11 Die in Battle at Kashmir’s Holiest Shrine

After a furious firefight that killed at least 11 people at Kashmir’s holiest site, Indian forces and separatist militants were locked in a tense standoff at the shrine Monday.

Indian troops and police surrounded the domed mosque of white marble on the shore of Dal Lake, while official sources reported that about a dozen armed separatists were holed up inside. Daylong efforts to persuade the guerrillas to come out failed.

The government gave them a Wednesday deadline to surrender or face severe reprisals.

For Indian officials, the standoff is a potential time bomb, because any strong-arm tactics used at Hazratbal, a beloved symbol of Kashmiri nationhood and a site said to house a hair from Prophet Muhammad’s beard, could trigger a backlash and disrupt New Delhi’s plan to hold elections in the disputed Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir in May.

An influential umbrella group of separatist organizations, the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, has already called on Kashmiris to boycott the polls.

A similar siege at Hazratbal lasted for more than a month in the fall of 1993 but ended peacefully when the guerrillas surrendered. In May 1995, however, another standoff with the Indian army at a second Kashmiri shrine occupied by militants ended in a fire that razed the old wooden building.

On Sunday morning, under disputed circumstances, a gun battle erupted between security forces deployed at Hazratbal outside the Kashmiri summer capital of Srinagar and militants from a splinter faction of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) that is based in Pakistan.

According to police, nine militants and two security officers were killed in the shootout.

But a spokesman for the JKLF’s Amanullah Khan faction claimed that 16 security personnel and 14 militants, including the group’s self-styled commander in chief, Basharat Raza, were killed.

About 20,000 people have been killed since an anti-Indian rebellion broke out in Kashmir in 1989.