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This article: Mirza Waheed writes about his homeland Kashmir in his debut novel The Collaborator, which is about an obscure village along the Line of Control, caught in the politics and violence between India and Pakistan. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?270612 The collaborator of the title is the book's narrator, a Kashmiri boy in his late teens, living in a close-knit community of families in a Gujjar Muslim village, Nowgam, near the Line of Control with Pakistan at the onset of the 1990s. This was the time Islamabad seriously began to infiltrate terrorists (many of them Pakistani, Afghan and even Arab) across the border to wreak havoc in Kashmir, and many young Kashmiri men were inveigled across to the Pakistani side to receive arms and training before returning to wage war %u2014 and all too often meet their deaths %u2014 on Indian soil. The novel speaks of a village whose every single woman has been raped by Indian soldiers, and depicts a gruesome beheading of a young Kashmiri as having been done by the army. Not only are such preposterous claims made as if they reflect fact, but the author largely absolves Pakistan of responsibility for its cynical use of Kashmiri youth in a proxy war with India; does not create a single sympathetic Hindu character, or so much as mention the syncretic, non-sectarian "Kashmiriyat" that was such a defining feature of the state's ethos before militancy destroyed it; makes only a glancing reference to the suffering of the Kashmiri Pandits exiled from their homes by Islamist terrorists; and recounts only one incident of the militants' own notorious brutality, while painting a portrait of Indian resistance to terror as unrelievedly brutal and murderous. The young men so sympathetically described in The Collaborator chose to pick up arms and use them, in unwitting pursuit of a neighbour's strategic goals; India's response, though hardly without flaws and failures of its own, was just that%u2014a response to terror, and not the cause of it. http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/arts-letters/the-autumn-of-hypocrisy#comment-13166 The Ghosts Will Walk: Sanjay Kak reviews Mirza Waheed's "The Collaborator" http://kafila.org/2011/05/05/the-ghosts-will-walk-sanjay-kak-reviews-mirza-waheeds-the-collaborator/