Attacks renew Kashmir tensions

"The gradual, stepped-up pressure by [Prime Minister] Vajpayee was aimed at Pakistan, at the US to do something about Pakistan, and at his domestic audience," says E. Sridharan, a political scientist with the University of Pennsylvania in New Delhi. "He [Vajpayee] had to show Indians that this time it was necessary to go beyond words. Now things are cooling."

But are they?

"The Indians are waiting. But they aren't thinking about the long-term ramifications of a cross-border action," says the Western government source. "This is dangerous."

The Kashmir dispute, rising out of the 1947 partition of India, when the ruling Hindu maharajah opted in a pressure-filled moment to join India - against the assumed wishes of the Muslim majority population - is the stuff of diplomatic lore, doctoral theses, and three wars.

After the partition, Pakistan received a UN resolution for a referendum by Kashmiris about which side they preferred. (In an emotional speech in Srinagar, in the 1950s, Jahawarlal Nehru, India's first leader also promised a vote.) But a vote has never taken place, and India's cardinal position on Kashmir is that the subject is an internal matter.

For Pakistanis, including schoolchildren, Kashmir is taught as an integral part of a national identity - that was never allowed to develop and flourish.

Musharraf has said, while in office, that there are distinctions between Kashmeri "freedom fighters" engaged in a just cause or legitimate "jihad" against military targets - and "terrorists." India has rejected the argument - and points to some five militant groups operating from Pakistan as terrorists. (The US last week put two of them, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, on its list of terrorist organizations.)

A tiny minority in Pakistan argues that while fighting for Kashmir may be historically justified, in practice it is costly and debilitating. "Kashmir may be a noble cause, but not at the expense of our nation and our future development," says former Army general Talat Masood, a consultant in Islamabad.

One point rarely made in either Delhi or Islamabad, is the persistent and overwhelming popularity in Kashmir itself for independence. The sentiment is often derided as fanciful. But much of the violent insurgency that began in the late 1980s against India by militant young men (known as "the boys") was a result, say historians in Srinagar, of the eviseration of a decades-long and politically sophisticated movement for a Kashmeri right to self-determination. T

"A lot of Indian politicians talk today as if the militant struggles of Kashmir are somehow Islamic in nature," says a university historian in Srinagar. "The Kashmir struggle long predates Islamic movements like the Taliban."

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