Kashmir

The summer and autumn of 2010 were among the most turbulent Kashmir has seen in years. Street protests swept the Valley for months, a curfew became a way of life in Srinagar, and the cycle of protest and crackdown kept repeating itself with a rhythm that felt disturbingly familiar.

Then the argument moved to Delhi. In late October, writer Arundhati Roy told a seminar in the capital that Kashmir had never been an integral part of India — a remark that triggered sedition complaints and a fresh round of shouting on every channel. Whether you agreed with her or found her reckless, the reaction itself said something: Kashmir remains the subject India is least comfortable discussing in its own terms.

Strip away the rhetoric and the questions are uncomfortably simple. Who speaks for ordinary Kashmiris — the stone-pelting teenager, the apple trader, the mother who has watched three generations grow up under the shadow of the gun? And why does every conversation about the Valley end up being a conversation about Pakistan instead?

Some of the week's sharpest writing on the subject, worth reading in full:

• The Guardian on Arundhati Roy's remarks and the intolerance debate
• Pakistan violates ceasefire, fires on Indian posts in Poonch

A region cannot be held together by argument alone. At some point, someone has to actually listen to the people who live there.