Muslims Demand Independence in Kashmir
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
SRINAGAR, India — Thousands of Muslims poured into the streets of Kashmir yesterday, demanding independence from India hours after archival Pakistan called on the United Nations to stop what it characterized as gross human rights violations in the divided Himalayan region.
Pakistan’s statement drew a sharp rebuke from India, which called the comments “deeply objectionable.”
More than six weeks of unrest in India’s part of Kashmir have pitted the region’s Muslim majority against its Hindu minority and left at least 34 people dead, many of them protesters shot during violent clashes with police and soldiers. Villages have been attacked, police stations torched and, in at least one town, security forces have been ordered to shoot on sight any protesters violating a curfew.
The latest death came yesterday when police opened fire on protesters in Srinagar, Kashmir’s main city, killing at least one and wounding three others, police and hospital officials said.
The trouble was grown out of a dispute over a government plan to transfer land to a Hindu shrine in Kashmir.
Another man, a Hindu, committed suicide yesterday in Jammu, Kashmir’s only Hindu-majority city, to protest the scrapping of the land transfer. He was the second Hindu to kill himself in protest.
