Transcript
Yalda (0:09)
Hello and welcome to the world. I'm Yalda and I'm currently in London. And Richard won't be joining us again for this particular podcast because he's still on assignment. But given the rising tensions between India and Pakistan and the series of strikes that we saw India launch on Pakistani territory, we felt that we needed to speak to our India correspondent, our India expert, Neville Lazarus, who joins us at the moment to get a sense of what on earth is going on, what the background to all of this is and where this is likely to go. And before I get stuck in and start my conversation with Neville, don't forget to follow us wherever you get your podcast and send us your thoughts on today's developments and the story that we're seeing take place at the moment. The usual place, the world@sky.uk. neville, it's so good to see you. I just want to take you back to the 22nd of April, just a few weeks ago, when a group of tourists who were Indian nationals, mostly one Nepali citizen, were killed by terrorists in Kashmir. Just give us a sense of how that unfolded and what the mood was in India. Because the sense I got was initially India shocked, traumatized, and then they wanted revenge.
Neville Lazarus (1:50)
Oh, absolutely. Shock and horror out and anger. There's an uproar out here. So we reached there to the location the next day because obviously it was such a big incident. We've had tourists who were largely left untouched in the many sort of attacks that militants and terrorists have had over the many decades in Kashmir now. And then, yes, a tourist, domestic tourist was killed, but not in this shape and form. So you had these tourists who were in what is called Behelgama Place, which is known as the mini Switzerland. It's. It's absolutely beautiful. Beautiful mountains. Ruiz. And, and you've got this meadow in, in, in this place which is up the sort of hill where families had come to enjoy. Now, this attack which had four gunmen coming and actually killing the men. In some cases, they had gathered the families and just shot the men. And we have eyewitnesses, some of the victims of family members saying that they. This woman who was married to was on a honeym husband was killed and she told the gunman to shoot her as well. And he said, no, if we don't kill you, you go and tell Prime Minister Modi of what we've done. So those sort of voices that came out brought about a lot of anger. In some cases, the religion was being asked of and then the person was shot. So it did become a really, really sort of a volcanic kind of anger that pervaded, you know, parts of the media, social media and people. And you could tell there was a mood change in 26 civilians who were killed. And the mood did go really south at the highest levels. We've had Prime Minister Modi saying in very sort of public statements he's made over the many days in the past, saying that there will be retribution, there will be revenge, and they will hunt down till the end of these earths the terrorists and the backers and everyone will be punished. Terrorism will be punished. And we saw what happened in the culmination of these attacks that took place. But, yeah, India was hurting. It really was angry. And there was a sense that Prime Minister Modi and the present government needed to do something to quell that anger.