Congratulations, Abhinav Bindra. India has won its first Olympic gold medal in an individual event. Field hockey used to be the only Olympic sport in which India was a contender, but this year the national team failed to even qualify. In the six Olympics prior, the hockey team hadn't made it as far as the semi-finals. Now, it seems, Indians are finally good at something again: short-range shooting.

Which brings me to the second item on the front page of the broadsheets: police shot at unarmed protest-marchers in Kashmir, killing five people, including a member of the Hurriyat Conference. Eight more protestors have been shot dead today.

UPDATE WED 13/08: 19 people have been shot and killed

Along with other contributors to this blog, I'm suspicious of the public outrage that followed the government's banal proposal to transfer land to the Amarnath shrine board. It seems likely that it was manipulated by separatist groups who were losing ground in the Valley. But it is quite clear that by now, whatever the outrage is about, it is not about 40 hectares of land. The reaction of the State government (led by the People's Democratic Party) and the Sangh opposition parties has dealt even more cards to the Hindu chauvinists and the Muslim separatists, giving them a chance to lay hold of Jammu and Kashmir, respectively, and tear them apart.

The PDP - after bungling their way into the transfer agreement, bungling the protests in the Valley, and then bungling their way back out of the agreement (setting things up for protests in Jammu) - has allowed police to turn Kashmir into a free-fire zone. A journalist I know sent me this abbreviated message from the ground: "Bullets, tear gas, unprovoked and indiscriminate firing on innocents ... a situation going out of control."

The Police Code of Conduct, along with state legislations, require police officers to move through various riot-control tactics before using live ammunition: lathi-charge, tear gas, rubber bullets, raising a riot flag. Even in extremis, bullets must be fired non-lethally (never to chest-level). Obviously these rules do not apply in J&K, but police conduct is a matter of state government control. It is incomprehensible that the government, which has now put its sympathies with the protestors, has failed to restrain the police killings. Apart from police homicide, it is electoral suicide.

Over the last year, Kashmir was as stable as it had ever been since the late '80s, when the insurrection began. The commercial reintegration of the Valley with the rest of the country was one of the most promising signs of substantive improvement. The Amarnath protests were already settling down when the BJP state unit in Jammu came up the most malignant response: an economic blockade. Sangh cadre have been stopping trucks from carrying goods into (fuel, wheat and pharmaceuticals) or out of (apples and trade goods) the Jawahar Tunnel to Kashmir. For good measure, the BJP state President, Ashok Khajuria, made a speech instructing disgruntled Muslims to "quit Jammu."

The BJP claims to be the political party most committed to retaining Kashmir as an integral part of India, so this might seem like bizarre behaviour. It initiates a predictable cycle: Kashmiris feeling alienated and collectively punished, and putting their trust back in the hands of separatist leaders and, potentially, a Pakistani assimilation. This is exactly what has begun to occur. The BJP blockade convinced a Kashmiri producers' association to begin a symbolic march to Pakistan, intended to communicate that if India would not accept Kashmiri trade goods, someone else would.

This is not an especially provocative comment, coming from commercial producers in a state of the Union of India, who have every right and need to sell their products. It might be viewed as fairly logical extension of the "quit Jammu" comment. Even if the punitive blockade had any validity, there is no reason that apple cultivators should feel like they asked for trouble. India can certainly not expect Kashmiris to feel a deep sense of allegiance to a Union from which they can be indiscriminately commercially excluded, overnight, by a small group of vengeful political activists.

And when they take out a protest to make that point, and police shoot into that protest to end it, then you can be sure that Kashmiri Muslims at large are hearing a pretty sound case for abandoning the Union of India. There is something uniquely incendiary for young agitators to see a leader murdered in their midst: remember Lala Lajpat Rai?

So how much does the BJP actually care about Kashmir's normalcy and reintegration with the rest of the country? Not as much, I'll hazard, as they care about keeping the state on the burner, and holding Kashmiri muslims in this hostile stance, until the General Election. As far as that goal is concerned, they are shooting exactly on target.