BOTHOO, Kashmir — More than a decade before last month’s attacks in Mumbai, fighters from Lashkar-e-Taiba showed up here, turning this pine-ringed village in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir into a lair that became known as “the cat’s attic.”

Local residents immediately recognized that the men were different from the Kashmiri guerrillas who came before them. These fighters were mostly from the Punjab Province in Pakistan. They were well armed and well trained as well as ruthless. They introduced suicide bombings to Kashmir in 1999. The next year, they attacked a nearby Indian Army camp, recording the screams of the soldiers holed up inside and then playing them back to villagers, who delighted in the soldiers’ suffering.

But today, after years of being caught in the middle of an insurgency that was brutally crushed by Indian forces, Kashmiris are weary of the fighting. Lashkar fighters still make the treacherous passage over the hills from Pakistan, people here say, though fewer of them come. The mostly Muslim valley is quieter than it has been in years.

In recent weeks, Kashmiris have even reached a watershed: channeling local grievances into polling booths and turning out in record numbers to vote in staggered state elections, which began Nov. 17 and end Wednesday.

Overall turnout figures have soared above 60 percent, according to the state election office, and by Kashmiri standards the voting has been notably free of violence and coercion. This time, the fighters, in what apparently was a concession to Kashmiri fatigue, did not threaten those who took part in the vote. In this district, turnout was 59 percent.

But the fact that Kashmiris are turning out to vote does not mean that they have embraced Indian rule, as weeks of massive demonstrations this summer amply demonstrated. They continue to chafe under the restrictions of the Indian security forces, whose record on human rights in Kashmir has come under international criticism for years. Kashmiris are voting to demand ordinary things: roads, electricity, jobs. “The main problem here is unemployment,” Shafqat Shabir, 18, a first-time voter in the nearest town, Bandipur, said last month on the day he cast his ballot.

He and his friends had taken part in the anti-Indian demonstrations, shouting azadi, or freedom. Freedom from Indian rule, said his friend Afaq Hussain Mir, 22, is “our birthright.”

That cause remains essential to Lashkar, and it is still the group’s most effective recruiting tool. Formed more than two decades ago with the help of Pakistani intelligence agencies, Lashkar originally had the mission of challenging India’s hold on this fertile valley.

As India-Pakistan peace talks progressed in recent years, Lashkar sharply decreased its attacks in Kashmir. At the same time, it moved on to bigger, higher-profile targets across India.

Its targets are believed to have included a science center in southern Bangalore, a Hindu temple in eastern Varanasi and, the most audacious of all, Mumbai, the financial capital, where a three-day siege killed 163 people and 9 gunmen. While Lashkar has denied any link to the Mumbai attacks, the one surviving gunman, from among at least 10, said he belonged to the group and named known Lashkar commanders as his trainers.

The link to Kashmir remains strong. The man who the Indian authorities say was the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, Zaki ur-Rahman Lakhvi, once served as a commander here in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Residents say his son, known as Qasim, was among the Lashkar fighters who have more recently trickled over the border. In October 2007, Qasim was killed in an all-night gun battle with Indian soldiers on the outskirts of Bandipur.

Sympathy for the guerrillas coexists with fear and frustration. When Lashkar fighters first came here, residents trekked down to the bazaar and bought provisions for them. Though they were brazen killers, people here said, the Lashkar cadres were well-behaved guests.

They did not interfere in village disputes, as members of some of the other guerrilla groups did. They did not harass women. They never ordered the men and women of Bothoo to stop praying at the shrine of a female Sufi saint, as other radical Islamist groups did, even if they never prayed there themselves.

But the people paid a dear price for the cadres’ presence. As Lashkar established itself here, Indian security forces fought back, turning this remote village into a war zone. Women lost their husbands. Men lost limbs. For years, no one was safe.

After the Indian Army set up a camp in the middle of Bothoo, the village chief said, he begged the local Lashkar commander not to attack. If Lashkar did attack, the village chief said, he feared that the army would retaliate by burning the whole place down, as it had done elsewhere.

The village chief spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of making enemies; his brother had been taken by Lashkar fighters who accused him of being an informant, and the man’s skeleton was found 21 days later.

Even today, loss hovers over these tin-roofed houses perched on the hill. Memories are raw. A woman in the village, Rosha Begum Reshi, said she lost her husband after Indian soldiers accused him of being a militant. They dragged him out of the house and shot him dead.

A man, Nazir Ahmad Reshi, lost a leg when members of another Pakistani militant group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, shot him as he tried to save a neighbor from their wrath. Today, at 28, he hobbles on crutches in and around his house. He cannot work. He cannot leave the village.

His father, Ghulam Reshi, spoke bitterly about the fighters who crossed the border from Pakistan. He no longer cared which group they belonged to. They were not welcome. “They wasted my son’s life,” he said. “Our own people didn’t commit these atrocities. It was as though they started sending convicted murderers from the other side.”

Despite such frustration, many still fear that without a political solution soon to the Kashmir conflict, Kashmiris, especially the young, will grow impatient and support insurgency once again.

For Kashmiris like Manzoor Ahmad Reshi, a carpenter, the prospect of more fighting inspires dread. In 1995, the army shot him in the right arm, he said. In 2002, the Jaish fighters shot him, he said, this time in the left ankle. He said he had been interrogated by the army eight times in the past 20 years.

The village has been quiet lately, but the Lashkar fighters still come to the woods around the notorious cat’s attic, villagers said. They carry satellite phones and are never without a full magazine of ammunition. They are fearless to the point of recklessness.

“The problem will not go away,” Manzoor Reshi said. “Unless there is a political solution, it will diminish; it will not go away.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/world/asia/20kashmir.html?pagewanted=print

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company