It has been over fifty days since the central government revoked Jammu and Kashmir's decades-old special constitutional status by abrogating article 370 and initiating a lockdown that curbed people's movement and completely halted communications.
The blackout has severely affected information flow from the state, though some news portals report unrest, with international media showing videos of protests and publishing reports of police firing on protesters and using tear gas to disperse them.
Military historian Shiv Kunal Verma, author of The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why and 1962: The War That Wasn’t, has tracked developments in Kashmir for decades. At an event held in the Indian Merchants Chamber in Mumbai, he shared his own reading of the current situation and about Kashmir in general through his talk, 'Kashmir—Behind the Veil.'
"As far as I'm concerned we are losing people over there (in Kashmir) all the time and (by revoking the article 370) we have given ourselves some sort of a chance by clamping down on the whole scenario. The point is when you are dealing with a military problem you can always point a finger and say that this is undemocratic or unconstitutional. Which army has ever gone into any scenario where everything is by the rule book?," he asks to an audience of Doon school alumni, some of who are from Verma’s own batch of 1976, and a motley crowd of interested individuals from varied institutions within India and abroad.
"You will always have problems but you have to look at the larger picture. And the larger picture is that since 1989 the infiltration pattern in the valley has been such that they've always fired at us from within the ranks of the people. Not necessarily because people are supporting them but because people are terrified of them. The Indian government is giving the state a chance to come out of absolute hell," says Verma, a film-maker and military historian who was born into an army family.
Verma’s father was a captain with the Rajput Regiment in 1962. Over the past two and a half decades, he produced a number of highly acclaimed films, documentaries and books based on the Indian defence services. At the talk, he shared unknown titbits of information about Kashmir and Kashmiriyat and also talked about his experience as a young film-maker who documented the Kargil War.
"Kashmir's problem is not an Indo-Pakistan problem at all. British interest was the main reason why Pakistan had to be created. They had to control the oil fields in Iran. The British needed something to retain their presence in the subcontinent. Churchill recruited Jinnah and got all this done and they threw in Kashmir as an added bonus. The vice-chancellor of the Karachi University has ratified this. This is all pre-planned. It could not have happened in the spur of the moment," he said.
Verma’s next book will be on the war of 1965, which he says has been due since the past three years. It will be published by David Davidar's publishing company, Aleph, in March 2020.