Waning Rebellion May Forever Stain Disputed Region of Northern India : Asia: New Delhi moves toward reconciliation in Jammu and Kashmir state. But its suppression of violent separatists has left millions traumatized.

“Welcome to the Happy Valley” reads a sign in the summer capital of violence-weary Kashmir, in fading paint and words that now sound like a sick joke.

On the lawn of a three-story building that once housed the offices of a maharajah, Hajira Sheikh waits in the warm sun of early autumn to visit her 30-year-old brother. He belongs to the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, a pro-independence group.

In police custody for the past 23 months, Ali Muhammad has had one thumbnail and two toenails torn out by his interrogators during questioning, his sister says.

The gaunt-faced woman is matter-of-fact about it all, and even manages a smile. She has come from the mountains of northern Kashmir, she tells relatives of other prisoners, to bring her brother some watermelon.

In Jammu and Kashmir, tales of torture in police custody lost their power to shock years ago. Here, in India’s northernmost regions and its only state with a Muslim majority, the agony-filled end game is being played out of one of the most traumatic events of the 20th Century--the partition of the Indian subcontinent, in which 14 million people lost their homes and half a million their lives.

In the 12th Century, Pandit Kalhana, a Hindu wise man, wrote that this Himalayan land of sparkling snowcapped peaks and lush green valleys “may be conquered by the forces of spiritual love but not by armed forces.” It was a warning that some in modern times failed to heed.

An armed uprising against Indian rule that erupted almost six years ago in Kashmir is waning, claim Indian officials, who have been talking for months about bringing central rule to an end and holding the state’s first elections since 1987.

But the tactics the New Delhi government has employed to crush the rebellion have been so wanton, brutal and widespread that India may have forever lost the allegiance of the 5 million Muslims who live in the Vale of Kashmir.

“I see no hope for reconciliation,” a middle-echelon Kashmiri civil service employee said sadly. “Every village has a graveyard filled with its children.”

Though Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had Kashmiri blood in his veins, even he was unable to reconcile Kashmir’s stubborn aspirations with the imperatives of central rule and a strong Indian state. Nehru granted Kashmir its own constitution in 1956, making it India’s only state with that distinction, but he also jailed its chief minister for his aspirations of autonomy.

Pakistan also lays claim to the territory, and today the dispute over Kashmir is the single most important reason that India and Pakistan, neighbors who share customs and a common colonial past, view one another with enmity and suspicion and are fierce foes everywhere--from the cricket field to their rival programs to develop nuclear weapons.

“This problem holds the key to peace in the subcontinent,” said Umar Farooq, chairman of the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference of 32 separatist organizations in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Since 1947, the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, whose territory was slightly bigger than Idaho, has been divided, with India occupying about half, Pakistan a third and China the remainder. For possession of this “second heaven,” as the Kashmiris lovingly call their land, India and Pakistan fought two of their three wars. In the current insurgency, the Indians charge, Pakistan has lavishly furnished the rebels with arms, training, money, bases and non-Kashmiri recruits.

“They don’t want normalcy. They want chaos,” Gov. K. V. Krishna Rao, New Delhi’s viceroy in Kashmir, said of the Pakistanis.

Dealing with the separatist drive has come to be the severest test of India’s ability to adhere to its democratic, liberal ideals. It is an examination some independent observers say the world’s most populous democracy has failed miserably.

“Under the cover of anti-terrorist laws, it has abrogated its democratic principles to pursue counterinsurgency in Kashmir. Long a champion of its citizens’ rights, India has mocked its own democratic values in this war,” Paula R. Newberg of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American specialist on Kashmir, charged in a recent book.

India’s viewpoint, naturally, is different. “I am defending the integrity of the nation,” Gov. Rao said in a recent interview.

To put down the rebellion, New Delhi has poured at least 400,000 army troops, police officers and members of paramilitary units into the state.

Such lavish use of manpower at enormous cost has led to some successes for the Indians. In urban areas, the militants have basically abandoned ambushes and gun battles as too risky; they now attack Indian forces by laying mines, planting bombs or tossing grenades. This month, two car bombings in the heart of Srinagar killed 13 people, and a parcel bomb killed a photographer for the Agence France-Presse news agency.

However, in the countryside, insurgency continues at a high level. For 11 weeks, a shadowy militant group, Al Faran, has been holding four Western captives, including Donald Hutchings of Spokane, Wash., in the Himalayas. In August, the kidnapers decapitated a fifth captive, a Norwegian.

High-ranking Indian intelligence officials estimate that 4,000 to 5,000 armed separatists are still active in the region’s high valleys and saw-toothed mountain ranges. In the past year, as Kashmiri insurgents have been arrested or killed, more foreigners, especially Pakistanis and Afghans, are said to have been infiltrating from across the border. A Kashmiri government spokesman last week estimated they now number between 1,700 and 2,000.

Regularly, the government of Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto denies that it furnishes anything other than moral and political support to the rebels, but no Indian believes such declarations, nor do many well-informed outsiders.

“Pakistan has been shamelessly using Kashmir, not just during this insurgency, but for the past 20, 30 years, as a way of getting at India,” Newberg said in a telephone interview from her office in Washington. “Though they claim their interest is in the Kashmiris, their larger interests are A, in getting territory, and B, getting at India.”

Since the uprising erupted in late 1989, Kashmiri police estimate that up to 25,000 militants, soldiers, police officers and civilians have been slain. Leaders of the Hurriyat Conference put the toll nearer 40,000.

“We know the cost: We are losing a generation,” said Abdul Gani, 57, president of the Muslim Conference, a moderate separatist party, who believes Kashmir’s mostly Muslim areas should unite with Pakistan.

At night, as muezzins call to the faithful from Srinagar’s tin-roofed mosques of brick, the streets empty. Soldiers hunker down in bunkers made of sandbags slathered with mud. Taxi drivers are afraid to venture out on the narrow winding roads because they might be roughed up by soldiers at checkpoints.

“Our faces are smiling, but our hearts are weeping,” Muhammad Shafi, 40, a Srinagar veterinarian, said. “Our family members are being killed, our property looted.”

In Kashmir, according to a 1995 report from Amnesty International, thousands of people have been arbitrarily detained by Indian security forces, torture is a “daily routine” and hundreds of civilians have been extrajudicially executed.

Murders and acts of banditry and extortion are also routinely committed by some militant groups, human rights organizations report.

Rao, the Kashmiri governor, claims that there has been a sea change in Kashmiris’ feelings since he took office in March, 1993. In a recent interview, he said he hopes to hold state elections by mid-November.

“You must keep the public on your side; that has been my effort all along,” said the governor, a retired army general who also combatted insurgents in the northeastern state of Assam.

Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, no relation to the governor, has said he is ready to grant Kashmir any degree of autonomy short of total azadi --freedom . Despite the brave talk of officials, though, holding elections remains problematic.

As of this moment, not a single Muslim party in the state is ready to take part in elections. Though conceivably one could go forward in the predominantly Hindu region of Jammu and largely Buddhist Ladakh district of Kashmir, an election would almost certainly be a debacle in the Kashmir Valley.

The National Conference, once the most influential party, wants New Delhi to first restore Kashmir’s pre-1953 status, when it was sovereign in all areas save foreign affairs, defense and communications. The Hurriyat, which has called on Kashmiris to boycott any election, demands instead that a plebiscite be held--as ordered by the U.N. Security Council in 1948--to determine whether Kashmir should belong to India or Pakistan.

“Elections would only bring a change of heads, and we need a change of hearts,” explains Hurriyat’s Farooq.

In combatting the 5 1/2-year-old challenge to its authority, India may be winning the battle, but it has evidently lost the wider war for the hearts and minds of Kashmiri Muslims. Many in the Kashmir Valley eye Pakistan’s motives with suspicion. They find little to admire in the neighboring country’s increasingly strident domestic politics and a type of Islam that has little in common with Kashmir’s own traditions.

“Independence! Independence! Independence! We want to be separate from everybody,” Srinagar fruit peddler Bashir Ahmad, 26, shouted when asked what he wanted for his homeland.

A score of men his age pressed around him to listen and offer their own opinions. One interrupted the vendor to say that Kashmiris by rights should be united with their “Islamic brothers” in Pakistan. The rest favored independence. Nobody spoke in favor of India.