NEW YORK, Dec 15: The peaceful civil disobedience movement in Indian-occupied Kashmir – from armed fight to peaceful campaign for self-determination – poses serious problems for India, says a report in Wall Street Journal on Monday.

The shift to a non-violent struggle “makes it increasingly difficult for India to portray the conflict over Kashmir as a clear-cut fight between the world’s largest democracy and murderous terrorists”, the newspaper said.

“Unlike (Lashkar-e-Taiba’s) jihadis, unarmed protesters in Kashmir can muster sympathy from sections of western, and Indian, public opinion,” the report said, noting that the decades-long armed struggle is waning in the disputed state.

“India is not scared of the guns here in Kashmir – it has a thousand times more guns.

What it is scared of is people coming out in the streets, people seeing the power of non-violent struggle,” Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the Kashmiris’ spiritual leader and a key organiser of the civil disobedience campaign that began earlier this year, was quoted by the paper as saying.

Even Kashmir’s leading pro-India politician Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, who was India’s home minister at the peak of the Kashmiri insurgency and Kashmir’s chief minister in 2002-05, agreed with the point made by Mirwaiz Farooq, who remains under house arrest.

“It’s justified when you kill a militant, but it’s not justified when you kill a demonstrator,” Mufti Sayeed was quoted as saying.

“Many among the new generation of Kashmiri protesters say they are happy that the insurgents no longer prowl the streets, demanding shelter and food from civilians, enforcing rigid Islamic observance – and attracting army reprisals,” the dispatch said, citing the views expressed by some demonstrators.