More protests over Kashmir land

Hindus have held more protests in India against a decision not to transfer land to a Hindu shrine organisation in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Four people died in Indore, in Madhya Pradesh, when police opened fire during clashes between Hindus and Muslims, officials say.

They say that another person was badly injured in other clashes in the state.
There were also violent clashes between protesters and police for a fourth day in the Hindu-majority region of Jammu.

A curfew remains in place in the area - in the southern part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The state government rescinded its decision to grant land along a Hindu pilgramage route to the Amarnath Shrine board after several days of protests by sections of Kashmir's majority Muslim community.

Correspondents say that efforts by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party for a country-wide protest over the issue met with a relatively muted response.

In Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, strike supporters shut down transport and businesses. Some roads were blocked, cars were smashed and trains disrupted.

"The response to the strike shows the anger of the people against the government's attack on secular fabric of the country," Prakash Javdekar, a senior BJP leader, told the Reuters news agency in Delhi. source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7487609.stm

Land and blood

The independence campaign flares up in a row about land for Hindu pilgrims

FIRE crackers and scattered cheering dotted the night on July 2nd in Srinagar, as Kashmiris celebrated a rare victory over the Indian government. Hours earlier, after a week of popular and violent protests, Kashmir’s government had rescinded a gift of protected-forest land to Hindu pilgrims. In response, local Muslim separatists called off the protests they had organised. But after this triumph, which followed a year or so of relative calm in the troubled valley, fresh agitation seems likely.

Indeed, it may well spread beyond Kashmir and go national. On July 1st India’s main opposition, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called for a nationwide strike to put pressure on the state government—which, like India’s central government, is a coalition led by the Congress party—to reverse its reversal. Sticking up for Hindu pilgrims—hundreds of thousands of whom flock to a cave in Kashmir each year to pay homage to a giant icicle they revere as an incarnation of the god Shiva—is staple fare for the BJP. So is sticking it to uppity Muslims.

As BJP leaders issued their call in Delhi, 80 people were injured in rioting by Hindu activists in Jammu, the southern, mainly-Hindu, part of India’s only Muslim-majority state. With a general election due by next May and Congress in trouble on the back of soaring inflation and other woes, the contretemps is a godsend for the BJP.

It is also handy for Kashmir’s separatist leaders. The 19-year-old freedom fight has cost over 40,000 lives, by the Indian army’s count, and at least twice that by the separatists’; but the current death-rate, at a bit under 100 a month, is at an all-time low. That, and internal feuding, has taken the wind out of the separatist movement.

Fighting has flagged partly because Pakistan, which like India holds part of the historic kingdom of Jammu & Kashmir and claims all of it, has greatly reduced its former support to the insurgents. At the same time, Kashmiris seem increasingly resigned to the status quo. Some still hanker after the accession to Pakistan they feel was their due at partition in 1947; probably a greater number want outright independence. But many feel they have lost the battle. Turnout in local elections, which the separatists boycott, is increasing. By rallying support for their cause, separatist leaders may hope to dent turnout at the next state election, due by November.

Hence the vigour with which they pounced on the government’s decision to grant 99 acres (40 hectares) of land to a Hindu body that manages the icicle pilgrimage. This, it was explained, was to help provide temporary shelter for more than 400,000 devotees who visit the icicle shrine, a cave at Amarnath in south Kashmir, each year. Yet the separatist chiefs preferred to see it as a brazen effort by the government to shift Hindus into the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley.

Thousands agreed. Beginning on June 29th, the state capital, Srinagar, and the rest of the valley saw their biggest protests since the early-1990s, when the insurgency was at its height. Five people were killed and hundreds injured in clashes between the army and stone-throwing youths. In this time of strife, two of the biggest of Kashmir’s many separatist factions, split over whether to negotiate with the government, were reported to have reunited.

Also on June 29th, after noting which way the wind was blowing, Congress’s main local ally, the People’s Democratic Party, quit the state government. Reduced to a minority, Congress is now looking for other allies to help it to hobble through to the polls later this year. The gleeful separatists are meanwhile plotting protests against the occupation of vast tracts of Kashmir by the army.

It may not stop there. Defying an unofficial curfew and a tear-gas bombardment by soldiers nearby, several thousand men gathered in Srinagar’s main mosque on July 1st. Despite a dozen huge green Pakistani flags hoisted above the throng, the speeches they heard, from local religious and political leaders, were mainly for independence. “The land-transfer deal has brought so many issues to light,” said one congregant, a local university professor. “In Kashmir, people are angry.” source: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11671155

Mirwaiz hits out at right wing parties

Mirwaiz hits out at right wing parties
Srinagar (PTI): Expressing concern over the deteriorating situation in Jammu region, moderate faction of Hurriyat Conference on Thursday accused right wing parties like BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal of giving a communal colour to it.

Its chairman Mirwaiz Umer Farooq said some parties with vested interests were targeting a particular community for vote bank politics.

"Some parties like BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal are trying to give communal colour to the situation. We want to make it clear once again that Kashmiris are not against the Amarnath yatra and have been facilitating for several decades now," Mirwaiz told reporters here.

He said the agitators in the Jammu region should learn a lesson from their counterparts in the valley as none of the Amarnath pilgrims or tourists were harmed during the nine-day agitation against the land transfer order to Shri Amarnath Shrine Board.

"Our struggle has not been against any community or religion. It has been for our rights and our future. The land in question belongs to our brothers from Jammu as much as it belongs to people of Kashmir," the chairman said.

He also alleged that a conspiracy was being hatched to change the demographic character of Jammu and Kashmir by bringing in people from other states of the country and settle them here.