Matthew J Webb's Kashmir's Right to Secede: A Critical Examination of Contemporary Theories of Secession explores the issue of Kashmir's right to secession within a critical evaluation of three streams of secessionist theory, broadly defined as nationalist, liberal-democratic, and 'just cause'. In testing the strength of these theories, Webb aims as much to ascertain the satisfactoriness of these theories as to evaluate the moral justifiability of Kashmir's secession. The book, therefore, is a work of political theory rather than history, as Webb eschews historical description and relies on existing literature for the book's empirical base.
Since October 1947, when the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Government of India, there has been a gap between India's democratic and secular ideals of and the reality of New Delhi's relationship with Srinagar. This led to various bouts of disillusionments, the first of them as early as the 1950s, in the largely-Muslim Kashmir valley. Persistent calls for Kashmiri secession only intensified through the next three-and-a-half decades as disenchantment with assertive Indian actions mounted and finally took a violent turn in November 1989.
Since then, keeping pace with events, the literature on Kashmir has also changed to detail accumulating Kashmiri grievances. Scholarship has steadily moved away from the historical origins of the Kashmir crisis, looking instead to explain the conflict through various contemporary political theories. It has looked at the deinstitutionalisation of Kashmiri politics; the power dispute between provincial elites and New Delhi and the assertion of the periphery against a stifling centre; the nature of Kashmir's federal autonomy; ethnic mobilisation, ethno-nationalism and separatism; and the re-definition of democracy, sovereignty, legitimacy, citizenship and rights in Kashmir and in India as a whole.
In this literary landscape, Webb's is the latest attempt to apply a normative theoretical reasoning to Kashmir – in this case, that of secession. Webb explains his choice of Kashmir as a case-study by invoking concrete concerns about war and peace, economic development and nuclear danger involving not just India and Pakistan but also China. But his book remains firmly in the field of abstract political philosophy – with no concession to comparative politics or international relations, and certainly not history – and limits its considerations to just the Srinagar Valley within Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. To use Srinagar's attitude towards New Delhi as a touchstone for testing three normative, principled approaches to secession is one thing, but to extrapolate from there to draw conclusions on those approaches' applicability to the Kashmiri case as a whole is quite another.