Death of separatist is a triumph for hardliners

Many people die violent deaths in Kashmir every day, largely ignored by a world that has grown sick of a dispute that got stuck in the mud of history round about 1948. But the murder yesterday evening near the Martyr's Graveyard of the Separatist Kashmiri leader Abdul Gani Lone is terrible news for anybody who dreams that Kashmir's suffering might one day come to an end.

Mr Lone was a man who, barely four years ago, welcomed the arrival of foreign jihadis to Kashmir to fight alongside the Kashmiris against Indian rule. But in the last year he radically changed his tune.

Yesterday morning, in the last interview of his life, he told The Independent: "The Jihadis have their own agenda. I welcomed them when they came in 1998 because we were under very great pressure. But when they attacked Red Fort and other targets in India, I said, for God's sake, leave us to our fate. This is our struggle, we should be in the driving seat."

It is not yet clear who murdered Mr Lone: in the balance of probability, it was hardline militants under orders from jihadi commanders across the border in Pakistani Kashmir. But it is as clear as day who benefits: The hard men in India, in Kashmir and in Pakistan, all of whom have decided that they can only achieve their very different goals by an almighty conflagration.

Mr Lone, very courageously, had set his face against these hard men. His bravest political move, back in December, was to fly to Dubai to meet other moderate Kashmiri leaders from Pakistani Kashmir to thrash out ways to take the struggle for Kashmiri liberation forward peacefully. Attending that meeting, with its moderate, Kashmir-centric agenda, was signing his own death warrant.

Mr Lone, who was approaching his 70th birthday, was a lifelong Kashmiri politician. Way back in the 1970s, when he was still in the Congress Party, he served as education minister in the state government. With the deteriorating political situation in Kashmir, he came radicalised and in 1977 floated his own Peoples Conference Party which he led until his death.

In the 1990s, like perhaps a majority of his fellow Kashmiris, he became convinced that liberation from India was Kashmir's only hope. But while he and his party never took up the armed struggle, he understood the motivation of those who did. "The Indian Government is responsible for the introduction of the Jihadis," he told me yesterday. "They took the decision that the issue [Kashmir's demand for self determination and specifically for the plebiscite mandated by the United Nations in 1948] could be dealt with administratively and they introduced the armed forces to do that."

The abuse meted out to Kashmir by the hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers stationed in the state, behaving with the arrogance and impunity of an army of occupation, changed the Kashmir equation for good. "We have a saying in Kashmir," Mr Lone said. "If your hen goes and lies down in your neighbours house, don't blame the hen. The Indians did something that forced the Kashmiri militants to be used by Pakistan. Why did the Kashmiri militants take up the gun? When India provided no place for dissent, when they forced the people to obey its will, then there was no alternative."

In 1994, as Kashmir's popular insurgency began to fizzle out under the weight of India's military machine, Abdul Gani Lone brought his party into the all-party Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference: an umbrella group of Kashmiri separatist parties operating above ground. The Hurriyat was always a messy coalition: it included both those who wanted Kashmir to become part of Pakistan and those who insisted that the state must become independent.

It is a somewhat sad, frustrated, uninspiring organisation, refusing to participate in state elections that it insists are rigged, its members are unable to substantiate their claim to represent the great majority of Kashmiri muslims. They neither exercise power, nor can they claim convincingly that they deserve to exercise it. Instead they survive in a twilight world of seminars and manoeuvres and press interviews, demanding a place at the table to thrash out Kashmir's future while India continues to insist that there is nothing to discuss – that all is for the best in the best of all possible Valleys. Small carrots are dangled in Hurriyat's field of vision: two years ago, for example, a vague promise of passports so Lone and his colleagues could travel to Pakistan to sit down with their opposite numbers there.

At his typically roomy Kashmiri house near the northern suburb of Srinagar, Mr Lone held court with stubbly grey beard and a fierce dogmatic intensity in his eyes explaining all the details of 1948 and all that to visiting press people. Gradually he honed a distinctive and very courageous political position: the foreign militants fighting in the valley must go home; Kashmiris must be in the driving seat for their own liberation; the Kashmir disputes can only be solved by negotiations. In the wake of 11 September, his calls for moderation grew clearer and more urgent.

And they put him at loggerheads with hardline colleagues in the Hurriyat whose unity has appeared ever more of a sham in recent weeks. His murder is a triumph – temporary, one can only hope – for those who insist that Kashmir must wade through yet more rivers of blood to reach its promised land.