8/18/13

Hindus hardliners raise Indian flag in Kashmir - Free Press Kashmir

Sunday, 18 Aug 2013

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Hindus hardliners raise Indian flag in Kashmir

Free Press Kashmir, Sunday, 18 Aug 2013
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Raju Gopalakrishnan SRINAGAR, Jan 26 (1992): Hardline Hindus, surrounded by more than 1,000 heavily-armed security men, raised the Indian flag in the heart of rebellious Moslem Kashmir on Sunday as militant gunfire crackled not far away. The biggest security operation ever seen in Srinagar, a hotbed of separatist militant supporters, ensured the antisecessionist flag ceremony passed off without injury but emphasised the gulf between Moslem Kashmiris and India. Every building bordering Lal Chowk (Red Square) was emptied of its Kashmiri inhabitants. Troops and paramilitary commandos took them over. According to a senior police official, more than 1,000 soldiers and paramilitary troopers stood guard in the square. They set up rocket-launcher bunkers at each corner as gunfire from the nearby old city crackled sporadically in the cold, grey morning. The ceremony was the culmination of an Ekta Yatra, or unity march, organised by the opposition Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and starting from the southern tip of India. But of the 50,000 BJP supporters who started the procession on December 11, only 70 made it to Srinagar. It failed in its original plan to go the whole way to Lal Chowk by road, with its leaders flying the last leg in military planes after repeated government warnings their safety could not be assured amid promises by militants to kill them. BJP leaders said landslides on the only road to Srinagar from India, twisting and turning through the mountains, blocked them. We have fulfilled our promises. The militants gave us a challenge and we have taken it up. They havent been able to stop us, said prominent BJP leader Madan Lal Khurana. Javed Ahmed Mir, military chief of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), had said death squads had been formed to stop the ceremony, but there was no sign of them. After flying to Srinagar on Saturday night, the leading marchers were insulated from danger by a huge security operation. They stayed overnight in paramilitary bases and were taken to Lal Chowk in a heavily-guarded motorcade through streets emptied of people by an indefinite curfew imposed after militants blew up the Kashmir police chiefs office on Friday. The police chief and four colleagues were dug out of the rubble badly injured after the boldest strike by the militants in two years of revolt in which more than 6,000 people have been killed. There was some embarrassment for BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi when the pole carrying the flag he had taken on his ziz-zag journey through India broke as he tried to raise it. Joshi had to unfurl the official flag he had earlier shunned and then tie his own one on to the second pole with a handkerchief. The militant gunfire, which went on all night, posed no direct danger to the anti-separatist demonstrators. Police reported two rocket explosions, the nearest about 1,000 yards (metres) away, but no casualties. They just want to show their presence, senior policeman C.S. Dwivedi told reporters. Joshi unfurled the flag to mark Indias Republic Day, an occasion more usually marked by Kashmiris raising the Pakistani banner. Speaking after the ceremony he reiterated the themes of his 45-day progress through India. Kashmir is an inseparable part of India, he told his few supporters. Anyone who thinks Pakistan is incomplete without Kashmir should know that India is incomplete without Pakistan.
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8/18/13

Hindus hardliners raise Indian flag in Kashmir - Free Press Kashmir

The two countries have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, since they became independent in 1947 on the partition of the British Raj. Tension remains high. India accuses Pakistan, which controls one-third of the Himalayan region, of arming and training militants in Indian-ruled Kashmir and in Punjab, where thousands of people have died in a decade-old separatist campaign. Few in India believe Islamabads denials, and Joshi hammers away at the theme that the separatist problems stem from Pakistani ambitions and government weakness in dealing with them.

Published: January 26, 1992 Updated:January 26, 2013

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