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The gunmen slipped into the crowded warren of shacks after sunset. Nanku Ram and his friends were sitting in a tea shop huddled close to a radio, listening to a cricket match, when a grenade exploded near them.
As people screamed and ran about in fright, the gunmen pulled automatic rifles from their backpacks and chased them through the dark lanes of the slum. Within minutes, the attackers' work was done and they fled into the nearby forest.
Ram ran into his hut and found his 15-year-old daughter soaked in blood. "I picked her up and ran. She kept saying, 'Water, water,' " Ram, a 40-year-old cobbler, recounted days later. "There was still some life left in her. But when we reached the hospital, the doctors said she was dead."
The July 13 attack, which killed 27 people, was one of countless incidents of violence stemming from an insurrection by Islamic guerrillas fighting to drive India out of Kashmir, the country's only majority-Muslim state. But if Ram's daughter and the others died for a cause, it was not theirs. The people of this impoverished neighborhood are Hindus and have no desire to be liberated from India.
"We are poor people. We have nothing to do with the Kashmir struggle," Ram said, wiping away tears. "Why did they come after us?"
For more than 50 years, Muslim Pakistan and Hindu-led India have both claimed as their own the area India formally calls Jammu and Kashmir, fighting two wars that have left the region divided between the two countries. Since 1989, Muslim militants in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir have fought an armed rebellion -- with Pakistan's backing -- that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Support for the insurrection, however, is far from uniform across a state that is home to a variety of ethnic and religious groups.
Although two-thirds of the state's 10 million people are Muslim, according to the latest government estimates, Muslims predominate in only one of Kashmir's three main regions, the Kashmir valley. In the other two -- Jammu, where Hindus have a slim majority over Muslims, and sprawling Ladakh, where Buddhists outnumber Muslims -- there is less zeal for independence or union with Pakistan.
The bulk of the fighting in Kashmir has been in and around the valley, particularly where the so-called Line of Control separating the region runs closest to it. Violence did not move south into the Jammu region until the late 1990s, though the attack in July and an assault on a Jammu military camp in May that killed 29 people have made this region a key battleground. Since 1998, 1,290 civilians have been killed in the Jammu region, Indian army officials say. In the past 100 days, 72 people have died in Jammu city alone.
"We believe all the mass killings will remain here now, as the arc of terrorism has shifted southwards," said Maj. Gen. P.K. Grover, explaining that the low-lying mountains in the region make it easier for militants to infiltrate from Pakistan. "By shifting to Jammu, the militants are laying their claim to the entire area."
The Hindus who predominate around Jammu say that they and their Buddhist neighbors want no part of the Islamic rebellion or the issues that drive it. Instead, they say, the dispute over the status of Kashmir has brought them nothing but suffering.
"The story of Jammu and Ladakh in the last 50 years is a story of neglect," said Vijay Mahajan, a Hindu trader and activist in the town of Rajauri. "But we could never speak out against Kashmir because of fear that it would push the Kashmiris toward Pakistan. We were asked to make this sacrifice in the interest of the nation."
This month, Hindu nationalist groups made a formal demand that the state be split into three separate segments: Jammu, the Kashmir valley and Ladakh. They say a three-way split, or trifurcation, is the most effective way to stop the Kashmir valley's violence from spilling over into other areas any more than it already has.
But many Indians contend that dividing Kashmir would violate the secular ideals enshrined in this country's constitution. Critics charge that dividing Kashmir three ways would amount to handing over the Kashmir valley to Pakistan and would be an admission that Hindus and Muslims could not live together.
The government has rejected the Hindus' demand for the division of the state, but Hindu groups are undeterred and have begun to campaign in Jammu. Such groups as the National Volunteer Corps, or RSS after its initials in the Hindi language, the umbrella group that includes all of India's radical Hindu organizations, say they hope to exploit regional and cultural differences and drum up support to tear Jammu and Ladakh away from the Kashmir valley.
The Ladakh Buddhist Association supports the move, saying that "the aspirations of the people of Ladakh [are] very different." Ladakh makes up 70 percent of the total area of the state.
While the demand to carve out separate states is aimed at bringing the regions of Jammu and Ladakh closer to the Indian union, an alternative plan has emerged from Kashmir's elected leaders that would keep the state in one piece but give it more autonomy.
When the British gave independence to the former British India in 1947, creating India and Pakistan, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had not officially been part of British India, joined India in exchange for special powers and political autonomy. The state was accountable to New Delhi only in matters of defense, foreign affairs and telecommunications. But by 1953, India had gradually stripped away those powers, and some Kashmiris now say that restoring them would address the popular frustration and alienation that has fueled the violence.
But the Hindus in Jammu and the Buddhists in Ladakh are bitterly opposed to this proposal.
"The people of Jammu and Ladakh
do not want autonomy from India. They don't want any special powers. They
want more integration with India," said RSS spokesman Ram Madhav. "Why
should they continue to suffer and sacrifice their lives?"
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