[Some in the region have wondered whether the
bus stand attack might be connected to India’s coming elections and a nefarious
effort to provoke animosities between Hindus and Muslims in the country. The
Jammu area is predominantly Hindu, while the larger Jammu and Kashmir region is
majority Muslim. Jammu has a history of religious tensions erupting into
violence.]
By
Sameer Yasir and Jeffrey Gettleman
 |
|
Injured
victims of a grenade blast were treated in a hospital in Jammu on Thursday.
Credit
Mukesh Gupta/Reuters
|
SRINAGAR,
Kashmir — Fears of communal
violence were once again raised in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir on
Thursday when a grenade blew up at a crowded bus stand, killing one person and
wounding many others.
Around the same time, videos of two Indian
men beating Kashmiri street vendors in a northern Indian city went viral
online, further stoking tensions.
The violence followed a week of hostilities
in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, both of which claim the mountainous
region.
On Thursday, witnesses said that a young man
lobbed a grenade toward a crowd of people, including many students, who were
waiting for a bus in central Jammu, one of the larger cities in the
Indian-controlled part of Kashmir.
“There was a loud bang — everything went
black in front of my eyes,” said Sat Kumar, a trader, who was taken to the
hospital along with more than two dozen others who were injured in the attack,
some critically.
The young man who threw the grenade initially
got away. But later in the day, Indian police officials said they had
apprehended someone with the help of CCTV footage.
Indian officials identified the suspect as a
17-year-old Kashmiri who was part of a militant group fighting against Indian
rule in Kashmir. The police said that during an interrogation, he had confessed
to throwing the grenade.
Last month, a young Kashmiri separatist blew
up a bus full of Indian soldiers, setting off a sharply escalating military
crisis between India and Pakistan, which India has accused of supporting
separatist militants.
India and Pakistan have feuded for decades,
and both wield nuclear arms. Other countries, including the United States and
China, have urged the two sides to step away from conflict. The crisis was
somewhat defused late last week after Pakistan returned an Indian pilot whose
plane it shot down over Kashmir.
Some in the region have wondered whether the
bus stand attack might be connected to India’s coming elections and a nefarious
effort to provoke animosities between Hindus and Muslims in the country. The
Jammu area is predominantly Hindu, while the larger Jammu and Kashmir region is
majority Muslim. Jammu has a history of religious tensions erupting into
violence.
M.K. Sinha, a police official in Jammu, urged
people to remain calm. “The culprits will not be spared,” he said.
India and Pakistan continue to eye each other
warily, and artillery shells continue to fly across the disputed border in
Kashmir. Last week, shelling killed several people on both sides of the border.
In Lucknow, a large city in northern India,
the police arrested four people on Thursday on suspicion of beating up Kashmiri
street vendors after a video went viral that showed the attack.
Wearing saffron shirts, the color favored by
many Hindu nationalists, the attackers called the street vendors “terrorists”
and said, “You sell here and throw stones there,” referring to protests in
Kashmir.
The attackers slapped the Kashmiri men in the
face and hit them with a long wooden stick.
This was hardly an isolated incident. After
the Indian convoy was attacked in mid-February, hundreds of Kashmiri college
students at universities in India were chased off their campuses, and some were
beaten up. And in New Delhi, the capital, some Kashmiris were thrown out by
their landlords simply for being Kashmiri.
Sameer Yasir reported from Srinagar, and
Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi. Suhasini Raj and Hari Kumar contributed
reporting from New Delhi.
