The Paradox of Protected Space: Enacted Peace in Kashmir's Pandit Enclaves

This thesis examines the Indian government's approach to peacebuilding in Kashmir through the lens of spatial organization, focusing on resettlement townships constructed for displaced Kashmiri Pandits. I develop a framework distinguishing between negative peace (absence of violence), positive peace (absence of structural violence), and enacted peace (cross-community integration embedded in routine social interaction), and test my framework on the BJP with government documents, political speeches, and spatial analysis of the Jagti Township. While the BJP government demonstrates clear commitment to negative peace through security infrastructure and ambiguous commitment to positive peace through welfare distribution, the evidence reveals an absence of enacted peace advocacy: official rhetoric constructs Kashmir's conflict as externally driven terrorism rather than internal communal division, and spatial organization actively forecloses the cross-community encounters necessary for sustainable peace.