The Lawyer Who Sliced Through Kashmir's Legal Mysteries

By Showkat Andrabi

In Unravelling the Kashmir Knot, senior advocate Dr Aman Hingorani turns to the law to decode one of South Asia's longest-running discords.

With the eye of a jurist and the patience of a historian, Hingorani lays out a case: that Kashmir chapter was not born of spontaneous dispute or cultural clash, but rather manufactured in the closing act of British imperialism, then compounded by miscalculations from distant capitals.

What emerges is less a polemic and more a forensic report.

Hingorani doesn't traffic in sentiment. Instead, he brings together a patchwork of court rulings, declassified records, UN debates and diplomatic notes to trace a straight line from the Partition to present-day plight. This is not just a history lesson, but a legal reckoning. And Hingorani wants the world, quite literally, to judge.

The core of his argument is stark: the political problem was not inevitable, but engineered. Britain, he writes, carved Pakistan out of India to maintain a pliable regional partner, and deliberately left Kashmir's fate open to fuel division.

The princely state's Instrument of Accession in 1947 should've settled the matter. But subsequent events muddied the waters beyond recognition.

Hingorani is at his sharpest when unpacking the legal and diplomatic gaffes of independent India. He takes Nehru's idealism to task, critiques the UN's toothless role, and argues that India's failure to push for legal finality has allowed Pakistan and China to entrench themselves in territories that rightfully belong to India.

But the book does not stop at critique. It proposes a solution – one both radical and grounded: take the matter to the International Court of Justice.

This, Hingorani insists, would depoliticise the issue, clarify India's legal position, and potentially close the door on decades of cynical narratives. It is a gamble, perhaps, but one rooted in logic.

What gives this book heft is Hingorani's blend of roles - lawyer, scholar, teacher, and mediator. He writes with clarity, but never compromises on detail. Some sections, especially those dealing with early diplomatic exchanges, require slow reading. But even the densest passages are lit with insight.

This is a book written not just with a mind for the courtroom, but with a heart aware of Kashmir tragedy. Without slipping into emotions, Hingorani acknowledges the human cost of inaction - the lives caught in standoffs, the generations raised in shadow.

In an age of simplistic binaries, Unravelling the Kashmir Knot offers something rarer: a calm, rigorous, and deeply informed voice.

The legal route, the book advocates, may not solve the problem overnight. But as Hingorani argues, it might be the cleanest cut through the tangle.

• The writer is a Srinagar-based teacher.

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