Tibetan monk burns himself to death in protest against Chinese rule
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Vassnti
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How inspirational! Let's hope this brave act will be imitated by his fellow monks.
In fact, the CCP should give them a nice spot and provide them with free oil and matches.
Sad day when the Gwai Lo cares more about the death of a Buddhist monk in China than the Chinese.
CardSharp
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You think Ao333 cares about the monk? His self-professed goal in this forum is to troll the various nationalities.
cross1993
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Fake news.
Added New York Times link
cross1993
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Vassnti
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Sorry the white guy crack was aimed at me not the OP, thought i should clear that up before i was warned and appologies for asuming just because he was Canadian he wasnt a troll
20 years of Akido, Judo and Zen i have the utmost respect for Buddhist monks. I found it terrible that people would regard the death of a monk as some thing to joke about, especially from some one that claimed to hold in high regard the history of China.
I do not particularly apreciate the Tibetan form of Buddhisim and i do not mean this as a political coment but the death of a man who harming no others feels driven to imolate himself deserves respect for his courage and devotion not ridicule.
Protests in Indian Kashmir: Stony ground | The Economist
Protests in Indian Kashmir
Stony ground
A new round of anti-government unrest
Jul 8th 2010 | SRINAGAR | from the print edition
Tweet
Street life in Srinagar
FOR the first time in more than a decade, the Indian army was called out this week on the streets of Srinagar, in the Indian-administered Kashmir valley, where 15 people have been killed during the past month. In earlier years people have died in the struggle between the security forces and a local insurgency backed by Pakistan-assisted militants. Now it is the local police and Indian paramilitary forces causing the deaths by firing guns and tear-gas shells at stone-throwing mobs. The protesters are young. The youngest to die was just nine.
This cycle of protests began on June 11th, when a 17-year-old youth was killed by a tear-gas shell near Srinagar’s main mosque, a focal point for protests. Police at first wrongly claimed the youth had been murdered to foment trouble, and Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s home minister, blamed Pakistan for allowing militants to cross the “line of control” that divides Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir.
Anger at these claims helped spread protests across the Kashmir valley, leading to 11 deaths and several days of curfews and bandhs (politically inspired strikes) that crippled business and closed schools. Buses were burned and police posts attacked. There was a brief lull as separatist leaders advised people to go shopping to stock up for a week of planned demonstrations against the killings, and in favour of greater political autonomy.
Related topics
South Asia
Pakistan
Peacekeeping and security
Government and politics
War and conflict
The lull ended when two people were killed on July 6th. One drowned fleeing the security forces. The other, a 25-year-old woman, was hit by a stray bullet at the window of her home. Two more deaths followed on July 7th and anger increased when security forces beat people in funeral processions. This led to the army being called in to stage order-restoring marches through the worst-hit areas.
Stone-throwing emerged as the main form of Kashmiri protest in 2008, when more than 50 people died in unrest over land allocated for an annual pilgrimage to Amarnath, a Hindu shrine in a mainly Muslim area of the state. This pilgrimage regularly stokes Muslim-Hindu tensions, partly because of its increasing size—over 50,000 pilgrims are taking part this year.
But the underlying cause of the latest violence is the disenchantment of mostly jobless young people after two decades of street battles, bandhs, and curfews. They have been disappointed in hopes for both economic development and some form of autonomy from the government in Delhi.
The authorities both there and at the state level have been treating the protests as a continuation of the secessionist insurgency that began in 1989, and has been backed by Pakistan, which claims Kashmir. Militants are still infiltrating from Pakistan, but the protests now are primarily acts of civil disobedience. The organisers say they would be fairly peaceful if they were handled sensitively. Police officers, however, say that neither India’s paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force nor the state police have had post-insurgency training in how to control civilian mobs without killing protesters and bystanders.
State politics are making things worse. Mehbooba Mufti Sayeed, leader of the People’s Democratic Party, the main opposition in the state legislature, is encouraging demonstrations against the government and the security forces to embarrass the government and its weak chief minister, Omar Abdullah, of the National Conference party. A scion of the state’s leading political dynasty, Mr Abdullah became its youngest-ever chief minister early last year. But the new approach he promised has not materialised. His calls for a gentler touch have fallen on deaf ears.
Protests in Indian Kashmir
Stony ground
A new round of anti-government unrest
Jul 8th 2010 | SRINAGAR | from the print edition
Tweet
Street life in Srinagar
FOR the first time in more than a decade, the Indian army was called out this week on the streets of Srinagar, in the Indian-administered Kashmir valley, where 15 people have been killed during the past month. In earlier years people have died in the struggle between the security forces and a local insurgency backed by Pakistan-assisted militants. Now it is the local police and Indian paramilitary forces causing the deaths by firing guns and tear-gas shells at stone-throwing mobs. The protesters are young. The youngest to die was just nine.
This cycle of protests began on June 11th, when a 17-year-old youth was killed by a tear-gas shell near Srinagar’s main mosque, a focal point for protests. Police at first wrongly claimed the youth had been murdered to foment trouble, and Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s home minister, blamed Pakistan for allowing militants to cross the “line of control” that divides Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir.
Anger at these claims helped spread protests across the Kashmir valley, leading to 11 deaths and several days of curfews and bandhs (politically inspired strikes) that crippled business and closed schools. Buses were burned and police posts attacked. There was a brief lull as separatist leaders advised people to go shopping to stock up for a week of planned demonstrations against the killings, and in favour of greater political autonomy.
Related topics
South Asia
Pakistan
Peacekeeping and security
Government and politics
War and conflict
The lull ended when two people were killed on July 6th. One drowned fleeing the security forces. The other, a 25-year-old woman, was hit by a stray bullet at the window of her home. Two more deaths followed on July 7th and anger increased when security forces beat people in funeral processions. This led to the army being called in to stage order-restoring marches through the worst-hit areas.
Stone-throwing emerged as the main form of Kashmiri protest in 2008, when more than 50 people died in unrest over land allocated for an annual pilgrimage to Amarnath, a Hindu shrine in a mainly Muslim area of the state. This pilgrimage regularly stokes Muslim-Hindu tensions, partly because of its increasing size—over 50,000 pilgrims are taking part this year.
But the underlying cause of the latest violence is the disenchantment of mostly jobless young people after two decades of street battles, bandhs, and curfews. They have been disappointed in hopes for both economic development and some form of autonomy from the government in Delhi.
The authorities both there and at the state level have been treating the protests as a continuation of the secessionist insurgency that began in 1989, and has been backed by Pakistan, which claims Kashmir. Militants are still infiltrating from Pakistan, but the protests now are primarily acts of civil disobedience. The organisers say they would be fairly peaceful if they were handled sensitively. Police officers, however, say that neither India’s paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force nor the state police have had post-insurgency training in how to control civilian mobs without killing protesters and bystanders.
State politics are making things worse. Mehbooba Mufti Sayeed, leader of the People’s Democratic Party, the main opposition in the state legislature, is encouraging demonstrations against the government and the security forces to embarrass the government and its weak chief minister, Omar Abdullah, of the National Conference party. A scion of the state’s leading political dynasty, Mr Abdullah became its youngest-ever chief minister early last year. But the new approach he promised has not materialised. His calls for a gentler touch have fallen on deaf ears.
WOW,indian did what?
---------- Post added at 11:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:40 PM ----------
Censorship in India: Censors
Censorship in India
Censors’ sensibilities
Dec 7th 2010, 15:47 by The Economist online | DELHI
Tweet
INDIAN leaders and visiting dignitaries like to wax lyrical about the world’s greatest democracy, with its billion-plus people relishing a tradition of vibrant debate. The fourth estate in the country appears to be pretty robust, too. Cable news shows reach a high proportion of the population, weekly current-affairs magazines and daily papers offer lively discussion and opinion in English, Hindi, Bengali and many other languages. Indians are also fast taking to the internet as a forum for debate. At first glance, then, Indians enjoy the freedom to speak and criticize no less than Americans, Europeans or others lucky enough to live in democracies.
Look closer and the picture is rather different. The country is enthralled at the moment by a series of corruption scandals, mostly involving members of the ruling Congress party. Now attention has turned to some journalists-cum-lobbyists whose close ties to powerful business and political types go beyond acceptable limits. Indian journalists, say local critics, are too often docile, unwilling to challenge those in authority, or, worst of all, easily bought off with gifts and made to publish (or withhold) stories in the interests of the powerful.
None of this stops Indians with controversial views speaking out, of course. But there are limits on what can be said. This month courts are pondering the prosecution of Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for sedition, for daring to question the place of Kashmir within India. The same colonial-era law is occasionally trotted out to threaten separatists and others who speak out.
At least outsiders have been free to say and write what they like in India. Yet censors are getting increasingly grumpy about what they draw. When foreign publications print maps of India that show the reality in Kashmir—territory divided between areas controlled by Pakistan and by India—censors at customs houses, citing a law from 1961, stamp them as "not recognised" by India. For The Economist, for example, that delays delivery of the magazine by a few days, affecting some tens of thousands of Indian readers.
Now, for some reason, India’s censors are getting angrier yet. Rather than just wield a stamp, the customs men recently stopped the import and distribution of a consignment of copies of the Financial Times newspaper. They were offended by a map of Asia that included Kashmir. This week copies of The Economist were also seized, preventing subscribers in some cities from being offended by the sight of a map of Asia that showed India’s borders.
It is far from clear what India’s zealous customs men are hoping to achieve. In neighbouring Sri Lanka, copies of The Economist are often seized by customs for a few days if officials take against articles that are critical of the government. The result, however, is usually only to bring more attention to the criticism (with readers switching to read articles online) and to spread fears that an intolerant government is continuing to crack down on critics. The self-defeating efforts by Sri Lanka’s customs men hardly offer a model for democratic India.
---------- Post added at 11:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:40 PM ----------
Censorship in India: Censors
Censorship in India
Censors’ sensibilities
Dec 7th 2010, 15:47 by The Economist online | DELHI
Tweet
INDIAN leaders and visiting dignitaries like to wax lyrical about the world’s greatest democracy, with its billion-plus people relishing a tradition of vibrant debate. The fourth estate in the country appears to be pretty robust, too. Cable news shows reach a high proportion of the population, weekly current-affairs magazines and daily papers offer lively discussion and opinion in English, Hindi, Bengali and many other languages. Indians are also fast taking to the internet as a forum for debate. At first glance, then, Indians enjoy the freedom to speak and criticize no less than Americans, Europeans or others lucky enough to live in democracies.
Look closer and the picture is rather different. The country is enthralled at the moment by a series of corruption scandals, mostly involving members of the ruling Congress party. Now attention has turned to some journalists-cum-lobbyists whose close ties to powerful business and political types go beyond acceptable limits. Indian journalists, say local critics, are too often docile, unwilling to challenge those in authority, or, worst of all, easily bought off with gifts and made to publish (or withhold) stories in the interests of the powerful.
None of this stops Indians with controversial views speaking out, of course. But there are limits on what can be said. This month courts are pondering the prosecution of Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for sedition, for daring to question the place of Kashmir within India. The same colonial-era law is occasionally trotted out to threaten separatists and others who speak out.
At least outsiders have been free to say and write what they like in India. Yet censors are getting increasingly grumpy about what they draw. When foreign publications print maps of India that show the reality in Kashmir—territory divided between areas controlled by Pakistan and by India—censors at customs houses, citing a law from 1961, stamp them as "not recognised" by India. For The Economist, for example, that delays delivery of the magazine by a few days, affecting some tens of thousands of Indian readers.
Now, for some reason, India’s censors are getting angrier yet. Rather than just wield a stamp, the customs men recently stopped the import and distribution of a consignment of copies of the Financial Times newspaper. They were offended by a map of Asia that included Kashmir. This week copies of The Economist were also seized, preventing subscribers in some cities from being offended by the sight of a map of Asia that showed India’s borders.
It is far from clear what India’s zealous customs men are hoping to achieve. In neighbouring Sri Lanka, copies of The Economist are often seized by customs for a few days if officials take against articles that are critical of the government. The result, however, is usually only to bring more attention to the criticism (with readers switching to read articles online) and to spread fears that an intolerant government is continuing to crack down on critics. The self-defeating efforts by Sri Lanka’s customs men hardly offer a model for democratic India.
Kashmir's troubles: Shaking the mountains | The Economist
Kashmir's troubles --- 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
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.
Kashmir's troubles --- 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
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.
Indian nationalism in Kashmir: A most unwelcome tricolour | The Economist
Indian nationalism in Kashmir
A most unwelcome tricolour
Jan 25th 2011, 13:15 by A.R. | DELHI
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WHAT are the leaders of India’s main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), trying to achieve in Kashmir? Shortly before January 26th, India’s Republic Day, a moment for military parades and celebrating the establishment of the independent country’s constitution, some of the BJP’s leaders tried to score political points by marching to Kashmir, the disputed territory on the northern border with Pakistan.
For weeks the BJP had been vowing to raise the Indian tricolour in the centre of Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Despite warnings that, by doing so, they could provoke mass protests, counter-demonstrations and possibly renewed violence, the BJP persisted, calling theirs a “nationalist” campaign and accusing the Congress-led government in Delhi (and, by extension, the government of Kashmir) of “appeasing” separatists and committing “psychological surrender”.
The BJP’s leaders were stopped before they could unfurl the national flag. A few nights before Republic Day, a trainload of 2,000 of the party’s activists, which had been chugging north from Karnataka state towards Kashmir, was quietly turned around by officials as it passed through Maharashtra state, and sent south again. A clutch of BJP leaders who managed to fly to Kashmir were arrested on arrival. A group of the party’s activists did manage to block roads and batter a minister’s car.
The BJP claims it was attempting nothing controversial. Kashmir is a part of India, so why not ensure that the Indian flag is raised there? The answer—as even the most nationalist provocateur knows—is that Kashmiris, the majority of whom are Muslim, have long disputed India’s right to rule over the territory. In 2010, stone-throwing youths launched mass protests in Srinagar, and separatist leaders called strikes, earning a violent response from ill-trained police. Over 110 Kashmiris were killed.
Almost nobody, not even Kashmiris, sees any prospect of winning independence from India, let alone joining their territory to Pakistan. So the real contest is over how much autonomy Kashmir can win for itself within India, and, in the short term, how to get Indian soldiers and police (which are too often responsible for repression and torture) to behave better. As important, for India’s sake as a whole, and in particular for Kashmir, is the need to discourage the rise of Islamic extremism in the territory.
In the past few weeks India’s government has made some encouraging noises. This month it announced its ambition to cut, by 25%, the number of soldiers deployed in Kashmir (it is unclear how many are there in the first place, but activists tend to put the number at a gobsmacking 500,000). The police are being retrained. Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, says he wants a repressive “special powers” law lifted. In return, some Kashmiri leaders have begun to admit to past wrongs of their own, notably conceding that some assassinations of separatist leaders were carried out by rival factions of their fellows, and not by Indian authorities.
Just as limited progress is being made—with Mr Abdullah saying that the priority is to avoid a repeat of the 2010 riots and bloodshed—the BJP is trying to stoke up nationalist fervour for its own party-political ends. As a tactic to raise its profile and popularity among (mostly Hindu) voters in other parts of India, it may possibly work. Its leaders reckon that portraying Congress as weak on this issue could complement a successful campaign that is currently painting Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, as weak on corruption. But the BJP’s move looks cynical and may make it harder to avoid another round of protests and killings in 2011.
Indian nationalism in Kashmir
A most unwelcome tricolour
Jan 25th 2011, 13:15 by A.R. | DELHI
Tweet
WHAT are the leaders of India’s main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), trying to achieve in Kashmir? Shortly before January 26th, India’s Republic Day, a moment for military parades and celebrating the establishment of the independent country’s constitution, some of the BJP’s leaders tried to score political points by marching to Kashmir, the disputed territory on the northern border with Pakistan.
For weeks the BJP had been vowing to raise the Indian tricolour in the centre of Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Despite warnings that, by doing so, they could provoke mass protests, counter-demonstrations and possibly renewed violence, the BJP persisted, calling theirs a “nationalist” campaign and accusing the Congress-led government in Delhi (and, by extension, the government of Kashmir) of “appeasing” separatists and committing “psychological surrender”.
The BJP’s leaders were stopped before they could unfurl the national flag. A few nights before Republic Day, a trainload of 2,000 of the party’s activists, which had been chugging north from Karnataka state towards Kashmir, was quietly turned around by officials as it passed through Maharashtra state, and sent south again. A clutch of BJP leaders who managed to fly to Kashmir were arrested on arrival. A group of the party’s activists did manage to block roads and batter a minister’s car.
The BJP claims it was attempting nothing controversial. Kashmir is a part of India, so why not ensure that the Indian flag is raised there? The answer—as even the most nationalist provocateur knows—is that Kashmiris, the majority of whom are Muslim, have long disputed India’s right to rule over the territory. In 2010, stone-throwing youths launched mass protests in Srinagar, and separatist leaders called strikes, earning a violent response from ill-trained police. Over 110 Kashmiris were killed.
Almost nobody, not even Kashmiris, sees any prospect of winning independence from India, let alone joining their territory to Pakistan. So the real contest is over how much autonomy Kashmir can win for itself within India, and, in the short term, how to get Indian soldiers and police (which are too often responsible for repression and torture) to behave better. As important, for India’s sake as a whole, and in particular for Kashmir, is the need to discourage the rise of Islamic extremism in the territory.
In the past few weeks India’s government has made some encouraging noises. This month it announced its ambition to cut, by 25%, the number of soldiers deployed in Kashmir (it is unclear how many are there in the first place, but activists tend to put the number at a gobsmacking 500,000). The police are being retrained. Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, says he wants a repressive “special powers” law lifted. In return, some Kashmiri leaders have begun to admit to past wrongs of their own, notably conceding that some assassinations of separatist leaders were carried out by rival factions of their fellows, and not by Indian authorities.
Just as limited progress is being made—with Mr Abdullah saying that the priority is to avoid a repeat of the 2010 riots and bloodshed—the BJP is trying to stoke up nationalist fervour for its own party-political ends. As a tactic to raise its profile and popularity among (mostly Hindu) voters in other parts of India, it may possibly work. Its leaders reckon that portraying Congress as weak on this issue could complement a successful campaign that is currently painting Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, as weak on corruption. But the BJP’s move looks cynical and may make it harder to avoid another round of protests and killings in 2011.
I think it is real news about he set himself on fire. Well, it is his choice. I bet he and all other monks know it is a lose cause to get Tibet out of China control.
China will not hesitate a little bit even all monks there set themselves on fire.
If they want to leave, they can go anywhere they want.
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