Nehru, and successive Indian leaders, reneged on this promise. Cheated of their vote, Kashmiris became increasingly militant. Finally, in January 1990, after security forces fired on a group of unarmed protesters, killing scores, the simmering discontent boiled over. A dozen Muslim guerrilla groups sprang up, some wanting independence, the rest opting to unite with Pakistan. Those who wanted to become Pakistanis found a ready source of arms and support from their brethren across the border. Indian officials say more than 29,000 civilians and 5,000 security forces have died in the insurgency. Property worth $500 million has been destroyed, and nearly 300,000 Kashmiris are homeless. Most of them are Hindus who fled the rising Muslim militancy in 1990. Although the Kashmir dispute is mainly a struggle for self-determination, the rebels and their Pakistani backers portray it as a religious war between Muslims and the Hindu titan. Armed militants, trained in Afghan camps, come from as far away as Sudan and the Middle East to fight this new jihad. Farooq Abdullah, the son and political heir of Sheik Abdullah, is now the state's elected chief minister. The insurgency, he says, has "destroyed almost everything that was created in 40 years." Says Richard Haas, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington: "Kashmir has the greatest potential to trigger a conventional or nuclear war."

Privately, officials in Islamabad and New Delhi admit that the knot of Kashmir could be untangled with relative ease. Here's how: both nations would accept the Line of Actual Control as the international boundary, with Pakistan and India keeping their territories. New Delhi and Islamabad would agree to scale back their forces in the region, while Pakistan closes down the supply of arms and Islamic warriors heading into the Kashmir Himalayas. Both sides would give greater autonomy to their Kashmiris, with closer ties in trade and culture between the two halves of the former kingdom. Chief Minister Abdullah recently commented testily: "To hell with it. Pakistan can have [their side of Kashmir] forever. Just allow us to live in peace on this part of Kashmir." Ideally, that's how the conflict could be resolved.

This won't happen anytime soon. "Neither India nor Pakistan is in a position to talk seriously about Kashmir," explains Amitabh Mattoo, an international studies professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. "Both have weak governments and adopt absolute postures." Any concession on Kashmir given by Prime Minister Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif would land him in trouble with Islamic rightists whose power is growing in Pakistan. They are demanding that all of Kashmir be seized by force. In India, Kashmir is an equally emotive topic, especially for the ruling coalition government, which is led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. U.S. analyst Haas concurs: "The time isn't ripe for resolution. Any ambitious diplomacy by outsiders is bound to fail."

International attention was riveted on Kashmir last May after India and Pakistan both set off nuclear bombs. Government officials in New Delhi and Islamabad proclaimed that the nukes would lessen the likelihood of conflict in South Asia, but the opposite occured. The tests unleashed furious artillery barrages along the Kashmir line matching each other shell for shell. At one icy battleground, the 6,600-m-high Siachen glacier, Pakistani and Indian armies have condemned themselves to spending $2 million a day, losing hundreds of lives a year through gunfire and sub-zero temperatures, to defend a spot that is of no strategic worth to anybody. Increasingly, Pakistani artillery attacks signal a greater danger for the Indians than just the exploding shells. These salvos provide a fiery cloak to hide infiltrations by guerrillas. According to some Pakistani estimates, a new batch of around 1,100 armed "volunteers" cross over every spring thaw, bringing the total to more than 4,000 insurgents.

Within the former kingdom, many Kashmiris have become disillusioned with the secessionist movement, which quickly turned dirty. Most of the educated moderates who started the uprising are gone, killed off by the army or by fundamentalist rivals who want unification with Pakistan. Too often, the first commanders were replaced by militants more keen on extorting protection money from shopkeepers than on liberation. To counter the pro-Pakistan rebels, the Indian military also succeeded, through bribes and threats, in turning many of the rebel groups against each other; often, the Indian army would be tipped-off to a rebel hideout by a competing militant commander. At the start of the revolt, many Kashmiris harbored the unrealistic expectation that after a few months of insurgency, India would give in and the Pakistani army would march over to free their state. But Pakistan didn't want to risk another war. Ghulam Ahmed Sheik, whose 22-year-old son was killed in 1990, within months of returning from a guerrilla training camp across the border, hates the Indians but feels cheated by Pakistan. "It's the poor who died in this rebellion," he says. "Pakistan just sat and watched."

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