I started taking notes for this book after observing Indian soldiers in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, gazing through the gun-slits of their sand-bagged bunkers. They were trying to coexist with the state’s natural beauty, its greatest resource. The panorama from Hotel Welcome, where I stayed, was a glimpse of so much more to delight in. But the bunkers draped in camouflage netting and dotting street corners were also contrasting sights of more to come.

A multi-religious political entity based on Kashmiriyat, a common culture shared by the country’s Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists, gave way to a bloody wedge between various groups of these communities. Insurgencies, kept up by foreign entities, attracted mercenaries who apparently needed a job and a mission. Attacks on Hindus, most of whom were Brahmins belonging to the Pandit caste, and Muslims, both of whom lived, by and large, as bhai-bhai (like brothers) for generations, not only relocated virtually the entire Hindu population of the Valley (equally called Vale) of Kashmir, but also made in sufficiently supportive Muslims targets. This dangerous episode presented itself in constitutionally secular India whose founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a Kashmiri Pandit himself and where Sufi (mystical) Islam as an unidiomatic faith with components from sources outside Muslim teaching, moved closer to Hinduism.

Although Article 370 of the Constitution of India recognizes the special position of the State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the latter is a part of India. Hence, the word “neighbours” in the title of the book refers mainly to Pakistan and the export of mercenaries from another neighbor Afghanistan. J&K faces a dilemma. After the grassroots violence, that emerged in 1988, and with Pakistan throwing its lot in with it, terrorism discouraged tourism, on which the state’s economy substantially depended, and economic stagnation pushed the unemployed youth towards guerilla activity that pays dividends in more ways than one. The armed rebels are now motivated less by Kashmiri nationalism than “fundamentalism”, partially sponsored by neighboring Pakistani groups and Afghanistan’s Taliban and other imported aliens, most of whom are strangers to that land and its peoples. Some called them depressingly, during the summer of 1999, the forces of India and Pakistan, both now possessing a nuclear capability, clashed at Kargil, giving chills to all those fear the future may be decided by an atomic contest. India may be acclaimed favorably for self-restraint after rebuffing Pakistan’s incursion.