A CURFEW was extended across India’s disputed northern Kashmir state yesterday after the army moved to take control of the province’s summer capital after a hiatus of nearly 17 years, plunging the insurgency-ridden border region into further chaos.
In scenes reminiscent of the early 1990s, when the insurgency for an Islamic homeland in India’s only Muslim-majority state was at its peak, armed personnel cars and mine-protected vehicles drove around Srinagar, two days after three protesters were killed in police firing.
The two men and one woman were shot dead by police and paramilitary personnel in Srinagar on Monday in a bid to contain angry demonstrations led largely by Kashmiri youth hurling stones and rocks.
Their protests were fuelled by the death of 15 protesters, including a nine-year-old boy similarly killed by the security forces in Srinagar since June 11th.
Years after their removal, piles of sandbags, surrounded by concertina-shaped barbed wire, were once again visible in Srinagar. The once war-ravaged city again resembled a besieged cantonment where only security forces personnel could be seen.
Thousands of edgy troops carrying automatic weapons sealed off neighbourhoods to restrict people’s movement while Kashmir’s National Conference government imposed press censorship by withdrawing curfew passes issued to journalists and television camera operators.
Members of the Press Guild of Kashmir claimed that security personnel had roughly snatched cameras and prevented journalists from filing their dispatches from outdoor television broadcast vans.
“We are ready to assist the state government whenever and wherever required,” army spokesman Col J S Brar said as senior officials confirmed that military troops would not be involved in crowd control but only as a “backup, deterrent force” alongside the provincial police and federal paramilitaries to contain the rioting.
Meanwhile, rival Kashmiri and national political parties blamed the local administration for summoning the army in panic in the sensitive border state, and for days have duelled with one another on national television over who was behind the continuing protests.
Some held neighbouring nuclear rival Pakistan – which controls a third of Kashmir but claims it in entirety – responsible for sponsoring the unrest.
Pakistan is blamed for fuelling the Islamist insurgency that erupted in 1989 and claimed nearly 70,000 lives.
Pakistan denies directly sponsoring the insurgency but has admitted that its territory was used by diverse militant groups who are battling India’s hold over Kashmir.
“While it’s tempting to reduce the protests to indoctrination by extremist Islamic groups, Pakistan’s machinations or the influence of other vested interests, the reality is that this radicalisation is caused by a sense of hopelessness amongst Kashmiri youth,” Amitabh Matoo, professor of international studies at Delhi’s Nehru university said. This, he added, was a generation that had seen nothing but suffering, killings and political uncertainty and had forcibly been sequestered in their homes for great periods. Their protests were a larger expression of disillusionment and anger, he said.
Two of the three wars between India and Pakistan since independence in 1947, and an 11-week border skirmish in 1999 in which more than 1,200 soldiers died, have been over Kashmir.
The complex Kashmir dispute has not only bedevilled bilateral ties but also turned the region into one of the world’s most volatile flashpoints after the neighbours became nuclear states in 1998 and began developing missiles capable of striking deep into each other’s territory.