NEW YORK: Editor of a Srinagar newspaper says that the Kashmiri people want to withdraw from Indian union,
“They don’t want to remain in India,” Khwaja Sanaullah Bhat, Editor of the daily Aftab, said in an interview with the New York Times.
Writing from Srinagar, Times ‘correspondent Edward Gargan also describes the difficult conditions under which Bhat brings out his newspaper. “These days. on his way to work, Khwaja Sanaullah Bhat picks his way pasta tangle of blackened beams, heaps of charred and cracked bricks, and a sandbag burner where a soldier carries an assault radical before he can reach the unmarked heavy steel door that leads to his office,” the dis patch said, “The rubble outside his office is the remains of Al Chowk, Srinagar’s central square, which was burned down curly in April by Indian security forces, who are Waging a war against secessionist guerillas here, “For three years, a violent rebel lion has racked the Kashmir Val ley, a gentle swath of paddy fields, groves of mulberry and apple trees, and villages of wood frame and mud houses where the over whelming Muslim population seeks to withdraw from union, “I see a disaster, and continuing disaster,” Bhat said.
“Sometimes it will be big things. Sometimes small things. But it will continue,” he said.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 11, 1993
