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VCheng
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from The Economist Dec 29, 2010 issue:
Shaking the mountains
India’s response to an uprising in Kashmir has been, by turns, repressive and complacent. It is storing up trouble for the future.
Dec 29th 2010 | SRINAGAR | from PRINT EDITION
A GROUP of special Indian police barged into a white-painted, single-storey house on the crisp morning of October 27th. They let their lathis do the talking. The wooden batons were first rammed through all the windows, furniture and a television. When the grey-haired owners protested, the rods were turned on them. The police broke the husband’s leg and beat his wife’s flesh a sickly purple. Before leaving, the officers added an insult, hurling religious books, including a Koran, to the floor.
Such intrusions are common in Palhallan, a hillside settlement in the north of Indian-run Kashmir. It looks like an idyllic rural spot, where bushels of red chilies hang from the eves of steep-roofed wooden houses and hay wains jostle with shepherds in narrow streets. But the village has been caught up in months of violent protests that have roiled Kashmir. In 2010 an uprising led by youthful Kashmiri separatists left over 110 people dead and thousands injured. Youngsters daub anti-India slogans on walls, yell at Indian police and soldiers to “go home”, and hurl stones.
In turn its residents have taken a beating. A young man lifts his hand to his head, showing a zip-like scar running from the crown of his skull to his neck. It is the result, he says, of a police battering. His lament is typical: “I am an unpolitical person, but they treat me like a terrorist.” Locals say they suffer collective punishment. Enraged officers usually fail to catch stone-lobbers, so lash out instead at families and residents nearby, accusing them, usually unfairly, of collusion
As a military helicopter buzzes overhead, a resident counts eight people killed and many more hurt in the area in the previous three months. Bitterness deepens with each injury and funeral. “The police,” he says, “they want to start a war.” A return to war, or widespread armed insurgency, is unlikely for the moment. But fury has spread, spurring some young Kashmiris to demand a more violent, more bloody response than mere strikes and stones.
On November 10th three men in Pattan, a small town a few minutes’ drive down the hill from Palhallan, took matters into their own hands. Hidden in the crowd of a bustling market they marched up to a pair of police constables, shot them at close range, snatched their rifles and fled. Both the policemen died. The Kashmiris have aped Palestinian methods, mobbing India’s ill-trained, sometimes panicky, police, by raining stones and broken bricks on them.
The police—more in the habit of using sticks and bamboo shields—have struggled, fighting back with huge quantities of tear-gas (tens of thousands of canisters were fired in 2010) and then bullets. They have reckoned that any protesters who die have themselves to blame. Officials in Delhi bristle at any comparison between the year’s events and Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland or the unrest in neighbouring Tibet. Kashmiris, they insist, have their own land and state, enjoy religious freedom, are by no means the poorest in India and take part in elections, most notably in 2008.
But there are severe limits to their democracy. Peaceful protests are prevented, jails are crammed with political detainees, detention without charge is common, phones are partially blocked, the press censored and reporters beaten, broadcasters muffled and curfews imposed. Those who complain too fiercely online are locked away. The authorities in Kashmir and Delhi say these measures are temporary. They say that to prevent abuses, the police are now being trained and re-equipped. (Soldiers, for the most part, have been kept away from street clashes.) Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, says that police officers may even be prosecuted for misdeeds. But the repression persists, and risks causing ever greater resentment and instability.
Seen from Delhi the uprising appears manageable. Kashmiris have dropped their guns and shooed away Islamic insurgents who a decade or so ago skulked in the postcard-perfect mountains. The presence of a 350,000-strong Indian security force (some say the number is much higher), amid a population of just 11m, has also kept the armed militants at bay.
It helps India that Pakistan, the eternal trouble-stirrer in Kashmir, is in disarray. And India takes heart from the weakness and fractiousness of local leaders in Srinagar. Many have been bought off with well-paid posts, or jailed, or both. Moderates who attempt to reunite the parts have been locked up or worse (one was shot and paralysed by a mystery assailant). Some of the highest-profile ones, such as the stone-pelters’ elderly icon, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, are kept under house-arrest.
Sticks and stones
Some Kashmiris darkly hint of picking up guns again, but the local leaders have no appetite for large-scale violence, fearful of a return to the carnage of the 1990s when thousands died each year. Instead they encourage low-casualty options such as throwing stones and prolonged stay-at-homes (hartals).
If such gestures have a goal, it is to gain attention. Young Kashmiris expose themselves to Indian bullets, hoping to draw compassionate outsiders—Barack Obama perhaps—to put pressure on India. Yet the strategy has so far achieved little. Outsiders, especially Western democracies once so cocksure and outspoken on human rights, now fret that their power is ebbing eastward. The Kashmiri separatists who suggest that “you people” or “Britain and America” could somehow chide India into a less repressive stance in Kashmir do not appreciate how eager Westerners are to court India as an ally.
The Kashmiris who have died in recent months have at least embarrassed India, which may yet respond by moderating the repression. But the radical separatists, who define azadi, the Kashmiri word for freedom, as outright independence from India—or even, for a shrinking number, incorporation with Pakistan—will not be placated. And nor will India consider letting Kashmir go.
Time appears to be on India’s side. With each passing year it will have more resources to throw north. The local economy, at least until recently, had been chugging along quite well, thanks to horticulture, tourism, funds from central India and heavy spending by the armed forces. A few Kashmiri expats had started returning and investing before the uprising in 2010. Development in itself will not fix Kashmir. But faster economic growth could at least prove a useful balm.
The government has made some political gestures. In September, an all-party delegation of Indian politicians—including even the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party—visited Kashmir. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made reassuring comments about addressing grievances there. The government in Delhi also pledged to send a high-ranking team of interlocutors to prepare a series of reports on Kashmir after consulting all sides in the conflict. A three-person team was eventually named in October.
These initiatives have started to persuade some in Kashmir of progress. But the team is made up merely of two academics and a journalist, people who carry no political weight. Nor does it help that they have already fallen into public squabbling. Kashmiris have watched their saga wearily. Some leaders have refused to meet the delegates, dismissing them as a joke.
Conspiracy theorists in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, accuse India’s generals of sabotaging politicians’ peace efforts because the armed forces reap big rewards in the territory. More likely the central government in Delhi, run by the Congress party, is shy of Indian nationalists, who complain whenever concessions are considered for Kashmir. In October, a writer, Arundhati Roy, suggested Kashmiris might have legitimate complaints, and that Pakistan might have a justifiable interest in Kashmir. Hindu nationalists demanded she be tried for sedition.
So Kashmir is left to smoulder, with dire consequences for its citizens. A visit to Srinagar’s psychiatric hospital shows throngs of patients, crowding around its overworked chief consultant. They relate a dismal roll-call of anxiety, stress, depression, alcohol and opiate addictions, child abuse and suicides. As Dr Mushtaq Margoob takes a break to munch a chapati and sip milky tea, he talks of Kashmir as a broken society. Some patients become destructive, he says, describing a mother who watched her son shot dead on the street and who then went on to burn down her own home and that of her neighbours.
The most damaged, he concludes, are the youngest. “We see a collective anger, an aggressive, traumatised generation”, he says. The head of a think-tank talks of 600,000 young, educated, Kashmiri adults who are now jobless, waiting for some sort of guidance. Religious and political leaders fret that their youngest followers, teenagers, excited by the stone-pelters, are increasingly attracted by more radical ideas.
Militancy stirs
Worryingly, the youngsters talk openly of religious antagonism. Some ask why Kashmir’s Muslims do not turn on Hindus (many Hindu pilgrims visit a sacred spot in the state, but have so far been left unmolested) to seek communal revenge for repression. The head of a student movement, a man who has spent most of his adult life in prison and who is now on the run and hiding from police in the backstreets of Srinagar, warns of infuriated youngsters turning to a “battle of extinction” in which “others, not only Kashmiris, will be killed”.
As long as political leaders exist to channel, and moderate, the rage of the stone-pelters and innocent victims, such excited talk might be discounted. Mr Geelani, a frail octogenarian, is one such. He condemns India as “an occupying imperialist power”, but he is largely a moderating influence. He opposes any return to arms. He supports the pelters’ goals, but not their methods. His practical demands, for the repeal of draconian laws, the end of police abuse and talks with the central government, are hardly off the wall.
But Mr Geelani’s influence is waning, along with his health. It is doubtful that anyone among a handful of potential successors could command as much local respect. The alternative could be more troubling. Some observers fear that as India succeeds in neutering Kashmir’s nationalist politicians, religious groups will flourish.
A Wahhabi welfare organisation, al Hadith, which almost certainly benefits from generous Saudi funds, is quietly emerging as a powerful welfare, religious and cultural force. As others bicker, it has gone about building community centres, mosques, primary and secondary schools and clinics. It is seeking permission to set up a university. Its genial leaders deny being extremists, pointing to their love of education and computers; they say that in the planned university, women and non-Muslims will be enrolled too.
As for claims that the group, which says it has 1.5m members, is spreading conservative values in a territory long known for its Muslims’ religious tolerance, one leader concedes only a “little, little component of cultural shifting”. A few more women are wearing burqas, or staying at home, than did in the past. More Arab-style mosques are springing up.
The non-Muslim minority in Kashmir is much less sanguine, seeing al Hadith as a proxy for Saudi interests and a powerful example of the spreading “pan-Islamisation” of Kashmir. They fret that ties may exist to Wahhabis elsewhere, including terrorists, and warn that a powerful new force is rising in the territory, filling a vacuum created by India. Just now their concerns seem overblown. But the government in Delhi would be wrong to think of Kashmir as yesterday’s problem.
from PRINT EDITION | Asia
Shaking the mountains
India’s response to an uprising in Kashmir has been, by turns, repressive and complacent. It is storing up trouble for the future.
Dec 29th 2010 | SRINAGAR | from PRINT EDITION
A GROUP of special Indian police barged into a white-painted, single-storey house on the crisp morning of October 27th. They let their lathis do the talking. The wooden batons were first rammed through all the windows, furniture and a television. When the grey-haired owners protested, the rods were turned on them. The police broke the husband’s leg and beat his wife’s flesh a sickly purple. Before leaving, the officers added an insult, hurling religious books, including a Koran, to the floor.
Such intrusions are common in Palhallan, a hillside settlement in the north of Indian-run Kashmir. It looks like an idyllic rural spot, where bushels of red chilies hang from the eves of steep-roofed wooden houses and hay wains jostle with shepherds in narrow streets. But the village has been caught up in months of violent protests that have roiled Kashmir. In 2010 an uprising led by youthful Kashmiri separatists left over 110 people dead and thousands injured. Youngsters daub anti-India slogans on walls, yell at Indian police and soldiers to “go home”, and hurl stones.
In turn its residents have taken a beating. A young man lifts his hand to his head, showing a zip-like scar running from the crown of his skull to his neck. It is the result, he says, of a police battering. His lament is typical: “I am an unpolitical person, but they treat me like a terrorist.” Locals say they suffer collective punishment. Enraged officers usually fail to catch stone-lobbers, so lash out instead at families and residents nearby, accusing them, usually unfairly, of collusion
As a military helicopter buzzes overhead, a resident counts eight people killed and many more hurt in the area in the previous three months. Bitterness deepens with each injury and funeral. “The police,” he says, “they want to start a war.” A return to war, or widespread armed insurgency, is unlikely for the moment. But fury has spread, spurring some young Kashmiris to demand a more violent, more bloody response than mere strikes and stones.
On November 10th three men in Pattan, a small town a few minutes’ drive down the hill from Palhallan, took matters into their own hands. Hidden in the crowd of a bustling market they marched up to a pair of police constables, shot them at close range, snatched their rifles and fled. Both the policemen died. The Kashmiris have aped Palestinian methods, mobbing India’s ill-trained, sometimes panicky, police, by raining stones and broken bricks on them.
The police—more in the habit of using sticks and bamboo shields—have struggled, fighting back with huge quantities of tear-gas (tens of thousands of canisters were fired in 2010) and then bullets. They have reckoned that any protesters who die have themselves to blame. Officials in Delhi bristle at any comparison between the year’s events and Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland or the unrest in neighbouring Tibet. Kashmiris, they insist, have their own land and state, enjoy religious freedom, are by no means the poorest in India and take part in elections, most notably in 2008.
But there are severe limits to their democracy. Peaceful protests are prevented, jails are crammed with political detainees, detention without charge is common, phones are partially blocked, the press censored and reporters beaten, broadcasters muffled and curfews imposed. Those who complain too fiercely online are locked away. The authorities in Kashmir and Delhi say these measures are temporary. They say that to prevent abuses, the police are now being trained and re-equipped. (Soldiers, for the most part, have been kept away from street clashes.) Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, says that police officers may even be prosecuted for misdeeds. But the repression persists, and risks causing ever greater resentment and instability.
Seen from Delhi the uprising appears manageable. Kashmiris have dropped their guns and shooed away Islamic insurgents who a decade or so ago skulked in the postcard-perfect mountains. The presence of a 350,000-strong Indian security force (some say the number is much higher), amid a population of just 11m, has also kept the armed militants at bay.
It helps India that Pakistan, the eternal trouble-stirrer in Kashmir, is in disarray. And India takes heart from the weakness and fractiousness of local leaders in Srinagar. Many have been bought off with well-paid posts, or jailed, or both. Moderates who attempt to reunite the parts have been locked up or worse (one was shot and paralysed by a mystery assailant). Some of the highest-profile ones, such as the stone-pelters’ elderly icon, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, are kept under house-arrest.
Sticks and stones
Some Kashmiris darkly hint of picking up guns again, but the local leaders have no appetite for large-scale violence, fearful of a return to the carnage of the 1990s when thousands died each year. Instead they encourage low-casualty options such as throwing stones and prolonged stay-at-homes (hartals).
If such gestures have a goal, it is to gain attention. Young Kashmiris expose themselves to Indian bullets, hoping to draw compassionate outsiders—Barack Obama perhaps—to put pressure on India. Yet the strategy has so far achieved little. Outsiders, especially Western democracies once so cocksure and outspoken on human rights, now fret that their power is ebbing eastward. The Kashmiri separatists who suggest that “you people” or “Britain and America” could somehow chide India into a less repressive stance in Kashmir do not appreciate how eager Westerners are to court India as an ally.
The Kashmiris who have died in recent months have at least embarrassed India, which may yet respond by moderating the repression. But the radical separatists, who define azadi, the Kashmiri word for freedom, as outright independence from India—or even, for a shrinking number, incorporation with Pakistan—will not be placated. And nor will India consider letting Kashmir go.
Time appears to be on India’s side. With each passing year it will have more resources to throw north. The local economy, at least until recently, had been chugging along quite well, thanks to horticulture, tourism, funds from central India and heavy spending by the armed forces. A few Kashmiri expats had started returning and investing before the uprising in 2010. Development in itself will not fix Kashmir. But faster economic growth could at least prove a useful balm.
The government has made some political gestures. In September, an all-party delegation of Indian politicians—including even the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party—visited Kashmir. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made reassuring comments about addressing grievances there. The government in Delhi also pledged to send a high-ranking team of interlocutors to prepare a series of reports on Kashmir after consulting all sides in the conflict. A three-person team was eventually named in October.
These initiatives have started to persuade some in Kashmir of progress. But the team is made up merely of two academics and a journalist, people who carry no political weight. Nor does it help that they have already fallen into public squabbling. Kashmiris have watched their saga wearily. Some leaders have refused to meet the delegates, dismissing them as a joke.
Conspiracy theorists in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, accuse India’s generals of sabotaging politicians’ peace efforts because the armed forces reap big rewards in the territory. More likely the central government in Delhi, run by the Congress party, is shy of Indian nationalists, who complain whenever concessions are considered for Kashmir. In October, a writer, Arundhati Roy, suggested Kashmiris might have legitimate complaints, and that Pakistan might have a justifiable interest in Kashmir. Hindu nationalists demanded she be tried for sedition.
So Kashmir is left to smoulder, with dire consequences for its citizens. A visit to Srinagar’s psychiatric hospital shows throngs of patients, crowding around its overworked chief consultant. They relate a dismal roll-call of anxiety, stress, depression, alcohol and opiate addictions, child abuse and suicides. As Dr Mushtaq Margoob takes a break to munch a chapati and sip milky tea, he talks of Kashmir as a broken society. Some patients become destructive, he says, describing a mother who watched her son shot dead on the street and who then went on to burn down her own home and that of her neighbours.
The most damaged, he concludes, are the youngest. “We see a collective anger, an aggressive, traumatised generation”, he says. The head of a think-tank talks of 600,000 young, educated, Kashmiri adults who are now jobless, waiting for some sort of guidance. Religious and political leaders fret that their youngest followers, teenagers, excited by the stone-pelters, are increasingly attracted by more radical ideas.
Militancy stirs
Worryingly, the youngsters talk openly of religious antagonism. Some ask why Kashmir’s Muslims do not turn on Hindus (many Hindu pilgrims visit a sacred spot in the state, but have so far been left unmolested) to seek communal revenge for repression. The head of a student movement, a man who has spent most of his adult life in prison and who is now on the run and hiding from police in the backstreets of Srinagar, warns of infuriated youngsters turning to a “battle of extinction” in which “others, not only Kashmiris, will be killed”.
As long as political leaders exist to channel, and moderate, the rage of the stone-pelters and innocent victims, such excited talk might be discounted. Mr Geelani, a frail octogenarian, is one such. He condemns India as “an occupying imperialist power”, but he is largely a moderating influence. He opposes any return to arms. He supports the pelters’ goals, but not their methods. His practical demands, for the repeal of draconian laws, the end of police abuse and talks with the central government, are hardly off the wall.
But Mr Geelani’s influence is waning, along with his health. It is doubtful that anyone among a handful of potential successors could command as much local respect. The alternative could be more troubling. Some observers fear that as India succeeds in neutering Kashmir’s nationalist politicians, religious groups will flourish.
A Wahhabi welfare organisation, al Hadith, which almost certainly benefits from generous Saudi funds, is quietly emerging as a powerful welfare, religious and cultural force. As others bicker, it has gone about building community centres, mosques, primary and secondary schools and clinics. It is seeking permission to set up a university. Its genial leaders deny being extremists, pointing to their love of education and computers; they say that in the planned university, women and non-Muslims will be enrolled too.
As for claims that the group, which says it has 1.5m members, is spreading conservative values in a territory long known for its Muslims’ religious tolerance, one leader concedes only a “little, little component of cultural shifting”. A few more women are wearing burqas, or staying at home, than did in the past. More Arab-style mosques are springing up.
The non-Muslim minority in Kashmir is much less sanguine, seeing al Hadith as a proxy for Saudi interests and a powerful example of the spreading “pan-Islamisation” of Kashmir. They fret that ties may exist to Wahhabis elsewhere, including terrorists, and warn that a powerful new force is rising in the territory, filling a vacuum created by India. Just now their concerns seem overblown. But the government in Delhi would be wrong to think of Kashmir as yesterday’s problem.
from PRINT EDITION | Asia
VCheng
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Editorial from The Economist, Dec 29, 2010:
India and Kashmir
K is for complacency
India risks storing up misery over Kashmir. It should grab a chance to do something more positive
Dec 29, 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
MENTION Kashmir in polite Delhi society and noses wrinkle. Indians in the capital much prefer to talk of the economic boom, of India’s flourishing trade and its growing international heft. Old problems in the disputed, Muslim-majority territory in the mountainous north are waved off as a remote affair. They are not for foreigners to poke their noses into. And don’t begin to suggest that the world’s biggest democracy faces a growing problem in Kashmir, or that repressed Kashmiris have anything in common with the Palestinians or Tibetans.
Yet, in recent months, stone-pelting youths have launched their own intifada. Separatists have called for hartals, or self-imposed curfews, across the territory. And ill-trained Indian police have fired tear-gas and bullets with little care, killing over 110 people, mostly young and armed, if at all, only with crude projectiles. Deaths have spread bitterness, as have widespread reports of rape, torture and violent intimidation by Indian police (see article). The chances are high that the miserable cycle of protests, deaths and funerals will resume in 2011.
India’s leaders are at least a bit embarrassed. They have promised better-trained police and sent three independent (if junior) interlocutors to hear Kashmiri grievances. The team is due to report within days. Yet the authorities are also harrying nationalist leaders in the territory. Separatists are often jailed or kept under house arrest. Demonstrations are usually banned. Western leaders, keen to keep India “onside” against China and greedy for its markets, have kept disgracefully quiet about human-rights abuses. On his visit in November Barack Obama uttered the K-word in public only when he was pressed by a questioner to do so.
It is not all bad. One silver lining is that Pakistan, which once devoted much malign energy to supporting an insurgency in Kashmir, is now preoccupied with its own fragility. Kashmiris, however troubled, are unlikely soon to return to the widespread armed militancy that used to claim thousands of lives a year. But India’s crushing of more moderate Kashmiri leaders is fostering other problems. The young stone-pelters are turning radical and religious. A mostly nationalistic dispute risks becoming ever more theological in much the same way as that between Israelis and Palestinians did.
A less complacent Indian government would work far harder to stop this slide. There is an immediate chance to seize the initiative while a winter freeze holds the troubled valley in its grip and before the pelting and shooting restart. It could signal that Kashmiris’ grievances will be taken seriously, for example by acting on the interlocutors’ report when it is released in January. Reducing the heavy presence of non-Kashmiris in uniform would ease tensions too. Cars cannot drive around Srinagar without manoeuvring past army roadblocks, snipers in pillboxes, lines of soldiers on the roadsides and military convoys. The security forces should be stopped from making arbitrary arrests. They should also allow nationalist political leaders to move and speak freely. That’s what democracies do.
Look to the horizon
In the longer term Indian leaders need to break their unhelpful silence on Kashmir’s prospects. The government will never allow the state to secede, let alone to join Pakistan. But India could agree to grant Kashmir greater political autonomy. It could concede that the army’s role in the territory will gradually diminish to one of mainly securing the line-of-control that divides it from Pakistani-run Kashmir. That would encourage the many Kashmiris who have taken part in Indian-run elections and who often accept in private that co-operation with India’s authorities would bring gains.
Perhaps India’s ruling Congress party, battered by corruption scandals, may not feel ready to brave Kashmir, especially if the opposition, the Hindu-dominated BJP, is hostile. Yet seeking reconciliation would be a sign not of weakness but of India’s growing confidence. Encouraging Kashmir’s moderate leaders is in the interests of all Indians—and of the West too.
from PRINT EDITION | Leaders
India and Kashmir
K is for complacency
India risks storing up misery over Kashmir. It should grab a chance to do something more positive
Dec 29, 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
MENTION Kashmir in polite Delhi society and noses wrinkle. Indians in the capital much prefer to talk of the economic boom, of India’s flourishing trade and its growing international heft. Old problems in the disputed, Muslim-majority territory in the mountainous north are waved off as a remote affair. They are not for foreigners to poke their noses into. And don’t begin to suggest that the world’s biggest democracy faces a growing problem in Kashmir, or that repressed Kashmiris have anything in common with the Palestinians or Tibetans.
Yet, in recent months, stone-pelting youths have launched their own intifada. Separatists have called for hartals, or self-imposed curfews, across the territory. And ill-trained Indian police have fired tear-gas and bullets with little care, killing over 110 people, mostly young and armed, if at all, only with crude projectiles. Deaths have spread bitterness, as have widespread reports of rape, torture and violent intimidation by Indian police (see article). The chances are high that the miserable cycle of protests, deaths and funerals will resume in 2011.
India’s leaders are at least a bit embarrassed. They have promised better-trained police and sent three independent (if junior) interlocutors to hear Kashmiri grievances. The team is due to report within days. Yet the authorities are also harrying nationalist leaders in the territory. Separatists are often jailed or kept under house arrest. Demonstrations are usually banned. Western leaders, keen to keep India “onside” against China and greedy for its markets, have kept disgracefully quiet about human-rights abuses. On his visit in November Barack Obama uttered the K-word in public only when he was pressed by a questioner to do so.
It is not all bad. One silver lining is that Pakistan, which once devoted much malign energy to supporting an insurgency in Kashmir, is now preoccupied with its own fragility. Kashmiris, however troubled, are unlikely soon to return to the widespread armed militancy that used to claim thousands of lives a year. But India’s crushing of more moderate Kashmiri leaders is fostering other problems. The young stone-pelters are turning radical and religious. A mostly nationalistic dispute risks becoming ever more theological in much the same way as that between Israelis and Palestinians did.
A less complacent Indian government would work far harder to stop this slide. There is an immediate chance to seize the initiative while a winter freeze holds the troubled valley in its grip and before the pelting and shooting restart. It could signal that Kashmiris’ grievances will be taken seriously, for example by acting on the interlocutors’ report when it is released in January. Reducing the heavy presence of non-Kashmiris in uniform would ease tensions too. Cars cannot drive around Srinagar without manoeuvring past army roadblocks, snipers in pillboxes, lines of soldiers on the roadsides and military convoys. The security forces should be stopped from making arbitrary arrests. They should also allow nationalist political leaders to move and speak freely. That’s what democracies do.
Look to the horizon
In the longer term Indian leaders need to break their unhelpful silence on Kashmir’s prospects. The government will never allow the state to secede, let alone to join Pakistan. But India could agree to grant Kashmir greater political autonomy. It could concede that the army’s role in the territory will gradually diminish to one of mainly securing the line-of-control that divides it from Pakistani-run Kashmir. That would encourage the many Kashmiris who have taken part in Indian-run elections and who often accept in private that co-operation with India’s authorities would bring gains.
Perhaps India’s ruling Congress party, battered by corruption scandals, may not feel ready to brave Kashmir, especially if the opposition, the Hindu-dominated BJP, is hostile. Yet seeking reconciliation would be a sign not of weakness but of India’s growing confidence. Encouraging Kashmir’s moderate leaders is in the interests of all Indians—and of the West too.
from PRINT EDITION | Leaders
agree with totally
Its time for Pakistan to move on-- accept LOC as international borders
rockstarIN
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Hundreds of young Kashmiris throng police recruitment rally
Srinagar: Hundreds of youngsters on Wednesday thronged the first police recruitment rally held in Jammu and Kashmir's Old City Srinagar after the recent summer unrest here on Wednesday.
Hundreds of youth lined up in the Khanyar locality of Old City in summer capital Srinagar to join the local police.
Wednesday's was the first on-the-spot police recruitment rally held in the politically sensitive Khanyar locality of Srinagar which had witnessed pitched clashes between the security forces and the protesters, mostly the youth, during the over four-month-long summer unrest in the valley.
Over 100 people had lost their lives in clashes between unruly mobs and the security forces during the unrest.
'The response to the recruitment rally proves that the youth here want to earn an honourable living for themselves,' Kashmir Inspector General of Police S.M. Sahai said.
'Even those youth against whom minor charges of stone pelting cases might be pending are welcome to join the police force,' said Sahai, who supervised the recruitment rally to ensure that it was transparent and credible.
The zonal police chief also said that it has been the intention of the police to recruit youth into the force from areas where their representation have been inadequate.
'It is chiefly because of unemployment that some youngsters indulged in stone pelting this summer,' said Irshad Ahmad, an aspiring police officer.
'Given a respectable job and an honourable opportunity to support our families, the youth would not waste themselves in anti-social activities,' Ahmad told reporters at the Khanyar recruitment rally.
Wednesday's rally was part of the continuing effort by the state police to provide opportunities to youngsters to join the police force through hassle-free and transparent recruitment processes.
Srinagar: Hundreds of youngsters on Wednesday thronged the first police recruitment rally held in Jammu and Kashmir's Old City Srinagar after the recent summer unrest here on Wednesday.
Hundreds of youth lined up in the Khanyar locality of Old City in summer capital Srinagar to join the local police.
Wednesday's was the first on-the-spot police recruitment rally held in the politically sensitive Khanyar locality of Srinagar which had witnessed pitched clashes between the security forces and the protesters, mostly the youth, during the over four-month-long summer unrest in the valley.
Over 100 people had lost their lives in clashes between unruly mobs and the security forces during the unrest.
'The response to the recruitment rally proves that the youth here want to earn an honourable living for themselves,' Kashmir Inspector General of Police S.M. Sahai said.
'Even those youth against whom minor charges of stone pelting cases might be pending are welcome to join the police force,' said Sahai, who supervised the recruitment rally to ensure that it was transparent and credible.
The zonal police chief also said that it has been the intention of the police to recruit youth into the force from areas where their representation have been inadequate.
'It is chiefly because of unemployment that some youngsters indulged in stone pelting this summer,' said Irshad Ahmad, an aspiring police officer.
'Given a respectable job and an honourable opportunity to support our families, the youth would not waste themselves in anti-social activities,' Ahmad told reporters at the Khanyar recruitment rally.
Wednesday's rally was part of the continuing effort by the state police to provide opportunities to youngsters to join the police force through hassle-free and transparent recruitment processes.
rockstarIN
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
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Govt contemplating troop reduction by 25% in J&K: Pillai
NEW DELHI: Jammu and Kashmir would see a 25% reduction in security forces and more bunkers would be lifted from Srinagar, home secretary G K Pillai said on Friday.
"There will be a 25% reduction of security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, especially from populated areas," Pillai said at a symposium on the 'Way forward in Kashmir' organized by the Jamia Millia Islamia University.
More bunkers will be lifted from Srinagar, he added.
The home secretary said the three interlocutors appointed by the central government have been asked to give their final set of proposals for a political solution by April.
The central government had appointed the interlocutors - journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, academician Radha Kumar and economist M.M. Ansari - in the wake of street protests in Kashmir and police action in which over 100 protesters were killed in the summer of 2010.
The interlocutors were tasked with suggesting ways of bringing about sustained peace in the state.
Read more: Govt contemplating troop reduction by 25% in J&K: Pillai - The Times of India Govt contemplating troop reduction by 25% in J&K: Pillai - The Times of India
NEW DELHI: Jammu and Kashmir would see a 25% reduction in security forces and more bunkers would be lifted from Srinagar, home secretary G K Pillai said on Friday.
"There will be a 25% reduction of security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, especially from populated areas," Pillai said at a symposium on the 'Way forward in Kashmir' organized by the Jamia Millia Islamia University.
More bunkers will be lifted from Srinagar, he added.
The home secretary said the three interlocutors appointed by the central government have been asked to give their final set of proposals for a political solution by April.
The central government had appointed the interlocutors - journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, academician Radha Kumar and economist M.M. Ansari - in the wake of street protests in Kashmir and police action in which over 100 protesters were killed in the summer of 2010.
The interlocutors were tasked with suggesting ways of bringing about sustained peace in the state.
Read more: Govt contemplating troop reduction by 25% in J&K: Pillai - The Times of India Govt contemplating troop reduction by 25% in J&K: Pillai - The Times of India
DESERT FIGHTER
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Bulshitsva....just like the fake ELECTIONS.
ajtr
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'India needs to reach out to Pakistan to resolve Kashmir issue'
Former veteran diplomat Teresita Schaffer has blamed the failure of successive Indian governments to address the plethora of grievances of the people of Kashmir for the resurrection of violence in the state.
Schaffer headed the South Asia Programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies -- a Washington, DC think tank -- for the past 12 years before it was shut down and replaced by an India Chair funded by the Wadhwani Foundation. Her observations were published in the South Asia Monitor which she dutifully edited every month and circulated in administration and Congressional circles.
Titled Beyond Kashmir's Summer of Violence, the erstwhile foreign service officer with over three decades of experience working on and in South Asia, lauded the Manmohan Singh government for "finally making efforts designed to win the goodwill of the Kashmiri people by appointing a group of interlocutors with the aim of beginning a dialogue with civilians as well as separatist leaders."
Schaffer said in particular, the government's appointment of three non-politicians as 'interlocutors' with the Kashmiris 'has raised some hopes', but argued that "to get any real traction, such gestures will need to be supplemented with outreach to Pakistan, serious implementation of the interlocutors' recommendations, and stronger leadership within Kashmir."
She said the "nearly six months of regular violence in Kashmir have brought to the fore a new generation of protestors, unimpressed by the traditional separatist leadership and armed with stones -- and the Internet."
Schaffer slammed the state government headed by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, which particularly in the first couple of months had "failed not only to reach out to the disgruntled constituents, but also to take charge of the situation," even as New Delhi "also stayed on the sidelines, appearing confused and unsure, as violence continued to escalate."
She said that in these initial months of the Intifada (rebellion) when New Delhi should have moved fast its "failure to implement any major on-the-ground political initiatives to pacify the angry sentiments of the Kashmir people" had led to the exacerbation of the volatile situation."
Schaffer pilloried the Indian government's 'principal response' of deploying the Indian army on the streets of Kashmir "for the first time in more than a decade" describing it as a gesture that "has become synonymous with New Delhi's dealings with Kashmir -- countering violence with more violence."
She said the current Intifada (rebellion) in contrast "to other periods of turbulence in the past 20 years, largely home-grown, spontaneous, and separate from the various political actors who have tried to position themselves as leaders of the people of the Kashmir valley."
"This new generation of educated, web-savvy, stone-pelting Kashmiris, frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the political leadership, years of violence, political alienation, and lack of economic opportunities, has turned to online forums such as Facebook and Youtube to highlight their frustration.'
Schaffer pointed out that "they are using social media not only to coordinate their weekly calendar of protests, but also to circulate videos that document the actions of the security forces."
Consequently, she said that this has achieved success "in attracting the attention of the mainstream Indian and international media that so often ignore turbulence in the valley," and reiterated that "these young people are strikingly different from their parents' generation in their refusal to take up guns or resort to militancy, which was the common phenomenon during the 1989 insurgency. For this generation, the weapons of choice are stones and the Internet."
Schaffer argued that "the recent discovery of thousands of unmarked graves believed to contain the remains of victims of unlawful killings in several districts across the Kashmir valley, and the Indian government's subsequent failure to investigate and prosecute the individuals responsible, is an example of the absence of accountability that fuels the anger on the streets of Kashmir."
She noted the statements made by the interlocutors, "that deviate from the standard Indian government vocabulary for dealing with Kashmir," particularly the references to Kashmir as 'a dispute', and the expression of the need to "listen to separatist views that are unpalatable in Delhi". Also their talking "about the necessity of Pakistan's participation in a solution on Kashmir," and the importance of "understanding the slogan of azaadi."
Schaffer said that while this has provoked a backlash from nationalists in Delhi, it has "struck a chord in Kashmir."
She asserted that while the "most recent political moves involve the Indian government and the Kashmiris," trying to resolve the Kashmir dispute without involving Pakistan would be an exercise in futility.
"While India has talked to Pakistan on a number of occasions in the past, and has also talked to the Kashmiris, it has never done both at the same time," Schaffer recalled, and added, "Further complicating the situation is the political weakness of the Pakistani government, which raises some questions about Pakistan's ability to move ahead politically if negotiators do achieve some kind of breakthrough."
She warned that "as things presently stand, spoilers based in Pakistan have every reason to try to sabotage India's efforts," and this reiterated that "India needs to reach out to Pakistan to give Pakistan a stake in success."
Schaffer also said "the burden is now on Delhi to demonstrate that the interlocutors are not simply another 'talk shop' and that the Indian government can deliver the needed policy changes. New Delhi needs to ensure that their recommendations are not mere cosmetic measures but serious proposals demanding immediate action and implementation."
Image: A Kashmiri woman offers a prayer
A1Kaid
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In order to militarily take Kashmir, Pakistan will need a strong offensive force considering Pakistan army's main purpose is defense (because PA is outnumbered). This leaves the task of taking Kashmir to designated divisions. More divisions should be raised and trained with the sole purpose of capturing an liberating Kashmir. These forces should consist of mainly or as much as possibly Kashmiri men if population recruitment will allow it. A large scale operation will have to be launched to clean up Kashmir to destroy and pound every enemy base, post, and position. Kashmiris will join PA is armed resistance which will be conducive.
Pakistan needs to better it's economy and in several decades take decisive action.
Pakistan needs to better it's economy and in several decades take decisive action.
CONNAN
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don't you think in the worst case scenario the above operation will lead to nuclear war
Abu Zolfiqar
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Separatist Strike Shuts Much of indian-administered Kashmir
Separatist strike shuts much of Indian-administered Kashmir | World | DAWN.COM
ajtr
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India to pull 10,000 troops from Kashmir
NEW DELHI: India plans to withdraw 10,000 paramilitary troops from Kashmir in 2011 and renew efforts to hold talks in the rebellion-hit Himalayan region, a top government official said Sunday.
A separatist insurgency has raged in Indian-administered Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state, for 20 years and at least 114 people died in street protests last summer in pitched battles with security forces.
“I think this year we can easily take out 10 battalions (10,000 personnel), if not more,” Indian Home Secretary Gopal Pillai told the Press Trust of India news agency.
“Irrespective of the situation, I can take out 10 battalions and it would not have any impact.”
There are currently 70,000 paramilitary troops in Indian-administered Kashmir plus 100,000-150,000 army soldiers.
Many state politicians in Kashmir believe their huge presence has fuelled recent deadly violence.
“There are more than adequate forces in Kashmir and it can do with less central forces,” Pillai, the home ministry’s top civil servant, said.
“You have to start talking to other people and get fresh ideas so I think we have to reach out to the people of Kashmir.”
Security forces opening fire at separatist demonstrations have triggered a cycle of violence in Kashmir over recent summers, and the government in New Delhi is keen to calm tensions in the year ahead.
ajtr
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Kashmiris asks world to attach permanent seat of India in UNSC with Kashmir issue solution
Published on: ⋅ February 23, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment
ISLAMABAD, (SANA): Kashmiri leadership has demanded of the international community to attach the issue of permanent membership of India in united nations national security council with the solution of Kashmir problem according to the whims of the Kashmiris.
This was said by the leadership of Kashmiris’ living in Indian Held Kashmir and Azad Jammu and Kashmir during a “Roundtable Conference organized by Justice Foundation London” here in Islamabad on Wednesday.
Solomon2
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Perhaps there is another way out. In theory, India and Pakistan in 1947 committed to letting Kashmiris vote to accede to either Pakistan or India. The vote hasn't taken place, not only because India won't let it but because Pakistani leaders know (contrary to the myth taught in Pakistani schools) that Kashmiris may not want to be Pakstanis; that was the lesson of 1965.
But in 1971 Pakistan split in two. Doesn't that mean that rather than two choices Kashmiris now have three? What if Kashmiris voted to join Bangladesh? Their cultural and physical distance from the rest of the country would be enough to ensure their effective independence, the lack of Pakistani troops would reassure India, and the fact that the majority-Muslim province would no longer be ruled by Hindus would console Pakistanis.
KS
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Actually dont you think that this 'distance' was the primary reason that caused United Pakistan to split into two ?
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