by Our Foreign Desk

INDIAN authorities detained dozens of Kashmiri separatists and placed their leaders under house arrest yesterday in a bid to halt mass protests.

Demonstrations were planned to mark the 32nd anniversary of the execution of separatist militant Maqbool Bhat.

Shops and businesses remained shut and a curfew was in effect in some areas of the state capital Srinagar after the separatists called a strike.

Most people stayed indoors while hundreds of armed police and paramilitary soldiers patrolled largely deserted streets that were blocked by razor wire and barricades.

Government forces “came in the morning and ordered us to stay indoors,” said resident Reyaz Ahmed.

Mr Bhat was hanged in a New Delhi prison in 1984 after being convicted of killing an Indian intelligence officer.

A similar strike and government curfew closed Srinagar and other towns on Tuesday as activists protested against India’s execution of terrorist Mohammed Afzal Guru three years ago in the same New Delhi jail.

Separatists allege that Mr Guru did not receive a fair trial for the 2001 attack on India’s parliament that killed 14 people.

They also demanded that the two men’s remains, buried within the New Delhi prison compound, be returned to Kashmir.

Militants launched a guerilla war in 1989 in a bid to force the annexation of Kashmir — or Jammu as they call it — by neighbouring Pakistan.

More than 68,000 people have been killed in the conflict — one of the many hangovers from the British-instigated partition of India upon independence in 1947 that led to a million deaths.