The recent raid on Kashmir Times is more than another attempt to intimidate an independent newsroom. It is a reminder of what is at stake when a paper that has, for decades, documented Kashmir’s political shifts, human suffering, and strategic debates is suddenly pushed into vulnerability.
At moments like this, the question is not just why a newspaper was targeted, but what India risks losing when it tries to silence the archives, voices, and narratives that have defined Kashmir’s public memory.
This is why Ali Ahmed’s newly shared compilation, “Kashmir: Strategic Sense and Nonsense,” arrives with renewed urgency.
The compilation of op-eds by Ali Ahmed (a former Indian Army officer and a strategic expert), published in the Kashmir Times between 2010 and 2019, chronicles how ideology crept into military decision-making, how counterinsurgency became unmoored from political purpose, and how the rise of the right wing pushed India toward a slow-moving instability that threatened not only Kashmir but the broader South Asian region.
What makes this collection especially relevant today is the sharp alignment between the concerns raised a decade ago and the political climate that has now produced raids on newsrooms, throttled dissent, and shrunk the space for free commentary.
The central argument that strategy becomes nonsense when ideological agendas contaminate it is no longer an academic warning.
The raid on Kashmir Times is evidence of the same drift he cautioned against - a governing culture that treats journalism as an obstacle, not a democratic necessity, and an army increasingly used as a political instrument instead of a professional institution insulated from partisan pressure.
Ali’s preface underscores another uncomfortable truth: Kashmir has rarely been allowed to define its own story.
Instead, its fate has been tethered to India’s internal political battles and the right wing’s strategy of Othering. When the state grows insecure, it turns its attention not only to the streets but also to the pages, archives, and editors, who document those streets.
The raid, therefore, is not an isolated domestic law-and-order exercise. It is part of a larger struggle over who gets to frame the narrative of Kashmir and who must be pushed aside for that narrative to hold.
By revisiting collected edits now, readers can see how consistently Kashmir Times warned against this path.
The work remains a valuable guide for students, scholars, soldiers, policymakers, and citizens who want to understand what Kashmir has endured and what India stands to lose when strategic clarity is replaced by ideological zeal.
Above all, the compilation, posted on Substack, stands as a tribute to the people of Kashmir and to Kashmir Times, a paper that—despite pressure, raids and intimidation—has kept a lonely light burning in a difficult decade.
At a moment when the free press is again under attack, these essays offer context, memory, and a reminder that journalism must remain a witness, even when power prefers silence.
The articles can be accessed here and here. We will be reproducing some of these in the next coming days. Below is the preface by Ali Ahmed:
For the people of Kashmir
By Ali Ahmed
The title needs explaining. I believe a nonsensical strategy has attended India’s Kashmir problem over the past decade. In the United Progressive Alliance government period, the government was afraid of its own shadow. It missed a splendid opportunity to address the Kashmir issue meaningfully. No doubt, it had the shadow of the right-wing looming across it staying its hand. As for the right wing, when it came to power, it has willfully messed up the situation further. As the right-wing has another lease of life in power, there can only more nonsense up ahead. The assumption is that Kashmiris will bear the brunt and, therefore, it is not of consequence for the rest of us in South Asia. This is untenable. The right-wing is perfectly capable of worse and this shall surely come to pass too over the coming five years.
This volume of my opinion pieces in the Kashmir Times over the 2010s are proof of India hurtling down hill as a country, taking Kashmir down with it and looking to drag down the rest of South Asia with it too. This understanding is reverse of the popular notion that it is Pakistan as a failing state that is out to drag India down with it. I believe the democratic ‘take over’ of India by the right-wing is an existential danger to the subcontinent. Its conjoined Kashmir and Pakistan policies are not merely potentially explosive, but are an explosion in slow motion. The answer is not to be found in Kashmir. It is to be looked for in the rest of India, where the electorate needs to rethink its self-interest. The apprehension is that this will not happen till the calamity impending is not over and done with.
In the main, the commentaries here deal with Kashmir and India’s Pakistan policy as relevant to Kashmir. There are several largely critical pieces covering the counter-insurgency campaign. Since a significant proportion of the army is deployed in Jammu and Kashmir, the op-eds covered the meaning of the 'strategy' in Kashmir - of which the army was a major instrument - for the army as an institution. The commentaries link India's Pakistan and Kashmir strategies to internal politics in India, in which the ascendance of the right wing meant preclusion of any peace headway. The constant call is for the passing opportunities to be seized. The needs of the strategy of Othering that brought the right wing to power in India account for the advocacy being ignored.
The nonsense in the Kashmir strategy owes to contamination of strategy by ideology. It is no secret that the strategic establishment owes right-wing allegiance. The strategic community has had its share of right wingers, who were in the closet till early this decade. Since a major plank of such cultural nationalist thinking is anti-Muslim, any strategy geared to addressing South Asian Muslim issues cannot but be contaminated by ideological baggage. To expect a rational strategy – even one based on realism – is to be wishful. The Pakistan strategy needs no edification. Needless to add, that the strategies will fall flat in good time. The issue is how to survive the deneument.
Plainspeaking is the need of the hour. The compilation is to focus minds. Nothing can be done to avert the catastrophe, but seeing off the right-wing back to the margins would require to be done once the dust – hopefully not radioactive - has settled. This would require the shoulder of all institutions. In alerting the nation, the collection of op-eds would have served a purpose.
The compilation would be of interest to students, academics, practitioners in uniform, policy makers and the attentive public. The issues dealt with are at the interstices of strategic. security and peace studies. It has insights for the military engaged in countering insurgency, for their political masters and the bureaucratic intermediary layer both in Srinagar and the national security establishment in Delhi. The book is dedicated to the people of Kashmir, both within and outside of the Valley.
I thank Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal for her unstinting support. Her liberality shines through. Her paper Kashmir Times has ploughed a lonely furrow and done a national service in keeping the liberal torch aloft in trying times. I thank the editorial staff for the support over the past decade of my writing for the paper, the writings put together between these covers: some 100 op-eds comprising 1.25 lakh words. Needless to add, all shortcomings in the language, style and facts are mine. I thank my family for its usual forebearance. Hope their optimism that the essays shall prove useful is proven true.
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