentially. It is imperative to gain a deeper understanding of these violations owing to their potential to not only cause a crisis but also escalate an ongoing one. Line on Fire, part of the Oxford International Relations in South Asia series, postulates that the incorrect diagnosis of the reasons behind CFVs has led to wrong policies being adopted by both India and Pakistan to deal with the recurrent violations. Using fresh empirical data and first-hand accounts, the volume attempts to understand the reason why CFVs continue to take place between India and Pakistan despite consistent efforts to reduce the tension between the two nations. In doing so, it recontextualizes and enriches the prevailing arguments in contemporary literature on escalating dynamics and unenduring ceasefire agreements between the two South Asian nuclear rivals.
Happymon Jacob teaches disarmament studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The Bhagat Singh Reader
Chaman Lal
HarperCollins Publishers India (2019)
Sporting a sharp handlebar moustache, his hat askew, Shaheed Bhagat Singh has been lionized in Indian imagination as one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Independence movement. Convicted and hanged by the British in 1931 for his role in killing a colonial police officer in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, he became a martyr at the young age of twenty-three, leaving behind an inspiring legacy. Tales of Bhagat Singh’s heroism and bravery are part of popular folklore, as it were – how he exploded bombs at the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and showered leaflets on the legislators before surrendering himself to the authorities, or how he led Indian political prisoners in a hunger strike demanding better conditions in jail. The Bhagat Singh Reader brings into prominence his less widely known intellectual output. It presents in a single volume a collection of his writings and thoughts: from his letters, telegrams and notices to articles that chalk out his subversive and progressive ideas, and his mails from prison to the colonial administration and judiciary. His forty-three sketches of Indian freedom fighters throw light on the larger picture of the independence struggle. This is a book that reveals Bhagat Singh the man and the thinker, the Marxist and the idealist.
Chaman Lal is professor (retired) and former chairperson of the Centre of Indian Languages at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is honorary advisor, Bhagat Singh Archives & Resource Centre, Delhi Archives, and fellow of Panjab University, Chandigarh.
Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
Matthew Carr
Hurst & Co.
A centuries-old story with remarkable contemporary resonance, Blood and Faith is celebrated journalist Matthew Carr’s riveting and “richly detailed” (Choice) chronicle of what was, by 1614, the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history.
Months after King Philip III of Spain signed an edict in 1609 denouncing the Muslim inhabitants of Spain as heretics, traitors, and apostates, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory, on threat of death. In the brutal and traumatic exodus that followed, entire families and communities were forced to abandon homes and villages where they had lived for generations, leaving their property in the hands of their Christian neighbors. By 1613, an estimated 300,000 Muslims had been removed from Spanish territory.
Blood and Faith presents a remarkable window onto a little known period of modern Europe—a complex tale of competing faiths and beliefs, cultural oppression, and resistance against over-whelming odds that sheds new light on national identity and Islam.
Matthew Carr is a writer, broadcaster, and journalist and the author of The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism and the acclaimed memoir My Father’s House. He lives in Derbyshire, England.