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Return of the tourists

Had you visited Srinagar at the height of summer last year, you might have found hoteliers begging you to take up a room. Don't make that mistake today -- most hotels are booked through the end of October as are the city's legendary house-boats.

It isn't just the pleasure-seekers who are returning to the state. So are pilgrims -- with 120,000 scheduled to visit the Amarnath cave this year. People clearly aren't as scared of terrorists as they used to be.

But absence of fear doesn't automatically equate to the absence of terrorism. Artillery battles are still common and the Doda district is haven to far too many militants. There is a simple reason for that -- the Indian State may be winning the battle for the hearts and minds of Kashmiris, but most of the terrorists active today are not Kashmiris at all.

Indian intelligence has proof that citizens from ten different nations are operating in Kashmir. There could be more, but that count is based on identifying those mercenaries who have been either captured or killed, which comes to roughly 250.

To begin with, these mercenaries were hired with a two-fold aim. First, they were to scare the tourists away, thus crushing the state's economy. The second aim was the "ethnic cleansing" of the state by making Hindus their target.

It must be said that they achieved a considerable degree of success in the beginning. There used to be one hundred thousand Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar; militant activity may have reduced that figure to less than ten thousand. And no government seemed capable of stemming the rot.

So why are the tourists returning to Kashmir? Give some of the credit to the "pro-active policy" advocated by the Union home minister and enthusiastically endorsed by Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. Sections of the media immediately accused L K Advani of steering India to war.

He was not. He wasn't even recommending the policy of "hot pursuit." All that the home minister meant was that India would take measures to stop cross-border infiltration and that mercenaries needn't expect kid-glove treatment any longer. (In the days of the Narasimha Rao regime, one band of terrorists were treated to the delights of a wazwaan -- the traditional Kashmiri banquet -- before a negotiated release!)

Plugging the holes in India's borders is a job that will take quite a while. But the effects are evident even in the six months since the new government took over in Delhi. It not only deprives terrorists of logistic support; it forces them to pick on the very Kashmiris they supposedly seek to liberate.

Terrorism is becoming indiscriminate in Jammu and Kashmir. Today, it isn't just one particular community that is their target. But robbing and killing for petty cash -- even food! -- isn't designed to win friends. And the harder the authorities crack the whip on militancy, the more those trapped mercenaries put pressure on the locals. They are on a downward spiral and they know it (which will probably make some of them more vicious in the short-run).

But Jammu and Kashmir isn't the only state where the integrity of India is challenged. The government in Delhi is waging battle on cross-border infiltration and terrorism in every state, not just Jammu and Kashmir.

That means tackling militants who ooze through porous borders into Uttar Pradesh. And such activity has been going on for decades in the North-East. (Infiltration into the Terai region of Uttar Pradesh has come down markedly but the situation in the North-East is still unclear.)

However, years of neglect on the borders can't be mended in months. There are far too many guns and far too much RDX in India -- as the citizens of Coimbatore discovered to their horror on February 21 earlier this year.

That is one problem. The other dilemma is that the terrorists today are mercenaries. And mercenaries by definition are men who work for money, not any ideal as such. As they discover that it doesn't pay to take on the security forces, they slip into less dangerous activities, chiefly smuggling. Unfortunately, India is sandwiched between the so-called Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle, two of the main fields for drugs and narcotics smugglers.

The Indian government has a long way to go before it can declare victory in the battle against criminals sponsored by powers outside India. But Delhi has taken the first steps on a long journey and that is an achievement in itself.

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T V R Shenoy