Peace Comes To Paradise

Sitting in the fortress-like police headquarters in Srinagar, Kashmir, last week, Shiv Murari Sahai, the top cop for the troubled Indian state, took an urgent phone call. That afternoon his officers had killed two Pakistan-based militants in the mountainous countryside. This brought to six the number of militants killed in firefights with police in just 24 hours, and his boss was calling for a report.

Once, this would have been a routine day for Sahai. But lately, violence in Kashmir—where separatists have waged a 20-year insurrection against India—has dropped to the lowest levels since the modern conflict began. There were just 777 politically related deaths there last year, down from 1,116 the year before and 4,507 in 2001, according to the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. According to Sahai's department, most shoot-outs are now initiated by security forces successfully hunting militants, and only 164 civilians were killed last year.

The relative quiet is owed to several factors. Hizbul-Mujahedin, Kashmir's largest militant group, is in decline: much of its leadership has either been killed, captured, bought off by the Indian security services or simply surrendered. Militants are having trouble finding fresh recruits as well, according to Indian security experts. A newly constructed fence along part of the border has helped keep fighters from slipping in from Pakistan. And Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's crackdown on Islamic militants over the past five years has dampened the striking power of many groups based in his country that target Indian Kashmir.

The waning violence has prompted a highly touted tourism revival, with an expected 850,000 visitors this year—the most since 1988, according to the state tourism secretary. While the United States and most European countries still warn their citizens against traveling there, the houseboats on Srinagar's tranquil Dal Lake are full of holidaymakers, most of them drawn from India's emerging middle class. Nearby Gulmarg is becoming a popular ski destination, and a fifth topflight golf course is set to open soon, which tourism officials hope will draw duffers from around the world.

Meanwhile, renewed negotiations between India and Pakistan—which have fought two wars over Kashmir since Partition—have raised hopes that peace may be at hand. Last month President George W. Bush told Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, the new Pakistani prime minister, that Kashmir was "ripe for solution," according to news reports citing Pakistani officials present at the meeting. While a yawning gulf between Islamabad and New Delhi remains, Pakistani officials have gone out of their way to make conciliatory remarks in recent weeks.

But some Kashmir watchers say the current calm bears an uncanny resemblance to 2001, when the region also enjoyed a similar diplomatic thaw and high hopes of an economic recovery in the war-ravaged valley. Yet that period was soon followed by some of the fiercest fighting the conflict has seen, bringing India and Pakistan back to the brink of war in the spring of 2002.