The landscape of violence remains entirely familiar, entirely comprehensible; yet there is that tiredness with guns and vendors of violence ...

(One can) see the reality of the Kashmiri people's hunger for normality and for rebuilding their devastated economy, and for rediscovering the lost social harmony. Civil society seems increasingly anxious to get on with the job of peaceful reconstruction.

The markets are bursting at the seams ... There is a construction boom. The buildings ... torched in the early 1990s ... have been converted into jazzy shopping arcades, the new monuments to middle class yearnings For the less well-placed, pirated cassettes of Bombay films are available with the vendors at Lal Chowk, the heart of downtown Srinagar ... The marriage season is on and throughout the Valley elaborate wazvaans (formal Kaslımiri dinners) are being hosted ...

There are other signs of normality too. An Urdu mushaira took place in Srinagar after a gap of 14 years. An all-India police football tournament was organised in Srinagar and, according to one local newspaper, about 20,000 people attended the final. Banks have relaxed loaning norms; a lok adalat in Bandipora settled 49 civil and criminal cases in a day; the district administration in Srinagar advertises in newspapers the days of "public hearing" of grievances ... Today, (there are) flooded with demands for ration shops, water connections, sewage, and other civic amenities" ...

Amid these outbreaks of normality, violence remains unabated. Unsentimental strategists continue to plan and execute violence with clinical detachment. There seems to be an unending supply of militant cadres, young and impressionable, only too eager to be tutored in the art of bomb-making and planting IEDs, trained to handle all the accoutrements of a terrorist. On the other hand, up at the army brigade headquarters, excited colonels and excitable majors plan on how to hunt, trap and kill these practitioners of violence; the "agencies" on both sides of the LoC are busy bribing and counter-bribing the "guides" who chaperone clutches of "boys" safely across to the nearest bus stop in the Valley. The thoroughly brutalised brass on both sides keep on experimenting with young lives. The people of Kashmir, in whose name every antagonist pretends to be shedding blood, are thoroughly tired of this ritualised violence.

While the "boys" and uniformed men and officers continue to lose their lives, the political crowd merrily keeps on trying to encash these deaths. Individually each of the "movement" leaders would want to maximise his leverage and position in any peace initiative; but collectively the Hurriyat Conference remains a divided house, and can agree only on sabotaging the peace ...

Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference crowd would publicly welcome the peace process, but privately resent New Delhi trying to talk to those officially branded terrorists, that too at the expense of "Faroog Saheb", who had stood by India in good times and bad.

The Congress(I) remains defunct as ever ... Among the non-Hurriyat voices, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and his intrepid daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, continue to keep up the democratic discourse. For now, there is an elaborate stalemate. Unless the "outsiders" somehow intervene to unhinge this structured stalemate, there is no respite from clinical, uninvolved violence ... Even the die-hard pro- Pakistan Geelani cannot be delighted about the latest ISI stratagem of putting the Islamabad-based, newly-devised Kashmir Jehad Committee, with Qazi Hussain of Pakistan's Jamaat-e-islmai as the final word in "policy", leaving only operational autonomy to the Hizbul Mujahideen. The 12-member Kashmir Jehad Committee,  formed on September I at Mansora (in POK), is a devise to virtually dry up the Hizb's political options.

... The Vajpayee Government is unable to think its way out of the stalemate; it neither has the political leeway nor the imagination to put its past behind it and to strike a bold compromise. That puts the onus on the Kashmiris themselves to see how best to salvage their lives and inner space from the encroachments made by the security forces and the (boys). (Source: The Hindu, I October, 2000)