THE DEATH toll in India’s disputed Kashmir province after three months of unrest has reached 106. Meanwhile, a delegation of MPs from major political parties has arrived in the region to try to defuse the crisis.
The Himalayan region’s separatist groups dismissed the MPs’ two-day trip to Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar as “grandstanding“ and a “publicity stunt” organised by the Indian government, which they consider their enemy, and refused to meet them.
Anti-India sentiment is running high in Kashmir, with the majority of the 106 protesters children and teenagers who were shot dead by federal paramilitary and state police for defying a curfew and hurling stones at them in their intifada-like protest movement.
Fresh protests erupted again in Sopore yesterday, a small town 60km from Srinagar, after a 22- year-old woman shot by security forces at the weekend died.
Six people were wounded after security personnel opened fire to disperse a crowd of more than 2,000 people blocking a highway to protest at the killing, despite the curfew. News of the shooting prompted more people to pour on to the streets, perpetuating the cycle of violence.
Officials and security officials in New Delhi concur that the uprising in Kashmir threatens to be as serious, if not worse, than the armed insurgency which erupted in 1989 and which claimed nearly 70,000 lives.
“This new generation of young Kashmiri protesters who have known little other than shoot-outs, police raids, barbed wire fencing and security checkpoints, harbour a deep-seated resentment towards Indian rule, which they believe provides them little or no hope and a dismal future,” a ruling party MP said, refusing to be named.
“They [the Indian government] have converted the entire Kashmir region into a prison and now a delegation has been sent to meet the besieged people,” Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a top separatist leader from the All Party Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, said of the visiting MPs’ group, led by federal home minister P Chidamabaram.
The MPs’ visit, he added, was “a facade, a joke”, an apocalyptic instance of “too little, too late”.
The Hurriyat conference – an umbrella group of separatist groups – has proposed the setting up of committees of leaders from India and Pakistan as a means of resolving the 63-year-old Kashmir imbroglio.
The Hurriyat also warned the MPs that their visit represented a “short-term crisis-management effort” and that they had no clear commitment to resolve the Kashmir crisis.
Kashmir has been divided between the nuclear rivals since independence from colonial rule in August 1947, but is claimed by both in its entirety. India doggedly claims that Kashmir is an “inalienable” part of its territory.