joe do you write for indian news channels? how do you know what I have highlighted. its just what your media says and you have repeated. I am sure you don't want me to start naming kashmiris who are dying for their rights. its not Punjabis confronting your occupation with stones and bare hands. its not Punjabis tied to military jeeps and paraded. if it is Punjabis then why are you punishing kashmiris? doesn't make sense does it
I've been visiting there since 1977, and know this from personal experience. However, the situation took a dramatic turn with the death of Burhan Wani.
There were actually three phases in the ethnic composition of separatism. First, 1989 to around 2002 or so, it was Kashmiri, and it was young people who walked across, got arms training and came back. An enormous amount happened in those days: fake hijackings of planes, genuine hijacking, false flag hijacking, murders of the minorities, a very peculiar episode that the minority concerned claims was purely out of fear, and many thoughtful KMs think may have been orchestrated by one of the villains in Kashmiri history - I shan't name him, he was a governor, brought in to punish - all sorts of things. From 2002 onwards until 2015, it was this pure Punjabi/Pashtun mix, and some of them were bloody men, men, for instance, like that beast Mast Gul who burnt down Chrar-i-Sharif to make his escape. After Burhan Wani's killing, again it has changed back to Kashmiris. All the 13 killed over the last four or five days were Shopian people.
Infiltrators and stone-pelters are two different groups altogether, nothing to do with each other. The stone-pelters are subsidised, and it is a particularly dirty operation: there are agents, and sub-agents, and village level agents, and each has a budget and a quota, and is supervised with a fair degree of control by someone from the Hurriyat. This money all comes from 'abroad'; no prizes are being given away, so don't bother to guess where. Surprisingly, it isn't so much Saudi Arabia, as most people tend to think, but closer to home, people who have also figured in Pakistani intelligence reports that have been leaked through friendly sources (not to me, not to people I know). Stone-pelters are obviously purely Koshur. Not so, until just a year or so ago, for arms-bearing terrorists. The two are different.
Look out for a book being written by B. R. S. Nain. It will annoy some pompous babus in Delhi, and startle and perhaps embarrass Pakistanis; I don't know, I am guessing from hints that some of us have received.
I have friends there still, and can walk in and move around freely, except in curfew zones; my friends, some of them, have political views exactly the opposite of my own, but we try to keep to neutral topics when we meet. However, because of increasing ill-health, age and money being tight, I haven't been there physically for some months now.
I don't trust the media. The mainstream media sitting in Delhi or Mumbai don't have a clue, the locals are - many of them, but not all - bought. There is a 'movement' industry whose members make money from both sides, speak for both sides, build hotels and resorts and send their kids to Malaysia or to Bangladesh (Arabia is too hot and dry for them, and Hyderabad and Bangalore are too boring, and which mental defective will go to Rajasthan or Haryana or Delhi?).
PS: about the highlighted bit, it was precisely true until some months ago - maybe one year.