And migrants. If earlier it was difficult to find -- bar the security personnel, the occasional tourist, and the visiting journalist, of course -- non-Kashmiri on the streets of Srinagar, today it is not.
Labourers from Bihar, shoeshine boys, beggars, bellboys from Himachal, carpenters, peddlers of different hue, belpuri-sellers, masons, all seem to have suddenly found the city safe and lucrative. This, together with the influx of Indian tourists/pilgrims, has changed the complexion of Srinagar.
Because most civilians you met earlier were Kashmiris, many of them bearded and dressed in khansuits or pheran, depending on the time of the year, you got the impression that you had, as a colleague visiting Srinagar for the first time put it, "stepped into a different world, maybe outside India".
The streets offer a better mix now, are way more crowded, and there appears more Kashmiris in non-traditional clothes -- perhaps due to the influence of cable television, more, I suspect, because of the new malls bursting with fashion-wear -- than before.
Image: Kashmiris and other Indian tourists enjoy the spray of fountains at the Nishat Mughal Garden overlooking the famous Dal Lake in Srinagar. Photograph: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: Soon, a Pandits township in Kashmir
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