Kashmir: The World's Largest Military Occupation

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]This map is illegal in India. By showing it to  you, this video will be banned there. Just look at what's on it. Kashmir. Kashmir. Kashmir. Kashmir.  Kashmir. The most dangerous place on earth.

[00:00:15]Kashmir. A valley tucked into the Himalayas.  Orchards, saffron fields, houseboats drifting on mountain lakes. The Mughal emperor Jihinger said,  "If there is a paradise on earth, it is this.

[00:00:34]This paradise is the most  militarized place on earth.

[00:00:43]Army camps, checkpoints, bunkers, interrogation centers, and surveillance towers. Three  nuclear powers converge on this valley.

[00:00:52]India and Pakistan have fought three wars over it.  Both claimed the entire region and criminalized those that deny their claim. They were bombing  each other over this just last year. The death toll here is in the tens of thousands and  yet Kashmir rarely makes the international headlines. Millions of people live here being  shot at, disappeared, spied on, threatened with the Israeli model. This is Kashmir. This  is what India doesn't want you to see.

[00:01:35]It's 1947. For nearly two centuries, the British  Empire owned the hundreds of millions of people living here. Their colony, the British Raj,  was enormous. They ran most of it directly, but they ruled nearly half of it through 562  princely states. These were native princes who pledged loyalty and loot to the British  crown in exchange for running their own internal affairs. But now the British were  leaving fast. Men like Gandhi, Nou, Jenna, and Bose had spent decades pushing them out. The  original plan was to hand over power by June 1948.

[00:02:15]Then in March of 1947, the British viceroy, Lord  Mountbatton, cut the timeline by a full year to August 1947. 10 weeks. That's how long they had  to decolonize the Raj. Hundreds of languages, dozens of religions, ancient kingdoms, and ethnic  groups with little in common except for the fact that the British had conquered them all and drawn  a border around them. In the end, the British agreed to divide their colony in two. A Muslim  state, Pakistan, and India. A nominally secular state with a clear Hindu majority. Pakistan wasn't  even one continuous country. West Pakistan here, East Pakistan here, over a thousand kilometers of  India in between. The great symbol of the British Empire came down for the last time to be replaced  by the banner of the new Indian government.

[00:03:09]The British Empire left on the 15th of August,  1947. They revealed the borders of these brand new countries 2 days later. Millions soon found  themselves on the wrong side of hastily drawn borders, launching the largest migration in  human history. The violence killed 1 million people. Tens of millions more lost everything.  Most of the 562 princely states were assigned to either state fairly easily. There were only  three outliers. Tiny Junigar had a Muslim prince with a majority Hindu population. The prince chose  Pakistan despite not bordering it. India cut off all supplies, sent troops to the border and forced  a vote. Janagar joined India. Hyderabbad also had a Muslim prince with an 85% Hindu population and  was famously rich. The prince chose independence.

[00:04:06]India invaded, tens of thousands of people were  killed and Hyderabbad was annexed to India. Then there was the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.  4 million people lived here. It was larger than East Pakistan. Sharing a strategic border with  Afghanistan, China and it was close to the Soviet Union. The subcontinent's largest rivers flowed  through Kashmir. Whoever controlled this state controlled the water supply. The princely state  was about 77% Muslim and mostly surrounded by Pakistan. Its major roads and trade links all  went through Pakistan. So most people assumed it would go to Pakistan. But the prince of Jammu  and Kashmir, Maharaja Harry Singh was Hindu and he couldn't decide. To understand what happens next,  you need to understand Harry Singh's kingdom.

[00:04:59]Originally Kashmir meant just this valley, a lush  bowl wedged between two giant mountain ranges.

[00:05:06]Kashmir was for most of its history remarkably  independent. For a thousand years, it was one of the great centers of Buddhist civilization on  the Silk Road, welcoming Indian, Chinese, Greek, Central Asian, and especially Iranian merchants  and scholars. It produced such beautiful Persian literature that at times it was called Little  Iran. About 1,000 years ago, Iranian Muslim missionaries began converting the Buddhist and  Hindu population to Islam. Soon Kashmir was home to two groups, a Muslim majority and a minority of  Hindus called Kashmiri Pandits. But they shared a single culture, a single language and a single  identity, Kashmiri. Then came the conquerors.

[00:05:50]In 1586, the Mughal Empire conquered the Kashmir  Sultanate, ending Kashmiri independence. Then the Afghans took over and then the Sikh Empire  conquered this area. By the mid-9th century, Britain had colonized most of South Asia. In 1846,  the British defeated the Sikh Empire, took some of their territory, and decided they didn't want to  govern these remote mountain kingdoms themselves.

[00:06:15]So they sold them to a Hindu warlord Gulab Singh  for 7.5 million rupees and 12 goats. Dozens of different peoples, Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits  in the Kashmir valley, Dogra Hindus, Punjabi and Bahiri Muslims in Jamu, Shia Muslims and Cargill,  Ladaki Buddhists in the east and dozens of other ethnic groups in the mountains in the north  were cobbled together into a single entity spread across 222,000 km. the brand new princely  state of Jamu and Kashmir or Kashmir for short.

[00:06:51]Kashmiris had been sold without their consent  like cattle and these are the exact borders being fought over today. For Kashmiris, the  largest group in this new princely state, Gulab Singh was an outsider. His dynasty, the Dogras  were Hindus from Jamu with no roots in Kashmir.

[00:07:11]Singh declared himself the owner of all land in  the valley. Muslims became renters overnight, forbidden from owning property. To divide and  rule, the dog handed the Kashmiri Pandits, the valley's small Hindu minority, exclusive access to  government jobs, education, and made them the tax collectors. They would run the Dogra bureaucracy.  The vast Muslim majority, mostly farmers, were forced to pay extremely high taxes that pushed  them into permanent debt to Hindu land owners.

[00:07:43]The Muslims were subjected to a system of forced  labor called beggar. If a road needed building, if a noble's luggage needed carrying, Muslims did  it. They were the property of the Dogra state.

[00:07:56]A British official wrote in 1870 that the vast  majority of Kashmiris were living virtually in a state of slavery. By 1930, Gulab Singh's dynasty  were one of the richest families in Asia while less than 1% of Kashmiri Muslims could read or  write. In 1931, Kashmiri Muslims protested the Dogra state and the police opened fire, killing 21  protesters. Out of that moment, a young man named Shik Abdullah, a Kashmiri Muslim, college educated  in Lahore, saw the system his people lived under.

[00:08:32]The Muslim peasant in debt to a Hindu landlord,  the pandit clerk, collecting taxes for a dog prince and he saw a system that robbed the vast  majority of Kashmiris. He founded a new party, the National Conference, secular, open to Hindus,  Sikhs, and Muslims. He drafted a manifesto for a new Kashmir, land to the farmers who worked  it, abolition of forced labor and landlords, free education and rights for women and workers.  Very few non-Muslims joined the party, but it rapidly became the most popular force in Kashmir.  In 1946, as the rest of the Raj fought the British in Kashmir, the freedom movement was against the  dog. The Maharaja had Abdullah and thousands of others thrown in prison. So it's 1947. Harry  Singh still hasn't decided. What he actually wanted was independence to keep his throne and his  privileges. Joining Pakistan meant subordinating himself to a Muslim government. Joining India  meant handing power over to the Indian National Congress and its prime minister Nou who were  openly allied with Shik Abdullah and the national conference the very movement that had spent years  trying to remove Singh. The majority of Kashmiris wanted an independent Kashmir without a dogra  ruler. In August of 1947 the Maharaja increased taxes on Muslims in Punch in Jamu. The people of  Punch were mostly Muslims, but they weren't ethnic Kashmiris. They were Punjabi and Bahiri speakers  with close ties to what is now Pakistan. They resisted the tax increase. The Maharaja had them  shot which sparked a pro-Pakistan rebellion that spread across Punch. The rebels took over most of  the district and declared an Azad or free Jamu and Kashmir government. As the rebellion spread, the  Maharaja got desperate. He knew he couldn't hold the Kashmir valley or the west or the north of the  princely state, but he might be able to hold Jamu, the Dogra homeland. The problem for Singh was  that Jamu was 70% Muslim. In October and November of 1947, the Dogra army began disarming Jamu's  Muslim peasants. Then they joined forces with Hindu nationalists, specifically an organization  called the RSS. The RSS is a right-wing Hindu nationalist group. Its leader openly admired  Hitler and praised the Nazi purging of Jews as a model for India. Reports began trickling in from  Jamu. Muslims there were in flight having been terrorized and in places cut up by six and Hindus  at the instigation of the Maharajas officials.

[00:11:19]Mahatma Gandhi recorded the Hindus and Siks  of Jammu and those who had gone there from outside killed Muslims. The Maharaja of Kashmir  is responsible for what is happening there. The Maharaj's forces and the RSS militias slaughtered  100,000 Muslims. Hundreds of thousands more fled to the newly formed Azad Kashmir. Jamu now had  a Hindu majority. Hearing about the massacres, thousands of armed Ptondons from Pakistan who  were in many cases related to the Muslims in punch crossed the border into the princely state to free  their Muslim brothers. The Pton many of them armed by Pakistan quickly turned the population against  them by looting and killing. Faced with thousands of armed fighters, Maharaja Hari Singh panicked,  fled and asked India for help. India agreed to send troops to help Singh if he brought the entire  princely state of Jammu and Kashmir into India.

[00:12:18]India's prime minister Neu was aware that Singh  had no legitimacy. His family bought the people.

[00:12:24]They ruled by force and they were rejected by  the people. Nou noted no major section of the population supports him. Singh had no right to  decide Kashmir's future but he did anyway. Singh signed on the 26th of October 1947 and handed the  princely state of Jammu and Kashmir over to India.

[00:12:45]Indian troops were airlifted to Shinagar where  they pushed the Pakistanbacked fighters back. Then Pakistan directly entered the fighting starting  the first IndiaPakistan war. The security council called upon both parties to terminate hostilities  in Kashmir and appointed a commission to work with the two new states toward a peaceful settlement  of the dispute. The fighting stopped in 1948 with a UN mediated ceasefire that left Kashmir  divided along a ceasefire line now called the line of control. India had won the rich Kashmir  valley. They now ruled over the vast majority of ethnic Kashmiris. They also got Jamu and Ladak.  Pakistan held Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, the land held by the Punch rebels. Both countries  claimed the entire former princely state. But in reality there was now an India occupied Kashmir  and a Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Because the areas controlled by Pakistan rebelled against the dog  and joined Pakistan by choice. Their control over these areas are much less contested than India's  side. As part of the ceasefire terms, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for  a free and impartial plebite, a vote by the people of the princely state to choose India or Pakistan.  Nou told the Kashmiris that their being in India was temporary and only until the vote could take  place. Kashmir would sit inside India but apart from it guaranteed by article 370 of India's  new constitution which gave Kashmir a degree of self-ruule with its own laws and flag. India would  only control defense and foreign affairs. India to this day has refused to hold the plebite. In the  first elections they held in Kashmir in 1951, any candidate that was pro- plebite was barred from  running. Harry Singh was quickly banished from Jammu and Kashmir. Shik Abdullah who was personal  friends with Nou didn't want to join either state.

[00:14:47]In April of 1946, he told the British that the  Kashmiri nation had a right to independence. But he feared that Pakistan would be a state dominated  by landlords who would crush his plans to uplift the landless poor. So if he had to join one state,  he preferred India. Neu made shik Abdullah chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Hoping to kill  anti-India sentiment and bring Kashmir fully into the country by choosing a popular leader.  Abdullah moved fast using the powers of article 370. He broke up the land class overnight and  redistributed land to the peasants who farmed it.

[00:15:23]He wiped out generations of debt and he built new  schools and hospitals. He was the first indigenous ruler Kashmir had seen in 350 years among the  valley's poor. He became a hero. But Abdullah had made powerful enemies. the pandit bureaucrats, the  landlords whose slaves had been taken away, the Hindu nationalists that hated Muslims. Together,  they demanded Nou destroy article 370 and get rid of Abdullah. This just made Abdullah furious and  he started to call for the plebite again, but now with a third option, independence. In August of  1953, Nou organized a coup and he had Abdullah arrested. Kashmir erupted. Thousands were detained  and Indian troops opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least 60 people. Abdullah spent most  of the next 20 years in prison. Nou declared the plebesite was now beside the point and anyone  campaigning for it was imprisoned. India replaced Abdullah with a puppet government that hollowed  out article 370 applying more and more Indian laws to Kashmir that gave India sweeping powers  to arrest protesters, install rulers and execute people that were considered to be pro-Pakistan.  They kept the now tamed national conference in power through rigged elections. In 1962, India  discovered that China had built a road through Laddax Axai Chin Plateau, territory India claimed  based on a British claim on the area. China didn't care about British claims. India sent troops to  the area. War broke out. China won, took Axai Chin, and declared a ceasefire. India and China's  disputed border is now called the line of actual control. Neu died in 1964. Just a few months later  on the 16th of October 1964, China detonated its first nuclear weapon. There was now a nuclear  power in Kashmir. Pakistan, China's ally, saw an opening. In 1965, they sent troops across the line  of control. Convinced that Kashmiris would rise up and join them, Kashmiris were furious at India,  but they did not want to join Pakistan. The second IndiaPakistan war ended exactly the same as the  first. Thousands died. The line didn't move. In 1971, Bengali speaking East Pakistan, marginalized  since independence by Pakistan's Punjabi dominated elites, revolted. The Pakistani military launched  a campaign of mass murder. Hundreds of thousands, some claim up to 3 million Bengalis were killed.  The United States, who recruited Pakistan as an anti-communist ally in 1954, provided Pakistan  with diplomatic cover and the massive supply of weapons it needed to carry out the mass killing.  India now saw a chance to [ __ ] their rival. They intervened in East Pakistan. They won the war,  cracked Pakistan in half, and an independent Bangladesh was born. India conducted its first  nuclear test in 1974. Two nuclear powers were now in Kashmir. Abdullah now 70 after two decades  in prison saw Pakistan crippled a nuclear India and an international community with no interest.  India offered him a chance not only of freedom but to become chief minister of Kashmir again if he  dropped the demand for a vote and accepted that Kashmir was an integral part of India. Abdullah  seeing no way out for Kashmir agreed in 1975.

[00:19:04]Abdullah's government brought in the public  safety act in 1978 which allowed Indian forces to detain any Kashmiri for any reason for up  to 2 years. Kashmiris watched as their hero surrendered and then betrayed them. According to  India, Kashmir is an integral part of India. The dispute is over. If you disagree, you will be  jailed. Abdullah died in 1982. A generation of Kashmiris had grown up with Abdullah's reforms.  They had been educated, entered professions, but found themselves living with rigged elections,  Indianappointed governments, and a police state.

[00:19:43]For the 1987 elections, Kashmiris built a  whole new movement, the MUF. They would try and take back democratic control. People canvased  across the valley. There was genuine democratic enthusiasm. The voter turnout was the highest in  Kashmir's history. When the results were revealed, it was obvious that they had been rigged again.  The deeply unpopular Indian puppet, the National Conference, took almost all the seats. Thousands  of young Kashmiris who had believed in the democratic process were rounded up, imprisoned  without charge and tortured. In 1988, Indian forces gunned down protesters. The rage in Kashmir  at the time was summed up by a Kashmiri school teacher. You saw what happened in the assembly  election. India will never let us enjoy even a basic right like choosing our own representatives.  Kashmir is occupied. Peace and dignity can only prevail through the barrel of a gun. The JKLF, the  Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front based in Assad Kashmir had existed since 1977, preaching  left-wing secular nationalism. They wanted independence for the entire former princely  state. For that, Pakistan threw their founder in jail. The other founder of the JKLF, Makbul  But was hanged by India in 1984. For years, the JKLF's call for armed struggle found no following  in the valley, still dedicated to nonviolence.

[00:21:18]But after 1987, young men began crossing into  Pakistan looking for weapons and training. By 1989, the first militants came back. JKLF  militants began bombing government sites and assassinating Indian officials. In December  of 1989, they kidnapped the daughter of India's home minister and traded her for five  imprisoned comrades. Thousands poured into the streets in Sinagar to celebrate  their release. They chanted a freedom.

[00:21:58]Two Indian security forces, the border security  force and the central reserve police run from New Delhi were unleashed on Kashmir. These forces were  made up entirely of Indians, mostly non-Muslims.

[00:22:11]On the 21st of January 1990, the Central Reserve  Police opened fire on Kashmir protesters on the Guacadal Bridge, killing 50 people. In those last  few days of January 1990, Indian security forces killed 300 unarmed Kashmiri protesters. The valley  became a battlefield. For the 125,000 Kashmiri pandits, about 4% of the valley's population, this  was terrifying. Over 80% of central government employees in Kashmir were Hindu. While the  JKLF killed hundreds of Muslims and secular supporters of the Indian state, or simply those  that were against their armed struggle, when the JKLF attacked government targets, that meant in  many cases killing pandits. In September of 1989, the JKLF killed the president of the Hindu  nationalist BJP's Kashmir unit. In November, they killed a Pandit judge who hanged the JKF's  founder in 1984. By mid 1990, between 30 and 80 pandits had been killed. The Indian forces  in the area did nothing to protect them.

[00:23:21]Over a few weeks in early 1990, 100,000 pandits  fled the valley. They ended up in refugee camps in Jammu, abandoned by the Indian state. Many thought  that they would return after just a few months, but the worst violence was yet to hit the valley  and would continue for over a decade. Pandits lost their homes. The valley lost piece of itself.  When a prominent cleric was killed in May of 1990, 200,000 Kashmiris attended his funeral. Indian  forces again opened fire on the mourners. 55 people were killed. To crush the insurgency, India  brought back a law from British colonial rule, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The law allowed  soldiers to detain anyone and they could shoot the kill without facing trial. It was total legal  immunity. For Kashmiris, it meant that a soldier could do anything to you and nothing would happen  to him. Cordon and search operations swept the valley. Nearly every Kashmiri has experienced one  of these. These men had been dragged from their beds in the early hours so their houses could be  searched. So they came here, they surrounded the whole village. All the villagers were forced  to leave their houses and go and sit outside.

[00:24:38]They were kept outside for 3 days apparently by  the security forces. The security forces then searched through the whole village. Suspected  militants were taken away for questioning, torture and execution. Women were raped. This was  collective punishment designed to terrorize the population into submission. The army agreed that  they did enter the village of Kunan Pushpura on the night of the 23rd of February. They say they  questioned people and found some arms. But these people have given human rights investigators  a more harrowing account of what took place.

[00:25:10]They say the men of the village were taken from  their homes and tortured and that at least 53 women left alone with their children were gang  raped. 53 women gave statements to human rights investigators. The youngest was 13, the oldest  80. This woman was pregnant at the time of the incident. She says that 3 days after she was raped  and beaten, her child was born with a broken arm.

[00:25:40]Indian security forces immune from consequences  consistently used rap as a weapon of war against Kashmiris. Thousands of Kashmiris were sent  to torture centers. Their names still infamous today. Papa 1, Papa 2, cargo. Victim's feet  were saw off. They were waterboarded. Heavy rollers crushed their limbs. Over 60,000  people were dragged into these dungeons.

[00:26:06]None of them were convicted of a crime. Thousands  of men were simply disappeared by the military.

[00:26:13]Their families were never told what happened  to them. Indian security forces killed unarmed Kashmiris and staged their deaths to look like  combat in what is known as a fake encounter, dropping the body near the line of control with  weapons placed next to it. Kashmir women had to systematically destroy their family photo albums.  During crackdowns, Indian soldiers searched for incriminating photos of men. A picture with  known militants or in Pakistan or even of a young man wearing a Pakistani cricket jersey meant  detention, interrogation and death. As tales of atrocities abound, Kashmiri nationalism grows.  There are no friends of India in Kunan Pushpora.

[00:27:00]But India isn't just facing an armed insurgency  in Kashmir. It's facing an uprising. The people of Sinaga, the capital of the valley, have shown  time and time again that they don't want to stay in India. So long as the uprising continues,  the threat of a fourth war in the subcontinent will remain. Through the 1980s, the United  States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan formed an anti-communist block. They built a pipeline.  American weapons, Saudi money and ideology, Pakistani intelligence. All of it funneled to  Islamist fighters in Afghanistan to try and break the Soviet army. This alliance made Pakistan's  intelligence agency, the ISI, the most powerful force in the country. When the Soviets withdrew  from Afghanistan, Pakistan began redirecting weapons into Kashmir to any militants willing  to use them. But Pakistan hated the JKLF. This was a secular left-wing independence movement that  considered both India and Pakistan to be occupying powers. An independent Kashmir run by the JKLF was  the last thing Pakistani elites wanted. By 1991, they stopped all aid to the JKLF and began arming  a rival group, Hisbul Mujahedin, a Kashmiri Islamist organization that wanted union with  Pakistan. The ISI began sponsoring splinter groups and the Hisbbo Mujahedin to kill JKLF members. The  JKLF under attack from Pakistan, Hisbbo Mujahedin and India collapsed. In 1994, they ended  their armed struggle and entered politics.

[00:28:38]Hisbel Mujahedin became the dominant and most  well-armed group. While their proPakistan goals were not as popular as the independence movement,  Hisbbo Mujahedin became the only way to resist Indian occupation because they had the guns. By  1995, the insurgency was at its height. Indian security forces were on the defensive. AK-47  wielding militants consistently ambushed them.

[00:29:10]India began recruiting former militants. They  armed them, they paid them, and they set them loose on Kashmiris. Men walking through the  bazaar and AK-47 casually draped across their shoulder. Each one of these men was once  a dreaded militant. Today they make up the valley's largest group of surrendered militants,  the JKwan, armed men who switched sides and now work for the state. Kashmiris call them Iguanis,  renegades. Internationally, this type of group is known as a death squad. They knew the valley. They  knew the militant hideouts. They became infamous for stealing, torturing, and killing all under  the protection of the Indian army. The renegades and the Hisbbo Mujahadin fought each other to a  standstill over the rest of the 1990s. Pakistan fractured the Kashmiri resistance in order to  control it, which they never really did anyway.

[00:30:06]In the end, they just helped India, who could  simply call Kashmir resistance Pakistani terror, and they never had to face a unified resistance  group powerful enough to force a settlement.

[00:30:20]In May of 1998, India detonated five  nuclear devices in the Thar Desert.

[00:30:30]In response, Pakistan detonated six nuclear  devices, revealing to the world that they too were a nuclear power, the third in Kashmir. By flooding  Kashmir with soldiers, shielding them from accountability and unleashing death squads on the  population, India managed to crush the insurgency without addressing a single Kashmiri grievance.  India pushed the arm struggle into Pakistan, giving them the control they always wanted. By the  late 1990s, indigenous Kashmir organizations like the JKLF and the Hisbbo Mujahadin were sidelined.  Pakistan's ISI began arming groups like Lashgar E Tiba and Jesish E Muhammad made up almost entirely  of Pakistani nationals usually poor rural Punjabis shaped by a panislamist ideology exported from  Saudi Arabia rather than Kashmiri nationalism.

[00:31:24]These groups did not live with the Kashmir  population like the Hisbbo Mujahadin or the JKLF did. They were under Pakistani control and were  willing to attack targets outside of Kashmir. By the mid200s, the insurgency had died out. Around  100,000 people were killed. The vast majority of them civilians. Indian forces left over 6,500  unmarked mass graves in Kashmir. And they created over 90,000 orphans. 8 to 10,000 people are still  disappeared. Their families are still searching for them. The occupation didn't end, however. Up  to 700,000 Indian soldiers still occupy Kashmir, one for every 20 people. In the Kashmir Valley,  where the forces are mostly concentrated, the ratio is far higher. Across the valley,  prisons, army camps, checkpoints, bunkers, interrogation centers, and Israeli drones make  Kashmir an everyday prison for the people of the valley. In 2010, three bodies were exumed  from unmarked graves. India insisted that they were foreign militants killed crossing the line  of control. An investigation revealed that they were local Kashmir boys lured to an army base,  murdered, and then dumped at the border to create a fake encounter. For years, the army had been  offering cash rewards for every militant killed.

[00:32:48]Soldiers just killed civilians, called them  militants, and collected the bounties. Kashmir erupted. Guns had failed to freedom. So Kashmiris  turned to mass protest. Stone throwers faced off against the world's largest military occupation.  Protesters swarmed military installations chanting go India go back. Women protesting on the streets  condemned India stating what kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian  soldiers. On the 11th of June 2010, security forces fired a tear gas canister at a 17-year-old  boy walking home from school. It struck his head, killing him. Tens of thousands of Kashmiris  marched at his funeral. The protests grew larger. Between June and October of 2010, Indian  forces killed over 120 Kashmiri men, women, and children. Among them was an 8-year-old boy named  Shamir Ahmad Rah. Indian forces beat him to death.

[00:33:51]In July of 2016, Kashmir erupted again. India's  answer this time was pellet guns. Indian forces fired 1.3 million metal pellets at Kashmiris in  2016. Hundreds of people were permanently blinded, including multiple children as young as 4 years  old. Indian security forces purposely fired the pellets towards faces in order to permanently  maim Kashmiris. 100 protesters were killed and 15,000 were injured. In 2014, Narendra Modi  came to power in India. A lifetime member of the RSS. Before becoming prime minister of  India, Modi was mostly famous for overseeing a pogram in the state of Gujarat that killed  over a thousand Muslims. His party, the BJP, believes that India must be a Hindu nation, that  Muslims and Christians are at best confused Hindus and at worst invaders that must be expelled. For  decades, the Hindu nationalists demanded Article 370 be revoked. On the night of August 4th,  2019, every phone line and internet connection in Kashmir went dead. A complete blackout across  the valley. A curfew locked millions of people in their homes. Public assembly was outlawed.  900,000 heavily armed security forces fanned out across the region. The next morning, India  revoked article 370 without any consultation with Kashmiris. Jamu and Kashmir were divided into two  territories. Jammu and Kashmir and the DAC. They were no longer states but simply territories  to be administered directly from New Delhi.

[00:35:34]political leaders, journalists, lawyers, former  chief ministers, children, many of them were severely tortured. India did all this under a  communications blackout that lasted over 500 days.

[00:35:48]The longest communications shutdown in history.  Kashmir suffered in total darkness. Article 370 had been hollowed out for years. The autonomy  it provided Kashmir was long dead. But one part of it, article 35A, protected Kashmir land rights,  making it so only residents of Kashmir could vote, buy land and get government jobs in Kashmir.  With that now gone, Indian citizens can now vote, buy land, settle in and apply for government jobs  in Kashmir. Any future voting in Kashmir will now be influenced by these millions of new voters.  The BJP's dream of a Hindu Kashmir was being built. A BJP politician celebrated that Hindus  could now get fair Kashmiri girls. An Indian console general at a gathering of Kashmiri  pandits said India should follow the Israeli model in reference to Israel forcibly removing  the Muslim majority population of Palestine. He said that if the Israeli people can do it,  we can also do it. Contracts for Kashmir's massive supplies of lithium, boxite and forests  were put up for sale while Kashmiris were still under blackout. They were bought up by Indians.  Indian bulldozers now destroy Kashmiri homes. Tens of thousands of Kashmiris have been displaced.  India ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for journalists has become a global  leader in mass surveillance. Much of it tested first on Kashmiris. Israel's Pegasus spywear  has been used on thousands of Kashmiri phones, letting the government spy on them anywhere.  Indian officials accused of torture are flown out to the US to train with the FBI on  surveillance. Kashmiris have to live knowing that they are constantly surveiled. Kashmiris that  resist Indian occupation are deemed antinationals, terrorists and Pakistani agents despite the fact  that independence is still the most popular demand in the valley. Kashmir academics, journalists,  activists and lawyers have been imprisoned under anti-terrorism laws. Social media users have been  dragged into the cargo torture center for online posts. When India revoked article 370, it issued  new maps claiming Chinese controlled Axai Chin as its own. 8 months later, Chinese and Indian  soldiers were killing each other in the mountains with nailstudded clubs. 20 Indians and four  Chinese soldiers died. It was the sharpest spike in tensions between these two nuclear powers in  decades. Mod's India is now an important US ally in their buildup against China which means it is  protected from international scrutiny. Kashmir is kept out of the headlines. Modi insisted tourists  and settlers pour into Kashmir. The tourists see the massive military presence as a positive as  safety while the residents live with the arrests, the tensions, mass killings and surveillance.  Modi insisted that Kashmir was now normal.

[00:38:54]In April of 2025, gunman walked into a wooded  valley called Palagam, a popular tourist destination in Kashmir and shot dead 25 Indian  Hindu tourists and a Kashmiri Muslim guide. It was the deadliest attack on Indian civilians in  Kashmir in decades. Despite over 700,000 Indian soldiers stationed in the area, none were  nearby. Indian security officials claimed that the Pakistani group Lashkar Etiba was behind  the attack despite not presenting any evidence.

[00:39:25]Two weeks later, it launched missile strikes  at Pakistan at what it claimed was terrorist infrastructure. Indian missiles hit mosques,  killing two three-year-old girls and a 16-year-old girl. Pakistan then bombed India. Kashmir bore  the brunt of these back and forth bombings with approximately 50 civilians killed on both sides.  Tens of thousands were displaced and residential areas were reduced to rubble. India unleashed  a new frenzy of arrests, house demolitions and military patrols on Kashmiris. On the 10th  of May, Donald Trump unilaterally announced a ceasefire. Pakistan accepted mediation. India  who insists that Kashmir is an internal issue remained quiet. Unwilling to accept outside  mediation but also unwilling to alienate Trump.

[00:40:12]Modi stated the fighting had only paused. The  brutal occupation hasn't paused. Kashmiris are still being arrested and killed. Land is still  being seized. The Indian military is still immune from any legal consequences. Kashmiris are an  ancient people that have lived under foreign rule for 500 years. Sold by the British, promised  a vote that was never held, terrorized for decades by the Indian state, armed and abandoned  by Pakistan, ignored by the international community. Kashmiris are not some security  threat to be managed. They are people who have been telling anyone willing to listen for over 70  years that they want to decide their own future.

[00:40:56]Stories like Kashmir are exactly why I make these  videos. They're complicated and they're ignored until a predictable crisis forces them into the  headlines. The world makes a lot more sense when you understand it before a crisis hits before  you're bombarded by an event totally deprived of context, but you can build that context. Wendover  Productions logistics of X series is a perfect example. It goes inside the world's hidden systems  like how the United States maintains its position as the largest arms producer on Earth. A supply  chain so vast yet so hidden most people never think about it even when war breaks out. It also  covers how Saudi Arabia moves millions of people through Haj without catastrophe. How search and  rescue teams find people lost in the wilderness.

[00:41:44]It helps you understand how things actually  work before you need to know. Then there's modern conflicts which breaks down events like the  drug war in Mexico in a way that's visual, clear, and useful for understanding today's headlines.  Real Engineering's Battle of Britain goes deep on the world's first war fought entirely in the  skies. Neo's underexposure finds the shadowy, under reportported sides of stories we think  we already know and brings them into the light.

[00:42:12]Adriven platforms cannot sustain highquality  series like these. But they're made possible by Nebula, an independent streaming platform  owned by the creators on it, people like me.

[00:42:23]Nebula has no ads, no algorithmic roulette, just  a viewer-funded space where ambitious projects exist because people actually want them.  Nebula has produced countless originals, exclusive content covering history, science,  culture, and travel. My videos are there at free, early, and alongside over 200 of your favorite  creators, and a growing library of highquality exclusives. If you want to watch some of the  best independent content online and support this channel, go to go.net. at nebula.tv/cogiddo  or scan the QR code on screen to get 50% off an annual membership. That's just $30 a year or $2.50  50 cents a month to support independent creators, help make videos like this one,  and enjoy a ton of original videos.