Bloodshed in the Kashmir Valley

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In Indian-administered Kashmir, George Arney reflects on the recent clashes between Muslim demonstrators and police which have left many dead.

Women wait at a hospital for relatives injured in clashes with policeFor the son of a doctor who always blenched at even the mention of blood, I have spent far too much time during my reporting career in hospitals.

And a lot of those hospitals have been in Indian Kashmir.

At the end of the 1980s, an armed rebellion broke out in Kashmir against Indian rule.

Hospitals in the picturesque but dilapidated capital Srinagar were always treating young Kashmiris - shot in demonstrations, maimed by Muslim militants or recovering from being tortured in the interrogation centres located innocuously in grand colonial-era mansions overlooking Srinagar's Dal Lake, which was famed, in more peaceful times, for its Mughal gardens and its quaint houseboats.

Hospitals were good places to go to get the stories of young people caught up in the Kashmir tragedy.

Summer of violence

Nearly 20 years on, the same is still true.

After years of relative calm, tensions have been rising in the Kashmir ValleyThe sparks of rebellion against India - which had died down in recent years - flared up again dramatically during the summer.

The streets were filled again with demonstrators and chants of "azaadi", or freedom.

The hospitals were filled again with young men and boys, shot down by the security forces.

So once again, I find myself striding down those same hospital corridors with their overpowering reek of antiseptic and urine.

The corridors echo with the fretting of anxious relatives.

Two small boys are sitting cross-legged in a corner, begging for coins to buy medicine for their families.

This time, thank heavens, I am not bound for any of the wards.

I am seeking out a hospital doctor, who, I am told, will fill me in on the story of what has been happening.

Dr Iqbal was shocked by the protesters' injuiresI find him in his consulting room with a couple of colleagues, hunched over a laptop on which video clips are being played of a recent demonstration.

Gunshots ring out. Protesters scatter in panic.

"This is where they opened fire," the doctor says. "Look! Look at these pictures.

"Look how they shot down Sheikh Aziz. He was trying to calm the crowd down.

"He was unarmed. They were all unarmed."

I was expecting to find cool, professional judgement.

As one of Srinagar's senior surgeons, Dr Iqbal has seen it all before. But he is outraged. He is quietly incandescent with anger.

Hospital gassed

The story he tells me is of a day in August when a big protest march set off for the Line of Control - the heavily armed de facto border which for more than half a century has cut Greater Kashmir in two - splitting it down the middle like some sub-continental Iron Curtain - between India and Pakistan.

The protest march was, inevitably, stopped well before it reached the Line of Control.

Not difficult to stop it on narrow, mountain roads. There was, the doctor says, absolutely no reason to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed demonstrators.

But for Dr Iqbal, what happened afterwards was even worse.

The dead and the wounded were brought back to Srinagar, back to his hospital.

No doubt emotions were high. No doubt slogans were chanted.

But did that justify tear gas being fired into the hospital? Right into the casualty department?

For more than an hour, Dr Iqbal and his colleagues were unable to do their jobs.

Troops are everywhere, behind the sand-bagged gun emplacements on every street corner, patrolling More than a hundred badly wounded people had been brought in. He could not give them proper care. And that really upset him.

"I've got children myself," he said. "How do you tell a 15-year-old boy that you've just chopped his leg off near the hip - that he's going to be maimed for life?

"Until that day when they fired tear gas shells into the casualty ward, I was an Indian to the core, I had no grudges with India.

"But that day, I knew we were not dealing with human beings on the other side."

Military patrols

No doubt the "other side", India, has its version of events.

Kashmiris are often seen as treacherous - pawns of Pakistan - ungrateful Muslim fifth-columnists. Both sides tend to see the other as alien.

A curfew was imposed in after confrontations with policeBut even as a neutral observer, you are forced - in Kashmir - to see some things through Kashmiri eyes.

Troops are everywhere, behind the sand-bagged gun emplacements on every street corner, patrolling.

Their vehicles - bursting with armed, masked men - roar down Kashmir's tree-lined avenues, past peasants, flocks of sheep, small horses carrying even smaller nomad children.

The Kashmir Valley only has a population of around five million people.

There are, the army says, fewer than 500 militants still operating there. Yet more than half a million Indian soldiers and paramilitary police are still patrolling its mountains, its towns and its villages.

While they are still there, acting, as Kashmiris see it, like an army of occupation, opening fire on unarmed demonstrators, it is hard to see how moderate, middle-class Kashmiris, like Dr Iqbal, will ever be persuaded of the benefits of rule from Delhi.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 18 October, 2008 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a>for World Service transmission times.