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| TOURIST INFLOW DWINDLING IN KASHMIR VALLEY | | | Srinagar, July 16 ;-Those connected with tourism in the Kashmir valley are enraged over the way the series of grenade attacks on tourist buses hit the visitor's traffic to the paradise on the earth.
With the tourist traffic witnessing sudden progress since the beginning of May traders,hoteliers and houseboat owners had hopes of making for the losses they had suffered during the last 16 years. However, these hopes were shattered after a large number of tourists cut short their stay and travel agents, hoteliers and houseboat owners received intimation from tourists canceling their trip to the valley during the next two months.
The anger of people was visible when for the first time in the past 16 years people, including women, staged protest demonstration in various parts of the valley while condemning the attacks on tourists.
The biggest anti-militant protest was witnessed in Gulmarg where seven tourists were injured in a grenade attack on a tourist coach recently.
Official sources said that militants were trying to achieve two goals. One was to damage the tourism based economy in Jammu and Kashmir so that more and more people supported the Jehadis by providing them money and shelter. Secondly, their aim was to crate panic among people in the border villages so that civilians did not act as police informers.
It is in this context that at a number of places in Poonch, Rajouri and Doda, besides upper reaches of Udhampur militants had started torturing innocent civilians, including women, to death. The purpose was to carry out ethnic cleansing from areas inhabited by Hindus and Sikhs and force others to provide shelter and material assistance to the militants.
The sources said that despite central Government's green signal for intensifying counter insurgency operations in militancy infested areas the troops had yet to formulate a definite policy for launching multidimensional anti-insurgency operations.
According to these sources, delay in intensifying anti-insurgency operations may encourage militants for intensifying their operations against the civilians, political leaders and the security forces.
And traders, hoteliers and houseboat owners are equally a worried lot because they do not know whether the militants will allow the next phase tourist season, beginning from September, to remain an incident free affair. And if militants continued to target tourists in the near future they may lose whatever sympathy people in Kashmir have for the Jehadis. |
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