Gendered Honor: How Mass Common Sense Shaped India’s Foreign Policy in Jammu and Kashmir, 1947–1950

How do the masses shape foreign policy? This question has been examined through various conceptual lenses—national identity, public opinion, and popular culture. At the core of all these approaches is an argument that “taken for granted” ideas matter because they constitute a society’s mass common sense, in turn inﬂuencing assorted political possibilities. What remains to be theorized is how and why such inﬂuence occurs. This paper argues that mass common sense sets the limits of legitimacy within societal discourse, thus shaping all political and policy discourses, including foreign policy. The paper evaluates this argument in the case of India’s decision to militarily intervene in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. This is done in two steps. The ﬁrst is to reconstruct India’s common sense circa 1947, and this is done from popular Hindi–Urdu language sources such as children’s literature and ﬁlms. The second is to trace possible ways through which commonsensical notions of gender, beauty, and honor inﬂuenced the Nehru government toward intervention. The study’s conclusions have relevance for interpretivist theories of foreign policy as well as for Indian foreign policy, speciﬁcally the persistence of India’s tendency to prioritize certain “regions” over others—and the Kashmir Valley and Jammu above all—over most if not all other foreign policy issue areas. política inﬂuence intervient. Cet article soutient que le sens commun des masses déﬁnit les limites de légitimité au sein du discours sociétal, façonnant ainsi tous les discours politiques et stratégiques, notamment en politique étrangère. Cet argument a été évalué en deux étapes en se basant sur le cas de l’Inde qui a décidé d’intervenir militairement dans l’État princier du Jammu-et-Cachemire en 1947. La première étape a consisté à reconstituer le sens commun de l’Inde de 1947 à partir de sources populaires en hindi et en ourdou, telles que la littérature et les ﬁlms pour enfants. La seconde a consisté à retracer les manières potentielles par lesquelles les notions de sens commun de genre, de beauté et d’honneur ont inﬂuencé le gouvernement Nehru pour l’intervention. Les conclusions de cette étude sont pertinentes pour les théories interprétativistes de la politique étrangère ainsi que pour la politique étrangère indienne, en particulier pour la persistance de la tendance de l’Inde à prioriser certaines « régions » par rapport à d’autres—surtout la vallée du Cachemire et Jammu—pour la plupart, si ce n’est tous les autres domaines de politique étrangère.


Introduction
The motivation of this paper lies in a relatively straightforward assumption-that despite their elite status, policymakers are a product of the societies they inhabit. Which means that, to varying degrees, they have watched some of the same films, laughed at the same jokes, and have read the same stories as the masses around them. On the other side of the equation, the masses, in carrying out their daily lives, (re)produce the taken for granted ideas and practices that become the common sense of that society. This paper thus seeks to investigate whether elites and the foreign policy they construct are influenced by the common sense of the masses (or mass common sense). In doing so, this paper aims to make three primary contributions, which are theoretical, methodological, and empirical, respectively.
Theoretically, this paper conceptualizes and operationalizes mass common sense as an analytical lens to understand the role of domestic society in foreign policy. This involves both defining mass common sense and distinguishing it from related concepts such as discourse. Second, this paper develops an inductive method for recovering common sense that combines discourse analysis with quantitative text analysis (QTA) techniques. Lastly, the paper shows how commonsensical ideas of gender, beauty, religion, and honor in Indian society influenced the country's decision to militarily intervene in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. It also shows how these ideas led India to prioritize securing some regions of the state over others (see link to map in online appendix 3).
There exists a rich corpus of literature on the topic that focuses on the historical trajectory of events that led to the conflict (Lamb 1966;Ganguly 1999;Schofield 2000;Dasgupta 2002;Swami 2006;Behera 2007;Whitehead 2007;Raghavan 2010;Noorani 2011;Snedden 2015). With its emphasis on this historical trajectory, the literature sees the conflict in Kashmir as a result of myriad factors, such as the British (mis)handling of the partition, the Maharaja's bungling, Jinnah and Pakistan's impatience in sending Pashtun tribesmen, and finally, Nehru's desire for the state. However, with its retrospective focus, this narrative implicitly assumes a teleological, "billiard balls" version of causality, where one event necessarily leads to another. India's motivations for intervening in Kashmir are thus seen as a natural outcome of Nehru's personal preference, coupled with India's desire to showcase its secularism by incorporating a Muslim majority territory, and the region's strategic location. 1 There are, however, some gaps in this narrative that need to be examined more closely. For instance, Kashmir as a test of India's secularism was more of a post facto justification for its inclusion into the Indian Union. Second, if strategic calculus had been a decisive factor, India's policymakers would have made more efforts to capture Gilgit, which could have given India access to Central Asia as well. Lastly, there is a tendency to attribute Nehru's identity as a Kashmiri Pandit as cause for his attachment to the land. However, without a larger mass discourse in India that portrayed the Valley as a beautiful land to be desired, it would have been very difficult for Nehru to feel such a strong affective connection to a land that his ancestors had left more than a century before his birth.
These empirical jumps, I argue, are a result of an elitedriven view of history that does not take into consideration the larger societal context. Such an approach often assumes that the course of the events that transpired was a "natural" outcome and fails to explain why alternate courses of action were not considered. For instance, it takes for granted India's response (military intervention), without clarifying why a fledgling state almost reflexively chose a protracted and costly military conflict over other responses. Lastly, conventional accounts do not engage with India's varying attitude toward different regions of the state such as Ladakh, Jammu, and Gilgit-Baltistan. Thus, instead of conflating the Kashmir Valley with the entire state, my account provides a disambiguated, region-specific analysis of India's response. 2 The plan of the paper is as follows. After discussing existing literature on domestic society in international relations, I proceed to conceptualize and operationalize mass common sense and its causal link to foreign policy. This is followed by a discussion on method. After this, I lay out some relevant ideas of Indian mass common sense from 1947-1950 followed by an analysis of how these ideas construct Indian mass discourse around Jammu and Kashmir. Finally, I explain how these ideas were shared by India's policymaking elite and influenced the country's foreign policy toward the Jammu and Kashmir conflict. 1 See, for instance, the analysis in Behera (2007, 27-28) and Raghavan (2010, 101). 2 Also, due to the fortuitous opening up of Jawaharlal Nehru's private papers to scholars, this paper is one of the first to draw upon this valuable source of new evidence that was unavailable earlier.

Background
This paper takes inspiration from and is situated at the intersection of various inter-related and overlapping schools of literature in the discipline, for instance, feminist, constructivist, Gramscian, and popular culture studies. For instance, my analysis on the masculinist tendencies of the state is based on the insights pioneered by feminist scholars in the discipline (Tickner 1992;Enloe 2014). More recently, however, there has been pioneering work that combines postcolonial perspectives with gender in order to critique hegemonic conceptions of India's nationhood and their impact on "peripheries" such as Jammu and Kashmir (Krishna 1994;Kabir 2009;Ramaswamy 2009;Kaul 2018). This paper contributes to the existing scholarship by showing how gendered idea of nationhood among the masses is not a later development-rather, it dates right back to India's independence, if not further. Furthermore, it substantiates the findings made by other scholars by providing an extensive and systematic dataset of societal discourse in Hindi and Urdu. My analysis is also informed by constructivist literature on the link between societal discourses of identity and foreign policy (Hopf 2002(Hopf , 2012Hansen 2006;Jackson 2011;Subotic 2011;Hagström and Gustafsson 2015;Allan 2016;Vucetic 2017;Vucetic 2021). These include both single-and cross-country comparisons. For instance, while Hopf (2002Hopf ( , 2012 and Hayes (2012) focus on Soviet and American societies, Subotic (2011) utilizes domestic identity to explain the differing levels of "Europeanization" in the Balkans.
However, while identity is useful as an analytical lens, it cannot incorporate all that is relevant within societal discourse (Hopf and Allan 2016, 22-24;Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Furthermore, stretching identity to incorporate what lies "beyond" also makes the concept analytically unclear (Brubaker and Cooper 2000;Ross 2006;Mitzen 2013). For instance, the commonsensical patriarchal notion that "justice is revenge" may be prevalent and commonsensical among the Indian masses, but it does not inform their understanding of themselves as Indians. An alternative approach has been suggested by William Flanik, who makes a case for the study of shared ideas through the lens of conceptual metaphors, which is based on the framework developed by linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (Johnson and Lakoff 2003;Flanik 2011). Similarly, Jutta Weldes and Mark Laffey offer an important insight by treating ideas not as discrete units, but as shared and interrelated "symbolic technologies." I utilize this relational understanding of ideas in the method that I have developed here (see below). Similarly, Krebs and Jackson employ the concept of rhetorical "commonplaces," but the question remains: how does one ascertain whether something is commonplace or not (Krebs and Jackson 2007). Furthermore, metaphors and rhetorical commonplaces focus mostly on ideas that are explicitly articulated. Thus, much of what is taken for granted or implicit in discourse is not systematically disambiguated in these approaches.
Scholars of popular culture have contributed immensely to our understanding of the role of shared ideas and discourse in international politics (Weldes 1999a(Weldes , 1999bBleiker 2001;Griffin 2019;Hamilton 2019;Crilley 2021). Furthermore, popular culture studies have also revealed the manner in which specific mediums such as television, aural technologies, and magazines have shaped mass culture as well as politics (Sharp 2001;Sachleben 2014;Grayson 2017;Guillaume and Grayson 2021). More recently, the attention on the "popular" has also translated into focus on populism and its impact on foreign policy (Wojczewski 2020). Here too, the importance of common sense in discourse is referred to through the concept of "discursive sediments" (Nabers 2009). This paper builds on these literatures in two ways. First, in terms of source selection, it studies popular texts from multiple genres, relying on modes of analyses developed by popular culture scholars. Second, in terms of method, it operationalizes mass common sense in a manner that distinguishes it from other ideas that may be prevalent in discourse, but not deeply internalized.
There have also been attempts to directly grapple with common sense as a concept. Scholars have focused on intersubjective knowledge among specific groups such as transnational elites, policymakers, intellectuals, militaries, or bureaucracies (Kier 1995;Doty 1996;Weldes 1999a;Soederberg 2006;Dodge 2009;Thorvaldsen 2013;van de Wetering 2017). A similar focus on elites can also be found in some Gramscian literature that views common sense as a normative tool in the terrain of contestation between hegemonic and counterhegemonic elites (Rupert 2003;Gill 2012). Similarly, Jutta Weldes considerably advances our theoretical understanding of common sense by incorporating Stuart Halls' framework that posits common sense as a moment of "extreme ideological closure" (Weldes 1996). A more empirical demonstration of common sense can be found in Ted Hopf's paper on common sense that explains how Russian mass common sense acted as a force of external ideational resistance to the state's neoliberal project (Hopf 2013). However, I argue that the influence of common sense can go further than this-it can often be the lens through which elites perceive and act in the world around them.
A more recent theorization of common sense can be found in Bentley Allan, Srdjan Vucetic, and Ted Hopf's recent paper on the viability of a Chinese hegemonic order (Allan, Vucetic, and Hopf 2018). The paper, however, focuses on certain types of common sense, namely the part of it that feeds into identity construction. Second, while the paper acknowledges that elites might partake in common sense owing to their socialization "at home," the theoretical emphasis of the paper is still on the conscious effort being made by elites to align their hegemonic ideas with mass common sense. Similarly, while only focusing on one textual genre (women's fiction in Russian), Morozov, Viacheslav, and Pavlova engage with the versatile nature of mass common sense and how it can simultaneously legitimate seemingly contradictory political projects (Morozov and Pavlova 2021). While their insights reveal the multiplicity in mass common sense, the paper does not engage with the methodological aspect of distinguishing commonsense ideas from the rest of social discourse. This paper builds on these existing insights and conceptualizes and operationalizes mass common sense in a manner that allows us to distinguish between it and other societal ideas. Furthermore, by combining qualitative and quantitative techniques, I provide a systematic method for recovering common sense that is easily replicated. The next two sections thus lay out my conceptual framework and method.

Conceptualization of Common Sense
I shall begin this section by first explaining my treatment of the term discourse in this paper. Instead of focusing on particular discourses, I treat the term "discourse" here as being coterminous with social discourse, which Marc Angenot defines as "everything that is said or written in a given state of society, everything that is printed or talked about and represented today through electronic media" (Angenot 2004, 200). Thus, social discourse (henceforth "discourse") can be viewed as a structure of signification that constructs social reality (Milliken 1999, 229). Based on Angenot's conceptualization, this paper defines "discourse" as the totality of ideas and practices within a society. Within this social discourse lies a subset of ideas and practices that comprise mass common sense.
I borrow my understanding of mass common sense from Antonio Gramsci, who at various points describes mass common sense (senso commune) as the "traditional popular conception of the world," "the folklore of philosophy," the "diffuse, uncoordinated features of a general form of thought common to a particular period and a particular popular environment," and even as a "chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes" (Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith 1972, 326-30). Gramsci's common sense is mostly unreflective, but it is not "rigid or immobile but is continually transforming itself" (Femia 1987;Gramsci and Boothman, 1995). 3 Drawing upon these ideas, this paper defines mass common sense as the set of most prevalent and internalized ideas within a social discourse. This definition allows me to distinguish mass common sense from discourse by using two measuresfrequency count and internalization ratio (IR), which I shall discuss further in the section on method.
In his prison notebooks, Gramsci also gives us some clues regarding the origins of common sense. While it is impossible to formulate a systematic theory of the origins of commonsense here, we can trace a few outlines. Instead of conceptualizing a dichotomous conception of elite ideas (or what is termed as the philosopher's philosophy) and common sense, Gramsci argues that philosophers elaborate what is already present in the naïve form in mass common sense (Thomas 2009, 430). Implicit in this is also a point about the origins of ideas, specifically the rootedness of philosophy within its larger social and historical context. At the same time, Gramsci resists a romanticized one-sided origin story, where everything emerges from folk wisdom. Common sense in his view is multiform, and it emerges from a variety of sources such as subaltern experience, folklore, religion, and also the sediments of erstwhile hegemonic ideologies (Crehan 2016). In other words, there is no single origin of common sense. Furthermore, it should neither be viewed as a simplistic derivation of elite ideas, nor as arising solely from the masses. I would like to posit further-since societies are not hermetically sealed, ideas of common sense can possibly come from the "outside"; i.e., there is also a need to think beyond the "did the elites/masses come first" debate.
Common sense is also crucial to understanding Gramsci's idea of hegemony. Gramsci argues that for a hegemonic discourse to maintain its position, or for a counterhegemonic discourse to become dominant, it must appeal to the common sense of the masses. Thus, common sense acts as both a facilitator of and a check against elite hegemony and at the core of these ideas lies the notion of legitimacy-if any idea or practice has to appear legitimate to the masses, it must appeal to their taken for granted worldview, i.e., their common sense. In terms of analysis, this makes common sense distinct from discourse since the latter is the totality of ideas and practices within a society, and therefore encapsulates within itself the limits of possibility of thought and action in society (figure 1). Furthermore, as Milliken (1999, 229) argues, discourses endorse a certain common sense, which makes other modes of categorizing and judging "meaningless, impracticable, inadequate or otherwise disqualified." Taking a more Hallsian approach, Weldes makes a similar point that social constructions become common sense when they are treated as "transparently reflected reality" (Weldes 1996).
Hence, within the limits of possibility of thought and action as set by social discourse, common sense defines the limits of legitimacy of those thoughts and actions. Ideas inside the limits of common sense will be uncontested and viewed as legitimate/taken for granted, while ideas outside the limits of common sense will appear illegitimate, though they may continue to be part of the broader social discourse. Since elites are also socialized by their larger society, they internalize this mass common sense to various degrees as well, and their actions can arguably be seen as bounded within this zone of commonsensical legitimacy. I argue, therefore, that a country's mass common sense also affects its foreign policy by defining the limits of legitimacy of state discourse and policy. Policies that lie outside common sense become highly improbable (though not impossible) as they are illegitimized. The next section explicates further the causal relationship between mass common sense and foreign policy.

Common Sense and Causality
Drawing on critical scholarship, this paper agrees with the contention that mass and elite discourses constitute each other. Further, drawing on some recent developments within this literature, it argues that causation and constitution are not only compatible, but also deeply inter-related if non-Humean conceptions of causality are considered (Kurki 2008;Vucetic 2011;Hansen 2013;Norman 2021). For example, Jackson proposes the idea of "adequate causation" that views ideational factors as historically situated configurations that give rise to actions as well as the actors performing them (Jackson 2006). Similarly, scholars such as Milja Kurki see causation not only in terms of "push/pull," but also in constraining or enabling certain outcomes. This is particularly useful in the way we can imagine the effects that shared ideas and meanings can have on social outcomes. In a similar vein, Benjamin Banta argues that for discourses, causation can be measured as "directionality, as enablement or constraint" on agents, and Lebow argues that constitution can have "causal effects" by providing antecedent conditions in the form of events and outcomes (Lebow 2009;Banta 2013).
Causation, thus, is not something independent of constitution, but rather causal explanations emerge out of a "causal field" that is defined by constitutive explanations (Norman 2021). For instance, a populist leader's speech acts or gestures in a rally may increase his popularity (i.e., causation), but this increase is rooted in the deeply shared meanings that constitute societal discourse. In other words, causation (in the social world) is rooted in constitution. This argument is made clearer by another idea that Norman proposes-the use of counterfactuals to understand the causal effects of constitutive factors. To reinvoke the previous example, if the same leader made use of the same speech and gestures in a different society, he may not receive the same effect, as they may not resonate with their shared meanings and ideas. Aside from the contextual value of shared meaning, another important thing to remember when considering a non-Humean interpretation of causality is that social phenomena are always multicausal (Carr 1961;Lenin 1972;Kurki 2008). They are never unitary, linear, or homogeneous.
Thus, when this paper argues that common sense defines the limits of legitimacy of foreign policy, it does not preclude the validity of other material or ideational factors. Rather, the argument here is that mass common sense can only enable or constrain certain policy outcomes by legitimizing or delegitimizing them-it cannot determine them. Thus, the aim here is to not portray common sense as a unicausal force, but rather as a part of a larger multicausal complex that influences foreign policy. To this end, this paper also aims to show the limitations of common sense and how other material and ideational forces may prevail over it. In the section on foreign policy analysis, I shall make use of counterfactuals to isolate the influence of common sense as well as trace its interaction with other material and ideational forces.
There is, however, another fundamental limitation that cannot be fully addressed here, but yet must be acknowledged for the sake of reflexivity (Desrosiers and Vucetic 2018). The account that I present here has ultimately been shaped by my socialization, which has been shaped by recognizable factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and perhaps, those that lie beyond the pale of my own recognition. Hence, the picture of common sense provided here is neither complete nor objective, and consequently, neither is the causal narrative. Furthermore, as Gramsci himself emphasizes the multiform and heterogeneous nature of common sense, any claim to present a totalizing picture of it is itself problematic. Thus, the discussion on common sense here should be seen as an attempt to invoke debate, rather than to settle it.

Source Selection and Method
My source selection was based on three criteriarepresentation of a substantive portion of mass discourse in India, adequate representation of popular textual genres, and finally, a controlled randomization of texts. Since India is a multilingual country, I restricted source selection to mainly Hindi and Urdu sources since these languages were spoken and understood by more than half of the country's population at the time. Furthermore, during this time, Urdu and Hindi were also the language of instruction and official communication even in states where they were not the primary language of the population.
Next, I selected representative texts from various genres through controlled randomization. 4 This was done to avoid cherry-picking texts that explicitly deal with Jammu and Kashmir, and to ensure a broad sweep of Indian common sense along with an adequate representation of various textual genres (see table A.2 in online appendix 1). Implementing a robust sampling strategy is also important considering that the time-intensive nature of discourse analysis makes it impossible to go through all available texts. In total, I selected 30 Hindi and Urdu texts for discourse analysis, and one English translation of folk stories from various languages of India (see table A.1 in online appendix 1). 4 I selected my textual genres using the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library's catalogue, which allowed me to recover genreclassified list of texts by year and language. The search engine is available at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/bibliographic/nbil/nbil.php. In case a text mentioned in the catalogue was not available, I referred to the index of Nehru Memorial Museum & Library at New Delhi.  In terms of method, I follow in the footsteps of recent scholarship in international relations that aims to combine qualitative and quantitative techniques within the framework of interpretivist research (Wagner, Hansen, and Kronberger 2014;Barkin and Sjoberg 2017;Wangen 2019;Bayram and Ta 2020). The first step was discourse analysis, which generated a corpus of interpretations that I could use for QTA. This step also involved translation, since most QTA software does not operate on Indian languages, or mediums such as films and nondigital data (Nabers 2009;Wagner, Hansen, and Kronberger 2014;Bayram and Ta 2020). This combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches helped me combine the richness of interpretivism with the reliability/replicability of QTA. This mixed methods approach enabled me to operationalize both the prevalence of an idea and its level of internalization, i.e., how taken for granted an idea is. Thus, this combination allowed me to treat both approaches as interlocking rather than separate processes. For example, quantitative analysis revealed connections between ideas recovered through discourse analysis, while discourse analysis revealed the semantic content of those relationships. This allowed me to treat common sense as a network or a web of meaning, rather than an accumulation of ideas as isolated objects (Laffey and Weldes 1997). Furthermore, quantitative data allowed me to evaluate the prevalence of different interpretations across different texts. This helped make the process of discourse analysis more inductive. After text selection, the discourse analysis involved translating/transcribing and inferring the key stated and implied ideas in the text under the "Excerpt/Scene" and "Inference" columns, respectively. Each inference would then be catalogued under an excerpt, segment, and inference number (see figure 2; the link to both the tables is available in online appendix 2).
Next, I categorized these inferences according to certain parameters to recover their level of internalization, or in other words, the extent to which an idea was taken for granted. If an inference (an idea as inferred from discourse analysis) was not articulated explicitly, but rather in an implicit/matter of fact manner, I coded such an inference as "Implied." Ideas requiring explicit articulation (due to a lower level of internalization) were marked as "Articulated." Next, I coded inferences on whether they had a normative-"should" based-or an ascriptive-"is" based-slant. Based on these parameters, individual inferences were codes as "Hard" (i.e., Ascriptive or taken for granted), "Soft" (Normative or recommended but may be contested), and "P but I" (Possible but Illegitimate), which indicates that an idea is considered illegitimate in that particular invocation. The final table with these consolidated codes appears as in figure 3 (link to the complete table is available in online appendix 2). These codes were then compiled into a single file and a frequency count was performed using an online software. I selected the top fifty unique keywords/keyword combinations to recover the most prevalent ideas in my corpus. The frequency table of these keywords is provided in online appendix 1 (see table 2). Together, this process generated around 500 pages of data for discourse analysis and QTA (see online appendix 2).
Next, I determined the relationship between different ideas using co-occurrence analysis, which refers to the process of recovering terms that frequently occur within a certain fixed distance from a particular keyword. I focused on the most semantically relevant among the top twenty most co-occurring keywords. 5 An example of the co-occurrence table for the keyword "authority" is provided in table A.4 of online appendix 1.
After that, I determined/articulated the level of internalization of these ideas, using a formula that I devised, that I call the "internalization ratio": internalization ratio (IR) = hard inferences of an idea total inferences of an idea , where hard inferences = (Ascriptive, Implied, Hard) + (Normative, Implied, Hard) + (Normative, Implied, Illegitimate) + (Normative, Articulated, Illegitimate). I have defined the thresholds for IR as follows: • If IR ≥ 0.5, I term it as relatively uncontested and commonsensical. • If IR < 0.5, then the idea is soft/contested and out of the bounds of common sense.
Based on this method, the next section lays out the various commonsensical ideas important to understanding Indian actions in Jammu and Kashmir.

Indian Mass Common Sense and Jammu and Kashmir
Out of all ideas that constitute Indian common sense, this section focuses on those ideas that affected India's Jammu and Kashmir policy in [1947][1948]. As shown in table A.3 (see 5 I fixed a distance of five words for co-occurrence analysis. online appendix 1), Indian mass common sense was dominated by themes such as gender, nation, and ideas about morality, justice, and honor. Beginning with gender, the most prevalent theme in Indian mass common sense (see table A.5 in online appendix 1), the co-occurrence table for feminine keywords reveals deep links between femininity in Indian mass common sense and ideas such as beauty, masculine honor, and chastity. Conversely, the co-occurrence table for masculine keywords is also dominated by keywords related to the idea of honor, bravery, and chivalry (see table A.6 in online appendix 1). Furthermore, while the term "passive" occurs in the co-occurrence table for femininity, the term "active" figures prominently in the table for masculinity. The sizable presence of masculine keywords and ideas such as chastity and honor indicates deeply patriarchal notions prevalent in Indian society. This preliminary evidence of quantitative data also indicates that women were seen as passive, bound by notions of masculine honor.
The concept of femininity was linked to the idea of beauty, which was associated with traits such as fair skin. For instance, on the cover of the children's magazine Chandamama's April 1950 issue, the illustration accompanying the love story of a prince and princess portrays both as fair skinned. 6 Similarly, in the film Ziddi (1948), the male protagonist Pooran's mother casually instructs her daughter-in-law to "find a moon-faced girl for him." 7 Mentions of fair skin as a sign of beauty and the general association of fair skin with desirability appear to have been deeply internalized with fourteen out of fifteen mentions of fair skin falling under the category of hard common sense, giving the idea an IR of 0.93.
The link between beauty and nature, however, goes much further in stories such as Gulab, where the innocent beauty of the protagonist-a little girl-is juxtaposed with the beauty of Kashmir. There is, therefore, a dual process taking place in this visual metaphor-first, a feminization of the natural landscape, and second, the "naturalized" synonymity of feminine beauty-both of which are subject to the male gaze. Besides fair skin and metaphors of roses and moons, specific body parts such as lips, hair, eyes, and a voluptuous frame were fetishized in short stories, pictorial representations in popular history books, and newspaper advertisements.
Besides beauty, women were largely seen in terms of their relationship with men and, more precisely, the institution of marriage. The importance of marriage is further demonstrated by the fact that the keyword occurs in twenty-four of the thirty-one surveyed texts. The co-occurrence table for marriage confirms these inferences (see table A.7 in online appendix 1). Some of the most frequent terms co-occurring with marriage are "centrality," "institution," and "conclusion." While the first two attest the centrality of marriage as an institution, the keyword conclusion points to a persistent trend across folk stories and films-namely, that marriage is the inevitable logical conclusion of most plot lines. Even folk stories such as "The Princess Whose Father Wanted to Marry Her," 8 which deal with themes as taboo as incestual longings that a father feels toward his daughter, nevertheless require him to marry his daughter before initiating any physical relationship (Normative, Implied, Hard). 9 Furthermore, marriage forms a central pillar of morality and religion. In the film Mela, when the female protagonist Manju is forcibly married off to an older man, she tells her husband that "religion [dharm] has tied us in a thread [of marriage] that neither Mehku can extricate us out of neither your sister" 10 (Ascriptive, Implied, Hard). The word "dharm" here implies both religion and righteousness, which shows the inter-relatedness of the two concepts. This conception of marriage is distinctly Hindu (as the Islamic conception of marriage is more contractual). Another key pillar of Indian femininity from 1947-1950 is passivity. For example, in the movie Barsaat, the urbane, sophisticated Gopal (the second male lead) tries to woo a peasant woman while she tries to resist him. Frustrated by his relentless attempts, she finally calls upon a nearby (male) villager to help her. 11 This also brings to the fore commonsense conceptions of honor (see table A.8 in online appendix 1). Out of fourteen invocations of male honor and bravery, nine were categorized as hard common sense, and the idea enjoys quite a high IR as a result (0.64). The presence of the verb "keeping" points to the fact that honor is not merely something one possesses, it has to be constantly "kept" or guarded, and maintained, with or without the woman's consent. This also leads to the attendant anxiety of losing one's honor. Other themes that are common to both are women and sexuality. The loss of a woman's honor (through loss of control over her movement and sexuality) is not just an affront to the male as an individual, but the entire family (of whom he is the head). In Shaheed, for instance, when the female protagonist Sheela returns to her husband Vinod's house at night after meeting Ram at the hotel, he confronts her and warns her that she will be a cause of dishonor to the entire family. 12 The other themes closely related to honor are bravery and chivalry. In the short story "Sach ka Sauda" (a transaction of truth), an editor who refuses to toe the line suggested by the owner of his newspaper is described as "not surrendering" and "saving his honor." Chivalry is mentioned as a key attribute of bravery in Hartan Saahab ke Laddu, where the author compares Maratha warriors unfavorably with Rajputs, for the former use guile and tricks to win wars while the Rajputs uphold the norms of chivalry. Furthermore, Hindu Rajput kings such as Maharana Pratap and Prithviraj Chauhan who fought against Muslim kings are also portrayed as patriotic and brave.
This portrayal is linked to the role of religion in shaping mass ideas of nationhood and belonging. In the cooccurrence table for India, the term "Muslim" appears quite prominently (see table A.9 in online appendix 1). Depictions of Muslims in various Indian texts portrayed them as violent and fanatical in matters of religion, as opposed to Hindus, who were predominantly portrayed as peaceful and tolerant. This trope of aggressive/violent Muslims and, implicitly, peaceful Hindus is most clearly illustrated in a cartoon published in the newspaper Aaj, published from Varanasi (see figure 4). 13 The cartoon shows a Muslim and a Sikh man tied to a pole titled prem (love). The base on which the two men are sitting is titled "Truth-Non-Violence," while the slab hanging over their heads is called "communal hatred," which is held in place by a tattered rope being chewed away by a rat called "biased action." On the side stands Mahatma Gandhi (a Hindu) as a policeman, holding a lantern delicately maintaining the peace (light is the symbol of knowledge here). In contrast, both the Sikh and the Muslim men are shown to be inherently violent and angry, held in place only by the external constraint of "prem" (love). What lends further credence to this interpretation is the headline over the strip proclaims, "Both Guilty!," i.e., implying Muslims and Sikhs are both responsible for violence. Conversely, by implicitly painting Hindus as the model citizens, the cartoon reaffirms a subtly majoritarian conception of the nation. 13 Aaj, September 28, 1947, 2. The film Barsaat (1949) opens with a scene of the mountains, streams, and snowy peaks surrounded by pine trees where the male protagonists from an unnamed city, Pran and Gopal, have come for a holiday (see figure 5). 15 As the film progresses, the protagonists fall in love with two women from a mountain village in Kashmir, Reshma and Neela.
In the film, the women and their larger community refer to themselves as paharis or "hill people," while Pran and Gopal are called sheher ke log or "city dwellers," thereby creating a dichotomy between the two. Reshma and Neela are depicted as traditional and innocent village girls, while the urban men are seen by the villagers as modern, exploitative, and untrustworthy (see figure 6). However, despite celebrating the traditional, spiritual morality of the hill people, Pran and Gopal's urbanity is equated with being superior/progressive. This aspect comes to the fore in a scene where the protagonists are invited to a village ritual in which the chastity of a woman is tested through a dance around the tribal deity. In the scene, Pran and Gopal are seated while the villagers stand around them, indicating the power relations between them. Furthermore, the fetishized depiction 14 Phrase borrowed from Ananya Jahanara Kabir of rural/tribal culture accompanied with unintelligible incantations ends up painting them as primitive and superstitious. The film thus ends up reflecting the ways in which the Indian societal mainstream perceives the frontiers and its people-noble but backward, and in need of a progressive intervention by the mainland (Kabir 2009). Neela and Reshma are shown as loyal and passive, and thus uphold ideal conventional standards of womanhood within the Indian context. The urban male from the plains thus sets the terms of the relationship, while the woman must resign unquestioningly to the fate determined for her by her lover. Furthermore, while the man is often shown as the "protector" of women's honor and safety, this often slips into a more possessive equation. Also, commonsensical ideas about marriage also mean that women cannot break their relationship of their own free will, even if the man is abusive. Their relationship reflects the divide between the plains and the hills, the city and the village, and the nation and its frontiers. There is also an implicit conflation between the beauty of the land and its people, with the physical attributes of Kashmiri women presented as symbolic of the beauty of the place, and both eventually being coveted through the gaze of the urbane Indian male, who must protect and, oftentimes, possess her.
The same depiction of Kashmir as a land of beauty and pleasure can be seen in the short story Gulab by Chandragupt Vidyalankar. 16 Here too, the narrative begins with a description of Srinagar as a town surrounded by pristine valleys with meandering rivers. The story revolves around Gulab, the daughter of a prosperous couple from the Indian mainland who gets separated from her parents and is mistaken for a Kashmiri due to her fair complexion.
The general depiction of Gulab as beautiful with features resembling those of Kashmiris thus reflects both the prevalent definitions of beauty in the Indian mainstream context and the imaginative fascination with Kashmir and its inhabitants as exoticized subjects and territories of desire. This depiction of Kashmir as a territory of exception, relief, and pleasure (in implicit contrast with the rest of India) can also be found in an article in the Hindi magazine Navjivan. While discussing the political problems in the state, the article characterizes Kashmir in the following words: … Kashmir is nature's playground. Its natural beauty is an object of attraction for the entire world. A man, tired and exhausted goes into its lap and comes back with a new life. A poet has rightly said that if there is heaven on earth, it is there. 17 Kashmir's beauty thus evokes an affective response of pleasure and relief, a contrast to the rigors of life in the plains with their crowds, overwhelming heat, and stress. However, such descriptions only apply to the Kashmir Valley and not to other parts of the erstwhile princely state, which are rarely mentioned. The Valley of Kashmir thus occupied a rather hegemonic position vis-à-vis other regions in the Indian imagination. This is evinced, for example, by a report on Prime Minister Nehru's visit to Ladakh in a July issue of the Urdu weekly Zulqarnain. The article details the topography of Ladakh as seen from the Prime Minister's flight, noting that the plane flew over some of the highest peaks in the world that were mostly "sand and rock, interspersed with a few Chinar trees." This is a stark contrast to descriptions of the Valley, which is portrayed as accessible, fertile, and verdant. 16    More curiously, the article begins with the following sentence: "Flying over some of the tallest mountains in the world, the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal and his colleagues landed in Leh [Ladakh] this morning." 18 What is interesting about the statement is the use of the qualifier "Indian" before Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Such a qualifier would seem out of place if Prime Minister Nehru were touring another part of the mainland. Thus, the use of the word "Indian" along with the depiction of Ladakh as a remote place surrounded by high mountains seems to evoke a feeling of the place being remote, distant, and perhaps "not quite" India.
This brings us to our second set of ideas regarding Kashmir in Indian mass discourse-the status of the region visà-vis India. An article in Navjivan on the political situation in the state argues that "Kashmir is a part of India. What its condition will be in the future is difficult to say ... It will be difficult for Kashmir to stay independent." Thus, while there is a vociferous claim over Kashmir belonging to India, there is an implicit recognition that the region might go to Pakistan. However, while Pakistani control over Kashmir is at least acknowledged as a possibility, an independent Kashmir is seen as inconceivable.

Elite Discourse and Policy on Jammu and Kashmir
I now turn to elite discourse and foreign policy on the region to trace the convergence between them. I shall focus primarily on two aspects of foreign policy-India's decision to intervene and its differential treatment of various regions within the princely state. In his memoir titled The Story of the Integration of Indian States, V.P. Menon, a senior bureaucrat who played an important role in securing Jammu and Kashmir's accession to India, describes the state as follows: In the south lies Jammu; in the centre is the Happy Valley of Kashmir which contains the summer capital, Srinagar; to the north is Gilgit; and between the Kashmir Valley and Tibet is the province of Ladakh. 19 In an otherwise straightforward description of the state's different regions, what is immediately noticeable is that the Valley of Kashmir is the only region that is accompanied by an adjective-"happy." Furthermore, the characterization of the Valley as the center of the state corresponds more to its status rather than its precise geographical coordinates. The use of the word happy to describe the Valley is also telling, for not only does it show an affective link between Indians and the Valley (one of happiness), but it also refers to the historical continuity of Kashmir as part of India beginning with the late nineteenth century. 20 An even more evocative affirmation of this sentiment can be found in the writings of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Roughly four years prior to India's independence, when he was still a prisoner under the British empire, he wrote: When I think of India, I think of many things: of broad fields dotted with innumerable small villages … and, above all, of the Himalayas, snow-capped, or some mountain valley in Kashmir in the spring, covered with new flowers, and with a brook bubbling and gurgling through it. We make and preserve the pictures of our choice, and so I have chosen this mountain background rather than the more normal picture of a hot, subtropical country. 21 What is immediately striking about this extract is that not only is the Kashmir Valley representative of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, but in Nehru's imagination it is also the representative image of India as a whole. He paradoxically chooses Kashmir as a representative image not because it is like the rest of India, but rather because it is unlike it. It mirrors the sentiment expressed in the magazine Navjivan (see above), where Kashmir is imagined as an elysian playground, a place of affective relief for someone used to the heat and dust of northern India. 22 Furthermore, mirroring the commonsensical view of a feminized Kashmir and a masculine India, Nehru also describes the Valley as a beautiful woman in a court statement that he drafted for Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah: If people from far off countries are attracted by it, what must be the feelings of those whose homeland it is and who have been nurtured in its bosom and who have drunk deep of its beauty and exhilarating air … an overwhelming desire seizes us and to do our utmost to change this unhappy scene and make of Kashmir what nature designed it to be. 23 The phrase "what nature designed it to be" provides a deus ex machina type justification for the argument that Kashmir's manifest destiny was to be a "happy" place that has adopted the norms of political modernity and union with India. A more blatant expression of this sentiment can be seen in a letter written by India's Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel to C. Parmeswaran, a resident of Srinagar, where he writes that "The extreme poverty and illiteracy of the masses present an unpleasant picture to a foreign visitor and the State is generally represented outside as extremely irresponsible and unprogressive" (June 19, 1946). 24 Together Nehru and Patel's utterances give the impression that while Kashmir (implicitly imagined as a woman) is an extremely beautiful place, it is also backward, and to overcome its plight, it must join India.
Like the conception of marriage in Indian common sense, the woman, although beautiful and good natured, is ultimately incapable of improving her lot, and for that she needs to be with a man, who conveniently desires her and knows what is best for her. Furthermore, this marriage 20 Ananya Jahanara Kabir is ordained by "nature," and thus part of India's manifest destiny (with Kashmir having no say in the matter). This idea of a union between India and Kashmir thus mirrors the idea of a marriage as an indissoluble institution within the rigid framework of "dharm" (religion/righteousness). As I will explain in the next section, this political marriage thus becomes an act of not only protection, but also possession.

Foreign Policy Decision-Making
On Given Nehru's stated logic of Kashmir's strategic location and economic importance, it follows that India's priority should have been to secure the region of Gilgit (bordering Afghanistan and Central Asia) and Ladakh (bordering Tibet/China). Kashmir Valley, in contrast, lies at the center of the state and, without access to Gilgit and Ladakh, would lie cut off from Afghanistan, Tibet, and Central Asia. Ahead in this section, I shall explain how precisely the near opposite of this took place.
Aside from Kashmir's strategic value, a variety of material and ideational factors gave rise to a spectrum of policy options for India in October 1947. First, there was the possibility of a minimalist response, which would entail only a diplomatic support of the Maharaja against Pakistan and leave out any military involvement. While this may seem implausible in hindsight, it needs to be emphasized here that India was a fledgling country with limited monetary and military resources and numerous domestic problems such as widespread religious violence and the displacement of millions of people due to partition. Furthermore, as a new member of the international community, and moreover, one whose leaders had played an immense role in shaping the nascent United Nations, the country faced normative pressure to show restraint (Bhagavan 2012).
This normative constraint was further amplified by the presence of British officers in India's government, and their interest in avoiding conflict between two dominions, which, formally speaking, were still under the British crown. The other possible response was a protective/defensive policy, aimed at securing territories considered vital to India's interest and not escalating the conflict beyond Kashmiri territory. Lastly, another possible response was a possessive/maximalist one, which would entail securing the entire territory of the princely state and escalating the conflict to Pakistan's territory. This spectrum of policy options is represented in table 1. Furthermore, this spectrum shall be used to understand India's policy toward the princely state as a whole, as well as its various subregions. As a response to the Maharaja's request for military support, a meeting of the Defense Committee (consisting of a senior minister, bureaucrats, and military officers) was immediately convened that morning in which it was decided that India will airlift its troops to Srinagar after securing conditional accession of the state. The minutes of the meeting reveal an interesting conversation between General Lockhart, the (British) Commander in Chief of the Indian Army, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel: General Lockhart's question was perhaps the only time the possibility of non-intervention (policy P1) in Jammu and Kashmir was raised during the meeting, and any chance of a further consideration was squashed by Nehru and Patel's reply. It is also important to note here that it is not just Nehru who expressed this sentiment, but rather it was shared by Patel. Furthermore, by drawing an existential link between the India and the Valley, their reply also revealed a possessive desire toward the state. 27 Jammu and Kashmir therefore was not just a hapless and weak state that had to be protected against an invasion, but one that constituted India's sense of self. In terms of the policy options available (table 2), such a statement would mean ideally opting for P3. However, since the term "Kashmir" here is multivalent-metonymically denoting the entire state territory as well as the Valley-it validates option P2, i.e., a limited response aimed at securing some, though not all territories of the state.
In fact, two months into the conflict, a proposal was being discussed to partition the state on religious lines, with Muslim majority areas such as the Valley going to Pakistan and Hindu majority areas such as Jammu going to India. While Nehru was not opposed to a partition (as I shall discuss later), he was opposed to one that would result in the loss of the Valley to Pakistan. In a letter discussing this proposal, he comments: Some people have suggested that Kashmir and Jammu provinces be split up, one going to Pakistan and other to India. I do not at all like this for many reasons, among them being that it is Kashmir that is of essential value to India. 28 This desire for Kashmir meant that Nehru preferred a vigorous military strategy in Jammu and Kashmir, especially when it came to protecting the Valley. This is further corroborated in a letter to his Defense Minister Baldev Singh, in which he complained his dissatisfaction "with the slowness of events in Kashmir ... We move heavily and massively against irregulars who hover about and make a nuisance of themselves" and proceeded to argue that "... surely the main objective is not to capture one place or another but to break up and drive out the enemy. This requires swift blows in many places and no time given for reformation and recuperation" (April 22, 1948). 29 Furthermore, surrendering or giving up the fight was just not an option. In an earlier letter, Nehru anticipates a long military campaign and writes that "we may be involved in military operations for a long time without any definite result. This does not frighten us ..." (December 12, 1947). 30 This harkens back to notions of honor and "not surrendering" that were prevalent in Indian mass common sense.
During the initial phase of the conflict, Nehru was quite explicit in his preference for a vigorous military strategy even in the face of pressure from India's Governor General Lord Mountbatten, who was wary of British officers being involved in a protracted India-Pakistan conflict. In a reply to Mountbatten, Nehru also suggests expanding the theatre of conflict far beyond Kashmir: You repeat in your letter that the only thing to be done is to stop the fighting. Yes, certainly, but how? We neither started it nor can we stop it, of course we can in a sense surrender. That I am sure you would never advise us to do and indeed if we thought of it others will fight on and there will still be no peace even with surrender … If grave danger threatens us in Kashmir or elsewhere on the West Punjab frontier then we must not hesitate to march through Pakistan territory towards the bases. 31 Thus, regarding the Kashmir Valley, Nehru's argument that India will not hesitate to march through "Pakistani territory" indicates a preference for an aggressive policy response (P3). While India never undertook such an action due to resource constraints as well as external pressure, it did, however, manage to secure most of Kashmir Valley before it entered into a ceasefire agreement with Pakistan on January 1, 1949. Thus, while we see that the ideal commonsensical option (P3) could not be implemented because of constraints, the presence of mass common sense ensured that India undertook more than a yearlong campaign to 28 JNSG,File 4,223. 29 Ibid., 185. 30 Ibid., 255. 31 Ibid., 255. secure its most preferred territory in the princely state, i.e., option P2.
In complete contrast to the Valley, other parts of the state such as Ladakh were seen differently. In the summer of 1948, when news of the invaders capturing substantial portions of the region reached Delhi, Nehru's response in his private correspondence with Sardar Patel (his Deputy Prime Minister) showed irritation, rather than a sense of urgency at the development: In Ladakh, we have for the moment lost ground and the raiders are on the doorsteps of Leh. This has no great military significance, and we can recapture all the lost ground. But it is irritating that on the map a huge province may be shown as under the enemy. (May 30, 1948) Given Ladakh's strategic location, this statement contradicted Nehru's strategic reasoning that he had given to the parliament the previous year (see above). I am not implying here that Nehru was being disingenuous earlier, or that Ladakh's strategic value did not matter. Rather, it seems that, subconsciously, the commonsensical imagination of the Valley vis-à-vis Ladakh may have influenced Nehru's initially tepid response regarding Ladakh. What should also be kept in mind that the former statement regarding the state's strategic location was made in the parliament, while his thoughts on Ladakh and Kashmir's centrality are part of his private correspondence. Furthermore, his ambiguous attitude toward Ladakh becomes clearer when we consider other statements by him.
Jawaharlal Nehru visited Ladakh in the late summer of 1949. Since the region had witnessed considerable violence at the hands of the tribal invaders from Pakistan, Nehru gave several speeches to assure locals of India's intentions. In one of these speeches, he said: Our troops came to Ladakh, thousands of miles away from India, because we consider Ladakh an integral part of India. Any attack on Ladakh will be an attack on India and will be resisted with all our might. 32 The glaring contradiction, most likely an unintentional slip, in the first sentence brings out quite clearly Ladakh's dual identity. It is simultaneously "India" and "away from" India. What is even more interesting is that in a letter written to state premiers after his return from the trip, Nehru stresses on a pluralistic vision of the country. Referring specifically to Ladakh, he warns his premiers to not make the mistake of regimenting "the whole of India into a single pattern" (July 20, 1949, JNSG, File 26, Part 2). Yet, in the same letter, he refers to Ladakh's exceptionality as a "frontier area," a "far away corner of India, yet it is India." Furthermore, he also compares Ladakh to the Kashmir Valley, arguing that "Kashmir proper is nearer in every way, geographically and otherwise to India, and yet it has its peculiar characteristics, quite apart from its astonishing beauty. It has been in the past one of the greatest seats of old Indian culture." 33 Thus, compared to the Valley (which is Kashmir "proper"), Ladakh is distant both geographically and culturally to India. Ahead in the letter, while the Valley has "astonishing beauty," Ladakh's natural features are described as "bleak wastes," which is similar to the description of Ladakh in the Urdu newspaper Zulqarnain. 34 topography, Ladakh also lagged in terms of development. In a speech given in Ladakh, Nehru says (patronizingly): In Ladakh, you are backward and unless you learn and train yourself you cannot run the affairs of your region. The Kashmir government will no doubt help you in getting trained. 36 Not only are the people of Ladakh conceptualized as "backward" compared to the rest of India, but they are also presented as inferior to Kashmiris from the Valley. Second, there is an implied hierarchy at play here, with the Kashmir Valley in a subservient position vis-à-vis India and Ladakh playing second fiddle to the Valley. This secondary importance was also reflected in India's military campaign in Jammu and Kashmir. While Nehru is initially only "irritated" by Pakistan's cartographic gains in Ladakh (see discussion above), toward the end of 1948, Nehru stressed that Ladakh must be controlled by India, but for different reasons: … at time of acceptance of their resolution, the whole of Ladakh and adjacent territory must be completely controlled by us after truce. By no conceivable stretch of imagination has Pakistan got anything to do with these regions. 37 What makes Pakistan's claim over Ladakh especially illegitimate compared to other regions of the state? After all, in a purely militaristic sense, all disputed territory should have an equal status in terms of legitimacy/illegitimacy of claims. The only perceivable difference was that Ladakh as a region had a Buddhist majority, 38 and thus in India's eyes was predominantly non-Muslim in character. Thus, while Pakistan could at least make a claim (however, inappropriate according to Nehru) for the state's Muslim majority areas, Ladakh's majority Buddhist character was used to legitimize India's claims over the territory. This is also re-enforced by the fact that Indian forces did not reclaim the entire territory of Ladakh; they left out large parts of Skardu-a Shia Muslim dominated area. India's response was thus defensiveaimed at consolidating some parts of the region. The logic of religious identity was also implied subtly in a Press Communique sent out by the Defense Wing of Press Information Bureau of India while reporting on the invasion by Pakistani tribesmen: Last summer, a large number of tribesmen, supported by Chitralis, Frontier Constabulary and Gilgit Scouts infiltrated into the Ladakh valley … A grave threat to the valley developed and the Buddhist population was terrorized by the hostiles. 39 Ladakh's characterization as solely Buddhist serves to draw a contrast between the peaceful natives and the terrorizing "hostiles," which can be simultaneously read as Muslims/Pakistani/Pashtun tribesmen. This plays to the commonsensical stereotype of the fanatical Muslim/Pakistani while simultaneously drawing a link between a Hindu majority India and a Buddhist majority Ladakh. Furthermore, the relative lack of concern for Muslim inhabitants of 36 SWJN,Vol. 12,350. 37 Ibid. 38 However, Muslims still constitute a significant minority in Leh district and account for around 15 percent of the population, according to the latest census reports: https://www.census2011.co.in/census/district/621-leh.html. Furthermore, due to little change in overall population trends in the region, the approximate breakup of religious composition has remained the same in state: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/share-of-muslimsand-hindus-in-jk-population-same-in-1961-2011-censuses/. 39 NAI, NAI Progs, No. 8(12)-K, 1948, 18.
Ladakh from the narrative indicates the assumption that they may not be as threatened by their co-religionist tribesmen, owing to communal solidarity. Furthermore, both statements exhibit the logic of partition of subcontinent on religious/majoritarian lines advanced by the British and India's political elite. Thus, we find here mass common sense on religion/Muslims and elite ideas reinforcing each other to enable India recapturing Ladakh. This twin logic also informed Indian elite discourse toward the Jammu region, which includes not only those areas that are currently controlled by India, but also the western part of the state under Pakistan's control. In contrast to the Valley, which was often imagined in terms of its natural beauty, Jammu was seen as a Hindu majority region with a natural connection to India, while its western frontiers were viewed as sympathetic toward Pakistan, owing to linguistic and religious ties. When the fighting started in 1947, several Muslim soldiers of the state from Jammu deserted. 40 This cast serious doubt on the loyalty of the Jammu Muslim community as a whole in the eyes of the Minister of State, N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, 41 who wrote to the Maharaja that we should hardly think of recruiting any large number of Muslims from Jammu province (including the Poonch area) which has contributed the largest number to the rebel ranks in the present disturbances. 42 Similarly, Dalip Singh 43 expressed his concerns quite directly to Sardar Patel in one of his letters: I have a high opinion of Brig. Paranjpe's abilities and straightforwardness. Even he however told me that his experience showed that a Muslim could not be trusted where the cry for religion was raised. 44 This perception of Jammu Muslims thus mirrored the common perception of Muslim disloyalty and fanaticism prevalent in Indian society. 45 Unlike Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and Jammu, there was a void in elite discourse in the case of the Gilgit region, which occupied the remote and mountainous northern portion of the state. As in mass discourse (where Gilgit was also absent), Indian elites also marginalized the region. As early as a week into Pakistan's invasion, there was already a recognition of the possibility of Gilgit being lost to Pakistan. A report by Sheikh Abdullah sent to Nehru confirms this: Another telegram was received today that the situation in Gilgit was deteriorating day by day and may collapse, at any time (November 1, 1947 to the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, all the discussion takes place around the Valley and Jammu. An extract from the letter on the state's political future is indicative of this neglect: Some people have suggested that Kashmir and Jammu provinces be split up, one going to Pakistan and other to India. I do not at all like this for many reasons, among them being that it is Kashmir that is of essential value to India. 48 A clear territorial precedence order can be discerned from this extract, with the Valley being the most important territory for India, followed by Jammu. Gilgit and Ladakh are not even mentioned in this discussion, or for that matter, anywhere else in the letter. As the Indian military campaign hit a stalemate by 1948, both countries were increasingly looking to the UN commission on Jammu and Kashmir to provide a resolution. Nehru suspected that the UN Commission may recommend a partition of the state between India and Pakistan. Commenting on a possible partition proposal, he wrote to his sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit (then Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union): I have some reason for thinking that they will recommend that the Kashmir Valley proper, Ladakh, Kishtwar, and Jammu minus certain western areas of Poonch and Mirpur, should remain attached to India. The rest, i.e., Gilgit, Muzaffarabad area, and Western Poonch and Mirpur, to go to Pakistan. I do not personally object strongly to certain border areas and Gilgit being cut off from Kashmir … (September 21, 1948). 49 Interestingly, this letter was written at a time when India had acquired control over substantial parts of the Valley, Jammu, and Ladakh. The only parts of the state that remained outside its control were the Muslim majority districts to the West (which were aligned closely with Pakistan) and Gilgit. Hence, in terms of elite discourse, India already had control of what it desired most along with non-Muslim majority areas such as Ladakh and Jammu. Furthermore, it directly contradicts the logic of strategic value that Nehru had previously espoused in the parliament.
This analysis illustrates how Indian elites' gendered desire effectively ruled out non-involvement as an illegitimate policy option. Furthermore, masculine notions of honor led to India preferring an aggressive military strategy to secure the Kashmir Valley. In the case of Hindu and Buddhist majority areas of Jammu and Ladakh, however, it was the logic of religious majoritarianism that motivated Indian action. For Gilgit, the lack of coherent common sense allowed for a flexible policy. In fact, the influence of mass common sense is more striking considering the broader context of the time. India was financially strapped and the government was busy quelling religious tensions and securing political integration of other princely states at the time. Given the situation, fighting a protracted military campaign to secure a mountainous Muslim majority state may have seemed untenable. However, the fact that not only did India choose to intervene in the conflict, but it also fought a yearlong campaign shows the pervasive influence of mass common sense on foreign policy.
Thus, in terms of the "causal story" at play here, we find that different aspects of mass common sense shaped India's response in varied ways. The centrality of Kashmir in Indian imagination ensured that right from the start, taking possession of the Valley was paramount to Indian policymakers 48 JNSG, File 4, 223. 49 JNSG, File 13, Part 1, 182.
(policy P3 in case of the Valley). Similarly, a different logic of religious identity was instrumental in India's (delayed) move to expel raiders from the Ladakh region. The notion of the state's strategic position as a gateway to Central Asia and Tibet, while explicitly articulated, was not decisive in shaping India's policy toward Gilgit or Ladakh. For Gilgit, we see a neglect right from the start, owing to its peripheral position in India's imagination, which was further amplified by resource constraints of running an already protracted war in tough, mountainous terrain. Thus, as far as Gilgit is concerned, India's response could be categorized as P1 (nonintervention). Overall, however, the interaction of common sense with other ideational and material factors meant that on the level of the princely state, India's response was restrained to P2 (limited intervention) from an initially maximalist position of P3.
However, let us also consider the counterfactual-what would have been India's response in the absence of mass common sense? In the context of a recent partition based on majoritarianism, pressure of British officers and the international community, and resource constraints, would India have fought more than yearlong campaign to overturn Pakistan's control of a remote Muslim majority area (Kashmir Valley), or mount a military campaign in Ladakh, which, to paraphrase Nehru's words, was "away from India"? To bring this into a sharper relief, consider India's lack of intervention in Tibet, which was another remote mountainous region on its periphery. While there is not much space here to discuss the complexities of India's Tibet policy, I cite this as an example that non-intervention was always a conceivable policy response. Moreover, the fact that seven decades later we still think of India's response in Kashmir as "natural" attests to the power of common sense in legitimizing certain ideas.

Conclusions
This paper makes an argument for treating mass common sense as an analytical lens for understanding foreign policy. First, it offers a systematic theoretical framework and method for conceptualizing and operationalizing mass common sense. Second, building on popular culture studies and feminist analysis from within and beyond the discipline, it shows how India's mass common sense influenced the way its political elite cast the Kashmir Valley as a territory to be desired and possessed. Another corollary of this was that regions such as Gilgit and Ladakh were relatively marginalized by Indian society and state. Thus, as opposed to existing literature, which takes the princely state as a unit of analysis, this paper disambiguates India's Jammu and Kashmir policy in a region-specific manner.
However, this is but a first step and more research is needed to interrogate some unanswered puzzles, such as the scope conditions for effectiveness of common sense. Still, if one were to extrapolate from the present case, there is a remarkable consistency in India's Jammu and Kashmir policy since 1947. By consistency, I do not imply a lack of change, but rather an overall tendency of India's policy to align even more closely to the limits of mass common sense. For instance, despite having fought and won three wars with Pakistan, India has not made a serious attempt to acquire areas such as Gilgit or other areas under Pakistan's control. Furthermore, in terms of its relationship with the state, the Indian state has gradually eroded Kashmir's political autonomy, despite initial assurances. In this sense, the Modi government's recent withdrawal of Kashmir's legal autonomy seems to be the logical culmination of India's jealously possessive hold over the Valley.
The paper also makes the case for re-evaluating the way we conceptualize the agency of the masses. I have shown here that the masses, by the very act of carrying out their everyday lives, reproduce ideas and practices that constitute the mass common sense of their society. Elite worldview is thus constituted and bounded by this common sense even if they are not aware of it. This also reverses the elite-heavy emphasis in Gramsci's theorization. For Gramsci, elites had to consciously grapple with common sense to legitimize their hegemonic/counterhegemonic ideas. However, I provide evidence in support of the argument that common sense is not merely something elites have to take account of, rather, having internalized it, this common sense becomes a channel for mass influence on elites.
Another key benefit of mass common sense as a conceptual lens is the fact that it can be used to demonstrate the paradoxes that are embedded in the social discourse of a country. For example, despite India's self-definition as a peace-loving nation, violence for the sake of honor was considered justified, particularly in the case of gender and religion. This paper also shows a way of combining interpretivist and quantitative techniques, without taking away from the advantages of either. The benefits of combining the two methodological approaches lie in the fact that it not only helps in recovering the common sense of a society, but also operationalizes it as a comparative tool to understand politics across different social contexts.
At the same time, there are several questions regarding both the ontological and epistemological aspects of common sense, such as the origin of common sense and the limits of its causal influence, that I have not been able to fully address here. The causal narrative presented here is also limited due to the preliminary nature of theorization of the link between common sense and other ideational and material factors. These are certainly important questions that deserve a more systematic engagement and thus offer some clues regarding the future direction for research on common sense in international relations. However, regardless of these limitations, as an initial foray, this paper makes a case for taking the masses more seriously in the discipline-for it shows that even if the subaltern cannot speak, they can still act, and decisively so.

Supplementary Information
Supplementary information is available at the ISAGSQ data archive.