Solve Kashmir First

Basharat Peer is a Kashmiri journalist and the author of the acclaimed memoir Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Account of Life, Love, and War in his Homeland (Scribner, 2010). As an Open Society Fellow, Peer began research on a comprehensive history of India's 154 million Muslims—one of the largest religious minorities in the world. Peer is compiling the stories of individuals and places to illuminate the challenges posed by religious violence, prejudice, and systemic injustice to democracy and human rights in contemporary India.

Peer has worked as an editor at Foreign Affairs and served as a correspondent at Tehelka, an English-language investigative newsweekly. He has contributed to Granta, the New Statesman, the Nation, the Financial Times Magazine, the Guardian, and the Times of India, among other publications. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.

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Moderator

Steve Coll is president of New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004.

He is the author of six books including On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008). Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Mridu Rai is associate professor of history at Yale University. She was educated at Delhi University; the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and Columbia University, where she received a PhD in modern South Asian history. Her doctoral research focused on the problem of religion and politics in the making of protest in modern Kashmir between the 1840s and the 1940s.

In 2004, her book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir was published.  Rai's new research looks at the region of Bihar and the relationships between caste, territory, region and nation as they evolved from the period of British colonial rule into the postcolonial era.

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. His most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.