India has taken 'ominous' turn into religious intolerance, says WP article.

NEW YORK -- The (Kashmir) valley looked like Switzerland but felt like the Gaza Strip," is how a veteran American journalist with years of reporting experience in South Asia described India's repression in the disputed state during one of her trips there even before it plunged into deeper crisis after New Delhi's annexation on August 5.

"I saw how the historic dispute (between India and Pakistan) had created a permanently open wound and a vicious cycle of protest and repression, often sparked by insurgent attacks," Pamela Constable, correspondent for The Washington Post, wrote in the newspaper she represents.

I drove past apple orchards and meadows and visited quaint house boats that bobbed on Dal Lake, waiting for tourists who never came. But the news that brought me there was depressing and often deadly. The local Muslim populace was always waiting for the next funeral.

Although correspondent Constable does refer to the repressive lockdown of Jammu and Kashmir after the revocation of the state's special status, the main focus of her article, entitled: 'India's iconic democracy feels like it is under siege', is about the B.J.P. government's push to promote the 'Hindutva' ideology as well as the eruption of country-wide protests against its anti-Muslim measures.

"These days, when I think back on the contentious but secular mosaic of India I experienced between 1998 and 2005, I am stunned to see the ominous turn it has recently taken into religious intolerance," the article said. "At that time, Hinduism was dominant but not overbearing...," she wrote in the Post.

Correspondent Constable wrote, "Promotion of the 'Hindutva' ideology, an

all-encompassing guide for life, often took the form of public services, carried out by disciplined youth cadres.... But religious tensions remained close to the surface, especially between Hindus and Muslims, whose differences had festered since the chaotic partition of India in 1947.

Despite their huge numbers and a few high-profile celebrities, such as film star Shah Rukh Khan, Muslims remained largely second-class citizens with little political clout. My first encounter with such 'communal' hostility took place in my kitchen, where the Hindu manager angrily upbraided the Muslim watchman for drinking from his teacup. In public, far uglier confrontations erupted periodically: In 1992, militant Hindu groups invaded and demolished the historic Babri Mosque; a decade later,

Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat...