As featured on Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, this video by Dan Schreiber explores the tension between tradition and tourism in a remote region of Northern India.
By Mariano Castillo, special to the Pulitzer Center
New York, NY
Miles away from the bustling streets of Mumbai, a decades-old Maoist insurgency is gaining ground.
When pro-independence demonstrations erupted in Kashmir over the summer, Danish Shervani said he hesitated to take part until he saw women and children shouting in the streets.
His initiation was painful. A band of riot police trapped him away from the crowds and beat him with bamboo shafts, breaking several bones and shattering a kneecap.
After a long, hot summer of protests against Indian rule, an uneasy calm descended on the Kashmir valley for the holy month of Ramadan. In a bid to reignite mass protests, separatist leaders had called for another pro-independence march this week on Lal Chowk, the commercial hub of the summer capital. The authorities responded with a two-day, shoot-on-sight curfew. Protests were abandoned. After a crackdown over the past few months that has left at least 45 people dead, mostly killed when troops opened fire on crowds, this was understandable.
"Ram, Ram, oh Ram," Chandan whispered to himself, moments after asking me to pray to my own God. He and Arvind, the other local journalist who accompanied me into the bush, held their heads down and closed their eyes, not wanting to accept the random turn of events, the prospect of a grim and pointless death.
The express bus from Hyderabad to Dantewada takes fifteen hours on a good day. As the suburbs of the software hub are left behind, and then the wrought-iron gates of Ramoji Film City, the smooth pavement falls apart. But the sweep of paddy fields and palms—a facsimile of the INCREDIBLE INDIA! billboard hanging at the Delhi airport when I first arrived—grew more hypnotic with each mile, making up for the rough going. Hills loomed in the hazy distance. Cowherds shunted their stock out of harm's way, and women carried grain in clay pots on their heads.
By Arun Venugopal
Jason Motlagh, a roving journalist who covers South Asia, has written an extensive piece for the Virginia Quarterly Review on insurgencies that persist across India, despite the country's record economic growth. Motlagh's 9,562 word piece (you read that right) involved months of reporting, and took him to remote areas of Assam, Chhatisgarh, Orissa and Kashmir. His work — including the photographs he took — was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
Vast ethnic diversity, geography and under-development have bred dozens of separatist movements in India's far-eastern Assam state. But these same factors that gave rise to spasms of violence throughout the region over the last 20 years have also had a containing effect: Militant groups have run up against each other, in addition to the Indian military.
Caught between India, Pakistan and a homegrown desire for independence, Kashmir has been hostage to conflict for more than fifty years. Today violence is in decline, a trend that is attributed to fatigue, a bilateral peace process with traction, and Pakistan's preoccupation with radical Islamic militants in the tribal areas along its Western border.
Still, nearly 700,000 Indian troops are deployed around the state. And there are mounting concerns that if the government does not reduce its presence, frustrations may spark a new cycle of violence.
Credits:
"Kashmir's Uneasy Peace"
Udalguri, India -- Flanked by mist-bearded foothills, groups of young men play volleyball on a grass clearing, jog around plywood barracks and chop wood. If not for the presence of automatic weapons, the scene could pass for a summer camp .
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