Unrest has roiled Kashmir since June, leaving at least 40 people dead, including five killed in the past two days when soldiers and police fired at Muslim protesters pressing for India to quit the region.
The latest death came Tuesday when a man shot during a protest a day earlier died from his injuries, according a police official who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
He was one of 38 people hospitalized with bullet wounds following Monday’s protests in Srinagar, the main city in India’s part of Kashmir.
The government of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state said in a statement that soldiers opened fire Monday after protesters shot at them, wounding two soldiers and two police officers. At least 17 protesters were believed to have been wounded.
But separatist groups organizing the protests have repeatedly said such accusations are an attempt by authorities to justify the use of force against unarmed civilians.
“India has no reason to clamp down on peaceful protests,” Masarat Aalam, a prominent separatist leader, said Tuesday.
With a curfew in a place Tuesday for a third straight day in the Kashmir Valley, the Muslim heart of Kashmir, there was little chance for protesters to get organised and out on the streets.
Among preventative measures, police arrested two more key separatist leaders Tuesday. Mohammed Ashraf Sehrai and Aasiyeh Andrabi were taken from their homes in Srinagar, said police officer Afadul Mujtaba.
At least three prominent separatists, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Omer Farooq, and Mohammed Yasin Malik, were arrested Monday, police said.
Newspapers were also having trouble handling the restrictions and none have been published in Kashmir for the past two days. It wasn’t clear if the government was trying to prevent newspapers from publishing. Authorities have ordered cable operators not to broadcast local Kashmiri news channels, presumably to limit images of the unrest, and Masud Samoon, a senior Kashmiri official, said the curfew would not be relaxed on Tuesday.
“We’ll decide in the evening” whether to keep it in place on Wednesday, he told The Associated Press.
Farooq Khan, president of the Kashmir Press Photographers Association, said paramilitary soldiers beat six journalists on Tuesday, even though they were carrying government-issued curfew passes.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists condemned all restrictions on the media in Kashmir in a statement Tuesday, and urged local authorities to protect journalists reporting on the unrest.
Also Tuesday, Hindu protesters clashed with police and paramilitary forces in and around Jammu, the region’s only predominantly Hindu city. Police shot one protester who has been taken to a hospital, said Randeep Kumar, the police superintendent in Jammu.
Kashmir’s crisis began in June when Muslims launched protests complaining that a government decision to transfer land to a Hindu shrine in Kashmir was actually a settlement plan meant to alter the religious balance in the region. After the plan was rescinded, Hindus took to the streets of Jammu demanding it be restored.
The unrest has unleashed pent-up tensions between Kashmir’s Muslims and Hindus and has threatened to snap the bonds between India and its only Muslim-majority state.
Kashmir has been divided between Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan since 1947 when the two fought their first war over the region in the aftermath of Britain’s bloody partition of the subcontinent. Both countries continue to claim Kashmir in its entirety.
Pawan Kumar, a spokesman for India’s border guards, accused the Pakistan army of firing across the cease-fire line dividing Kashmir between the longtime rivals Tuesday, wounding four Indian paramilitary soldiers.
The incident occurred in Poonch district, nearly 270 kilometres northwest of Jammu.
Pakistan army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said an Indian post actually fired shells into Pakistani territory and that Pakistan had lodged a formal protest. He would not say if anybody was wounded on the Pakistan side.
Three militants also opened fire as they sneaked from Pakistan’s part of Kashmir to India overnight, sparking a manhunt near Jammu, Indian police said Tuesday.
Kashmiri separatist movements were mostly peaceful until the start of an Islamic insurgency in 1989. The rebels want to see India’s part of the region merged with Pakistan or given independence.
At least 68,000 people have been killed in the fighting.