The summer of 2011 has been kind to Kashmir. It has spared the Valley the violence that led to the deaths of over a hundred young stone-pelters last summer. The mood in the Valley is turning: tourists are back, the army has largely retreated to its barracks and the necklace of stalls that rings the banks of Dal Lake does brisk business late into the evening. The number of tourists this year (7,54,588) has for the first time surpassed the number in 1988 (7,22,035) – the year before militancy hijacked the Valley.
Exactly seven years ago, in August 2004, on my way to interview the then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed at his heavily guarded Srinagar residence, the roads were deser-ted except for grim-faced armymen with assault rifles. Much has changed for the better in the Valley since. Many shops in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk, shuttered last summer, are now open till midnight. And yet serious problems continue to blight the Valley. The first, much debated, is granting greater autonomy to Kashmir within the elastic boundaries of the Indian Constitution. The second, much ignored, is the question of Kashmir’s exiled Pandits.
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