“Annexation of Vanvasi Areas by Pakistan. Need for Deeper Probe”, Indian Narrative, August 15, 2026.

“On the eve of our Independence Day — which also happens to be the Independence Day of Pakistan, both nations born in the twin throes of one Partition — international discourse on the subcontinent’s unfinished business has settled into a comfortable, three-cornered vocabulary: Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, so-called “Azad Kashmir,” and Indian-administered Kashmir. Three labels, one dispute, endlessly rehearsed at the United Nations and in Western op-eds — and one, in my submission, incomplete.

There is a fourth territory whose accession to Pakistan has never been subjected to the same rigorous documentary and legal scrutiny that Kashmir’s accession to India undergoes in every seminar room and select committee: the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas — 27,220 square kilometres, by Pakistan’s own 2017 census reckoning, an area larger than Haryana — merged since 2018 into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and claimed by Pakistan not through any instrument of accession, but by default.

I frame this argument carefully, and deliberately decline to join issue with a separate claim that circulates, from time to time, in less rigorously sourced accounts of Partition: that Sir Cyril Radcliffe awarded FATA to India. That is not a proposition this piece engages with, still less endorses — the Punjab Boundary Award’s jurisdiction never extended west of Punjab, and the point is better left to rest there than argued at length. What I am proposing instead is narrower, more defensible, and — I would argue — considerably more useful on the international stage: not a territorial claim, but a comparative one, about the quality of title………………………”

Read the full article at Indian Narrative.