Originally published in Le Temps.
SRINGAR - An eagle boldly splits the air, to and fro, between disputed territories. On the ground, an electrified fence hurtles down the jagged flank of the mountain, bumps into the river, then resumes its straight race up heights.
In the Uri district, in Silikot, the fence sharply cuts an odd borderline: partaking the Muslim province of Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the Line of Control (LoC) embodies the confrontation of two nuclear powers that waged two wars over this rugged Himalayan region.
Built by India in 2004, the fence doesn't always have a clear logic: encircling a cluster of chalets, splitting a forest or forsaking some village like Charunda on the wrong side. Then suddenly, in some places, in front of steep heights, it ceases to exist for a while.
Comprising 550 kilometers of a 740-km demarcation, it aims at blocking "infiltrations" of mujahedins trained on the Pakistani side from crossing over to challenge Indian sovereignty in Kashmir.
India has largely choked off the separatist uprising, which began in 1989: 47,000 soldiers dead, 8,000 civilians "disappeared". With more than half a million soldiers and legions of spies, Kashmir remains hostage to an unprecedented military presence.
"Normally it's calm," says Farooq, who hails from Silikot. Occasionally, soldiers defy one another in skirmishes breaching the 2003 ceasefire agreement.(On Thursday, four Indian soldiers were killed in an ambush by Muslim militants in Hurdmeer village, the BBC reports.)
Back in January, at the Sawan Patra post by the mountain's summit, a Pakistani was killed after India accused its neighbor of cutting one of its soldiers' throat and beheading another. These sporadic reprisals poison Indo-Pakistani relations, which had started afresh in 2011 after being frozen in 2008, when India blamed the Mumbai terror attacks on Lashkar-e-Toiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist group that seeks liberation of Kashmir from Indian control.
Some signs of peace
Well beyond lingering border tensions, the enthusiastic sounds of Indian tourists make a happy hubbub on lake Dal, near Srinagar, the biggest town in the valley. Couples float along in gondolas, slaloming between lotuses and water lilies. Families indulge in water skiing or the visit of Mughal gardens. Soon, they can also enjoy the Gulmarg ski station, Sonmarg glaciers or Pahalgam's romantic landscapes. War swept away the hashish-smoking hippie flâneurs, but now the Indian middle class is taking over the Kashmiri heaven.
This is the other face India tries to show: normalcy, tourism. "Indeed, terrorism has not yet reached the level zero," concedes the Inspector General of Police Abdul Ghani Mir. "In the valley, 30,000 former mujahedins and 100 active terrorists, both locals and foreigners, are numbered. But the situation is far better than it used to."
Sameer Yasir, a political analyst at the University of Awantipura, notes that while some checkpoints have been cleared, soldiers in bulletproof vests still roam the countryside. "Yet, there is no reduction of troops on the ground," he says.
The anti-Indian feeling remains strong within the population. Hopes of reconciliation were born when then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had showed a "friendly hand" to Pakistan in April 2003. But the progress was limited. From summer 2008 onwards, protests erupted in the valley, and a burgeoning movement was repressed by the police, with 112 protesters killed during summer 2010.
Ever since, Kashmir has looked like Lake Dal's troubled waters. During the past winter, the valley was paralyzed by a curfew, enacted to smother protests after the controversial hanging of a Kashmiri convicted for having ties with terrorists.
