The Kashmiri people’s struggle for freedom from India’s rule is “overwhelmingly homegrown”, The New York Times said in an in-depth dispatch from Indian occupied Kashmir where the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) anti-Muslim policies have “spurred more people to turn against the government.”
“The conflict today is probably driven less by geopolitics than by internal Indian politics, which have increasingly taken an anti-Muslim direction,” Times’ Correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman wrote from Qasbayar, a Kashmiri village.
The report said that most of the fighters are young men who draw support from a population “deeply resentful of India’s governing party and years of occupation.”
“Kashmir sits on the frontier of India and Pakistan, and both countries have spilt rivers of blood over it, correspondent Gettleman wrote.
“Three times, they have gone to war, and tens of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict. It is one of Asia’s most dangerous flash points, where a million troops have squared off along the disputed border. Both sides now wield nuclear arms. And the two sides are divided by religion, with Kashmir stuck in the middle,” he said. [Keep reading ........]