We are playing and kidding withour weapons. —Amir, Twenty-two-year-old Kashmiri guerrilla The publicists over at the Party of God agreed one afternoon to take me out to see some of their kidnap victims in the Kashmiri countryside. They wanted to talk about their revolution and make me understand just how strong, righteous, and humane they really were. We arranged to meet in the hallway of a public building in Srinagar, Kashmir’s once-idyllic summer capital. The separatist insurgency in Kashmir is such that it is possible to meet and commune with armed young Muslim guerrillas just about anywhere in the valleys that meander through the region’s snow-capped Himalayan peaks. The Indian government’s several hundred thousand heavily equipped counterinsurgency troops, non-Kashmiri and non-Muslim, are certainly a visible presence, but they generally have little clue as to what exactly is going on in the slum warrens and villages around their sandbag bunkers and barbed-wire encampments.
