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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
With the anger of the Muslim world focused on Iraq, jihadis extend the war to volatile Kashmir -- leaving 24 Hindus dead and hope deeply strained.
Apr 9, 2003 | In the chill of Kashmir's lingering winter, gunmen in military uniforms crept into a backwoods village where a dozen Hindu families had bundled up for bed. The masked men banged on doors with rifle butts, corralling as many villagers as they could into the town square -- men on one side, women on the other. They removed jewelry, slicing one woman's ear to recover a gold earring. An hour and a half later, the intruders unloaded a flood of bullets that left more than half this village's Hindu residents dead.
As morning draped sunlight on Kashmir's worst massacre in three years, survivors swayed and wailed over 24 corpses lined up in the dirt -- 11 men, 11 women and two boys, aged 2 and 3. An old Hindu man slumped under a tree just a few yards from the bodies of his two daughters and two of his three grandkids and broke into a feeble sob. His Muslim neighbor stroked his arm and whispered, "Be patient now."
But soon after, when Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, the Kashmiri head of state, arrived by helicopter to survey the scene, the grandfather rose to his feet. He gestured sharply at his dead family and bellowed as he paced back and forth, echoing the question everyone in Nadimarg was asking: How could this happen?
Inspired by the same brutal logic that brought down the World Trade Center, Muslim jihadis fighting for ownership of Kashmir are capitalizing on a global climate of religious tension. Both democratic India's regression into religiously based politics, marked by the rise of a pro-Hindu ruling party, and the spectacle of the U.S. attack on Iraq have given Kashmir's jihadis fresh propaganda for religious war. Their timing comes near the one-year anniversary of the horrific violence in India's western state of Gujarat when Hindu mobs slaughtered 1,000 Muslims in the streets.
The leader of Lashkar-e-Toiba, perhaps the scariest militant outfit in Kashmir, said this week that killing Hindus is justified. "Our policy of Kashmir through jihad is absolutely right," he was quoted as saying in several Indian papers. "We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."
In the latest phase of a dispute that spans a half-century, India and Pakistan are once again squaring off over Kashmir. Since a standoff last year when the world's two newest nuclear powers had placed a million troops along their border, a nervous status quo has prevailed. But the massacre in Nadimarg -- and the worldwide repercussions -- are a clear signal that tensions are building again.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the Himalayan state, which rests along their northern borders. The first was in 1947 when the subcontinent expelled its British rulers. Since then, Pakistan has controlled the western third of the state, with the rest controlled by India.
In the decades following Kashmir's independence, India allowed the ethnically and linguistically distinct Kashmiris some limited autonomy. But when state elections in 1987 were rigged in favor of a pro-India party, a cadre of young nationalists, already frustrated by institutional decay in the state, took up arms. Many of them believed that the entire state, both Hindus and Muslims, should be independent of the two regional powers that surround it.
But the militancy has given Kashmir years of bloodshed. Since independence fighters first picked up guns in 1989, at least 50,000 militants and civilians have died. The penetration of Islamic fundamentalists into the militants' ranks has further spoiled the message of religious unity. While the early stages of the insurgency were nationalist in tone, Pakistani pan-Islamists had by the mid-1990s begun to distort the objectives of the struggle, casting Kashmir as part of a broad war for Islam that includes battlegrounds in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and now Iraq.
Last week, Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha argued that a preemptive invasion of Pakistan would be more logical than the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Pakistan officials promptly warned of a "befitting" response. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell quickly intervened, urging an end to the volatile words that could create an apocalyptic spiral.
The latest tensions come after a hopeful lull. After India administered the region's first fair elections in decades, Sayeed's pro-India administration came confidently into office last October promising to make friends between separatists who want independence and Delhi, which refuses to let go. And for several months, a harsh winter imposed a freeze on the violence.
But under warming skies, as emotional anti-U.S. protests have filled town squares across the state, the valley's posse of Islamists has seized the moment to re-create a mood of terror. They know that their greatest support comes when people are polarized.
Peddling horror in the name of Allah, they have in recent weeks sliced off the noses of six villagers suspected of spying for the army. They've assassinated a separatist leader who had gambled on dialogue with Delhi to the ire of his hard-line compatriots. And in Nadimarg, they've sown new religious hatred between the 8,000 Hindu Pandits who live among 5 million Muslims in the valley.
