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End the killings now

Sunday night's carnage in the mountains of Doda and Udhampur has demonstrated how surreal the idea of peace remains for ordinary people in Jammu and Kashmir. Like the welter of bombings and assassinations that preceded last month's Assembly by-elections, the communal massacres were intended to broadcast the contempt Islamist terror groups have for the dialogue process — and demonstrate their ability to disrupt it. Much of the dialogue process so far has focussed on sterile questions of processes, legal arrangements, and representational legitimacy. It must instead prioritise the core concern of the people of J&K: the killing must stop now. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs across the troubled State have learned that bullets and bombs do not choose their victims on the basis of their religious beliefs. Terrorism in J&K is too often projected as a war by Islamists against Hindus, a depiction amplified by media reports that, for the most part, ignore the large-scale killing of Muslims who were either perceived as enemies by the armies of the jihad, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, as data published yesterday by The Hindu make clear, J&K's Muslim civilians have been the principal victims of the jihad Islamist groups are waging in their name. In no year, since the jihad began in 1988, have Hindus been more than 20 per cent of civilians killed, a figure considerably lower than their share of the State's population.

When All Parties Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and his delegation meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi today, the people of J&K will expect a forthright call for an end to the violence in the State and, more important, an unequivocal condemnation of those who perpetrate it. The Prime Minister, for his part, will have to address several persistent problems. Ever since 2001, when a series of three communal massacres prompted the State Government to enforce the Disturbed Areas Act in the province of Jammu, progress on securing remote mountain communities has been slow. Officials, arguing that it is impossible to protect thousands of hamlets scattered across the mountains, have focussed instead on arming local self-defence organisations. However, members of ill-trained and under-equipped Village Defence Committees have often been easy terrorist targets; this experience has made many villages, including two of those targeted on Sunday night, refuse to take up arms. While no simple answer to the problem is in sight, a solution obviously has to be found — so that the killings stop. Prime Minister Singh will also need to find means to pressure Pakistan to act against the most likely perpetrators of the carnage, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, if the peace process is to survive their depredations. The challenges are enormous, but without demonstrable progress peace will remain five idle letters on paper.

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