Word: kashmir
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When I left New York City for New Delhi earlier this year, I thought Kashmir would be a "good news" story. The valley had been relatively quiet for years, and in April and May Kashmir was celebrating record numbers of tourists. By August, however, normalcy had been replaced by strife, death, curfews and checkpoints. The immediate cause of the conflict this time was a dispute between Muslims and Hindus over 100 acres (40 hectares) of land near the Amarnath shrine in the Kashmir valley, which Indian authorities had granted to a Hindu pilgrim group. A compromise now gives the group...
...India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir after partition, and a Kashmiri separatist movement has been fighting to eject Indian troops from the region since 1989. The separatists' trump card has always been the threat to join Pakistan, which supported them with guns and guerrillas. India eventually silenced the separatists with force, but Amarnath has reignited their movement. The cries of "Azadi" (Freedom) and the Pakistani flags waving above the crowd of 500,000 people at one particularly fierce protest on Aug. 18 made the point that Kashmiris were once again ready to leave India...
...province. Since the government rescinded its diversion of land, the Hindu-dominated area of the state has seen widespread protests, in which at least 10 people have lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands have protested what they say is the special treatment given to the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley. While J&K receives the highest per capita financial assistance from the federal government in New Delhi, they claim, most of those resources are channeled into the Valley. They point out that J&K is the only state with its own constitution and with a special status in the Indian constitution...
...problem of separatism is completely different. "The only solution is to get people back on the table to talk," says A.S. Dullat, a former chief of India's external intelligence agency, the R&AW, and a former incharge of Kashmir affairs in the Prime Minister's Office, "But for that they need to wait for passions to cool." With general elections round the corner, the talks are more likely to be an exercise to buy time than to find a meaningful solution. Chadha Behera says the separatists themselves are to blame for the deadlock with New Delhi: "They themselves...
While opinion columns in Indian newspapers have, rather remarkedly, for the first time started talking of letting Kashmir have independence, the fact remains that no government facing an election is likely to take any hard decision on Kashmir. For the moment, the situation looks likely to fester...