ABSTRACT
In stark contrast lay the breathtakingly beautiful vale of Kashmir. In the new government a lightweight politician, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed was unexpectedly nominated as the nation's first Muslim Home Minister. Though a Kashmiri, he was elected from Muzaffarnagar in U.P. Though he failed to represent his home state in the Indian parliament, an event there was soon to engulf him. The upsurge of militancy in Kashmir was the culmination of a process that slowly gathered steam since the mid 1970s when a deceptive calm pervaded the valley. In 1985, in a particularly brazen act, the Syed Ali Shah Geelani Government bypassed the elected local bodies like panchayats and municipal committees; instead political appointees took over, thereby getting control over large sums of public funds. In a state with a surfeit of intelligence organisations the identity of the government operatives is usually an open secret.
