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This article analyzes how environmentalism reinscribed violent forms of state sovereignty in the disputed region of Kashmir in the aftermath of a decade-long uprising against Indian rule. After the return of an elected government, six years after its suspension in 1990, environmental restoration legitimized new forms of state and nature making in Kashmir. Nature rather than territory emerged as an arena of citizen activism, which further strengthened the state's ability to regulate the use and management of Kashmir's water resources. State and civic bodies deployed discourses of history and restoration to create new and imagined ecologies based on visions of nostalgia, commerce, and esthetics. By undermining place-based understandings of nature and ecology, discourses of environmental stewardship and conservation ended up fostering violent mechanisms of social and political control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kashmiri Pandits are a minority ethnic group from the Kashmir Valley in northern India. In 1989, the separatist movement to free Kashmir from India culminated in widespread violence against members of all communities, and initially against Kashmiri Pandits in particular. There was a mass exodus of nearly 95% of the Kashmiri Pandit community during the early 1990s. Sixteen years later, there are approximately 7,000 Kashmiri Pandits who permanently reside in Kashmir. These "non-migrants" have remained in Kashmir due to economic constraints, familial circumstances, and/or a deep attachment to the land, to name a few reasons. They face grave problems today, including lack of employment opportunities, government corruption and complacency, and inadequate monetary and moral support from the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]