Quiet end to Kashmir's standoff spares India's Rao

Quiet end to Kashmir's standoff spares India's Rao

SRINAGAR, India (Reuter): Armed separatists have left Kashmir's holiest shrine in a peaceful end to a two-day standoff, sparing Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao embarrassment before general elections starting next month.

Seventeen members of a faction of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) walked out of Hazratbal shrine late on Tuesday after reaching an agreement with authorities, said a senior government official who asked not to be identified.

He said the militants, who entered the shrine on Sunday after a gunbattle in which at least 11 people were killed, were not arrested.

"We were just interested in getting the shrine vacated, not in the militants," he said in Srinagar, summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir which is mostly Hindu India's only Moslem-majority state.

JKLF spokesman Tariq Ahmed said the militants and authorities agreed they would move to positions they occupied before Sunday's clash.

The JKLF faction had been controlling access to the shrine, in cooperation with state police stationed nearby.

Witnesses said they saw Kashmiri militants moving out of Hazratbal and into a building they have long occupied outside the shrine's premises on the banks of Dal Lake.

The swift end to the armed standoff contrasted with a tense 32-day siege of Hazratbal by army troops in 1993 and a two-month face-off last year in the town of Charar-e-Sharief, site of a shrine to Kashmir's patron saint.

That confrontation ended with the burning down of the Charar-e-Sharief shrine.

Abdul Gani Bhat, spokesman for the Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference which groups together more than 30 separatist organizations, said many Kashmiris suspected the JKLF faction had struck a deal which would boost Rao's Congress party in general elections which begin on April 27.

"It is an election gamble. It is a Kashmiri weapon that the Indian prime minister can brandish to the people during his election campaign saying, 'See what we can do,'" Bhat said.

Bhat said the militants had given the government a victory to flaunt outside Kashmir and undermined the entire Kashmiri separatist movement. "It has created confusion in the minds of the people, in my own mind," he added.

The JKLF faction which had members inside the shrine is led by Pakistan-based Amanullah Khan. For months it has been at odds with the main faction headed by Yasin Malik, which is part of the Hurriyat.

Rao has been keen to hold the first elections in Kashmir since the separatist rebellion broke out in 1991, and is known to want to avoid any prolonged crisis there during general elections from April 27 to May 30.

Jammu and Kashmir spokesman K.B. Jandial said the shrine would soon be opened to the people. "We have demonstrated that we are capable of handling emotive and sensitive issues with toughness and tact," he said.

He believed the peaceful resolution would smooth the way to successful polling in Jammu and Kashmir on May 7, 23 and 30.

Paramilitary troopers armed with automatic weapons were still deployed around the shrine, revered because it is believed to house a hair from the beard of the Prophet Mohammad.

But their officers insisted they had not yet received orders to allow people into the shrine, whose white dome and minaret glistened in the bitter morning chill.