← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
Why do India and Pakistan fight over Kashmir?
00:45:23
The political and cultural complexities of this contested and heavily militarised region.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:38]
Dan Snow
Welcome everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit on 22 April this year, 26 people, 25 of them Indians and one Nepali in Indian administered Kashmir were killed by gunmen who opened fire on visitors near the popular tourist town of Pahalgam. There has been a long running history of violence in this part of the world. There's been an active insurgency since 1989 in this majority Muslim region of India. It's claimed tens of thousands of lives. Initially, no group claimed responsibility for the tackle of the Indian Foreign Secretary of Vikram Misri would later say that the gunmen were members of Lashkar Itaibai, a Pakistan based militant group. The killings, well, I think they sparked enormous anger across India. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed that the country would pursue these gunmen and their backers to the ends of the earth and stated they'd be punished beyond their imagination. The authorities in Pakistan denied any involvement in the attack. But in the immediate aftermath, India closed its main border crossing with Pakistan and suspended a water sharing treaty and expelled certain military diplomats. Two weeks later, on 7 May, India accused Pakistan of supporting the militants and they launched a series of military strikes on targets in Pakistan and Pakistan administered Kashmir. The Indian Defense Ministry called this operation Sindor and said it showed clear commitment to hold accountable those responsible for the deadly terrorist attack. Pakistan says it was not involved in the attack and it called the strikes unprovoked. Prime Minister Shibaz Sharif said the heinous act of aggression will not go unpunished. Both sides then traded statistics about the number of attacks and whether aircraft had been shot down or not, and whether those attacks had hit civilian, military or militant targets. They were followed by several days of intense shelling, aerial incursions between the two countries with casualties on both sides. Fears grew that these tit for tat strikes would escalate into a broader, far more damaging war between the two nuclear armed neighbors. The USA helped to broker a ceasefire on May 10, but both sides have alleged violations. The Pakistani military have blamed India for orchestrating a tragic bus bombing on Wednesday 21 May in Bulakistan region that killed five people, including three children. There's no evidence for Pakistan's allegation, but at the time we recorded this podcast on Thursday 22 May 2025, the ceasefire did appear largely to be holding. Now, as ever on this podcast, we want to do a deep dive on the history behind some of the major current events going on in the world around us. This recent standoff, these recent blows between India and Pakistan is just the latest in an ongoing conflict. India and Pakistan have fought several times over Kashmir since the partition of Britain's South Asian Empire in 1947. Both sides claimed the region in its entirety. So why is this territory so hotly contested? Why, given all the blood and the suffering and the misery of 1947 of the partition, does this one area still generate, still have the capacity to to cause such friction? Where did it begin? What might happen next? To give us some pointers here, we've got Andrew Whitehead. He's a brilliant historian, lecturer and freelance journalist. He spent 35 years at the BBC as a correspondent and a presenter and editor of BBC World Service News. He's the author of A Mission in Kashmir in which he gathered a huge range of first hand testimonies. In that book he provides a vivid account of the origins of the Modern day Kashmir conflict in those final months of 1947 in he's been to Kashmir many times, most recently in the last few months. Kashmir itself is, well, it's ethnically diverse. It is a Himalayan region. It's very, very high. As you'll hear, the population is divided. Roughly about 10 million people live in Indian administered Kashmir. Four and a half million people live in Pakistan administered Kashmir. There's also around 2 million people living in another area, Pakistan controlled but autonomous Kashmir, Gilgit, Baltistan, and then China. It also administers a little bit to the east of India, administers Kashmir that has been the cause of border disputes between China and India since the 1950s. So as you can hear, this is a contested region. It's a very mountainous region. The front lines, the notional national boundaries cross some of those inhospitable and savage terrain on Earth. Glaciers. Where in the past people weren't super concerned about the line of demarcation. So today it remains one of the most contested and one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world. It gets its ethnic diversity from, well, from its past, obviously, 300 BC. So just after Alexander the Great, the area was conquered by Ashoka the Great. He was ruler of a vast Asian empire, huge proponent of Buddhism. And Buddhism is still practiced by people in Kashmir. In the first half of the first millennium, it was conquered by Hindu empires. It became an important center, well, actually both Hinduism and Buddhism and it was ruled by Hindu dynasties until the 14th century, until the medieval period. At that time, around 1320, it became part of the Muslim Mughal empire until the 18th century. It was then ruled by the Afghans until the early 19th century when it was conquered by the Sikhs. So that ended centuries, about 400ish years of Muslim rule. And as a result, the majority of the population there are Muslim. Tell us more about that deeper history. And to bring us up to speed on the last few decades, to give us essential context for what is going on in the world around us, here is Andrew whitehead.
- [07:37]
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- [07:41]
Andrew Whitehead
God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
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Dan Snow
Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Dan.
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Andrew Whitehead
It's a pleasure.
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Dan Snow
First of all, you've spent lots of time there. You've talked to so many people there. Just describe it for us. What's it like being in, well, the area we might loosely call Kashmir. We'll come back perhaps and define it.
- [08:08]
Andrew Whitehead
Later on, the definition is quite important. I've been to the Kashmir Valley many times, most recently, actually as a tourist in March, and in many ways it's enchanting. We're talking about a big, flat bottomed valley in the Himalayan foothills. Srinagar, the main city, is more than 5,000ft above sea level, so that's higher than Ben Nevis, for example. Lots of lakes surrounded by mountains. One of the Mughal emperors, when he first turned up in Kashmir, he is reputed to have said, if there is a paradise, this is it. This is it, this is it. It was a Persian couplet and it has attracted tourists down the centuries and it still is breathtaking. And it's quite fertile land, so lots of saffron, but also apples, cherries, willow. So a lot of really good cricket bats are made from Kashmiri willow. Educational levels are quite high and it has a very distinct both architectural sense and culture. The Kashmiri language, which is the mother tongue, isn't related to Hindi or Urdu. It's more Central Asian in origin. Kashmiri mosque design is not the coupler that you see in Pakistan or India traditionally. It's more pagoda like. And the mosques and the shrines are very striking. So, as you can tell, I feel invested in the place. In spite of all the misery that Kashmir has endured and continues to live through, I enjoy spending time there.
- [09:42]
Dan Snow
And let's talk now about its deeper history, because people will have been hearing lots about it recently, but let's go all the way back. Well, as far as you like, really. Is it the fact that it's surrounded by these mountains, Is it remote, or is it in fact, on a very useful highway between north and south and east and west across the great Eurasian landmass?
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Andrew Whitehead
Yes, to a degree. But the Kashmir valley, and there are many Kashmirs, and I'm talking particularly about the Kashmir Valley, which is the crucible of the Kashmiri language, Kashmiri culture that didn't have all weather road access until 1890, so really quite remote. It had a river going through it, the river Jhelum, which connected it to what's now the plains of Pakistan, Punjab. But it was quite remote. But. But it was also quite fought after. I mean, the British were always very jealous of maintaining control over that part of South Asia, because part of the great game, they were trying to make sure that Russia didn't muscle in on the Indian Empire. And Russia is much closer to hand. There's no border, but Russia is closer to hand in Kashmir than it is in Delhi or Lahore or places further south. But its History has been quite complex. So the first time I went to Kashmir, in early mid-1990s, I asked a professor of history there when the last time was that Kashmir was ruled by Kashmiris. And he said with great vigor, 1586. And then he said, but don't quote me on that. So I mean, the Kashmiri narrative is that ever since 1586 they've been ruled by outsiders, by Moguls and then by Afghans, then by Sikhs, then by the Dogra ruling family, the Maharajas family, who were not Kashmiri speakers, and since 1947 by Delhi. It's not quite that simple. But that's part of the Kashmiri narrative, that they've lost agency, they don't have control over their own homeland and they've been denied that by a whole series of outsiders.
- [11:46]
Dan Snow
Let's go. Well, all the way back, really. So there is a substantial Hindu population there. Presumably it was at one stage ruled over by Hindu dynasties.
- [11:58]
Andrew Whitehead
So it's quite complicated. There's a substantial Hindu population in Jammu, which is Hindu majority, which was part of the Maharaja's domains. The Kashmir Valley had its own Kashmiri speaking Hindu population, quite small in numbers, but they Almost all left 30 years or so ago when a separatist insurgency broke out. They were really intimidated to leave. And I'm talking about two Kashmirs and I should perhaps just explain what I'm meaning. So the bigger Kashmir is all the territory that was ruled by the Maharaja of Kashmir in 1947, when India and Pakistan gain independence. And that would be now about 20 million people. And a little bit more than 2/3 is currently within India. The rest is with Pakistan and that would be roughly 3/4 Muslim, all told. But within that there's a much smaller area, which is the Kashmir Valley, which is really what India and Pakistan are fighting about. Whatever they say, that's the key issue. Who controls the Kashmir Valley? At the moment, it's under Indian rule. All the Kashmir Valley is within India. And the population of the Kashmir Valley is seven and a half, eight million. So a little bit more than Scotland and that, if you don't count soldiers and civil servants who are just passing through, that is round about 95% or a little bit more Muslim and largely Sunni Muslim.
- [13:27]
Dan Snow
You mentioned the Maharajah of Kashmir. Did it always have that sort of identity? Was it, albeit that the Maharajah might. That that might be absorbed by different empires, different times? Was there always a sort of. That was, roughly speaking, the boundary of this Kashmiri principality?
- [13:40]
Andrew Whitehead
No, the boundaries kept changing and what happened was I Mean, well, if it was simple, wouldn't be sort of unresolved as a geopolitical issue for so many decades. So. And in 1846, when the British defeated the Sikh Empire, which was then based in Lahore, they were helped by basically a feudal warlord, a guy called Gulab Singh, who was a Hindu based in Jammu. And as a reward for his help, the British sold him the Kashmir valley for 7 and a half million rupees and an annual tribute of a few shawls and a few goats, which has led to the Kashmiri refrain that the Brits sold us out for a few goats. Not entirely true, but not entirely inaccurate either. And so Gulab Singh added the Kashmir Valley onto his initial domain, which was the Hindu majority area around Jammu, and then he managed to carry on agglomerating adjoining territories. So the Maharaja of Kashmir's territory in 1947 was, I think, the biggest princely state by area in South Asia, and I think the second biggest in population terms. But it was itsy bitsy. There was areas which were Hindu majority areas which were Sunni Muslim majority, a small area which had a Shia Muslim majority, and a large area, a small population which had a Buddhist majority, didn't have a common language, it didn't have a common culture. The only thing they had in common was that they had the same maharaja.
- [15:16]
Dan Snow
And we should say that the reason people might be confused, if it's part of this British South Asian Empire, why has it got a maharaja? Because bits of what we could loosely call India, but India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, bits of that. The British allowed maharajas to rule as kind of client kings under that British Imperial umbrella.
- [15:33]
Andrew Whitehead
That's right. Britain was the paramount ruler. But significant chunks of British India were ruled by maharajas or Nizams or Princely Rul. And they had a British resident, so a British, basically diplomat, who kept an eye on what they did, but they were broadly in control of what happened within their domain. And in 1947, when the Brits left India, technically it was up to the maharaja to decide whether to accede to India or to Pakistan. In fact, most maharajas had no decision to make, because if you were surrounded entirely by the territory of one, one new state or the other, that's the one you had to join. Kashmir was one of the few states of any significance which had borders with both India and Pakistan. And therefore there was a real decision to be made.
- [16:25]
Dan Snow
Right, so this really is the big moment we've got. The British are leaving the subcontinent. After plenty of debates, violence, I mean, all sorts of things, it was decided that the South Asian British Empire would be partitioned, majority Muslim and majority Hindu components, hence India and Pakistan. Kashmir is right on the edge. So how that line of demarcation was. Or is it this Maharaja just making this decision?
- [16:54]
Andrew Whitehead
So Kashmir was affected by partition, particularly because refugees moving from parts of what had become Pakistan moved through Kashmir to get to India. And there was some violence in the Jammu area, which was adjoining Sialkot in what became Pakistan. But broadly, the story of 1947 was rather different. In Kashmir, there was violence and there were massacres, some allegedly involving the Maharaja's own army, massacres of Muslims in Jammu. But the bigger picture was which side was the Maharajah going to jump? It was his decision. According to the India act, which the British Parliament passed, he could opt for India or Pakistan. I think many people in the British India Office assumed that Kashmir would go to Pakistan because it was Muslim majority. The whole logic of partition was that adjoining Muslim majority areas become part of a new Muslim nation, Pakistan. And more than that, the commercial and transport routes with the Kashmir Valley really lay down the Jhelum and to the west and southwest in what became Pakistan. On the other hand, the Maharaja was a Hindu, even though three quarters of his citizens were Muslims. And Hindus obviously felt much more comfortable in India than in Pakistan. What complicates it is the Maharaja actually hankered after the idea of independence. And he thought if he delayed a decision, perhaps nobody would really notice and he would be in charge of an independent Kashmir. And he talked about Kashmir as a Switzerland of the east, by which he meant both mountainous but also neutral between neighboring powers and sort of tourist paradise. And the British Left in mid August 1947, with Kashmir status unresolved. I mean, people would go up and have a chat with a maharaja, but he would go out on a shooting. It was a great duck shooter shooting trip, to avoid awkward discussions. Or he would feign illness. And he tested the patience of Mountbatten and of various others. But nevertheless, he managed to delay making a decision.
- [19:12]
Dan Snow
And the British do leave. In the summer of 1947, they have presided over this, one of the greatest migrations in history, as people are desperately right across Bengal and Punjab in particular. People are just, well, they're being forced out. There's violence, there's intercommunal violence. People are walking, taking trains, trying to find the right side of this border. There was meant to be a process, wasn't there, where a lawyer was, Cyril Radcliffe, I think his name was, wasn't he, who was trying to sort of work it all out through demographic information, sense information on a map. But these facts were being made on the ground at the time, village to village, weren't they?
- [19:47]
Andrew Whitehead
Yeah. And Radcliffe, I mean, he did as good a job as he could, given that he didn't really understand the situation. The information he was presented with was less than complete. But of course, the line that he drew in Punjab in particular turned out to be somewhat arbitrary. And the uncertainty about where it would lie led to this huge migration of people and. And millions of deaths in terrible communal violence. The Kashmir Valley is partitioned today, but it wasn't partitioned by Cyril Radcliffe. So it wasn't part of that partition line that the British bequeathed to India and Pakistan. When the British left, Kashmir was one unit and the Maharaja was still to make a decision about which way to jump. And it wasn't seen as quite as important as Punjab. So I think basically the British, they just thought, okay, we've done our best. We can't tick off everything on our list of things to do. That's one that we will have to leave for another day or we'll have to leave for others to sort out.
- [20:47]
Dan Snow
Yes, it's not going to be our problem. Not entirely. Unlike what the British did in Palestine and with their mandate there after the Second World at a very similar time, we now know that the Maharaja's dream of independent Kashmir did not come to pass. Why not? What happened then?
- [21:02]
Andrew Whitehead
Well, he delayed. There were all sorts of signs, his choice of Prime Minister, for example, that he was cozying up to the idea of joining India if he couldn't become independent. The new Pakistan government felt deeply aggrieved because they felt they had a very strong case to Kashmir. And they did what Pakistan has done down the decades ever since, which is that they fought for Kashmir by proxy. They sent in an army, an armed force of tribesmen from the northwest frontier. So not soldiers in uniform, not the Pakistan army, but people who had been encouraged and perhaps equipped, certainly provided with trucks and petrol by sections of Pakistan's new authorities and said to them, go off there to Kashmir, do what you can, try and grab it for Pakistan and for Islam. And as soon as the tribal army entered the princely state, the Maharaja panicked and he did exactly what Pakistan didn't want him to do. He signed up. He signed a formal agreement saying that his state would become part of India. And the Indian government then sent in an airlift of troops. And this is in late October 1947, so a couple of months after independence, and those Indian troops managed to repulse the Tribal invaders who were on the outskirts of Srinagar at this time, so close to capturing the Kashmir valley, they pushed them back, but not all the way out of the princely state. So basically Kashmir was informally divided within a few months of independence between India and Pakistan and in different ways has remained divided between those two countries ever since.
- [22:50]
Dan Snow
Right, so that's fascinating. So that line, the line of division today, that is a sort of roughly a scar of this very early, reasonably brief 1947 war between. Between these two sides.
- [23:03]
Andrew Whitehead
Yeah. So initially the Indian troops repulsed the invaders. Then Pakistan thought, well, if we're going to get pushed back, we might lose the whole of the princely state. So in early 48, Pakistan sent its army in in uniform. And then there was for several months there was a war, the first India Pakistan war fought about and in Kashmir, across Kashmir, really quite vicious war. And then in 1949, the United nations actually drew up a ceasefire line between India and Pakistan. And that line remains not quite unchanged, but it remains what's now called the line of control which divides the former Maharaja's principality between India and Pakistan. But with India having the larger part and having all of the crucial bit, the Kashmir valley. The United nations expected there would eventually be a plebiscite so that the people of Kashmir could vote to decide whether they did want to be part of India or whether they wanted to be part of Pakistan. But that plebiscite has never been held.
- [24:08]
Dan Snow
Listen to Dan Snows history talking about Kashmir or Coming up.
- [24:19]
Verizon Advertiser
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- [24:49]
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- [26:30]
Dan Snow
The Maharaja, presumably, who briefly thought he might be presiding over the wonderful Switzerland of the east, once Kashmir was part of India. The Maharajas, they were allowed to keep their titles, I suppose, but they had no, no formal roles following that, did they?
- [26:44]
Andrew Whitehead
No, it became a bit more complicated because Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, appointed the Maharaja's son as in effect, the Governor.
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Dan Snow
Oh, interesting.
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Andrew Whitehead
Yeah. But what also happened is the Maharaja's nemesis within Kashmir was a radical charismatic nationalist called Sheikh Abdullah. And Sheikh Abdullah actually at the time also supported Kashmir's accession to India because he saw India as more secular, more democratic, more radical. Pakistan was more conservative, more feudal minded in many ways. And Sheikh Abdullah became the Prime Minister of Indian Kashmir and was a great reforming figure.
- [27:22]
Dan Snow
He was a Muslim.
- [27:23]
Andrew Whitehead
He was a Muslim and a left winger, but he was the Prime Minister and actually he presided over the most far reaching measures of land reform anywhere in South Asia. They really changed the face of the Kashmiri countryside and they were empowering for many small farmers and peasants and disempowering for the large landlords and also helped up. I mean, the Muslims had lower social status in princely Kashmir, so it helped to empower Muslims and in part disempowered large Hindu landowners. And Sheikh Abdullah actually got on really well with Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru himself is a Hindu, but his forebears came from Kashmir. They're Kashmiri pundits, Kashmiri speaking Hindus. Nehru didn't go A lot to Kashmir, but it meant a lot to him and also to his daughter, Indira Gandhi. She spent holidays in Kashmir. I think she went to Kashmir as a young bride. There's pictures of her with her father on horseback in Kashmir. So for the Nehru family, Kashmir was really quite important. That's one reason why Nehru was really quite determined that Kashmir didn't fall out of his and India's grip. But it's also true that Nehru was a radical, he wasn't a communist. You could describe him as a socialist. And Sheikh Abdullah, who at that stage had some communist leanings, felt that actually Kashmir would be safer with a progressive figure who would be more supportive of social justice, of land reform and of genuine empowerment of the masses than it would be to have Kashmir as part of a conservative, neo feudal Pakistan, which is what Sheikh Abdullah feared might happen in Pakistan.
- [29:06]
Dan Snow
Interesting. Okay, so we have got the 1949 temporary end of hostilities. People are hopeful there might be some sort of plebiscite, but there is not one. And when is the next serious outbreak of fighting? Is it 65?
- [29:19]
Andrew Whitehead
Yeah, 65. By 53. Nehru decides that he doesn't want Sheikh Abdullah anymore because Sheikh Abdullah is actually making a bit of a fuss about maybe Kashmir's accession to India shouldn't be permanent and he's sort of edging towards supporting a plebiscite himself. So he gets, gets chucked out and then India starts a tradition which you could say has survived in large degree, where actually the only people who get a chance to be chief ministers in Indian Kashmir are those that Delhi likes. If Delhi doesn't like you, you don't get the job. But the next conflict was in 1965. Pakistan thought that there was such disaffection within the Kashmir Valley towards India that if it sent in some troops to try and undercover, so to speak, to try and stir things up, there was a chance of a Kashmiri insurgency which would manage to evict India from the Kashmir Valley. So Pakistan staged what was called Operation Gibraltar. But the Kashmiris did not rise up against India and this became a wider conflict in which the Indian army actually crossed the border and started advancing towards Lahore, one of the principal cities of Pakistan, Punjab. So this was really quite a serious situation for Pakistan, but Kashmir was the trigger of it and was one of the main theaters of that conflict.
- [30:41]
Dan Snow
These wars, what is the effect on the people of Kashmir, on its economy? Are they reasonably small surgical affairs or are they large scale industrial grinding wars that are seeing destruction of property and people and criminality and all the rest.
- [30:54]
Andrew Whitehead
Of it, no, we're not talking about the trench warfare of the sort that we saw in the First World War. The level of conflict in terms of destruction and infrastructure and of industry was quite Limited. So in 47, 48 was actually probably a little bit more in terms of damage. In 65, and in subsequent conflicts, not so much. So daily life in Kashmir, in many ways carried on. I mean, agriculturally, it is very fertile land. The base of the Kashmir Valley. It's got apples, cherries, willow, apricot rice. So it's much more fertile than many areas of South Asia. And following land reform, basically, rural Kashmir was more prosperous than many areas of North India or Pakistan.
- [31:39]
Dan Snow
So, 965, another bout of fighting. There was a mediation again, a ceasefire, act of compromise, but it wouldn't last long. When's the next round?
- [31:48]
Andrew Whitehead
Well, the next war between India and Pakistan is in 1971, and of the four wars that those two countries have fought to date, that's the only one that hasn't been principally about and in Kashmir. So that was when East Pakistan became Bangladesh and the Indian army supported the Mukti Bahini, the freedom fighters, as they style themselves in East Pakistan, to break away to form an explicitly Bengali nation of Bangladesh. But it did have an important implication for Kashmir because that was a unequivocal defeat of Pakistan. And in 1972, in a conference in Simla between the Indian and Pakistani governments to basically work out a peace deal, India and Pakistan also signed up to a treaty which related to, or an agreement which related to the status of Kashmir. And there was supposed to be a secret section of that, which meant that actually Pakistan would drop its claim to that part of the principality which was controlled by India. So, in other words, both sides would keep what they got, but wouldn't actively claim the other. In fact, if there was a secret paragraph, Pakistan didn't observe it. But the similar accord meant that both India and Pakistan acknowledged that the Kashmir dispute was simply a bilateral issue. The rest of the world had no stake in it. It was to be sorted out between India and Pakistan. Of course, it never has been sorted out, but ever since then, India's basically said United nations has got no real status in the Kashmir issue. Britain, the form of colonial power. Thank you very much, but you can keep out of this one. The Americans. Well, thank you for interest, but actually we'll sort it ourselves. Which is actually why India is hopping mad now that President Trump has rather suggested that he will have a hand in sorting out this, as he called it. Thousand year long conflict. India basically says no, no thanks.
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Dan Snow
So 1971 war, nearly all the fightings in, well, what is now Bangladesh, the force of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, free and fight, hundreds of thousands of casualties. A terrible conflict. But reasonably quiet along that border in Kashmir.
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Andrew Whitehead
Yes, reasonably quiet. As I say, the implications are much more with the similar record of the following year than with actually with the conflict itself.
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Dan Snow
And then does it move from format interstate warfare to more of that sort of late 20th century insurgency that we might recognize?
- [34:18]
Andrew Whitehead
Yes, I mean this is again Pakistan fighting for Kashmir by proxy. So there were lots of grievances within Indian Kashmir and there was something of a tradition of rigged elections in Indian Kashmir as well. So a lot of young Kashmiris felt that whoever they voted for the people that India wanted, seemed to win the local elections. And in the late 1980s, a number of young and quite well educated Kashmiris started moving over to Pakistan Kashmir where they were trained in military style camps to stage a low level guerrilla war. And in 1989 some of them started to infiltrate back into Indian Kashmir and to begin an insurgency. And there's absolutely no doubt that Pakistan had a role in encouraging, arming and equipping those insurgents. And that insurgency started at a fairly low level, but it became quite a big movement. A significant number of young Kashmiris took up weapons. A larger proportion of the Kashmiri population in the Kashmir valley were at least indulgent to what the armed Kashmiri separatists were doing. There were plenty who said, this is wrong, we do not support violence, whatever our view is about where Kashmir should lie geopolitically. But the insurgency became a really big problem. There were targeted assassinations. Almost all Kashmiri speaking Hindus, who tended to be the professionals, the senior civil servants, the judges, the lecturers, the lawyers left the Kashmir valley because they were in fear of their lives. And the Indian army moved in in very large numbers and probably as many as a million people at the, the peak in uniform in Indian Kashmir, with a population, civilian population in the Kashmir Valley of at that stage probably 6 million. This is a huge presence. And when I started going to Kashmir in the early to mid-90s, it felt like a war zone. There was an informal curfew or a formal curfew every night in Srinagar. There were huge military convoys. Every substantial street corner had military posts and checkpoints usually swathed in anti grenade netting and things like that. And you would see people being forced out of minibuses and buses and dragooned in single file in front of military checkpoints where One assumes there was a local informer trying to identify or helping to identify people who were suspected of being separatists or sympathetic to the separatists. In military jargon, it was a low level insurgency. If you were in Kashmir, it didn't feel very low level. And the number of casualties over that period, we're talking about many tens of thousands of deaths.
- [37:11]
Dan Snow
Wow. And is that bombs but also these targeted assassinations as well.
- [37:15]
Andrew Whitehead
It's all sorts of things. The insurgents, initially they had some level of training. I wouldn't say that they were a terribly effective guerrilla force, but it was improvised explosive devices. It was throw a grenade and run. And it was not so much sniper, but certainly uses of guns as well. And then it was a very aggressive Kashmiris would say brutal response by the Indian security forces clearly trying to close down an insurgency which they saw as being sponsored by their neighbor and regional rival. And as indeed, I think at that stage it clearly was. And there were persistent reports of human rights abuses. And I think there's no doubt that some of the interrogation centers set up by India at that time in Kashmir were actually torture centers. I think that's fairly well documented.
- [38:10]
Dan Snow
There's more on Kashmir coming up, folks. Don't go away.
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- [39:31]
Dan Snow
Points of that line of control are where India and Pakistan faced off against each other. Even if they're not fighting, but they're eyeballing each other across Nomad Zone. They're higher than humans have ever fought before. Just reminding ourselves that even the lowest point of this is still higher than the highest point of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. We're pushing the bounds of military technology and endurance.
- [39:50]
Andrew Whitehead
Well, indeed, in the Sietchen Glacier, which is, you know, we're talking about 18, 19, 20,000ft up. So very, very high. It's so remote and inaccessible that nobody actually bothered in detail pinpointing where the line lay, which is why there is now a conflict, a highest altitude conflict in the world, a standoff, military standoff, with thousands of troops on both sides in this remote Siachen Glacier. But both are determined to deny it to the other. And the highest motorable road in the world, which I've actually been on, which goes up to, I think it's 17,000ft, is the approach road on the Indian side leading to the Siakchen Glacier. Parts of this are really very remote mountain territory. Other parts, I mean, the ceasefire line in Jammu, it goes through rice fields, so it varies in different stretches of the line.
- [40:45]
Dan Snow
Remarkable. The insurgency is rumbling along. Is there an outbreak of a more formal war in 1999?
- [40:52]
Andrew Whitehead
Not a formal war, but again, this is Pakistan fighting for Kashmir by proxy. So in an area called Kargil, which isn't in the Kashmir Valley, but was part of the area ruled by the maharaja. So an area which both India and Pakistan claim, the line is through such remote territory that India actually didn't keep troops at all its mountain lookouts during the winter. What's the point? How do you equip them? How do you get supplies there? So as soon as the snows started, they withdrew people from these mountain lookouts. Well, in 1999, basically with Pakistani military help, some armed groups, Islamist armed groups, which were active in Kashmir, basically took over lookout positions very high up on the Indian side of the ceasefire line while India wasn't looking. And it took India actually several weeks to work out that some of its posts were actually occupied by enemy forces. And of course, these posts, they're very high up, they have the advantage of height in terms of firing down and they're very difficult to dislodge. I mean, the Indians chose these as lookout posts because they were fairly impregnable. So once you've got enemy forces in there, from India's point of view, they are very difficult to dislodge. So that fighting that India undertook to try and dislodge those infiltrators became over a period of weeks and months in 1999, basically an undeclared war which involved military aircraft and regular troops from both sides, with hundreds of casualties on both sides. It wasn't formally a war, but in practice it was a war and it was a war about Kashmir.
- [42:38]
Dan Snow
That line is. There's just so much room for friction, so much opportunity for friction, or any of these incidents, I suppose, could ignite a wider conflict between these two nuclear armed powers. Let's come slightly close to the present. I mean, 2016, there was a remote Indian army base again was attacked.
- [42:54]
Andrew Whitehead
That's right. So on that occasion, an Islamist group active in Kashmir staged an attack on an Indian army base near a place called Uri. So just the Indian side of the ceasefire line in Kashmir. And it caused quite heavy casualties. And by that stage India had a Hindu nationalist government. The current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi was in power and he's always used a more vigorous and more assertively nationalist rhetoric in terms of how to respond to any acts of violence for which he saw Pakistan as culpable. And he actually sent commandos across the line of control, across the ceasefire line, to attack a target in Pakistan. And that may have been done previously, but on this occasion India made a big thing about it. So this set a precedent that if bad things happen in Kashmir for which we hold Pakistan responsible, we're going to go into Pakistani territory to carry out reprisal operations. We've seen that happen on a number of occasions since then. It happened in 2019 when there was a car bomb attack in Indian Kashmir in which 40 Indian servicemen were killed. That led India to take military action in Pakistan Kashmir, but also in what you might call Pakistan proper. So beyond the area that both countries claim, and that involved air attacks as well. So that was quite a big deal. And that was doused down partly thanks to American diplomatic involvement. And then we had the. The Pearl gum attack much more recently in April, where four gunmen basically attacked Indian tourists who were visiting a Mountain Meadow at 7,000ft up, quite remote. But Indian tourists have been coming back to Kashmir in considerable numbers recently because the security situation had been a lot better. Last year there were 2 million Indian tourists who visited Kashmir. When I was in Kashmir myself in March, even though it wasn't peak season, there were a lot of Indian tourists around, hardly any international tourists. And indeed the British advices don't go, but there were a lot of Indian tourists. But these gunmen, they corralled the men among the tourists who were in the meadow. They seem to have asked those men whether they could recite a Muslim prayer. And those who couldn't were assumed not to be Muslims and were killed quite often shot dead in front of their families. And 25 tourists were killed. And so was a Kashmiri guide who tried to protect the tourists he was accompanying. And this was by far the worst attack on tourists in Kashmir that there's been. And as you could understand, it caused outrage. I mean, globally, but particularly across India. It was a terrible and appalling terrorist crime. India watchers and South Asia watchers knew straight away that India's response would include military action against targets in Pakistan. And that's what happened.
- [46:11]
Dan Snow
How have things changed in Kashmir? You mentioned the security situation, but what about the politics of Kashmir? Has it changed? Does it sit uneasily within Modi's new India, where there's a more. A more assertive identity around Hinduism? You know, certainly very different to that independence generation of Nehru and Gandhi. They believed in a more cosmopolitan, secular India. Modi is selling something slightly different. Is that changed the tone of debate within Kashmir?
- [46:37]
Andrew Whitehead
I think it has. So in the Jammu region, which is Hindu majority, the BJP is now the dominant party in the Kashmir valley, which is overwhelmingly Muslim, and as I say, is the area that matters most. The BJP has a presence, it has a structure. There are some Muslims who basically say the BJP's slogan for Kashmir, of tourism, not terrorism, is one that would be good for local people in the economy. But broadly, the BJP does not have a foothold there. And in 2019, the BJP government, the Indian government, abrogated Kashmir's nominal autonomy within India's constitution. So after independence, India basically agreed to accommodate Kashmir by giving it a special status in this constitution. Those privileges have more or less become a dead letter over the intervening decades, but still it was of totemic symbolic importance to Kashmiris. But the BJP said, hang on, this is appeasement. Why should Kashmir have special status? It can't have special status because it's the only Muslim majority state in India. That's not right. So it withdrew it and also withdrew state status. So it devalued the importance of Kashmir within India. And that really offended people in Kashmir. They still feel a deep sense of humiliation about that. And the way it was done was also very traumatic. So schools were closed, colleges were closed, the Internet was switched off. All mobile telephony was switched off for a period. Tourists were told to leave straight away. And thousands of Kashmiris were detained, including Mainstream Kashmiri politicians. 3 Former chief ministers were held under house arrest or jailed, all of whom at various times had been allies of the BJP or in coalitions, either national or state level. These were not people who were anti India, not people who espoused violence. They were constitutional mainstream politicians, and they were locked up too. And some human rights activists remain under detention. And the Kashmiri news media, which had been fairly feisty and independent, was completely disemboweled, and it really is now a shadow of what it once was. So I think a lot of that is resented, though also many Kashmiris have done well out of the increasing number of Indian tourists who are coming there. You see hotels being built. You pay more to have a car by the day in Srinagar these days than you would do in Delhi or in Mumbai. And when I was there, the striking thing is the number of huge mansions that are being built across the Kashmir Valley. When I say mansions, three floors, maybe 10 or 12 rooms, which seem to be being built by local Kashmiri families. Where they're getting the money from and how it's coming in I don't know. But some people are clearly doing well in Kashmir and the land has always been good, so it doesn't feel poor. But do Kashmiris feel aggrieved? I would have to say I think they do.
- [49:44]
Dan Snow
Amazing. Thank you so much for taking us through the deeper history of this region and the competition between India and Pakistan for its sovereignty. Andrew Whitehead, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast.
- [49:56]
Andrew Whitehead
It's a pleasure. Thank you, Tom. If you're alignment in charge of keeping the lights on, Granger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing. Which is why you can count on Grainger for professional grade products and next.
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