Kashmir tensions return as five Indian troops are killed in firefight

Following a brief period of uneasy peace, India's insurgency-ridden northern Kashmir region is again on the boil after five of its army personnel died in a firefight with armed militants.

In the deadliest such incident for the security forces in Kashmir this year, the soldiers were killed late on Monday night after a protracted gun battle at Surankote, 140km southwest of the territory's summer capital Srinagar and adjoining its disputed border with Pakistan.

Indian security officials claimed that the gunmen had crossed over from Pakistan across the line of control that divides Kashmir between the neighbouring nuclear-armed rivals to fuel a 32-year-old insurgency for an independent Muslim homeland that has claimed more than 70,000 lives.

"Over the last month or so we again see renewed attempts at infiltration [from Pakistan] into Kashmir," Indian army chief Gen M M Navarane declared at a public function in New Delhi over the weekend. The militant groups do not want normalcy in Kashmir, he said.

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Pakistan has consistently denied these charges, claiming it provided Kashmir's insurgency only "moral and political" support. In turn it accuses India of perpetrating human rights abuses in Kashmir and of forcibly occupying the Muslim-majority region.

Kashmir, meanwhile, has been on edge since last week’s targeted killing of three Hindus and one Sikh by suspected militants, invoking comparisons with similar killings of non-Muslims in the early 1990s when the insurgency raged uncontrollably.

At the time these sparked the panicked, overnight exodus of some 300,000 Hindus and a handful of Sikhs from Kashmir where they had lived for generations, following fears of an ethnic cleansing campaign by militants.

Fearful of retaliatory killings, just a handful of Hindus returned to Kashmir in recent years, albeit under state protection, with the majority preferring to live in penury as refugees in several cities and small towns across India.

Subsequently many of their homes and business premises across Kashmir were pillaged and eventually occupied by locals, confident that their owners would never be coming back.

Shootings

Meanwhile, news reports from Kashmir said that some Hindu families were again contemplating leaving after the recent shootings.

"I am getting panicked calls from Pandit [Hindu] families," said Sanjay Tickoo, who heads an organisation representing 5,000 Hindus in Kashmir, to the BBC.

Police detained more than 300 people for questioning over the minority-community killings, but so far have made little or no progress.

Kashmir is one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes, and one over which India and Pakistan have fought three of their four wars since independence in 1947.

The most recent conflict in Kashmir’s Kargil region in mid-1999, in which 1,200 soldiers from both sides died, threatened to escalate into a nuclear exchange but the situation was successfully defused by Washington’s intervention.