Pradeep Magazine, a Kashmiri Hindu, remembers his life in the Muslim-dominated valley and wonders why things turned out so wrong. From Hindustan Times:
To be a Kashmiri and a Hindu can be a painful experience these days. To which side of the divide do we belong? The answer is taken for granted and in this fight between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between Hindu and Muslim, I am supposed to articulate the agony of exile, the religious persecution of ‘us’, minorities, and fight for my homeland from which we have been thrown out through ‘violent’ means.
These are questions that are not easy to answer, especially by someone whose father migrated from the Valley in the early 60s to better his economic prospects. I am a migrant like a large number of Kashmiris who had been moving out of the Valley into mainland India for many decades now, as there were not many jobs back home for want of any economic development.
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A Jihad Grows in Kashmir
Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times:
For more than a week now, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have filled the streets of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-ruled Kashmir, shouting “azadi” (freedom) and raising the green flag of Islam. These demonstrations, the largest in nearly two decades, remind many of us why in 2000 President Bill Clinton described Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both India and Pakistan, as “the most dangerous place on earth.”
Mr. Clinton sounded a bit hyperbolic back then. Dangerous, you wanted to ask, to whom? Though more than a decade old, the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir, which Pakistan’s rogue intelligence agency had infiltrated with jihadi terrorists, was not much known outside South Asia. But then the Clinton administration had found itself compelled to intervene in 1999 when India and Pakistan fought a limited but brutal war near the so-called line of control that divides Indian Kashmir from the Pakistani-held portion of the formerly independent state.
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