Srinagar’s Shalimar Gardens has been the location of so many Bollywood songs that for any Indian, it’s impossible not to hear the tunes in one’s head when one is there.
By our correspondent in Kashmir
Millions of honeymooning couples have come here over the years, to stroll hand in hand along the stone paths in between the perfectly maintained flower beds, to sit on the stone benches in the cool gateways. But today, Shalimar is deserted except for the mali’s weeding the flower beds, or cutting the grass.
Srinagar’s tourist areas are ghost towns. Kashmiri shawl shops, handicraft factories, hotels, taxi drivers and shikara boat owners are being systematically bankrupted by the nearly two months of curfew and hartal imposed in turns by the police and the separatist parties.
Driving on the deserted roads of Srinagar is an eerie experience – in no other Indian city could one speed along major city arteries without even slowing down at major intersections. Policemen, padded down and helmeted like American football players are the only ones to be seen on the roads.
Yesterday we came across a group of teenage boys throwing stones at police standing about 50 metres away. Our vehicle braked suddenly and tried to back away. There was a tense silence in the van – we’d just come back from a hospital where we had met several people who’d been shot by bullets or tear gas shells during such demonstrations. Luckily in this case, the police men just backed away and didn’t fire into the crowd.
The police, it seems are now wary of opening fire. The boys in these protest groups have taken to opening their shirts and coming right up close to the security forces to ask them to shoot.
“They are now ready to die” one journalist told me. “Why not – what do they have to live for in this situation?”
Unless Delhi measures the temperature on the street correctly very soon, the violence will continue and the hospitals will continue filling up. For the first time, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a public statement yesterday saying his heart was with the Kashmiri youth. He made no judgement about the street violence and avoided the terms “stone pelters” which has been used to make this look like a movement of violent youth instead of the pan-Kashmiri sentiment that it is.
“Too little and too late” said a senior bureaucrat to me after the statement – “did it take 51 deaths in two months to get the PM to acknowledge what’s happening here, let alone the 100,000 deaths over the last 20 years?” It’s a common perception amongst Kashmiris that those people in “mainland India” as they see them – only notice Kashmir when Kashmiri blood is spilt.
I talk to a man with a bullet wound in his thigh. In his hospital bed he is surrounded by cousins and brothers who’ve come to help care for him. What do you want now I ask. I know the answer before it comes out of his mouth. It is the word you hear everywhere all over Kashmir – Azadi. Freedom.
