On Tuesday, April 22nd, a group of gunmen opened fire on a popular tourist area in the Indian region of Kashmir, killing 26 people, including 24 tourists. The very next day, on Wednesday, Kashmir Resistance, also known as the Resistance Front, a Pakistani-backed rebel group, claimed responsibility for the attack, which was the deadliest incident of its kind in India since the 2008 shootings in Mumbai. India’s retaliation has been swift and fierce. It suspended all diplomatic ties with Pakistan, accusing its neighbour being involved directly with this rebel group, and cut Pakistan off from a much-needed water supply by suspending the Indus Water Treaty, a treaty which has survived over 80 years and two wars.

Tensions between the two nuclear-powered countries have spiked, and any progress leading to cooperation has been shattered. But what’s really behind this conflict? Can its escalation be stopped? And what does it all mean for the new, civilizationalist world order that’s rising in its midst? That is what we are about to find out. Kashmir is a highly contested region between India and Pakistan, with both India and Pakistan claiming ownership and jurisdiction over the whole region. Currently, the area is split in half between a Pakistani-administered Kashmir and an Indian-administered Kashmir. Since 2019, India has been increasingly tightening its authority over the predominantly Muslim semi-autonomous region, dividing the area into two union territories.

The Indian government’s provocation has sparked unrest in the region, especially from the Kashmir resistance, which is an offshoot of Lashkar i Taiba, a foreign terrorist organisation, and an Islamist group accused of plotting attacks in India and the West, including the three-day assault on Mumbai in November 2008. The Indian government has long claimed that this terrorist group is supported directly by the Pakistani government. However, Pakistani officials for their part have repeatedly denied that they support and fund any militants in Kashmir, though they do offer moral and diplomatic support as fellow Muslims.

But on Tuesday the 22nd, that tension between India and Pakistan exploded. Around 2.45pm local time, tourists were gathered near Pahaldgum in a beautiful destination known as Mini-Switzerland, when a group of armed men in camouflage emerged from the forest and opened fire indiscriminately on tourists gathered in the meadow. Some survivors said the attackers questioned victims about their religion before shooting them. The carnage left behind was horrific and the government of Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, immediately pointed the finger of blame right directly at the Pakistani government for allegedly supporting members of the Kashmir resistance, again an accusation that Pakistani officials deny.

Regardless, India immediately suspended all diplomatic relations with Pakistan and even weaponized water by cancelling the 80-year-long Indus Water Treaty that had survived two wars between the bitter rivals and withstood many twists and turns in diplomatic ties before New Delhi’s decision last week. The Indus Water Treaty outlines the use of water in the contested region of Kashmir. India mainly controls the source of the water and shares it with Pakistan, who is heavily dependent on water from this river system for its hydropower and irrigation needs, I mean feeding 80% of its irrigated agriculture.

With India’s suspension of the treaty and closing all of its dams that feed water into Pakistan, effectively cutting off that water supply that Pakistan is so dependent upon, Pakistani officials are calling that provocation nothing short of an act of war. The possibility of war between these two nuclear powers is at an all-time high, as Pakistan promises to defend its sovereignty in the face of threats from the Indian government. Prime Minister Modi is actually pledging to hut the Pahagam gunman to the ends of the earth, which many fear will involve inevitably Indian military incursion directly into Pakistan.

Indian and Pakistani troops have gathered at the border in Kashmir, even exchanging gunfire over each of the last four days. Civilians in border towns are fleeing their homes rapidly. So far, France, Italy, Israel, Japan, Egypt, and Jordan have pledged their support for India, but right now all eyes are on two major international actors, the United States and the Russian Federation. Both have expressed their condolences and concerns, but the real question is will either one of them get involved? Gang, if you’re a homeowner, you need to listen to this. When was the last time you checked on your home title? That’s the legal proof you own your house? Well, if you’re like me, the answer is never.

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Use promo code TurleyTalks at HomeTitleLock.com to make sure your title is still in your name. You also get a free title history report plus a free 14-day trial of their million dollar triple lock protection. That’s 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud should happen, they’ll spend up to $1 million to fix it. Go to HomeTitleLock.com now. Use promo code TurleyTalks. That’s HomeTitleLock.com promo code TurleyTalks. For nearly a hundred years, India was governed as a British colony known as the British Raj. Now this period of direct British rule began in 1858 after the Indian rebellion of 1857 when the British crown took over what’s called the East India Company, which by that time had become by far the largest trading company in the entire world.

They actually even had their own private army. They ended up ruling large areas of the Indian subcontinent, and after the company was taken over by the British government, its rule would go on to cover the entire Indian subcontinent, including present day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. But by the mid 1940s, Britain announced that it was going to grant India independence largely due to the economic strain of World War II and growing Indian demands for self rule. But that self rule was hampered by virtue of the growing tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities that had been fueled by political competition, socioeconomic differences, and British divide in rule policies.

And so an organization known as the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah argued that Muslims and Hindus were distinct nations, indeed distinct civilizations, and therefore Muslims needed a separate state, a sovereign nation of their own, to protect their own unique identity. And so they proposed what’s called the Lahore resolution, which proposed a two state solution between Muslims and Hindus, which was then eventually realized in June of 1947 with the passage of the Indian Independence Act in the British parliament, which called for the creation of two independent dominions, India and Pakistan, with Hindus concentrating in the central and southern region while Muslims in the northwest.

Now again, since there was no formal statehood prior to this partitioning, more than 500 relatively autonomous states, all governed by princes, were given the choice to join either India or Pakistan, or they had the choice of remaining independent. One of those autonomous states was Kashmir, a territory made up of a Muslim population under a Hindu prince or Maharaja. That Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, initially sought to maintain the independence of Kashmir, but unfortunately got caught up in a train of events that included a revolution among his Muslim subjects along the western borders of the state, as well as an intervention of Pashtun tribesmen.

In all of that, he decided to join the newly formed Indian nation. However, because Kashmir is predominantly Muslim, and because so much of its population wanted to join up with Pakistan, Pakistani forces intervened, which caused Indian forces to retaliate, intent on confirming the annexation of Kashmir into India. Localized warfare continued until a UN brokered ceasefire in January of 1949. In July of that year, India and Pakistan defined a ceasefire line that divided the administration of the territory between a Pakistani-controlled region and Indian-controlled region, and that partitioning of Kashmir exists to this very day.

And I’m not even going to get into the Chinese incursion in 1962 that took the northeast portion of Indian-controlled Kashmir. That’s for a different video. But bottom line, what’s happening here in Kashmir is precisely the kind of clash that Harvard scholar Sam Huntington predicted would dominate the 21st century, what he called a clash of civilizations, particularly surrounding what he called cleft countries. Now, cleft countries are sites of overlapping and often incompatible civilizations, like what we saw in Europe with the former Yugoslavia, where Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic cultural spheres all overlapped and ultimately conflicted.

Or we see that today with Ukraine, with its Catholic-dominated, more European-Western region, and its Orthodox-dominated, more Russian-Eastern region. For Huntington, because the liberal globalist order was dying in his day writing in the 1990s, he recognized that international order would inevitably turn away from an ideologically defined international order as that which dominated the Cold War era between the Democratic West and the Soviet East. It would move away from that ideologically defined world order to a more identity-defined world order, where religious nationalisms and civilizationalisms would increasingly reshape international relations and politics.

That is precisely the world we’re living in, and the conflict that we’re seeing erupt in Kashmir is precisely the kind of clash of civilizations conflict that Huntington predicted would predominate the 21st century. Inevitably, it does appear that other great powers in the region, particularly Russia and China, will have to in some way get involved in de-escalating the hostilities. But one thing is for sure, as long as rival civilizations overlap the way they do in Kashmir, this latest regional clash for sure will not be the last. Hey there, Turley Talk, and you know what? I’d love to hear from you.

That’s why I’m launching the Dr. Steve Hotline, where you can call in, leave a question, and maybe even hear your own voice featured on an upcoming episode of the show, whether it’s about the latest political shake-up or cultural trends or how we keep pushing forward in this new conservative age. I want to know what’s on your mind. Call me at 717-844-5984. Just leave your question. I’ll be checking in every single week to answer as many as I can. Again, that’s 717-844-5984. Your chance to be a part of the conversation. One more time, 717-844-5984.

Give me a call and let’s talk. [tr:trw].

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