President of Jamiat-e-Ahl-e-Hadees (JAH), Moulana Showkat Ahmad Shah ASSASSINATED

Srinagar, Apr 8: A winding alley leads to this 3-storey house on the corner of Salfia Colony in Lal Bazaar Srinagar. The aura around is gloomy. Pain and anguish is visible.

In the house, chaos is evident everywhere. People are coming in and out. With each incoming female mourner the tone gets shriller and space shrinks. Moulana Showkat’s mother, wife and daughter sit in the foyer of the house. Women around them console and wipe tears on their faces.

Amid these scenes, Moulana’s son, a management graduate, comes out of the house. Shoaib Showkat clad in Pathani suit and black sweater is followed by his fellows. His legs shiver and tremble in the public park and he takes a deep breath followed by a glass of water.

“I want to perform ritual ablution of Abu. Please let me to Maisuma,” Shoaib tells his friends. Maisuma was the place where his father was killed. And his body was placed outside the Masjid where he was going to lead congregational Friday prayers.

Maulana at the time of this attack was accompanied by his nephew, Rizwan, a student of SP School. Rizwan is consoled by everyone. He doesn’t relent and his cries go louder.

“Rizwan is suffering from trauma as he was with Showkat sahib at the time of the gruesome incident. He is a witness to his killing,” said a neighbour outside this house.

Rizwan narrates his ordeal in a room calling Abu Jee every now and then. “Every Friday I take off from school and follow Abu Jee to Masjid at Gaw Kadal. And today I was moving ahead of Abu Jee on stairs when suddenly a huge blast occurred. As I turned back I saw him lying down. Dust was hovering around,” he uttered amid tears flowing out of his eyes.

Moulana is survived by two brothers who are also part of his joint family. “It was Rizwan who rang up home informing this sad blow to the family. Besides someone from local police station told us about the incident,” said their relatives.

Outside, the narrow alley is filled by public. Now more people have joined in. They are discussing with each other Moulana’s gentle nature.

“His was a noble soul in our locality. I saw him leaving the house today morning wearing short coat over Kameez shalwar guarded by security personnel. His house was attacked earlier. He had to erect these tin sheets over this boundary for his security,” said his close neighbour Muhammad Shafi, a retired government employee. His other neighbours echoed Shafi’s views.

“He was helpful to everyone be it any occasion. We knew this family for past more than two decades and his killing is unjust,” they told Greater Kashmir.

In between this all, his brother Reyaz Ahmad announces the burial time and leaves with Shoaib and Rizwan to Maisuma to offer funeral prayers.

(C) GK

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Unmasking National Conference's Hidden Agenda (Power Hungry)

Omar’s government is self-serving.
Kashmir deserves better

BY PREM SHANKAR JHA

Whodunnit? Fire spread from this government building across Kashmir. Mirwaiz and government blame each other

ON SUNDAY, a day after Kashmiris celebrated Eid peacefully on a day that remained unmarred by confrontations with the police, the government of Jammu and Kashmir clamped down the most draconian curfew the Valley has seen in more than two years. Had Omar Abdullah lit a match in a petrol storage depot, he could not have done a better job of setting Kashmir on fire. As of the morning of 14 September, 17 Kashmiri youth died in police firing, another half-dozen were in critical condition and more than 40 were seriously injured. More ominous still, for the first time in the entire intifada, two policemen had also died, a sure sign that the self-imposed restraint was breaking down.

Did the state government set Kashmir alight by accident or design? Omar Abdullah and Kuldip Khoda, the Director-General of Police, accused the followers of Mirwaiz Umar Farooq of not adhering to his promise to control his followers and allowing them to burn down the offices of the Power Development department and the Crime Branch of the Kashmir police. He, therefore, slapped FIRs on him, placed him under house arrest and announced a curfew within hours of the incident.

Kashmiris are convinced, however, that the buildings were set on fire by ikhwanis in the pay of the state police to create the pretext for the crackdown that followed. They point out that the Mirwaiz’s procession had been absolutely peaceful and his speech had been moderate and constructive. He had, in short, honoured the commitment given personally to Omar Abdullah. The Crime Branch building was 500 metres away from Lal Chowk, across the Jhelum river and well off the procession route. Eyewitnesses are unanimous that they saw smoke billowing out from the building while the Mirwaiz was still speaking.

What makes Khoda’s account less than credible is the disproportionate nature of the state government’s response. If the Mirwaiz had been unable (or had not tried) to prevent miscreants from using his procession as a cover for their misdeeds, the most they needed to do was to place him under house arrest. How did his failure justify inflicting such draconian punishment on the population of Srinagar and the entire Valley. For Eid had passed peacefully. Not a single stone had been thrown and not a single policeman hurt. Would it not have been better to take advantage of the respite to start building bridges with the people once again?

But the way in which Omar Abdullah and the state police had used the slimmest of pretexts to launch a premeditated crackdown plan makes it exceedingly likely that the burning of the Crime Branch building was indeed Kashmir’s equivalent of the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 4 August 1964 (a fictitious attack by north Vietnamese navy on an American destroyer) that gave the Johnson administration an excuse for declaring war on North Vietnam.

THE ABDULLAHS, father and son, had motive enough to manufacture such an incident. Omar’s 6 August crackdown had turned into a fiasco. His police officers had started to take leave rather than fire on their own people. As many as 1,800 constables had failed to turn up for duty. In desperation, Omar had to ask Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani to request the ‘boys’ to heed the curfew and abjure violence. This had gravely undermined the authority of his government in Kashmir.

In Delhi, confidence in his capacity to restore order and govern the state was dwindling and the demand for Governor’s rule was gaining strength. In a sudden volte face, the BJP, which had earlier been demanding the replacement of Omar with Farooq Abdullah, had also begun to demand Governor’s Rule on the grounds that only the Centre could launch the massive crackdown that was now needed to keep ‘those renegade Kashmiris’ under Indian rule. The J&K government was also raring to have another go for the Centre had allowed it to induct a number of battalions of the Rapid Action Force from India and boost the number of CRPF companies deployed in the state.

By failing to recognise the moral force of the Kashmiri intifada and allowing his police to use bullets against stone-throwing youth, Omar has unwittingly made his government the most hated in Kashmir’s history

The Abdullahs also had personal reasons for wanting to regain control of the Valley. By failing to recognise the moral force of the Kashmiri intifada (locally called the Ragda) and allowing his police to use bullets against stone-throwing youth, Omar had unwittingly made his government the most hated in Kashmir’s history. Farooq Abdullah therefore knew that if governor’s rule was imposed on the state, the election that would soon follow would spell the end of the National Conference (NC). Keeping it in power at almost any cost, therefore, became Farooq Abdullah’s all-consuming goal.

Today, everything hinges upon crushing the uprising in Kashmir. If the NC succeeds, it will not only be able to prevent the imposition of Governor’s rule but also persuade New Delhi that it is the only Kashmiri party that has the commitment to India and the political will to ensure that the state remains firmly within the Indian union. The longer New Delhi dithers and the higher the post-11 June death count (now 91) rises, the more will it become a prisoner of the NC in Kashmir.

This Faustian pact is anything but new. On the contrary, its origins can be traced back to the very different conditions that prevailed in 1947, when Sheikh Abdullah firmly sided with India in the run-up to Independence and Partition. It was an asset to India when the NC was the indubitable champion of Kashmiriyat in the Valley. But this mantle fell from its shoulders when Farooq Abdullah agreed to fight the 1987 election in coalition with the Congress. Since then he has been fighting a protracted no-holds-barred fight to prevent that mantle from shifting to any other Kashmiri party.

By siding assiduously with him since then, Delhi has gradually become an opponent of Kashmiri nationalism. It allowed Farooq first to rig enough seats in the 1987 elections not only to make sure that its rival, the Muslim United Front, would come a distant second (that was never in doubt) but that it would fail. One of those who lost his seat by a mere 35 votes after a prolonged recount was Syed Salahuddin, who went on to found the Hizbul- Mujahideen. What followed is now history.

WHEN ABDULLAH came back to power in 1996, one of his main preoccupations was to prevent the Hurriyat and the JKLF from returning to the mainstream of Kashmiri politics. In this, he had ruthless, albeit unsolicited, help of the ISI. In 2000, when Abdul Majid Dar, the leader of the Hizbul- Mujahideen in Kashmir Valley, offered a ceasefire and agreed to secret talks with the Indian Home Secretary, the J&K government sabotaged the talks by getting its principal information officer and its director-general of police to inform the media of the conference. The time they gave them, however, was 90 minutes before the secret meeting was to have started. As a result, when Dar and his companions arrived at Chashma-shahi guest house, they found 150 press and television journalists waiting for them (Dar later broke with Salahuddin and was duly assassinated).

When, a few months later, the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s unilateral announcement of a ceasefire was enthusiastically endorsed by the Hurriyat, Abdullah made no secret of his scepticism and warned that the ceasefire would only undo the gains made by the security forces in the previous years. When P Chidambaram initiated his quiet diplomacy in 2009 and invited Yasin Malik and the Mirwaiz for talks, one of Kashmir’s most senior police officers leaked the information deliberately to the press.

In recent weeks, as the search for an alternative to the endless, mindless killing of Kashmiri youth gathered momentum, the NC devoted all its energies to discrediting its main political rival, the PDP. Thus, for weeks, everyone in power firmly believed that it was the PDP that was behind the stone-pelting. When Abdul Ahad Jan threw a shoe at Omar Abdullah on 15 August, by the evening nearly all the television newsrooms in Delhi had received ‘credible information’ that he had been incited into doing so by Nizamuddin Bhat, the secretary-general of the PDP. And when the state government summarily dismissed the extraordinarily able, and incorruptible, chairman of the J&K Bank, Haseeb Drabu, the story quickly spread that he had been dismissed because he had been financing the stone-pelters. Drabu had been appointed by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.

It is against this background that Delhi needs to consider the wisdom of continuing to back the Omar Abdullah government through thick and thin. There is very substantial, if not legally conclusive, evidence that India is becoming the victim of one political party’s determination to stay in power, no matter what the cost. The cost is a steadily hardening animosity in Kashmir as the belief gains ground that Delhi is behind the state government’s killing spree. Whether this perception is true or false is no longer relevant. The only thing that matters is what the Kashmiris believe.

It is still within Delhi’s power to change this perception. Four steps will do so more completely than the government can imagine today. These are, one, to suspend the assembly and create an interim government for a few months under the venerable Congress leader Saifuddin Soz; if for some reason this proves impossible, then declare Governor’s rule straightaway.

Two, announce that curfew and Section 144 will no longer be applied. But ask all processionists and demonstrators to keep the peace and cooperate with the police in ensuring that there are no mishaps. Both the Hurriyat and the police are already familiar with these procedures as they had been successfully used to avoid conflict during the vast post-Amarnath demonstrations from 14 to 21 August 2008, before New Delhi inexplicably reversed its policy of restraint and opted for a state-wide crackdown.

Three, Delhi should, through clear and unambiguous announcements, make it clear that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Disturbed Areas Act will be lifted from the entire Valley but only after cooperation between the public and the police has been re-established and demonstrations have become orderly and peaceful.

Four, a fresh general election will be held as soon as life returns to normal in the Valley. Delhi will then lose no time in resuming a dialogue with the elected government on ways to move towards lasting empowerment of the Kashmiri people within the framework of the Indian Union and, when conditions are once more propitious, with Pakistan.

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Why silence over Kashmir speaks volumes

By Pankaj Mishra (Indian author and writer of literary and political essays)

Bloody protests against military rule get little coverage, while India maintains its reputation 

Once known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than 80,000 people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killings fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet. In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valley's 4 million Muslims are exposed to extra-judicial execution, rape and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.

Why then does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldn't be louder and clearer. India has contained the insurgency provoked in 1989 by its rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators that fill the streets of Kashmir's cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones. Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle their voices as it did of the old one. Already this summer, soldiers have shot dead more than 50 protestors, most of them teenagers.

The New York Times this week described the protests as a comprehensive"intifada-like popular revolt". They indeed have a broader mass base than the Green Movement does in Iran. But no colour-coded revolution is heralded in Kashmir by western commentators. The BBC and CNN don't endlessly loop clips of little children being shot in the head by Indian soldiers. Bloggers and tweeters in the west fail to keep a virtual vigil by the side of the dead and the wounded. No sooner than his office issued it last week, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, hastened to retract a feeble statement expressing concern over the situation in Kashmir.

Kashmiri Muslims are understandably bitter. As Parvaiz Bukhari, a journalist, said early this week the stones flung randomly by protestors have become "the voice of a neglected people" convinced that the world deliberately ignores their plight. The veteran Kashmiri journalist Masood Hussain confessed to the near-total futility of his painstaking auditing of atrocity over two decades. For Kashmir has turned out to be a "great suppression story".

The cautiousness – or timidity – of western politicians is easy to understand. Apart from appearing as a lifeline to flailing western economies, India is a counterweight, at least in the fantasies of western strategists, to China. A month before his election, Barack Obama declared that resolving the "Kashmir crisis" was among his "critical tasks". Since then, the US president hasn't uttered a word about this ur-crisis that has seeded all major conflicts in south Asia. David Cameron was advised a similar strategic public silence on his visit to India last fortnight.

Those western pundits who are always ready to assault illiberal regimes worldwide on behalf of democracy ought not to be so tongue-tied. Here is a well-educated Muslim population, heterodox and pluralist by tradition and temperament, and desperate for genuine democracy. However, intellectuals preoccupied by transcendent, nearly mystical, battles between civilization and barbarism tend to assume that "democratic" India, a natural ally of the "liberal" west, must be doing the right thing in Kashmir, ie fighting "Islamofascism". Thus Christopher Hitchens could call upon the Bush administration to establish a military alliance with "the other great multi-ethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism" even as an elected Hindu nationalist government stood accused of organising a pogrom that killed more than 2,000 Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat.

Electoral democracy in multi-ethnic, multi-religious India is one of the modern era's most utopian political experiments, increasingly vulnerable to malfunction and failure, and, consequently, to militant disaffection and state terror. But then the west's new masters of humanitarian war, busy painting grand ideological struggles on broad, rolling canvases, are prone to miss the human position of suffering and injustice.

Indian writers and intellectuals, who witnessed the corrosion of India's secular democracy by Hindu supremacists, seem better acquainted with the messy realities concealed by stirring abstractions. But on Kashmir they often appear as evasive as their Chinese peers are on Tibet. They may have justifiably recoiled from the fundamentalist and brutish aspect of the revolt in the valley. But the massive non-violent protests in Kashmir since 2008 haven't released a flood of pent-up sympathy from them.

Few people are as well positioned as the much-revered Amartya Sen to provoke national introspection on Kashmir. Indeed, no one can fault Sen's commitment to justice for the poor and defenceless in India. Yet Sen relegates Kashmir to footnotes in both of his recent books: The Argumentative Indian and Identity and Violence.

Certainly, as Arundhati Roy's recent writings prove, anyone initiating a frank discussion on Kashmir risks a storm of vituperation from the Indian understudies of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. The choleric TV anchors, partisan journalists and opinion-mongers of India's corporate media routinely amplify the falsehoods and deceptions of Indian intelligence agencies in Kashmir. Blaming Pakistan or Islamic fundamentalists, as the Economist pointed out last week, has "got much harder" for the Indian government, which, has "long denied the great extent to which Kashmiris want rid of India". Nevertheless, it tries; and, as the political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the few fair-minded commentators on this subject, points out, the Indian media now acts in concert with the government "to deny any legitimacy to protests in Kashmir".

This effective censorship reassures those Indians anxious not to let mutinous Kashmiris sully the currently garish notions of India as an "economic powerhouse" and "vibrant democracy" – the calling cards with which Indian elites apply for membership to the exclusive clubs of the west. In Kashmir, however, the net effect is deeper anger and alienation. As Bukhari puts it, Kashmiris hold India's journalists as responsible as its politicians for "muzzling and misinterpreting" them.

"The promise," Mehta writes, "of a liberal India is slowly dying". For Kashmiris this promise has proved as hollow as that of the fundamentalist Islam exported by Pakistan. Liberated from political deceptions, the young men on the streets of Kashmir today seem simply to want to express their hatred of the state's impersonal brutality, and to commemorate lives freshly ruined by it. As the Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer wrote this week in a moving Letter to an Unknown Indian, Indian journalists might edit out the "faces of the murdered boys", and "their grieving fathers"; they may not show "the video of a woman in Anantnag, washing the blood of the boys who were killed outside her house". But "Kashmir sees the unedited Kashmir."

And it remembers. "Like many other Kashmiris," Peer writes, "I have been in silence, committing to memory the deed, the date." Apart from the youth on the streets, there are also those with their noses in books, or pressed against window bars. Soon this generation will make its way into the world with its private traumas. Life under political oppression has begun to yield, in the slow bitter way it does, a rich intellectual and artistic harvest: Peer's memoir Curfewed Night will be followed early next year by a novel by Waheed Mirza. There are more works to come; Kashmiris will increasingly speak for themselves. One can only hope that their voices will finally penetrate our indifference and even occasionally prick our conscience.

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Kashmir's cry for 'freedom' ( By Soutik Biswas, online correspondent for BBC News in India.)

It is yesterday once more in Kashmir. From the time I have flown into the valley on Monday, Srinagar has resembled a ghost town, bringing back memories of a visit two years ago. The only signs of life are tetchy security forces manning checkpoints or idly fiddling with their mobile phones, the odd chemist or a cigarette shop that is open, an occasional car with a flashing red beacon or an ambulance hurtling down its empty roads, a "ration truck" bringing in supplies to its besieged residents.

The interminable day and night curfews have drained all life out of Srinagar. People have retreated into their homes leaving back graffiti on the walls screaming Go Back India! In the restive old city, surly young men sit outside shuttered homes and shops and glare at the troops peering out of sandbagged bunkers and manning the razor wire checkpoints. People wake up at the crack of dawn to store up on supplies when the grocers open for a few minutes. At night, an eerie silence descends over the city as the moon plays hide and seek with the clouds.

It is another summer of unrest in what is possibly the most scenic valley in the world. Two months of cyclical violence between stone pelting protesters and heavily armed security forces have left more than 50 dead - mostly teenagers. Things are looking grimmer than ever before. It's a summer that could turn out to be another defining point in the valley's tortured history. A whole generation of children of the conflict - Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer evocatively calls it their "war of adolescence" - who grew up in the days of militancy and violence in the early 1990s are driving the protests today. (Seven out of 10 Kashmiris are below 25.)

Growing up in the shadow of the gun and what they say is "perpetual humiliation" by the security forces, they are angry, alienated and distrustful of the state. As prominent opposition leader Mehbooba Mufti tells me when I visit her at her heavily secured home overlooking the stunning Dal lake: "If these young men are not given something to look forward to, God help Kashmir." The valley, most residents say, is in the early stages of an intifada.

Mainstream politicians admit that they have lost confidence of the people. "We can only wait and watch how the situation develops," says Ms Mufti. The hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani appears to be only leader with a modicum of legitimacy, however precarious. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's "give peace a chance " appeal to Kashmiris in a televised speech on Tuesday appears to have left them cold. When politics and the state withers away, it creates a dangerous vacuum. One senses an early beginning of this in Kashmir today.

In the labyrinthine heart of the old city of cone-roofed cheek by jowl brick homes and shops, old "heritage" houses in elegant decrepitude, overflowing sewers and potholed roads, India has receded further from the collective consciousness of its residents. In their homes, mothers are stocking memories of their dead children in trunks, suitcases, cupboards and school bags. Most have died in the firing by security forces.

One mother emptied a cupboard and a suitcase full of of her 14 yr-old boy's belongings for me. Wamiq Farooq had gone to play in the neighbourhood when a tear gas shell fired by the troops exploded on his head. Doctors tried to revive him for an hour at the hospital before declaring him dead.

Now, sitting on a brown rug in a modest family home, his mother brings out Wamiq's red tie, red belt, white cap, fraying blue uniform, half a dozen school trophies, report cards, school certificates and then his pithy death certificate. "He is sure to be a face in the crowd," writes his school principal on one certificate praising Wamiq, the Tom and Jerry cartoons and science-loving teenaged son of a street vendor father. Then she slowly puts back Wamiq - his life and death - back into the suitcase and the cupboard and tells me, her eyes welling up: "I never understood why Kashmiri people demand freedom. After Wamiq's death, I do. I want freedom too. So that my children can return home unharmed and in peace."

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The world wants to think the best about India. So we turn our back on Kashmir

By Dean Nelson (Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor)

Think of India and it’s all Gandhian saintliness, Ravi Shankar’s sitar, a whiff of incense and the feel-good beats of Bollywood Bhangra. These memories, sounds and smells conjure images of the world’s largest democracy, where tolerance and spirituality supposedly reign over realpolitik.

We don’t think of it as a country whose troops are jailing opposition leaders or placing them under house arrest, denying people the right to gather in prayer, beating children to death, or massacring stone-throwing protesters. The words “shoot to kill” are a grim relic from our own recent past, and certainly nothing we ever associate with India.

That’s why India is the world’s first “soft superpower”. It can barely do wrong for doing right, and if it does we don’t really want to know. As David Cameron made perfectly clear during his recent visit, we’re interested in India as the world’s second fastest-growing economy and by its contribution to the war on terrorism, but not how it treats its own people.

So despite the fact that 50 mainly young men and teenagers have either been shot or beaten to death in the last eight weeks in Kashmir; the two main separatist leaders have been jailed or placed under house arrest; that the Kashmir Valley has been locked down and the streets of Srinagar occupied by swaggering Indian troops who threaten housewives with big sticks, our leaders have remained completely silent.

Had these incidents been in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan, or had the victims been Tibetans revolting against Chinese rule, we would have called it a massacre. But India’s great “soft power” is that the world wants to think the best of it.

To that end, our leaders overlooked the 53 young men and teenagers who were treated for bullet wounds in just one hospital in Kashmir’s state capital, Srinagar, last week. They had been shot either for throwing stones during protests against killings by Indian security forces in Kashmir – or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in their own city.

This present wave of protests began after Indian soldiers shot dead three young Muslim men in the hope of passing them off as Pakistani terrorists and themselves as war heroes. They had lured them with the promise of jobs. A few weeks later a 17-year-old schoolboy was killed when Indian police fired a tear gas canister at his head.

Last week I interviewed Fayaz Ahmad Rah, a Srinagar fruit seller, as he mourned the death of his nine-year-old son, Sameer. Neighbours told me they had seen members of India’s paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force beat him to death with sticks and then dump his body in stinging nettles. The CRPF claims he was in fact a protester and that he had been trampled by other demonstrators as they fled a police advance.

Fayaz said his son had been walking through their usually safe tiny back lanes to his uncle’s house 100 metres away after stopping to buy sweets. When he washed his son’s body for burial, there was a half-chewed toffee still in his mouth, he said.

Over the last eight weeks a round of teenage civilian deaths, protests and more shootings followed by further protests has sucked Kashmir into a bleak vortex. But since it began, not a single member of India’s security forces has been shot or killed. It couldn’t be a more unequal contest.

Luckily for India, it happened in Kashmir where the words “Muslim”, “Pakistan” and “militants” shield what is either bad marksmanship or a shoot to kill policy from scrutiny and criticism.

This decision to look the other way only fuels the anger in Kashmir. From his home where he was being held under house arrest last week, separatist spiritual leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told me India had turned Kashmir into a “police state” and that British politicians and others were turning their back on it.

He had not been allowed to go to his mosque for more than six weeks, while other separatist Hurriyat leaders were also in jail or under house arrest. In many mosques throughout the state, only men over the age of 50 – regarded as beyond their stone-throwing years – have been allowed to meet to pray.

“It’s a direct interference in our religious affairs, a situation in which in a muslim state, if we’re not allowed to pray, the Muftis will say we have to call a war on the state,” he said.

Those demonstrating are part of a new generation born into violent protest which has seen leaders like Mirwaiz Umar Farooq sacrifice their credibility for talks with India, which came to nothing. “People now ask the question ‘you went for dialogue, what did you get? Did the killings or violence or disappearances stop?’ All it did was undermine the credibility of those who wanted, like me, to give dialogue a chance,” he said.

He believes India is not sincere about talks and is only interested in continual delay in the hope that protests and the desire for Kashmiri independence will peter out.

India has its own arguments, of course. It focuses on earlier killings and “ethnic cleansing” of Kashmiri pandits, and the reluctance of Buddhist Ladakh and Hindu and Sikh majority Jammu to follow the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley into Pakistan or independence. It criticises the refusal of separatist parties to take part in state assembly elections.

These are valid points, and I certainly don’t have the answers to a problem which has blighted India and Pakistan and provoked three wars between the nuclear enemies since their independence from Britain.

But I do think Britain might come to regret its silence and India its troops’ brutality. We risk alienating the remaining friends we have in the Muslim world and within our own substantial Kashmiri community in Britain. India risks losing the tremendous goodwill it had built up throughout the world over decades.

The Kashmiris, on the other hand, have little left to lose: the world has forgotten them.

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