Kashmir Grows Weary of Constant War

As guerrillas battle in the Himalayas in the name of the Kashmiri people, many who live here express not gratitude but despair.

Nine years of guerrilla war--fueled by the grand designs of Indian and Pakistani leaders--have left thousands of Kashmiris dead, hundreds vanished and countless others scarred by rape and torture.

While Indian soldiers and Pakistani-backed fighters mount an ever more desperate battle to claim this mountain region, more Kashmiris say they feel stuck between the two.

“We have two Gods,” said Ghulam Pala, who owns one of the numerous floating hotels on Srinagar’s fabled Dal Lake. “When we go with one, the other causes problems for us.”

Pala, 55, tells a tale familiar to many Kashmiris: He supported the guerrilla war against Indian rule when it broke out in 1990, even though the fighting sapped his hotel business. To make ends meet, he sold his wife’s gold jewelry piece by piece.

Today, independence from India for Kashmiris seems as elusive as ever. The family jewelry is gone, and Pala’s son, Farooq, is old enough to pick up a gun. Pala hates the Indian government and especially its soldiers, but he no longer harbors any hope that the Kashmiri militants will be able to expel them.

“We have been fighting for 10 years and we have nothing,” Pala said as his boat, the Duke Well, rocked gently over the lake. “Kashmir will never be free. We just want to run our business.”

Resignation echoes through Indian Kashmir, where locals estimate that as many as 60,000 people have died since 1990. India and Pakistan have been fighting over the region since 1947, when the two countries broke from the British Empire. Kashmir, a region so different from the rest of the subcontinent that it even boasts its own method for making tea, was torn apart. Kashmir became India’s only Muslim majority state in a country dominated by Hindus.

From the start, India’s Kashmiris hankered to join their brethren across the border--as part of Pakistan or as an independent nation. In 1990, heavy fighting broke out when Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control, which divides the two nations in Kashmir, mounted a separatist war against India with Pakistani support.

The current fighting began last month, when several hundred guerrillas crossed the border into India and seized positions above a vital roadway. India dispatched thousands of troops to dislodge them, and Pakistani and Indian soldiers unleashed furious artillery barrages along the border. It’s the most intense fighting since the last Indo-Pakistani war, in 1971, and all the more troubling because of the nuclear tests each side conducted last year.

As fighting continued Wednesday, Indian and Pakistani leaders prepared to meet Saturday to discuss the conflict.

The fighting along the border seems strangely distant in Srinagar, the capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state and once the epicenter of the separatist movement. Many Kashmiris say the Indian army’s crackdown on the militants drained away their dreams of a united Kashmir.

Ghulam Langoo, a caretaker of Srinagar’s magnificent Jamai Mosque, said he and most Kashmiris would prefer an independent state. He charged that Indian soldiers have beaten, raped and tortured his fellow Kashmiris, but he doesn’t want to surrender any more of his sons to the struggle. His oldest son, Zahoor, went off to fight the Indians in 1992 and never returned. He won’t allow his other two sons to join the insurgency.

“I gave one son to the nation,” Langoo said. “No more.”

Indian officials boast that they have smashed the Kashmiri separatist movement, and they produce reams of data to support their claim. The number of militants killed, the number captured, the number surrendered all peaked in the mid-1990s and then tapered off--proving, the officials say, that the Kashmiri movement is dying.

“Slowly the region is coming back to normal,” said Maj. P. Purushottam of the Indian army. “The militants no longer have the support of the people.”

But if relative calm has come to parts of Kashmir, it seems less due to a change of allegiance on the part of Kashmiris than exhaustion after years of fighting. Independent observers say that both sides have thrown away restraint and that civilians have borne the brunt.

The U.S. government has accused the Indian government and Pakistani-backed guerrillas of rampant human rights abuses. In a recent report, the U.S. said that Indian security forces have killed and tortured Kashmiri suspects, and it accused the guerrillas of carrying out a string of massacres in Hindu villages. In one notorious incident in February, suspected militants entered the predominantly Hindu village of Baljarana and opened fire on a wedding party, killing seven.

“We used to support the militants,” said a Kashmiri businessman who has given money to guerrilla groups. “Now we just want the war to end.”

In Srinagar, many Kashmiri families blame the Indian forces for a campaign of terror. Many say they have suffered at the hands of security forces or know someone who has.

Parveena Ahangar has not seen her son since 1990, when she says Indian soldiers took him from a relative’s home. Like many mothers of the disappeared, she refuses to acknowledge that her son may be dead.

“I am certain my son is still alive,” Ahangar said. “He did not vanish into thin air.”

Ahangar is one of hundreds of Kashmiri mothers whose sons disappeared without a trace in the 1990s. Many people believe that the young men were killed while in the custody of Indian soldiers who suspected they had links to militants.

Ahangar has demanded that the Indian government account for her son’s whereabouts. She organized a group dedicated to finding the disappeared and has documented the cases of about 300 men who vanished in the custody of Indian forces.

Indian officials have told Ahangar that they don’t know where her son is--and have given the same message to other Kashmiri mothers seeking their sons. The officials say the army has not killed a single Kashmiri that it has taken into custody.

“As the militants lose on the battlefield, human rights is their only weapon,” said Purushottam, the Indian army major. “There have been a number of allegations, and all of them have proved false.”

While the Indian army seems to have quelled the violence in Srinagar, the militants still operate in the mountains above the valley. In the first week of June, local newspapers reported, about 42 people were killed in gun battles around Kashmir.

Still, the Indian crackdown seems to have largely achieved its goal: While many Kashmiris feel intense bitterness toward India, they also appear to have lost the will to continue fighting.

For all the violence committed against them, the villagers of Wavosa say they have listened with apathy to radio reports of the recent fighting between Indian forces and the Pakistani-backed guerrillas. Mohammed Akbar, one of the village elders, said that the days of encouraging the militants are over.

“Nobody wants to lose a son,” he said.