Yasir Hamid Bhat

Publication

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his Biographers

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah (1905–1982) occupies an enigmatic position in Kashmir’s political memory. To his supporters, he remains the Sher-i-Kashmir; to his critics, a symbol of political compromise. Lockwood observed long ago that Abdullah’s politics were shaped by the ‘test of wills’ between his regionalism and nationalisms (Lockwood Citation1969, 384). This ‘test’ became the defining feature of his political life. This review essay critically examines Chitralekha Zutshi’s Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir and Altaf Hussain Para’s The Making of Modern Kashmir: Sheikh Abdullah and the Politics of the State. Zutshi interprets Abdullah primarily as a figure shaped by postcolonial nationalist narratives, arguing that his leadership was continuously reconstructed through symbolic representation and political pragmatism (Zutshi Citation2024). Para, in contrast, attributes Abdullah’s contradictions to his personal political development, asserting that Abdullah used ideologies ‘to raise his own stakes rather than to build a consistent political philosophy’ of his own (Para Citation2019, 280).

Conceptualising Stress in the Armed Forces: A Public Health Perspective

In recent years, the frequent reports of suicide and fragging cases among armed forces personnel have prompted several questions about the negative effects of stressful life experiences on the well-being of soldiers. The narrow conception of mental health is not enough to understand and explain the status of mental health and well-being of a soldier, which eclipses the interwoven nature of various social determinants of health at workplace, such as the complexity of social categories reflected in class, power and caste structures.