Sanity Breaks Out

In any other year, India and Pakistan would be on the verge of war by now. Last week, Islamic guerrillas in Kashmir killed six Hindu pilgrims and eight Indian army officers, injured 60 more people and came within a grenade's throw of wiping out India's entire northern military command. With a Hindu nationalist government in New Delhi and an equally nationalistic general in power in Islamabad, such provocations would usually be sufficient to push the countries to the brink of nuclear disaster.

Instead, both sides have displayed remarkable self-restraint. Indian Deputy Prime Minister and Hindu hard-liner, Lal Krishna Advani, cautioned the country's Parliament: "These attacks are specifically aimed at ending the normalcy we have achieved in the Valley." Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a Taliban supporter and chief of Pakistan's fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, was on a goodwill visit to India at the time of the attacks—and lost no time in condemning them. He added that he would encourage both governments to hold peace talks, and called all Kashmiri militants to "cease their operations." Even Zafar Akbar, a senior commander of a breakaway faction of the Kashmiri guerrilla group Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, announced that he and "hundreds of colleagues" were renouncing violence for dialogue.

What's changed? Leaders in both countries have realized that the political advantage of stoking anger against their neighbor is diminishing. So India and Pakistan remain in a tentative rapprochement, and Kashmir savors its best tourism season in years. Alas, the violence won't stop: many other militants, fearing abandonment by their Pakistani handlers, are hardening their stances. But Kashmir has seen rivers of blood before. Judging by last week, it is now witnessing a rarer outbreak of hope.