NEW DELHI: Indian Kashmir risks a return to militancy and violent protests if New Delhi fails to push a stalled peace process in the disputed region, one of the state’s most influential separatist leaders said on Tuesday.
Yasin Malik’s comments came amid a spurt in militant attacks in Kashmir in the last week, combined with diplomatic limbo between India and Pakistan that further complicates US efforts to battle militancy in the region.
Huge and mostly peaceful protests by pro-separatist Kashmiris in 2008 and 2009 sparked hopes New Delhi may try to reignite a peace process, but both sides made little progress amid mutual suspicion and New Delhi’s fraught ties with Islamabad after the Mumbai attacks.
“The need of the hour is to restore the credibility of the dialogue process,” Yasin Malik, head of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front which pushes for a peaceful campaign for Kashmiri independence, told Reuters during a conference in New Delhi.
“It has taken us so many years with a very hard effort to bring a transition from violent movement to non-violent movement. This transition needs to be respected ... If Kashmiris are not given respect they could fall back to a violent past.”
“For 15 years I have been propagating non-violence but ... there are signs of frustration among both the youth and the older people, because there were huge protests and no one seemed to listen,” said Malik, a former militant.
Malik’s history underscores the problems facing the peaceful separatist cause. Imprisoned as a militant in 1990, he renounced violence and declared a cease-fire in 1994, but he has been often imprisoned and his peaceful aims have so far given little fruit.
“Since the cease-fire I have lost 600 colleagues and been arrested 200 times. There have been three attempts on my life,” Malik said, before rolling up his trousers to show what he said were the marks of torture by security forces.
Many experts see a peace process in Kashmir as key to improving India’s relations with Pakistan, allowing Islamabad to divert its resources from its eastern border to focus on helping the United States battle Al-Qaeda and Taleban militants. But New Delhi continues to drag its feet over holding talks with Pakistan, which lays claim to Kashmir, saying that it must first crack down on militants behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered to help resume talks over Pakistan and Kashmir. “I have no reason to doubt his integrity,” Malik said. “But he is surrounded by military bureaucracy, he is surrounded by civil bureaucracy. Some of these people are constraining him.”
