The Beauty Of Jammu Kashmir

The Beauty Of Jammu Kashmir

Jammu and Kashmir was a state in northern India. Located mainly in the mountains of the Himalayas, Jammu and Kashmir bordered Himachal Pradesh and Punjab in the south, China (autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang) in the northeast and is separated from the territories controlled by Pakistan by the Line of Control.

The state, which was once part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, is the subject of a territorial dispute between India, Pakistan and China and has been the subject of several wars. The part of Jammu and Kashmir controlled by India is then called "Indian-occupied Kashmir" in Pakistan while the territories which form in Pakistan Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, as well as Aksai Chin and Shaksgam Valley administered by China, are claimed by India as part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmir included three regions: Jammu (in), in Hindu majority, the valley of Kashmir, in Muslim majority and where concentrates most of the population, and Ladakh, in Buddhist majority, in little settlement dense.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed until August 5, 2019 a special autonomy status guaranteed by article 370 of the Constitution of India. It is subject to a reform aimed at dividing Ladakh, with effect from October 31, 2019.

Geography
Jammu and Kashmir is bordered to the west and north by Pakistan, to the north and east by China, to the south by Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. A significant part of the state is claimed by Pakistan, another is occupied by China largely in the Himalayas. This region includes four peaks which culminate at over 8,000 meters. It consists of three main regions: Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh.

The former princely state is today de facto divided into three regions administered respectively by India, Pakistan and, to a small extent, by China. India claims all of Kashmiri territory as its own, including the part today (2005) administered by Pakistan which is called Pakistan Occupied Kashmir or POK. Pakistan, meanwhile, does not recognize India's sovereignty over the region and names the part under Indian administration, the Occupied Kashmir, while the region it controls is called, for a small part (but densely populated, to the southwest) Azad Kashmir, that is to say "Free Kashmir", while most of Pakistani Kashmir, at altitude and sparsely populated, is administered separately and forms the "Northern Territories ".

The Indian government has banned all publications and maps that show this area as "disputed territory", which has led to a ban on the importation of the CD version of the Encyclopædia Britannica since 19982.
Landscape of the Pahalgam valley (in), in the Kashmir valley.
Sacred lake of Sheshnag, in the holy valley of Amarnath.

History
Jammu and Kashmir is one of the ancient princely states of India, ruled by a Hindu maharaja until 1947, but whose population, especially dense in the Srinagar valley, was and remains predominantly Muslim. During the Partition, maharaja Hari Singh refused to join either India or Pakistan, and chose to remain independent, which was an option then possible. But Pathan warriors, armed by the Pakistani government, then entered Kashmiri territory, which led the maharaja to ask for assistance from India, which repelled the invasion, and consequently obtained the integration of 60% of the territory in the federal republic. The other parts were integrated into Pakistan and their non-Muslim minorities gathered in the Indian part, which forms the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In 1950, article 370 of the Indian Constitution granted this State relative autonomy vis-à-vis the central power, whose areas of intervention were limited to questions falling both within the competences of the Indian Union and of the 'Federated state' provided the state government agrees'. Nevertheless the federal functioning itself tempers this resolution since the governor is appointed by New Delhi. The scope of the original article was diminished with the 1975 agreement between Indira Gandhi and the leader of the regional party Cheikh Abdullah. In addition, the emergency provisions of the Indian Constitution are often invoked in the event of unrest. The President’s rule, an exceptional measure allowing the management of a State of the Union to be entrusted to the central power, thus weighs like a sword of Damocles during the various negotiations.

Since then, India and Pakistan have been clashing over the problem of the administration of Jammu and Kashmir, which the two nations are calling for in its entirety. India currently administers just over half of the territory, Pakistan just under half and China a very small part, the Aksai Chin.

However, on August 5, 2019, the Indian government of Narendra Modi, applying a campaign promise from the Hindu nationalists, announced the publication of a presidential decree removing the constitutional articles (in particular article 370) relating to the autonomy status of the Jammu and Kashmir. This decree, immediately applicable, abolishes the federal state by demoting it to the status of Union Territory, thus placing it under direct administration of federal power. This territory being cut off from Ladakh, a region with a Buddhist majority, would only include the plains with a Hindu majority of Jammu in the south and the Srinagar valley with a Muslim majority in the north. According to observers, this decision raises fears of a general uprising of the populations of this latter region3,4. Within hours of the decision, several senior political leaders in the region, including Chief Minister of State Mehbooba Mufti, were placed under house arrest.
Residents suffer traffic restrictions and phone and internet cuts, officially to fight the separatist rebels. Most local politicians are imprisoned, and journalists expelled from the region. At the end of October 2019, a delegation of 22 MEPs, most of them from the far right, was received by the Indian nationalist authorities, which caused tensions and clashes between police and demonstrators.

Cycle of wars
The divisions of Kashmir.
Jammu and Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu maharâja while its population, concentrated mainly in the Srinagar valley, is predominantly Muslim. Kashmir being landlocked neither in India nor in Pakistan, the maharâja who wanted neither to alienate the Muslim majority of its subjects, nor to cause the expulsion of the Hindu (locally majority around Jammu) and Buddhist ( majority in Ladakh), opted for independence.

The invasion of the princely state of Junagadh (whose Muslim sultan had chosen to join Pakistan, but whose predominantly Hindu population had revolted and which the Indian army had occupied), Pakistan armed Pashtun warriors of the tribal areas of the North-East Frontier province which set out for Srinagar. This penetration forced the maharaja to make the decision (or according to Pakistan, to make public the decision he had made after secret negotiations with the British and the Indians) to seek military aid from India. The Indian army therefore entered Kashmir up to the line called Line of Control. UN intervention ends the war and a resolution is passed in the Security Council providing for a referendum within two years of the end of the war.

This referendum was to allow the inhabitants to choose either to join Pakistan, or to join India, or to become independent, but posed a major problem because the decision taken had to concern the whole of Kashmir, so that if the majority ruled for Pakistan, the inhabitants of the country of Jammu and the Ladakhis would have been expelled (like other non-Moslem populations of Pakistan), while if it ruled for India, the inhabitants of the valley of Kashmir, densely populated, would make it the only Indian state with a Muslim majority. In any event, the referendum could not take place, because neither the Pakistani nor the Indian forces ever withdrew, as stipulated in the Security Council resolution. Since then, Kashmir is therefore in a de facto state of partition, non-Muslim minorities have been expelled from territories controlled by Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir is the only Indian state with a Muslim majority. For its part, China was ceded a strip of land by Pakistan and occupied the Aksai Chin: India still claims these territories.

 

Demography
The total population in 2011 was 12,541,302 inhabitants1 according to the official census, including 6,665,561 men and 5,883,365 women. In 2001, the population was 10,143,700 inhabitants (including 5,360,926 men and 4,782,774 women). This represents a population increase of 23.71% over ten years. The population of Jammu and Kashmir represented 1.04% of the total population of India in 2011 (compared to 0.99% in 2001) .

languages
The official and administrative language of the State of Jammu and Kashmir is Urdu, a language foreign to the region and imposed by the government. The two dominant languages ​​in relation to the number of speakers are Kashmir, spoken in the Kashmir valley, and Dogri, language of the Dogranchal (Jammu region). The easternmost regions (Kargil and Ladakh districts) speak two languages ​​close to Tibetan, Balti and Ladakhi, and are sparsely populated (143,388 in Kargil and 147,104 in Ladakh in the 2011 census).

The western regions, of Indo-Aryan languages ​​and of Muslim or Hindu faiths, concentrate most of the population. It is particularly dense around Srinagar.

Religions
The population of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is generally Muslim at 68.31%, according to the 2011 census. Hindus come second with 28.44% of the population. The remaining 3.25% is divided between Sikh (1.87%), Buddhists (0.9%), Christians (0.28%), Jain (0.02%) and others (0.17%) 2 .

However, if the Kashmir valley is 96% Muslim, with 3% Hindus and Sikhs, 9 the Jammu region is 87% Hindu, with an 8% Sikh minority and 5% Muslims. As for Ladakh10, of Tibetan culture, it is predominantly Buddhist (81%) with a Muslim minority (15%), and a Hindu minority of 3%.
Map of the different regions of Jammu and Kashmir:
Demography of the region: concentration of the population in the west.

Tourism
Tourism, which is an important resource in Kashmir, has been generally discouraged since the mid-1980s. However, Kashmir remains a very touristy region today. The main points of attraction in the region are the cities of Srinagar and Leh. The latter city is the starting point for excursions to the Zanskar Valley and the Ladakh Valley. It is the first pole of attraction of tourist flows in the State. Tourists mainly go there to enjoy the many cultural and sporting attractions.

However, due to its instability, the Kashmir Valley attracts few tourists, both Indian and foreign. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of foreign and domestic visitors increased (with a rebound in 2016 and 2017) from 1.3 million to 850,00012.

The Dogranchal, which has little to offer in cultural and sporting tourism, however attracts Hindu pilgrims who come to pray in the many shrines and sacred sites of the region, in particular the Vaishno Devi sanctuary, dedicated to Shakti. The regional tourist office invests a lot in religious tourism in Jammu.