SRINAGAR, India: Police shot dead at least 13 people in India’s predominantly Muslim Kashmir Valley yesterday as protests against an economic blockade by Hindus over a land row snowballed.
In the neighboring Hindu-dominated Jammu region of the northern Jammu and Kashmir state, one person was killed and several were injured when Hindus and Muslims clashed.
At least 200 people, including 85 policemen, were injured in a dozen separate incidents of police firing across Kashmir a day after a separatist leader was killed by police while trying to lead Muslim traders into Pakistan.
Even as state authorities clamped curfews on all major towns in the valley and deployed police and paramilitary forces to keep order, people came out of their homes and held protest demonstrations.
Violence erupted Monday after four people, including Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, were killed in police firing for opposing a blockade by Hindus of a key highway that has stranded hundreds of trucks carrying food and other supplies in and out of the region.
Abdul Aziz was part of the group attempting to march to Azad Kashmir to protest the blockade and threatening to sell Kashmir’s farm products across the border. Traders have been complaining of shortages of food and medicine because of the highway blockade, and say that hundreds of truckloads of Kashmiri fruit are spoiling because they cannot be delivered.
The Hindu minority was angered when the state government reversed a decision to give 99 acres of land to a Hindu trust to build facilities for people visiting the Amarnath shrine. Muslims had complained that the gift of land would alter the religious balance in the region.
