Biography

In 2017, I worked with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), Srinagar, where I drafted an International Law manual on Enforced Disappearances. Participating in APDP’s engagements with the OHCHR taught me about the potential of international legal institutions. However, the everyday experience of observing a state against a society reinforced the explanatory limits of purely doctrinal legal scholarship. This was a transformative experience. These encounters combined with my time at Jindal Law School and the University of Melbourne have motivated and equipped me to pursue a doctoral project interrogating the historical trajectories of international law through the Indus Waters Treaty, 1960. The Treaty, signed by India, Pakistan and the World Bank, divides access to the waters of the lucrative Indus basin flowing through the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. Both states claim ownership over Kashmir but neither involved Kashmiri voices while dividing waters crucial to socio-cultural lives in the Valley. This project will reflect my continued political and scholarly commitment to interrogating large historiographical questions by taking the lives and aspirations of ordinary people -Kashmiris- seriously.