Bitter fruit

摘要

At this time of year, lorries carry Kash-mir's crisp pears and rosy apples from the temperate valley to India's capital and beyond. On August 18th the lorries were out in force, blocking the streets of Srina-gar, the summer capital of the state of Jam-mu & Kashmir. Their cargo was not fruit, however, but smouldering protesters, demanding their freedom from Indian rule and even saluting Pakistan, which controls the western and northern parts of Kashmir and lays claim to the whole. The unrest, which began with a dispute over a Hindu pilgrimage, has ripened into one of the biggest tests of India's grip on the valley.rnThe pilgrimage brings 400,000 Hindus each year to the Amarnath shrine, an ice stalagmite in the south of Kashmir, which pilgrims see as a phallic symbol of the god Shiva. In May Kashmir's state government gave the shrine's overseers the right to build facilities on 98 acres along the route. Kashmir's separatist politicians portrayed it as a loss of territory to Hindu outsiders, and raised the spectre of Hindu settlement that would erode the Muslims' demographic majority in the state. They roused violent protests, which eventually forced the government to change its mind.