JAMMU: Rampaging mobs in this winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir torched government buildings, including a police post, and repeatedly clashed with security forces on the final day of their court arrest campaign yesterday. At least 50 people were injured.
Hundreds of Hindu protesters defied a curfew imposed to defuse protests over a land row with the region’s Muslims. Hindu crowds also set fire to a government apartment in Jammu and hundreds, including children, marched to police stations and courted arrest as part of their movement to flood the region’s jails in a civil disobedience campaign.
The land row pits Muslims in the Kashmir Valley against Hindus in Jammu, the two main regions that make up Jammu and Kashmir state. The dispute and the weeks of protests that have followed have become one of the toughest challenges facing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government since it took office in 2004.
The crisis snowballed into massive protests this month, boosting separatists in Kashmir who want India’s only Muslim-majority region to secede. Police have killed at least 22 Muslim protesters in Kashmir.
India’s National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan yesterday traveled to Srinagar, Kashmir’s Muslim-majority summer capital, to meet security officials.
In a significant development, the two groups of the separatist Hurriyat Conference have decided to reconstitute their recently formed coordination committee. After a three-hour long meeting of its executive committee in Srinagar, the moderate Hurriyat group yesterday decided to recall two of its senior leaders, Shabir Ahmad Shah and Nayeem Khan, from the coordination committee formed recently to handle the unity moves between the two Hurriyat groups and to announce joint programs.
Shabir Shah, the chairman of the Democratic Freedom Party, is a senior executive member of Mirwaiz Omar Farooq’s moderate Hurriyat group. Nayeem Khan, the chairman of the National Front, is also a senior Hurriyat leader of the Mirwaiz group. Khan is also the provincial president of the moderate Hurriyat.
“We were told that we have not succeeded in handling the coordination between the two Hurriyat groups properly,” Khan told IANS.
