At ground zero in Kashmir, the chairman of Hurriyat’s moderate faction, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was planning to leave for the US on a fellowship, hoping to study conflict management in Belfin Centre at Harvard. Hurriyat hawk Syed Ali Shah Geelani was ill and disillusioned by Pakistan’s “divorce” from Kashmir. Several separatist leaders were complaining that Kashmiris are fatigued and New Delhi had declared the “end game” in Kashmir.

After successfully fighting militancy for 18 years, the Centre was looking at the “free and fair” 2008 Assembly polls as the last dose of its policy prescription to fully recover Kashmir.

The people’s march on Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road changed all that. Hundreds of trucks with young men sitting on their bonnets were slowly moving ahead. At the first Army camp ahead of Baramulla, the troops had abandoned their roadside pickets to avoid confrontation. “We will not stop. We have to cross the LoC. We have to re-unite Kashmir,” said Abdul Rasheed War (26), a teacher in a private school. “Kashmir has woken up. The movement is alive again,” he added.

Why is anger spilling on Kashmir’s streets? The Amarnath land transfer controversy and the subsequent “economic blockade” is the apparent reason. But the real answer lies in the people’s march on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road.

Ironically, this road was re-christened as the “highway of peace” between India and Pakistan on April 7, 2005, when for the first time a bus service connected the divided Kashmir. The slogans and flags in the march told another story. There was hardly any mention of the Amarnath land row or the blockade. The protests had transcended the issue of the Amarnath land transfer; it’s only about separatism now.

... contd.