Bitter fruit

tauringhuang.

Aug 21st 2008 | SRINAGAR
From The Economist print edition

Hindus and Muslims up in arms

AP

In Jammu the tricolour flies in angerAT THIS time of year, lorries carry Kashmir’s crisp pears and rosy apples from the temperate valley to India’s capital and beyond. On August 18th the lorries were out in force, blocking the streets of Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Their cargo was not fruit, however, but smouldering protesters, demanding their freedom from Indian rule and even saluting Pakistan, which controls the western and northern parts of Kashmir and lays claim to the whole. The unrest, which began with a dispute over a Hindu pilgrimage, has ripened into one of the biggest tests of India’s grip on the valley.

The pilgrimage brings 400,000 Hindus each year to the Amarnath shrine, an ice stalagmite in the south of Kashmir, which pilgrims see as a phallic symbol of the god Shiva. In May Kashmir’s state government gave the shrine’s overseers the right to build facilities on 98 acres along the route. Kashmir’s separatist politicians portrayed it as a loss of territory to Hindu outsiders, and raised the spectre of Hindu settlement that would erode the Muslims’ demographic majority in the state. They roused violent protests, which eventually forced the government to change its mind.

This in turn infuriated the Hindus of Jammu, the state’s winter capital. They see themselves as a neglected minority within the state, even as Kashmir’s Muslims constitute an estranged minority within India. Hindu militants rioted across the district, throwing stones at lorries on the highway that links the Kashmir valley to the rest of India. This “economic blockade” created a sense of siege in the valley. Hindu nationalists had made a grim economic reality of the separatists’ political dream.

The separatists spotted an opportunity. If the path to Jammu was blocked, they would instead march to Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. On August 11th the Indian security forces fired on the march. Their bullets killed four people, including a separatist leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz. Fifteen more Kashmiris were shot in protests the next day.

In Srinagar improvised black flags now fly from the wing mirrors of cars and the handlebars of motorbikes, to mourn the dead. The shootings have united two of the movement’s many rival leaders: Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a moderate, and the hardline pro-Pakistan Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Mr Geelani may call for another march on Muzaffarabad, which poses the risk of further bloodshed. But on August 18th the separatists showed they could choreograph a mass demonstration, voicing provocative slogans, without threatening life or limb. And the security forces likewise showed restraint, with police sitting in the shade, their riot shields by their feet.

The government argues that a march is unnecessary, because the highway south is now safe, protected by the army. It has advertised in Kashmiri newspapers the number of lorries passing to and from Srinagar. But few in the city believe the figures, perhaps because the same newspapers on August 20th reported the severe beating of a southbound Kashmiri trucker.

Mohammed Akhbar of the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Srinagar says the hospital is short of adrenalin and antibiotics, but hopes the government will clear the way for fresh supplies. Ram Sahai, the Hindu president of Jammu’s chamber of commerce, a strong supporter of the Amarnath movement, admits that mobs in Jammu have attacked lorries. But they were indiscriminate, he says, damaging Jammu’s economy as well as Kashmir’s. This may not reassure Kashmiri truckers contemplating the trip.

So grim are the prospects for reconciliation that, in his speech on August 15th, India’s independence day, Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, spoke of the “threat to the unity and integrity of the country”. That morning in Srinagar, India’s national flag was raised on the clock tower on Srinagar’s main drag, where Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, once promised Kashmiris the right to self-determination. By the afternoon, the Indian tricolour had been pulled down, replaced by the green flag of Islam. Neither flag now flies on the tower, which has also lost its clock face, destroyed in the protests. The valley remains in limbo.