The conspicuous US withdrawal from Afghanistan has resulted in a political vacuum, garnering immediate attention of regional and great powers alike. In The Comrades and the Mullahs, presenting Afghanistan’s long history of foreign invasions and resistance, journalists Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny show how the country was a theatre for the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires, and later got caught in Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan has certainly become a diplomatic predicament for India.
The political dispute over the territory of Kashmir is an intricate problem confronting the modern South Asian leadership. The intricacies of the conflict have led to voluminous writings on the region and evident from them is a greater focus on Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) as compared to the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The ‘escape’ of Pakistan–occupied Kashmir from the scholarly radar has begun to change only recently.
