Violence shakes India's north

Violence shakes India's north

(NSI News Source Info) Kolkata, India - September 1, 2008: It is a separatist feud from within that India has rarely seen before: Jammu against Kashmir and Kashmir against Jammu, two regions literally at war. But as this northernmost state of India reels under a prolonged bout of communal violence -- after a long hiatus -- leading to renewed terror attacks, Jammu and Kashmir, already known as one of the world's most dangerous spots, may be growing even more perilous. Experts fear that if the three-month-long agitation that already has created a deep communal divide in the region is not suppressed quickly, it could well snowball into a crisis beyond India's control. "The Jammu and Kashmir problem has already taken a very serious turn, as the state is heading toward splitting into communal lines. But if the (Indian) government does not take control of the situation by dialogue first, and then, if need be, use even force, Jammu and Kashmir could become a precarious region for not only India, but also for the whole world," said A.K. Verma, a security analyst who recently retired as the head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's foreign intelligence agency that focuses on Pakistan. Indeed, ever since this former princely state was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1947, the region has been tumultuous, with India and Pakistan both claiming jurisdiction over the whole territory. But despite the tensions between the two countries that led to violent eruptions at times, Jammu and Kashmir managed to remain as one, warding off all external pressures to split into two -- Jammu for the Hindus and Kashmir for the Muslims. But today, the region seems to be cracking from within. The current agitation has assumed separatist overtones. "Kashmir is back on a razor's edge," says M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service and now a foreign affairs commentator. It all started over a piece of land. It began in May this year when the government of Jammu and Kashmir ordered the transfer of 40 acres of forest land to the Shri Amaranth Shrine Board -- a conglomerate of about 30 Hindu groups that manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to Amarnath, a remote cave deep in the Himalayas near Kashmir -- for the construction of temporary shelters for the Amarnath travelers. The order sparked violent protests in the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley, where politicians in favor of separating Kashmir from India considered the transfer a loss of territory to Hindu outsiders, and raised the specter of Hindu encroachment on the Muslim majority in the state. They created violent protests against the transfer, and as things went out of control, the state government backtracked and reversed the transfer order. While the Kashmir valley calmed down, the Hindus in Jammu saw the revocation of the order as a disregard of the minority's interests within the state, and the Hindu-dominated area erupted in large-scale violence that took an even more serious turn. Hindu militants not only rioted across the district, but the protesters also created an economic blockade that cut off the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley from the rest of India. With the situation going from bad to worse, it was time for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to intervene. He called for an all-party meeting on Aug. 20 to come up with "an immediate initiative for a dialogue to facilitate a suspension of the agitation and a peaceful resolution." But that meeting failed to reach a consensus and ended in a stalemate. And while protests refuse to die down, the situation in the region now, many say, has never been so bad. Not only has the region already seen 40 deaths but worse, the region has come under renewed terror attacks. Terrorists struck Jammu on Wednesday, storming into the city, killing five and holding six people hostage. The crisis was eventually brought to an end after police managed to kill the terrorists in an 18-hour gun battle, but not before it resulted in two more deaths of innocents. According to authorities, even though the rest of India has seen intermittent terrorist attacks, this was the first in Jammu and Kashmir in six years. More terror attacks may be in the offing. Quoting officials, a recent report in the Times of India said there were 750 to 800 terrorists active in Jammu and Kashmir, adding that hundreds more were positioned in "launch pads" along the border with Pakistan, waiting to cross over and take advantage of the turmoil in the state to create further security problems. Army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor says there are as many as 40 terrorist training camps operating across the border, with 20 along the Jammu and Kashmir border with Pakistan and another 20 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Admittedly, the region has never been a peaceful territory in the last 60 years, but according to Vijay Sazawal, international coordinator of the Indo-American Kashmir Forum, an advocacy organization for Kashmiri Hindus, the region has never seen a communal uprising like this emerging from within either. Of course, communal passions have erupted in the region many times in the past -- the last major one was seen in 1990, when the region experienced "a dangerous unleashing of this passion" -- but that, too, according to Sazawal, was "mostly orchestrated by Pakistani-trained operatives." But the difference this time around, say experts, is that the government's mishandling and competing political forces trying to take advantage of a simple administrative issue, the land transfer, have allowed the situation to snowball into a violent standoff. According to the Institute for Conflict Management, a Delhi-based think tank on Indian security issues, "It was solely due to the administrative incompetence of the Indian government and the government of J&K that the state has turned into a sectarian and separatist problem." However, another theory is that the current unrest has been engineered by Pakistan to strengthen the anti-India movement and lend force to the separatist issue. "There has been a complete misinterpretation of the situation of J&K for many years, with overwhelming focus only on declining terrorism, whereas no one has paid attention to the motives and efforts of Pakistanis and the Pakistan-backed groups," says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management. The proponents of this theory believe that over the past four or five years, forces such as Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and its military, as well as terrorist organizations and separatist forces in Jammu and Kashmir such as Tehreek-i-Hurriyat and the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, have been maintaining an assured level of violence, while at the same time trying to build up political extremist-dominated movements. And in that pursuit, "over the past year and a half these forces have used various issues to destabilize the region and provoke greater street mobilization in favor of the separatism and radical elements in Pakistan and J&K," the think tank says. For instance, ICM claims that in 2006 Islamists exposed a prostitution racket in the state to establish that the secular and modern policies of India were in fact destroying the Islamic cultural environment of Jammu and Kashmir. Later, the same forces engineered the rape and murder of a teenager to start a prejudicial campaign against the presence of non-ethnic Kashmiri workers. The current problem has given yet another opportunity to forces hoping to separate Kashmir from India, says Kanchan Laxman, a fellow at the ICM. It will help them transform the predominantly terrorist movement into a more wide-based movement of political extremism, to secure a stronger position at the negotiating table and achieve what has not been possible on the ground through terrorism alone. This is why Sahni of ICN feels India needs to clamp down on all the elements in the current dispute, including the Hindus, and clamp down hard. "India has, for far too long, tolerated violent dissent in the name of democracy. This has not only widened the separatist spaces in J&K, it has also made moderate and secular politics inadequate for handing radical forces. The hitherto soft approach of the Indian administration, therefore, must be brought to an end, and the necessity now is to use a far greater force than what has been used so far, to bring the region under control," he says.