The crowd’s hostility was unmistakable.
Each time they passed Indian soldiers, thousands chanted the name of one of South Asia’s most violent Islamic groups.
“India, your death will come. Lashkar will come,” they shouted, harking back to the early 1990s when militants from groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba roamed this predominantly Muslim region’s towns and villages and even Kashmir’s peaceful separatists openly defied New Delhi.
Those days seem more like the present than the past in Kashmir, where a dispute over 40 hectares of land for a Hindu shrine has prompted protests by hundreds of thousands, reviving the separatist movement and threatening to further undermine the India-Pakistan peace process.
While the militants may still be underground, a new generation of Muslim Kashmiris has loudly taken up the separatists’ old slogan of azadi — freedom — from Hindu-majority India, long viewed by many here as an occupying power.
The latest and largest protest came on Friday as an estimated 200,000 people streamed into central Srinagar, shutting down this city once famed for its cool summer weather and sweeping Himalayan panoramas.
They chanted “Death to India!” and “We want freedom!” while soldiers and police kept their distance, hoping to avoid a repeat of clashes that have killed at least 34 people in recent weeks.
Such scenes have pierced the notion, widely held throughout India just months ago, that a semblance of normal life was returning to Kashmir after 19 years of rebellion. Militant attacks were down, separatist politicians appeared sidelined and tourists were back lounging on houseboats on Srinagar’s Dal Lake.
That is all gone now, pushed aside by the anger at Indian rule that many here say was subsumed but never extinguished.
“This is a freedom movement, a people’s movement,” said Salman Ahmed, a 27-year-old protester. “We are united to fight India until we get freedom.”
The timing could not be worse. Divided between India and Muslim Pakistan, Kashmir lies at the heart of their rivalry. The unrest is straining already tense relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors, who have fought two wars over Kashmir.
Statements from Islamabad supporting the protesters have prompted angry responses from New Delhi. They’ve also raised suspicions of a Pakistani hand in the unrest, reflecting India’s belief that recent political turmoil in Pakistan is allowing hawkish elements there to renew the struggle against India after four years of peace talks.
Such fears are being stoked by repeated skirmishes along the heavily militarized frontier that divides Kashmir — each side blames the other — and the bombing of India’s embassy in Afghanistan, an attack New Delhi charges was orchestrated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Islamabad vehemently denies the allegations.
One top Indian security official, A.K. Mitra, chief of the paramilitary Border Security Force, recently told reporters that the ISI plans to use the unrest to sneak 800 Islamic militants into Kashmir.
But on the streets of Kashmir, it is India’s continued claim to the region — and the presence of an estimated 500,000 Indian soldiers — that is seen as the problem.
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