Lal Chowk - from 1947 to AK-47

SRINAGAR - Labyrinthine lanes, a clock tower, hundreds of shops, thousands of people and burnt buildings in the backdrop - this is Srinagar’s Lal Chowk that Thursday faced more terror violence, just as it repeatedly has in Jammu and Kashmir’s 20-year insurgency.

As the clock tower, which never shows the correct time, ticks at the centre, Lal Chowk seems to be in a time warp with the past continually intruding into the present. It may be the bustling business hub, but things have changed little over the decades. Violence continues to be a leitmotif — particularly after AK-47 rifles started roaring in the otherwise serene Kashmir Valley.

Always at the centre of political activities and terror turmoil, the biggest commercial centre of the valley has been witness to many moments in Jammu and Kashmir’s troubled history.

Four years after the insurgency erupted in 1989, a part of Lal Chowk was gutted in a fire that erupted after a paramilitary group came under a militant attack April 10, 1993. Many civilians were killed in exchange of the bullets as people were fleeing their homes.

At least 60 houses, over 200 business stores and five huge commercial buildings were destroyed in the blaze. The half burnt Palladium theatre, which houses a paramilitary camp, still carries the burnt scars of the 1993 arson even though surrounding shops and complexes have been reconstructed.

It has also been a centre for political rallies, dating right back to 1947.

“Tu man shudi, man tu shudi - Ta kas na goyad bad azeen, man deegaram tu deegari…” late chief minister Sheikh Abdullah told India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in Persian while addressing a mammoth gathering near the clock tower.

In a plain testimony that Kashmir had acceded to secular India, Abdullah was telling Nehru in his 1947 address: “You become me, and I become you - we have become one.”

Many years later, on Republic Day in 1991, two years after the insurgency erupted in 1989, Bharatiya Janata Party’s Murli Manohar Joshi dared separatists in curfew bound Lal Chowk as he unfurled the tricolour on the clock tower.

That was a tokenism that has been forgotten in the tumultuous militant struggle.

Since then, the clock has silently watched many flags, even the Pakistani crescent, being hoisted from time to time.