Sheikh Abdul Aziz

Jammu, Aug. 11: The Amarnath row has suddenly triggered a far grimmer crisis that threatens to plunge the Kashmir valley into the anti-India tumult of the early nineties.

Senior Hurriyat Conference and People’s League leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz was among five shot dead in police firing near Uri this afternoon, at once stunning and inflaming a Valley already in uproar over the alleged economic blockade imposed by protesters in Jammu.

Today’s events have spiralled swiftly out of hand and left the government besieged on more fronts than it had anticipated. The dramatic escalation in the Valley may indeed have radically transformed the nature of the crisis — a provincial problem has overnight reincarnated into an emergency with international ramifications.

There’s an angry — and growing — mass of Kashmiris bent on marching across the Line of Control into Pakistan-held Kashmir. Within the Valley itself, Aziz’s killing is bound to provoke fresh and violent reaction.

To make matters worse, Pakistani forces have resumed firing across the LoC on Indian Army pickets in the Poonch-Rajouri sector.

“This is no longer a political crisis in the state,” said a senior official based in Srinagar. “This is now a fullblown national crisis that could require extraordinary measures.”

Indefinite Valley-wide curfew was clamped and security forces were put on optimum alert this evening in anticipation of trouble, but tempers in Kashmir are known to make short work of such restrictions.

Sheikh Aziz’s funeral tomorrow — slated in the hotbed of militancy near the Jama Masjid in downtown Srinagar — could prove a fresh flashpoint. An irate Hurriyat chief Mirwaiz Omer Farooq tonight warned the government against keeping the Valley clamped under curfew tomorrow, saying the people of Kashmir would give “a fitting funeral” to the slain Sheikh Aziz.

“We want to ask the government who is responsible for the death of Sheikh Aziz and four other innocent Kashmiris and only then shall we disclose out future course,” the Mirwaiz added.

“The atmosphere has suddenly become darkly surcharged,” said an old Srinagar resident. “This could be worse than 1990 because the Valley is intent on pushing into Pakistan (occupied Kashmir) and nobody seems in control. Sheikh Aziz’s killing will give greater momentum to a movement that has erupted out of nowhere.”

The rapid and dramatic deterioration of the security scenario in the Valley has verily hijacked the focus from the Amarnath movement and produced a flaming exigency that may well demand immediate intervention from New Delhi.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called an all-party meeting in the capital on Wednesday to find ways of undoing the Amarnath tangle; the Valley’s lightning descent into chaos today could make that agenda redundant. Especially with Mehbooba Mufti’s People’s Democratic Party intent on exhorting an inflamed Valley mob across the LoC.

The 54-year-old Aziz was a member of the moderate Hurriyat faction led by the Mirwaiz, but began his career in the early 1990s as a militant. He was the first supreme commander of an outfit called Al Jihad but later came overground to join the People’s League and espoused secessionist objective.

Frequently jailed, the Pampore-based leader had been released in January this year and was an active spokesperson of the Hurriyat.