Name Radha Kumar | Role Author | |
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Books History of Doing, Making peace with partition, Divide and Fall?, Gender, Politics and Identity at Times of Crisis | ||
Radha Kumar is an Indian feminist, academic and author. Her work focuses on ethnic conflicts and peace processes from a strongly feminist perspective.
Contents
Early life
Kumar is the daughter of Lovraj Kumar, a former bureaucrat and member of the elite Indian Administrative Service, and his wife Dharma Kumar, a Marxist historian. While Lovraj Kumar belongs to Uttarakhand, Dharma hails from a Tamil Brahmin family from south India. Radha Kumar grew up in Delhi and studied in Modern School (New Delhi). She obtained her Masters degree from Cambridge University, and holds a PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Career
Kumar has written several books on a wide range of subjects, mostly dealing with gender issues in a conflict situation. Usually, the conflicts that she has chosen to address in this manner have involved a Muslim party or a communist party or both of these. Kumar has been a director at the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Jamia Milia Islamia, an Islamic institution located in Delhi. She is also co-founder and Director-General of the Delhi Policy Group, a think-tank which has received generous funding from US-based agencies including the Ford Foundation.
Kashmir interlocutor panel
In October 2010, Kumar was appointed as one of the three interlocutors for Jammu and Kashmir appointed by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) of the Central Government of India. The panel was headed by Dilip Padgaonkar, former editor of the Times of India. and the other member was M.M. Ansari, a former Election Commissioner of India.
Within a few weeks of the panel's constitution, and after private hints had failed, a public reprimand was issued to the panel by P. Chidambaram, home minister of India, for speaking too freely and too frequently to the press; and also for pushing various schemes and solutions, when the assigned job of the panel was to gauge and summarize the views and ideas of Kashmiri society. All of these criticisms pertained to actions taken by Kumar. Her reaction to the reprimand was to tell the press that the home minister (who had appointed the panel) had no business to tell the interlocutors what they should do. Next, Kumar had issues with her co-panelists over her having attended a conference regarding Kashmir organized in Brussels by the Tramboo Center, founded by Abdul Majeed Tramboo and closely associated with Pakistans spy agency, the ISI. The internal rift reached a level where Kumar reportedly sent in her resignation to the home minister. She was persuaded to stay, since the panel was dealing with a matter as sensitive as Kashmir. The aggravation arising from this issue spilled over into disputes over petty matters and the panel was rift-ridden to the end of its term. The report it finally submitted was placed on the website of the home ministry for less than 24 hours before being taken down. It has never been heard of since then.