Policeman hurls shoe at Omar Abdullah

SRINAGAR: A policeman flung a shoe at Indian-administered Kashmir’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah at an independence day event Sunday, which saw thousands of Kashmiris in the streets protesting against Indian rule.

Security was tight across the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley for the annual national holiday, which separatists traditionally mark as a “black day”.

At the main official function in a sports stadium in Srinagar, Abdullah had just unfurled the Indian national flag when the show was thrown.

The minister was not hit and the policeman, who had chanted “we want freedom”, was quickly overpowered by bodyguards.

“Hurling a shoe is better than hurling a stone,” Abdullah commented after the incident. Abdullah heads the National Conference, the main pro-India party in Kashmir.

Stone-throwing protesters have been defying almost daily curfews over the past two months and clashing with police in Srinagar and other towns in the valley.

The unrest has claimed 57 lives, most of them young men or teenagers killed in police firing.

On Friday and Saturday, security forces shot dead six protesters and bystanders in clashes with demonstrators.

One of the young men killed on Saturday was from the southern town of Anantnag, where thousands of residents — men and women — held night-long anti-India demonstrations, witnesses said.

Night protests were also held in Narabal, on the outskirts of Srinagar, where another protester was killed Saturday.

India's highest representative in Kashmir, state governor N.N. Vohra, has urged the security forces to “revisit their strategies and tactics of crowd control for securing maximum protection of human life”.

The recent surge in anti-India protests began when a teenage student was killed by a police tear gas shell on June 11 in Srinagar.

In his Independence Day speech on Sunday, which he delivered to a half-empty stadium, Abdullah expressed his personal grief at the heavy death toll.

“My heart bleeds,” he said. “The victims of the unfortunate events are my own brothers and sons and I am in gloom and bereavement.”

Acknowledging the sense of frustration among young Kashmiris, a huge number of whom are unemployed, the chief minister announced plans to provide 50,000 government jobs in the next few months.

Resentment against Indian rule in Kashmir boiled over into an armed separatist insurgency in 1989 which has since claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The recent unrest is the worst for two years.