India faces a full-blown separatist uprising in Kashmir that may sink hopes for peace in the strategic region as disaffected Muslim youth rebel against a government seen as leaderless, complacent and out of touch.
New Delhi paints the street protests as incited by Pakistan-based militants or radical bands of stone throwers. However, the evidence is growing this may be a wider and spontaneous movement led by young Kashmiris angry at years of misrule.
Critics say the risk is that India’s refusal to recognize the roots of the alienation may ignite a vicious cycle of violence and return Kashmir to the kind of upheaval seen during the 1990s.
PHOTO: AFP
It all bodes badly for a disputed region seen as key to wider long-term stability under South Asia’s security arch of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“This is the most serious challenge to central authority I have seen in 20 years,” said Siddharth Varadarajan, strategic affairs editor of the Hindu newspaper. “And the government doesn’t have much of a clue how to resolve it.”
Muslim-majority Kashmir, which India and Pakistan both claim but rule in parts, has been racked by militancy since 1989 when an insurgency against Indian rule erupted. Around 47,000 people have died, but militancy had fallen in the past few years.
The latest violence started with the death of a teenage student in early June. The region has been locked down for weeks, and protesters have defied curfews to attack police with stones and set security camps and police stations on fire.
The death toll in seven weeks has risen to at least 40, mostly demonstrators shot dead by police. Basic foods and fuel supplies are running short and families have been confined to their houses for days, with schools and businesses shut.
So polarized has it become that protesters seem more radical than their leaders. An appeal by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a separatist hardliner, for peaceful protests went unheeded.
For many Kashmiris, the whole population appears to support the protests. Volunteers have established blood donation camps, pooled rice and vegetables in community kitchens and supplied food to patients in Srinagar hospitals.
“The protests seem to have taken a direction of their own, which we’ve never seen before,” well-known separatist leader Sajjad Gani Lone said. “There is not a leader who could say stop the protests and they would stop it.”
It did not have to be this way.
Only 18 months ago, hopes for peace in Kashmir grew after young Kashmiri leader Omar Abdullah, who is backed by the central government in New Delhi, won the state election on promises of ending injustice in the region and pushing economic development.
His election came only months after mass protests across the valley, then the biggest in two decades, sparked by a dispute over land for a Hindu shrine trust.
However, those hopes were quickly dashed by Abdullah’s own mistakes — he was seen as detached from the problems of Kashmiris — as well as alleged army abuses including the rape of young girls, and heavy handedness from India’s government, such as the banning of pre-paid cellphones and text messaging on security grounds.
“Omar has mishandled the situation, but the real problem is that India’s political leadership took their eyes off the ball,” political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan said.
Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram says more than 1,000 security personnel were injured by protesters and that the government is open to a political settlement if demonstrators shun violence.
But over the last 18 months, New Delhi failed to move on any of Kashmir’s contentious issues, including a widely hated law that gives special powers to the army such as holding suspects for up to two years without trial.
“It is all symbolic of the vacuum in Indian leadership,” political analyst Narasimhan Rao said.
“This government is just moving from one controversy to another,” he added, referring to government battles over high inflation to controversies over mismanagement in the build-up to the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.
Indeed, the government appears to have little policy initiative to diffuse the crisis aside from just wearing down the protesters, perhaps hoping that the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan next week will help protests subside.
That same policy led the 2008 protests to tail off, a relief that proved only temporary.
“Kashmiris cannot offer the same degree of mobilization forever,” said Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a Kashmir university law teacher. “New Delhi interprets that as reconciliation by Kashmir. In reality, it is just a dormant volcano.”
New Delhi does have a card up its sleeve. Despite the deaths and protesters, this is not the equivalent of China’s Tibet.
While Kashmir was a diplomatic football in the 1990s, this time around the troubles have had little international resonance, with no criticism from the UN or the US.
While Pakistan has made some diplomatic noise, there is little sign that the disturbances will impact on relations that are tentatively improving after the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
“Compared to a decade ago, no one is willing to annoy India,” Varadarajan said. “It carries too much weight globally. In this region, the world’s eyes are on Afghanistan, not Kashmir.”
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