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.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reached out to Pakistan on Tuesday, saying he was ready to go “more than half way” if Islamabad cracked down on militants. Peace with Pakistan was in India’s “vital interest” he told parliament in a speech, presumably directed at those in the Indian strategic establishment who believe in a more muscular approach toward Pakistan especially after the Mumbai attacks.

So is Singh laying the ground for a slight thaw in ties?  Since he was re-elected with a stronger mandate, some kind of opening to Pakistan has been expected, given that it has been more than  six months since ties went into deep chill following the attacks in November. The feeling in New Delhi has been sooner than later it has to engage Pakistan.  You cannot change your neighbours, new foreign minister S.M.Krishna said soon after taking over and if that is the case, you can’t not talk to your neighbour indefinitely.

The Times of India said Krishna quoted President John F. Kennedy to his officers: “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.”

Mansoor Ijaz, an American of Pakistan origin writing in the Washington Post, said Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari should call for a peace summit this summer.  Singh and Zardari were two leaders who could make peace, he argued. The newly mandated Indian leader was now strong enough politically to risk a peace gamble; Zardari on the other hand  was an ideal candidate to reach out and make peace because he did not see India as an existential threat.  He also had a penchant for risk-taking, Ijaz said.

“India’s election results give it the political strength to offer such a plan. Pakistan’s myriad problems demand that it accept any reasonable offer at the table. The moment to secure durable peace in Kashmir is now,” he wrote.

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One of the more intriguing reports about Pakistan under former president Pervez Musharraf was that it had come close to a deal with India on Kashmir. The tentative agreement failed to see the light of day after Musharraf became embroiled in a row over the judiciary which eventually forced him to quit. His successor, President Asif Ali Zardari, then renewed calls for peace with India, stressing the economic gains of increased trade ties and even offering to overturn Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine by offering to commit to a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. Then came last November’s attack on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, and all talk of peace was off.  India quashed any suggestion a resolution of the Kashmir dispute would help bring peace to South Asia, insisting that linking Kashmir with the Mumbai attacks would reward acts of terrorism.

Three developments this week pushed Kashmir back onto the agenda.

In the Kashmir Valley itself, protests erupted over the alleged rape and murder of two Kashmiri women.  Residents said the women, aged 17 and 22, were abducted, raped and killed by security forces. Indian authorities denied the killing and said the women drowned in a stream.

In Pakistan, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said a resolution of the Kashmir dispute held the key to durable peace in South Asia. Significantly, he said a peaceful solution must be found in line with U.N. resolutions passed in 1948 giving the people of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir the right to vote on whether to join India or Pakistan.  That suggested a hardening of Pakistan’s position compared to the one adopted by Musharraf, who had been willing to set aside the U.N. resolutions if this opened the way to a peace deal. Gilani’s comments were echoed by opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, who was quoted by the Daily Times as saying that there could be no durable peace in South Asia without a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict.

Finally, a Pakistan court ordered the release of Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, who had been held under house arrest after the attack on Mumbai. His release was criticised by the United States while India said it raised serious doubts about Pakistan’s willingness to crack down on militant groups operating from inside its borders. Many in India are sceptical about Pakistan’s willingness to crack down on militants, fearing it will target those groups which threaten Pakistan itself, like the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat valley, while leaving Kashmir-oriented groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba alone.

So what does the future hold for Kashmir?

Some analysts argue that India may well resume talks with Pakistan, if only to do so on its own terms rather than being seen to cave in to American pressure to ease tensions so that Islamabad can concentrate on fighting the Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan. U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns will travel to India on June 10-13, according to the State Department, in what is being seen by Indian media as preparing the ground for an expected visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next month. 

But even if India were to resume peace talks (and media reports suggest opinion is still divided on the subject), there appears to be little room for substantive concessions on Kashmir.  Rather some are arguing that India should capitalise on the participation of Kashmiri voters in state and national elections to try to restore normalcy to the Kashmir Valley, pulling out its troops and leaving the police to maintain order. In the long run, this would allow India to declare the Line of Control dividing Kashmir as the international border - an idea Pakistan has long resisted.

In Pakistan, the latest editorials on the subject suggest there is no single view on how to approach India and the Kashmir dispute. The News International has an op-ed editorial saying that Pakistan should repudiate the tentative deal made by Musharraf as offering far too many concessions to India and betraying the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. 

“The best course would be to return to the pre-Kargil position: political, moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people for a settlement under the UN Security Council resolutions. It would be in consonance with the wishes of the new generation of Kashmiris which has grown up in the shadow of Indian bayonets and is not prepared to accept indefinite Indian occupation of the state. Implicit in this stance would be a rejection of the Kashmir non-paper hammered out during the Musharraf regime. In the diplomatic newspeak popularised by Joe Biden, it is called pressing the reset button,” it says.

In Dawn newspaper, columnist Irfan Husain defends Musharraf’s efforts at peacemaking. “For all his many faults, at least Musharraf did try to break the logjam over Kashmir with a number of out-of-the-box proposals that were either shot down, or allowed to languish unanswered by the Indian government,” he writes.  He calls on India, as the more powerful country, to make a symbolic gesture towards confidence-building by pulling some troops back from the border and for both countries to work together to fight terrorism. “We have seen that a piecemeal approach to fighting terrorism has not worked. By pooling intelligence and by denying jihadis sanctuary and political space, the war can be won.”

And in another column in Dawn, Ayesha Siddiqa argues that Islamabad should open up trade to India, including a transit route to Afghanistan, to improve relations and give India a stake in maintaining stability in Pakistan.

“But then what does one do about the Kashmir issue? More than 60 years of experience tell us that we were not able to solve it militarily and using the issue to withhold solutions for other matters is not likely to work either. At the moment, India has no stakes in solving the issue to Pakistan’s advantage especially when it is investing in its own political system to come up with a solution for the Indian state and the Kashmiri population,” she writes. “Part of the reason why India refuses to be sympathetic to Pakistan’s position is that it has no major stakes here. Transit trade and bilateral trade is one of the formulas for starting a more constructive relationship between the two countries.”

And how does all this look from inside Kashmir itself? Take a look at the home page of the Greater Kashmir newspaper.

(Photo: mourners at funeral of Nisar Ahmad, a protester killed by a tear gas canister; Indian policeman fires tear gas; funeral procession in Srinagar; a charred policeman’s helmet next to a burned effigy/Fayaz Kabli)

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.

(more…)

Pakistan’s military has ordered troops to hold fire in the Swat valley following the deal between the provincial government and Taliban militants to enforce Islamic law.

The truce comes after nearly two years of fighting in which the Taliban have extended their control of the alpine region barely 130 km (80 km) northwest of Islamabad, destroyed the police force, established a shadow government and implemented an austere form of Islamic law. 

So the question being asked in the aftermath of the deal is: has the Pakistan army backed off from a debilitating war? Second, and more important from the standpoint of the bigger battles ahead especially in the tribal areas, does it really have the stomach for counter-insurgency operations ?

Jauhar Ismail in a post on All Things Pakistan says in an ideal world he would have hoped that the Pakistan army gained the upper hand in Swat to allow the authorities to negotiate from a position of strength. But that didn’t turn out to be the case, partly because of bad strategy and also because of the nature of guerrilla warfare.

Ultimately, the author argues the Pakistan army was never trained to fight a counter-insurgency. All its training, indeed most of its weapons, are focussed on the threat from India, existential or otherwise. Using helicopter gunships and artillery barrages to pummel your own people into submission is almost a sure-fire way to lose the war.

The Indian army, by contrast, has had greater experience in guerrilla warfare, beginning with the dozens of insurgencies in the northeast, to the Sikh revolt in the Punjab in the 1980s and the Kashmir revolt in 1989. And if the Indian army finds itself still engaged in both Kashmir and the northeast (Punjab was a success, though) after decades of operations, you can imagine what the Pakistanis are up against in such a short time period.

On the Pakistan Defence Forum, a blog focused on the armed forces, there has been considerable debate on the issue of why the Pakistan army has been unable to regain control of Swat. One reader said the whole logic of declaring war on the area was flawed.

His comments are worth reproducing briefly :

“Why couldnt Russia control Afghanistan or America control Viet Nam? There is no military solution to this problem. The solution is political, social and economic. We cannot control that valley because we have lost the confidence of the people. when the people are against you then no army can control a territory.”

“Pakistan has invaded itself, it has made an enemy of the people of those regions and all in the name of a few dollars from the USA and a fear of getting attacked by the American Empire. It is not the fault of the army but those bastards who sent the army into a Pakistani region.”

Strong words those, and as Bill Roggio notes in The Long War Journal, with 142 soldiers and paramilitary soldiers dying since August 2008, the Swat insurgency by that count is more dangerous than the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq.

So where does the Pakistan army go from here? Masood Sharif Khan Khattak, a former director general of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau, says it must be preserved and not forced to fight an endless war on its own territory.

[Photos of Islamist leaders from Swat and Pakistani troops in the area]

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}