Will 2009 BE KASHMIR’S YEAR OF DELIVERANCE?

Will 2009 BE KASHMIR’S YEAR OF DELIVERANCE?

Politics at the crossroads of past and present

Praveen Swami

PDP politicians chose not to confront the Islamists. Instead, the party lurched into a cycle of competitive chauvinism, in an effort to appropriate the Islamists’ causes and use state power to realise them. Hindu fundamentalists in Jammu, in turn, used this campaign to initiate their own communal programme, built around cow-protection and opposition to supposed ethnic-Kashmiri expansionism. In the summer, these tensions exploded in the form of protests for and against land-use rights to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board — with terrible consequences.

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