Sumantra Bose

Sumantra Bose is an Indian politician scientist and professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He specialises in the study of ethnic and national conflicts and their management, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent (especially Kashmir) and the former Yugoslavia (in particular Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Quotes

• On 15 March 1990, by which time the Pandit exodus from the Valley was substantially complete, the All-India Kashmiri Pandit Conference, a community organisation, stated that thirty-two Pandits had been killed by militants since the previous autumn.
  • Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-century conflict (2021), Yale University Press, p. 92.

• In 1991 the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ... published a book titled Genocide of Hindus in Kashmir. It claimed among many other things that at least forty Hindu temples in the Kashmir Valley had been desecrated and destroyed by Muslim militants. In February 1993 journalists from India’s leading newsmagazine sallied forth from Delhi to the Valley, armed with a list of twenty-three demolished temples supplied by the national headquarters of the BJP, the movement’s political party. They found that twenty-one of the twenty-three temples were intact. They reported that "even in villages where only one or two Pandit families are left, the temples are safe ... even in villages full of militants. The Pandit families have become custodians of the temples, encouraged by their Muslim neighbours to regularly offer prayers." Two temples had sustained minor damage during unrest after a huge, organised Hindu nationalist mob razed a sixteenth-century mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya on 6 December 1992.
  • Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-century conflict (2021), Yale University Press, p. 94-5.