Separatists in Indian Kashmir Shunning Violence

by Sanjay Jha | December 14, 2008 at 11:19 pm

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Unleashing violence has been main tool for Insurgents fighting Independence for Kashmir. Thousands of innocent lives have been lost since the uprising started in 1989. Islamic militants have been fighting Indian forces to liberate Kashmir from Indian administration. Initially Kashmir uprising was very localised but Mujahideen fighters, after the end of Soviet-Afghan War, joined the ranks of local separatists and Since then, violence has increased significantly in strength. Many insurgents have carried out attacks on local Hindus, Indian civilians and Indian army installations in response to what they see as Indian army occupation.

Muslim separatists have always called for boycott of local elections and it appears that this time they failed to read the mood of the people as a good turnout at the start of Indian Kashmir state elections indicate.

Fed up with the two decades of violence, Kashmiri people are adopting peaceful protest and shunning violence. Armed separatist struggle is waning its base among youths.

India now largely faces a different, and potentially more challenging foe here: peaceful campaigners for self-determination, who borrow from Mahatma Gandhi's rule book of non-violent resistance.

"India is not scared of the guns here in Kashmir -- it has a thousand times more guns. What it is scared of is people coming out in the streets, people seeing the power of nonviolent struggle," says the Muslim Kashmiris' spiritual leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a key organizer of the civil disobedience campaign that began earlier this year. The number of armed attacks in the valley, meanwhile, has dropped to its lowest since the insurgency began in 1989, Indian officials say.

The former princely state known as Jammu and Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan since 1947, and has been claimed in its entirety by both ever since. It has long been the main axis of discord between the two neighbors, now both nuclear-armed.

Since the early 1990s, Pakistan's intelligence services trained and financed Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar, helping fuel a conflict that has cost 60,000 lives. Mr. Farooq's father was gunned down by suspected jihadi militants in 1990 for seeming too accommodating to India.

Mumbai terror attacks have come as a shocker for people looking at peaceful political solution of the Kashmir problem.

Indians, which has long viewed Kashmiri separatist unrest as a law and order problem fomented by Pakistan, did seem to shift this summer towards recognition of Kashmiris' deep-seated grievances, and the need for a political response, rather than the use of force to suppress discontent.

Less than two months ago, traders in Kashmir celebrated the first trucks, laden with fruits and other goods, crossing the de facto border between the Indian- and Pakistani-ruled sides of the disputed province.

This tiny relaxation of the highly militarised line of control followed massive summer protests in Indian-administered Kashmir, during which up to 500,000 people took to the streets to call for independence and an end of India's oppressive army presence in the fabled Kashmir Valley.

Though minor, the weekly truck caravan - and unprecedented Indian public debate on Kashmiri aspirations - raised hopes for a revival of the peace process to settle the decades-old dispute between India and Pakistan on Kashmir's future - the main friction between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

But the attacks in Mumbai have plunged Kashmir's predominately Muslim population into fresh despair over the prospects for their troubled home, contested ground since the tumultuous 1947 partition of the British-ruled Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.