By Sarwar Kashani, IANS
New Delhi : Despite a positive change in the overall security situation in Kashmir, terrorism in the state looks far from being resolved, says BBC journalist and author Andrew Whitehead.
“Srinagar (the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir) is much better than what it looked like in early and mid 1990s. It’s jostling with activity. People can walk on roads after 10.30 p.m. unlike then (when militancy was in its peak),” said Whitehead, also a social historian, whose book “A Mission in Kashmir” (Penguin Viking) was launched here last week.
Whitehead, who has travelled and reported extensively in Kashmir, reserves his “judgement” on a final solution of the Kashmir issue.
“As a journalist, I don’t think I should be giving my take on that, more because I am a foreign journalist. I mirror the situation for the people… but I don’t see the issue being resolved very soon,” the British author told IANS in an interview.
The soft-spoken Whitehead has visited Kashmir Valley since 1993 as a BBC correspondent and studied the problems very closely. He has also visited Pakistan-administered Kashmir several times.
Asked if he felt that the Kashmir separatist movement had suffered due to the jehadi colour given to it, Whitehead smiled, but lamented the leadership crisis in Kashmir.
“The world does not ignore Kashmir… but Kashmiris have not produced a single leader of international stature,” he said.
Whitehead’s “A Mission in Kashmir” traces the human angle of one of the world’s most enduring conflicts, which first erupted in violence in 1947 when Pakistani tribals, backed by army, invaded this princely state.
He has recorded first hand accounts of eyewitnesses, including an Italian nun, Sister Emilia at St. Joseph’s mission, who survived the tribal attack on the Christian mission at Baramulla in Kashmir.
“The convent and the hospital there were the scene of one of the most violent and notorious events during the initial stages of the Kashmir conflict in 1947 and it was where my personal quest into the origins of the Kashmir dispute began,” Whitehead remarked.
The book, as the author claims, is an apolitical attempt – free from being obscured and impeded by competing nationalism (by India and Pakistan) – to establish how the Kashmir dispute first erupted.
The book “is much more a work of history than of reportage. At its heart are the stories of those caught up in the first Kashmir conflagration”, said Whitehead.
Asked why anybody should believe the people he has interviewed, Whitehead says, “Take it the other way round”.