<b>Shekhar Gupta:</b> No, we haven't lost Kashmir

We'll keep the land, but we'll lose the people if we keep militarising our view of Kashmiri anger

Have we (India) lost Kashmir? The answer is no. But qualifications and caveats must follow. We have “lost” Kashmir many times since 1947. The first time, when Pakistani raiders were about to storm Srinagar airport when Lt. Gen. (then Lt. Col.) Harbakhsh Singh’s troops landed there, one Dakota at a time. How hopeless that situation was, go back to a decent library and read Lt. Gen. Lionel Protip (“Bogey”) Sen’s ‘Slender Was The Thread’.

The second time we “lost” Kashmir was in 1965, as the logical culmination of a grand design launched by Pakistan 1962 (India’s China debacle) onwards. Mass upsurge