SRINAGAR: A trans-Kashmir bus service resumed yesterday after it was suspended in the wake of massive demonstrations in the Indian part of the disputed region, officials said.

Anti-India protests hit the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley last week, forcing authorities to halt the route. The demonstrations were triggered by the police firing on Muslim protesters, which left at least 22 people dead.

“The bus service has started again,” police officer Pervez Ahmed said, adding that 60 people had departed for Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Most of those travelers were residents of Pakistani Kashmir, eager to go home after witnessing weeks of protests, Ahmed said.

The service began in 2005, a year after India and Pakistan launched a peace process. The mainly Muslim region has been rocked by some of the biggest protests since a deadly separatist Islamic insurgency against New Delhi’s rule erupted in 1989.

The latest tensions center around a small piece of land awarded to a Hindu pilgrimage trust, triggering Muslim protests that began in June when the order was made public. The order was then rescinded, prompting Hindu hard-liners to block the region’s main highway, which set off new waves of Muslim protests.

Hundreds of students in summer capital Srinagar yesterday took to the streets carrying black and green flags.

Hindu leaders asked people yesterday to stop paying government taxes, seeking to expand their street protests into a mass civil disobedience movement. “We will not be henceforth paying VAT (value added tax), electric and water bills and passenger tax,” said Leela Karan Sharma, a Hindu leader in Jammu.

Hundreds of Hindus in Jammu chanting anti-government slogans yesterday came out on the streets and burned effigies of ruling politicians, blaming them for failing to resolve the crisis.

The crisis has had little impact in the rest of India, but yesterday, thousands of Hindu extremists marched through the streets of the eastern state of Orissa in support of Jammu protesters.

The row has posed a political dilemma for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh months before a general election due by May.