During two decades of anti-India revolt, Kashmir has lost tens of thousands of people, property worth billions of dollars and much more.

But the disputed Himalayan Valley has also lost over 1,500 working days (more than four years) to separatists’ shutdown calls in the past 20 years, dealing a crippling blow to its ailing economy.

The tourism industry of the scenic Valley, ringed by Himalayan peaks and dotted with mirror-calm lakes, shimmering streams and dense pine and conifer forests, is frequently disrupted by strikes and violent protests over the separatist cause.

But do war-weary Kashmiris have other means to raise their voice against human rights violations and resist New Delhi’s rule?

According to the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the region loses 100 million rupees for every day of shutdown.

Shutdowns have been a general expression of anti-India protests by separatists and militants since simmering discontent against Indian rule turned into a full-blown rebellion in 1989.

But many people now question the rationale behind endless strikes.

Local newspapers quoting residents of Kashmir say separatists are setting the wrong precedent by enforcing strikes after every “unfortunate incident”.

“It appears the separatists are extracting revenge from innocent ordinary people rather than taking revenge from the perpetrators of these crimes,” Mohammad Ramzan, a shopkeeper was quoted as saying by The Himalayan Mail.

But hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani says strikes are the only means to raise a voice against the unprecedented “Indian oppression on people of Kashmir” for the last 62 years.

Protests in Kashmir have intensified since bodies of two women, aged 17 and 22, who locals say were abducted, raped and killed by security forces, were found on May 29.

Shopian town in south Kashmir, where the bodies were found, has remained shut for a month.

Kashmiri columnists say despite a sustained campaign against strikes, little has changed and people continue to follow the protest calls.

“It is because hartals (shutdowns) are an unavoidable tool of resistance,” Javaid Malik wrote.

The strife-torn region has suffered a lot due to frequent shutdowns that have severely dented Kashmir’s tourism industry and education.

Do separatist leaders need to rethink this issue?

A suicide bomber has struck in Pakistani Kashmir killing two soldiers in what is said to be the first such attack in the Himalayan region. The attacker targeted military barracks, which raises the question whether Pakistan’s Islamist militants are opening a new front just as they come under pressure in the northwest.

A suicide attack in Muzaffarabad, eerily identical to the scores that have taken place on the Indian side of the scenic region in the past, will trigger interest in New Delhi for likely clues to which way the war in Pakistan is headed.

Nobody yet has claimed responsibility, but if it is the Pakistan Taliban what signal is it sending? Is it going to fight the Pakistani army everywhere including Kashmir, which really has been at the core of Pakistan’s policy towards India.

Or is it the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has long operated on the Indian side of Kashmir as also other parts of India ? Are they sending a warning against any crackdown on the group, which New Delhi has been demanding even more stridently since the Mumbai attacks.

For the Lashkar, seen to have long-running ties to Pakistan’s security establishment, to be turning against its benefactors in such manner and such an emotive location would indeed be a watershed.

Or is this intended to raise tensions between India and Pakistan in Kashmir again? India holds Pakistan-based groups responsible for the rebellion in Kashmir. Are the Pakistanis going to point the finger at India, now that violence has reached their part of Himalayan region?

No coincidence, but the attack comes just as India’s defence minister said infiltration by guerrillas from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir was down this summer.

[Photo: Bridge connecting the two parts of Kashmir]

President Barack Obama chose his words carefully when asked in an interview with Dawn earlier this week why the United States has been silent on Kashmir in recent months:

"I don’t think that we’ve been silent on the fact that India is a great friend of the United States and Pakistan is a great friend of the United States, and it always grieves us to see friends fighting. And we can’t dictate to Pakistan or India how they should resolve their differences, but we know that both countries would prosper if those differences are resolved," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

"And I believe that there are opportunities, maybe not starting with Kashmir but starting with other issues, that Pakistan and India can be in a dialogue together and over time to try to reduce tensions and find areas of common interest," he said. "And we want to be helpful in that process, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be the mediators in that process. I think that this is something that the Pakistanis and Indians can take leadership on."

During his election campaign, Obama said the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute so that Pakistan could focus on tackling militants on its western border with Afghanistan. "We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants,” he said in an interview with MSNBC in October 2008, shortly before the presidential election.

The U.S. public position changed after the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.  Under pressure from India, which argued that any talk of resolving the Kashmir dispute would be rewarding terrorism, the Obama administration quietly dropped any reference to Kashmir.

But has the U.S. position on India, Pakistan and Kashmir really changed, or just gone underground?

It's hard to believe that the U.S. position has changed dramatically. As I discussed in this analysis, the Lashkar-e-Taiba -- once nurtured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to fight India in Kashmir -- is increasingly being seen as a potential threat to the West comparable to al Qaeda (scroll down on this pdf document from CTC Sentinel to see a detailed background report on the LeT and its Jamat ud-Dawa charitable wing).

Neither the United States nor Britain can afford to turn a blind eye to the Lashkar-e-Taiba when its training camps can be used by disaffected Pakistanis from the diaspora. And that suggests that the old "hands-off" approach in which the West tended to view the Kashmir dispute as a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan no longer works. It needs to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its sights on the LeT while also nudging India to resume a peace process that might -- over the long term -- help reduce tensions over Kashmir.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari met at a regional conference in Yekaterinburg in Russia this month. But they remain a long way off from resuming a formal peace process broken off by India after the Mumbai attacks. While the Pakistan government has said it wants to resume the peace process -- a position supported in detail in Pakistani op-eds, including by former Pakistan ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and by retired Lieutenant-General Talat Masood -- India wants Pakistan to take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba first before it will resume formal talks.

In the meantime, the Pakistan Army is engaged in what looks as though it will be a very protracted and difficult battle against the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. So even if it were determined to target the Lashkar-e-Taiba, it would be unlikely to do so until it has defeated the Pakistani Taliban. Yet without a reduction in tensions with India, it is also unlikely to move significant numbers of troops from the eastern border with India to use against the Pakistani Taliban on the western border with Afghanistan.

So how does the United States break the logjam?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits India in July, and while she is likely to choose her words in public as carefully as Obama, privately she is expected to try to enlist Indian support for U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- including by moving forward on peace talks. In advance of her trip, she has promised to "create a new era" in the relationship between the United States and India.  Given India's reluctance to respond -- or be seen to respond -- to American pressure on talks with Pakistan, that's probably the kind of language New Delhi needs to hear if it is to be won over.

The challenge for Clinton, and U.S. administration as a whole, will be in winning over India without offending Pakistan, where people are intensely wary of a U.S.-India relationship that would squeeze the country from both sides, from Afghanistan and from India.

After India’s ruling Congress party won a decisive victory, Kashmir’s main separatist alliance urged New Delhi to resolve the decades-old dispute over the Himalayan region.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, said India has a strong government after a long gap and it is time for a solution to the Kashmir issue.

Are Kashmir separatists seeking to revive a stalled dialogue?

Talks between New Delhi and moderate separatists broke down in 2007 after three years, and the failure, which separatists say further alienated the people of the region from India, was partly attributed to the country’s “weak” government.

In the biggest anti-India rally this year, Hurriyat chairman Farooq said India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had made a promise to the people of Kashmir, and it was time the new Congress-led government fulfilled it.

But Farooq is battling opposition at home from more radical leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani and militant groups who oppose talks with India without the participation of Pakistan.

The peace process between India and Pakistan, who both claim Kashmir and have fought two of their three wars over it, has advanced little as the Pakistan government is caught up in its own domestic crises.

Although violence in Kashmir has declined to its lowest level since the separatist revolt began in 1989, peace remains a distant dream and little seems to be hunky-dory for New Delhi in Kashmir.

Almost daily street protests are giving new life to a separatist movement and pro-India politicians in Kashmir are realising that.

National Conference, Kashmir’s ruling party, seems serious about resolving the Kashmir dispute.

Party chief Farooq Abdullah has said Hurriyat should get ready for talks.

“The process will be started soon after the formation of new government at centre,” he said.

The National Conference says it will try its best to take forward the dialogue process, but many strife-weary residents are cynical.

A history of suspicion and mistrust between New Delhi and Srinagar still poses a serious risk to any future peace efforts in the region.

Can the new Indian government overcome it and initiate a dialogue with separatists?

During nearly two decades of violent Kashmir conflict, I have covered fierce gun battles, between Indian soldiers and Muslim militants, suicide bombings, rebel attacks, massacres, protests, mayhem, violent elections and disasters.

But the question that always comes to mind is "what is the hardest to shoot?'

I always remember protests or riots, clashes between stone throwing protesters and gun-toting Indian troops. Stress levels quickly rise as me and my text colleague, Sheikh Mushtaq, realize that our assignment will not be easy whenever we go out, mostly on Fridays, the day when Muslims offer congregational weekly prayers, which turn into weekly protests against Indian rule in Kashmir.

There is literally no place to hide and shooting is nearly impossible when angry protesters take to the streets and rocks rain down; Indian troops retaliate with tear gas shells, rubber bullets and many times with live ammunition. Most of the time we, with protective gear and camera equipment strapped to our shoulders in backpacks, are stuck in the narrow streets of downtown Srinagar as impatient crowds and ruthless troops battle for hours.

Blood is always spilled in the streets of Kashmir where tens of thousands of people have been killed in two decades of an anti-India insurgency.

It was a pleasant and beautiful day in Srinagar, a city of over one million ringed by snow-capped Himalayan mountains, but tear gas brings bittersweet tears to my eyes and rocks sometime make me bleed. I clutch my camera, adjust the focus and aperture and keep on shooting masked rioters and police replying with slingshots, teargas shells and bullets. A rock came towards me, I ducked but it hit another cameraman. He was bleeding lying beside me. On many occasions, I had to drop my camera and take care of injured reporters and photojournalists. Several times even I was not lucky.

Years back I was hit by a tear gas shell and then enveloped by a cloud of dust and tear gas smoke. As the tear gas shell exploded between my legs and tore my calf muscle badly. Mushtaq from a distance was looking at me helplessly as the rattle of gun fire followed screams and cries for help. I was bleeding and fell unconscious. After hours I found myself in a hospital and later spent months in bed missing the thrill of photography.

When Kashmir last year faced some of the biggest anti-India protests in nearly 20 years, photojournalists faced the wrath of security forces and angry protesters.  Many of us were beaten up by riot police and demonstrators, protesting Indian rule in the disputed region. They break our cameras and sometimes beat us with batons and gun butts.

It is painful and disturbing but when I see people writhing in blood and dying with bullet wounds, my pain disappears and I feel guilty when police do not allow us to photograph the tragedy. I feel disappointed when they stop us after ambulances and hospitals are attacked.
People often ask "what is the most difficult to shoot in a conflict zone?"  I always say "protests or rioting."

Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, is visiting India for a second time in seven weeks. But what has surprised many is the timing of the trip, coming as it does at a time when India is preparing for a general election and most government business is virtually on hold.

Though India is not part of Holbrooke’s remit, New Delhi’s engagement is imperative for any effort to stabilise the so-called Af-Pak region.

But that hardly explains the visit now, considering that he could expect to do little business with a “lame duck government” in New Delhi.

So why is he coming now?

Many Indian analysts believe that keeping India and Kashmir out of Holbrooke’s brief was a way of Washington massaging New Delhi’s ego.

In reality, though, they say India is very much part of Holbrooke’s mandate because Pakistan wants a solution to disputed Kashmir as an element of any regional peace efforts — a demand Washington can hardly ignore if it expects Pakistan’s cooperation.

An Indian analyst here says Holbrooke is using the interregnum to show his turf includes India.

So if it is impossible to disentangle Kashmir from any effort to win Pakistani cooperation to stabilise Afghanistan, where does that leave India-U.S relations?

Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reports from Washington that the United States is seeking fundamental change in Pakistan: it wants Pakistan, presumably the military most of all,  to stop thinking of India as the enemy.

And linked with this, it wants Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, accused of sponsoring militant groups to advance its security interests in the region, brought under effective civilian control.

Dawn says the Americans are offering Pakistan a new enemy as replacement : the militants operating along the border with Afghanistan who are increasingly striking deeper within Pakistan.

On Sunday a suicide bomber struck in a religious centre in Punjab kiling 22 people, continuing an expansion of the militant campaign into the heartland which seems to have gathered momentum over the past month.

Can it work? India as no longer the existential threat to its very identity as many in Pakistan believe?

U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke has begun a fresh trip to the region  this week that will also take him to New Delhi, and a report released by the Asia Society just before that trip suggests ways through which America can begin reshaping perceptions in Pakistan so that it feels less threatened by its bigger neighbour.

Holbrooke and National Security Adviser General James Jones were part of the task force that worked on the report "Back from the Brink: A strategy for stabilising Afghanistan and Pakistan" before they stepped down following their appointment in the Obama administration. A PDF of the report is here.

Very broadly it calls for addressing Pakistan's security concerns on Afghanistan, Kashmir and nuclear weapons so that "it no longer requires the use of covertly supported guerrilla forces against neighbours." 

The recommendations of the task force are: support dialogue between India and Paklstan so that they find a lasting solution to Kashmir, address Afghan-Pakistan disputes so that Afghanistan recognizes the Durand Line as the border between the two countries, and finally begin a dialogue with Pakistan over its nuclear  programme including perhaps recognising the reality of  its nuclear weapons.

But what about the mood over the border in India? Since the attacks in Mumbai blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, India has set its face against a resumption of dialogue that was in any case making fitful progress.

It is now in election mode, and if you follow the debate the mood has clearly hardened with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party promising a more muscular Pakistan policy.

But by making Pakistan the overarching element of its security strategy and expecting India to play its part, is the United States  running the risk of ignoring the interests of New Delhi which not long ago was being celebrated as a strategic partner? Is it back to re-hyphenating india and Pakistan, as an Indian analyst here suggests?

[Reuters photo of protest in Lahore against a suicide bombing and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke with Afghan President Hamid Karzai]

The Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group blamed by India for last November's assault on Mumbai, has threatened more violence in Kashmir after a five-day gunbattle that killed 25 people, including eight Indian troops.

A spokesman for the group, speaking from an undisclosed location, said: "India should understand the freedom struggle in Kashmir was not over, it is active with full force."

The threat by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, if followed through, would be a new headache for the United States, which would like to see an improvement in relations between India and Pakistan as it overhauls its approach to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Washington has been careful to avoid any suggestion that it would intervene overtly in the Kashmir dispute, in what has been seen as an acknowledgement of Indian sensitivities about outside interference.  But Indian newspapers have reported that the United States has nonetheless been quietly leaning on India to reduce tensions on Pakistan's eastern border so that its army can concentrate on fighting militants on its western border with Afghanistan.

And former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, leading a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan expected to be released this week, has suggested in the past that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute would help ease tensions across the region.

In an interview with Germany's Spiegel magazine last December, he said that for those involved in global jihad, the Kashmir cause is in many ways "like a second Palestine".  Solving the conflict and bringing peace between Israelis and Palestinians, he said, would help dry up support for al Qaeda. "We are not going to get al Qaeda to change its mind. These are fanatics. What we want to do, though, is to separate the fanatics from the rest of the Islamic world."

So the last thing Washington needs is any new flare-up in violence in Kashmir that would push back any chance of resolving the dispute and raise tensions along the India-Pakistan border. (Before a ceasefire was agreed at the end of 2003, the Indian and Pakistani armies fought near daily artillery duels across the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, which India said were meant to prevent infiltration of militants into Kashmir from the Pakistani side.)

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On the subject of the review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, special envoy Richard Holbrooke made a couple of intriguing comments in an interview with the BBC this week. 

First he said openly that the Afghan Taliban were based in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.  "Quetta appears to be the headquarters for the leaders of the Taliban and some of the worst people in the world," he said.  Many analysts have assumed for some time that the Afghan Taliban are operating out of Quetta -- so much so that the New York Times suggested earlier this month that the United States might extend its attacks on militant targets on the Pakistan border into Baluchistan. But it's quite new for U.S. policymakers to talk publicly about the Taliban's presence in Quetta.

Foreign Policy picked up on a similar statement last week by Lieutenant General Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  "Now that the U.S. government has gone on record that the Quetta shura ... is operating openly in Pakistan, it won't be long before policymakers are asked some pretty tough and uncomfortable questions," it said. "Like, what are you doing about the fact that our own government now admits that the Taliban's nerve center is functioning not in Pakistan's tribal areas, but in the capital of a major Pakistani province..."

Secondly, the BBC quoted Holbrooke as saying that conflicting reports that Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself may support dialogue was a "mysterious issue" that U.S. officials were "trying to learn more about".  I've discussed the question of talks with the Taliban in an earlier post but I thought that response from Holbrooke was curious.

For an interesting take on the possibility of talks with the Taliban, Jean MacKenzie, program director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan has published an interview in the Global Post with two former high-ranking Taliban officials who both said dialogue was feasible.

She also has a separate story on an interview with the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.  There's a lot in there worth reading, though I was struck by his comment that “you cannot talk to the Taliban from a position of strength. We are Afghans. If we are in a lower position, and the enemy acts tough, we will act 10 times tougher.”  That is perhaps one answer to those who say the United States should improve its military position against the Taliban first before it considers dialogue.

(Reuters photos: Women mourn at the funeral of a Kashmiri Muslim soldier/Fayaz Kabli; and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke)

India and Pakistan aren't always bickering, including over Kashmir, the dispute that has defined their relationship over more than six decades. Away from the public eye, top and trusted envoys from the two countries have at various times sat down and wrestled with the problem, going beyond stated positions in the public and even teasing out the contours of a deal. In the end of course, someone's nerve failed, or something else happened and the deal was off.

Beginning 2004  and up until November 2007 India and Pakistan were embarked on a similar course and very nearly came to an agreement on Kashmir, says investigative journalist Steve Coll in an article for the New Yorker. Special envoys from the two countries met in secret in hotels in London, Bangkok and London to lay out a solution and after three years they were ready with the broad outline of a settlement that would have de-militarised Kashmir.

An abstract of the article  is here and the Washington Post  has a story on it.

Under the plan, the Kashmir conflict would have been resolved through the creation of an autonomous region in which local residents could move freely and conduct trade on both sides of the territorial boundary. Over time, the border would become irrelevant, and declining violence would allow a gradual withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops that now face one another across the region's mountain passes, Coll writes.

He quotes Pakistan's then foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri as saying that the back-channel talks had by 2007 become "so advanced that we’d come to semicolons."

"It was huge -- I think it would have changed the basic nature of the problem," the article quoted a senior Indian official as saying. "You would have then had the freedom to remake Indo-Pakistani relations."

But by then, then President Pervez Musharraf  was so engulfed in political problems that he couldn't sell himself, let alone a landmark deal on Kashmir . Musharraf fought for the agreement but he had slipped  into a political death spiral and resigned in August 2008, the deal still-born.

As I said before it wasn't the first time India and Pakistan took the high road to peace and then  faltered. Musharraf wrote in his book In the Line of Fire that he and then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee came close to an agreement on how to tackle Kashmir in a 2001 summit in Agra but "mysterious higher powers" had overruled and "humiliated" Vajpayee.

Going further back, the two sides are also known to have reached an agreement over the Siachen glacier, only to step back at the last minute.

But you have to wonder now after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 if there is any room for this kind of diplomacy. The mood has soured and it would take a considerable amount of courage for anyone to step up to peacemaking in secret. Or perhaps that is all the more reason they must once again throw themselves into the challenge?
[Photos of an anti-India protest in Kashmir at the weekend, and the Taj in Mumbai]
 

Violence in Kashmir is down to its lowest level since the separatist revolt began in 1989, but peace remains a distant prospect in one of the world's most beautiful regions.

The Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Studies which tracks militant violence across South Asia says 541 people were killed in militant-linked violence in 2008, continuing the declining trend from the previous year when fatalities had fallen to 777. That was well below the 1,000 mark  used to define a high-intensity conflict and way lower than the 2001 peak of 4,507 deaths in a single year.

Just for purposes of comparison on a broad level, a separate analysis by the Institute shows that the number of people killed in militant-related violence in Pakistan hit 6,715 in 2008 from a 2003 figure of 189, reflecting a dramatic deterioration in the security situation.

So, as Pakistan fights the militants in its most serious internal challenge yet, some of whom it fostered to fight Indian forces in Kashmir, is peace at hand in the Himalayan region ?

Not by a long shot , going by the steady stream of street protests that seem to go off every now and then. Last year's demonstrations, the biggest since the revolt began, over a government decision to hand over land near a Hindu shrine deep in Kashmir to a trust now seem to have become a watershed, giving new life to a movement that was despairing.

And because it is a street campaign, a sort of a non-violent struggle, it could be potentially more challenging to the Indian state than the guns and grenades of the militants, say Kashmiri leaders.

"India is not scared of any guns here in Kashmir - it has a thousand times more guns," Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, told the Wall Street Journal in this report in December.

"What it is scared of is people coming out in the streets, people seeing the power of nonviolent struggle."

Is this really a civil disobedience movement, a leaf from Mahatma Gandhi's book thrown in the face of those who rule India in his name?

{Reuters pictures of Gulmarg in Kashmir and a protest in Srinagar}