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India weighs troop reduction in quieter Kashmir
The demilitarization of Kashmir would represent a final push toward peace between India and Pakistan.
By Anuj Chopra | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 2, 2007 edition
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SRINAGAR, INDIAN KASHMIR - For the first time in several years, the Indian government on Friday gave indications that it might finally consider the longstanding demands of Kashmiris to reduce its troop presence in the Kashmir valley.
Under persistent pressure from the People's Democratic Party (PDP), a ruling coalition partner in the semiautonomous Kashmiri government, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that India's Defense Ministry has convened a committee of experts to study plans for demilitarizing the region.
For many Kashmiris, the new potential for troop reduction indicates a home stretch in the 17-year-long effort to end the region's violent conflict. Troop reductions in Kashmir would also represent a final push toward peace between India and Pakistan. Two of the three major wars the nations have fought with each other have been closely related to disagreement over the future of the Kashmir Valley.
The number of Indian troops, widely seen as the visible agent of Indian oppression, now stands at nearly 600,000 – a significant increase from 36,000 in 1989 when militancy flared.
But by the Indian government's own estimates, violent deaths have dropped by two-thirds since 2001, to 3 a day from 10, the lowest since 1989. Some 376 terrorists have surrendered to Indian security forces in the three years preceding Nov. 30, 2006, according to India's Home Ministry.
The number of Islamic militants operating in the valley have also decreased to about 1,400 from nearly 10,000 in the early 1990s.
"It is unjustified having so many troops here," says Khurram Pervez, a Kashmiri human rights activist from the Coalition of Civil Society in Srinagar, the region's summer capital. "It's understandable to have, say, 100,000 troops to fight a few hundred militants. Not 600,000."
Calls for demilitarization received fresh impetus after several recent, high-profile alleged human rights abuses on the part of Indian soldiers in the region. Members of the Indian Army were held in December on charges of killing innocent Kashmiri civilians and passing off their bodies as unidentified terrorists in order to increase their eligibility for promotion.
Kashmiris are also lobbying for the repeal of the Indian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a law that many human rights groups say grants Indian soldiers sweeping impunity to commit human rights violations under the guise of fighting terrorism.
According to Indian government estimates, about 1,017 Kashmiris have disappeared mysteriously or were killed in fake gunfights. Human rights groups say that the figure is nearly eight times higher. In January this year, Mohammed Mir, a 22-year-old car mechanic in Srinagar, mysteriously disappeared. Days later, his body, which was riddled with bullets, was handed over to his family by the 52 Rashtriya Rifles, a regiment of the Indian Army, who said that he was a militant killed in action.
"My son was a good man," says his father, Abdul Mir. "[The Army] murdered him."
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