Sangh Parivar

Kolkata, India — 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 has already
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 has 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 protestors
also created an economic blockade that cut off the Muslin-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 terrorist
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 750-800 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 General 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 stand-off.

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 that 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.

http://upiasiaonline.com/Security/2008/08/29/jammu_and_kashmir_tests_ind...