The Indian Army was preparing to send 10,000 extra soldiers to Kashmir yesterday amid fears that Hindu-Muslim violence in the volatile state would spread.

Fifteen people have been killed and hundreds injured in riots and running battles with police since the state’s government rescinded a decision to give about 100 acres of forest land to Amarnath — a Hindu cave shrine containing a revered stalagmite — to build shelters for pilgrims. The move, which followed demonstrations by Kashmir’s Muslim majority, caused violent Hindu protests this week.

An army source said that the fresh forces would back up paramilitary and police units that have been stretched close to breaking point.

The 90 ft-deep Amarnath cave, which attracts hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims every summer, has become the cause of some of the worst sectarian clashes in Kashmir for two decades. The Kashmir Valley, a Muslim stronghold, has been under virtual siege since Hindu mobs blockaded highways and halted food, fuel and medical supplies.

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Mehbooba Mufti Sayeed, the head of the Jammu & Kashmir People’s Democratic Party, told The Times that the situation in some Muslim enclaves had become critical. “We don’t have life-saving drugs; our food is rotten. The whole nation is watching but does nothing about it,” she said.

The main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reacted angrily to news that the army would deploy its fresh troops around Jammu, the state’s Hindu-dominated winter capital, from which the siege has been co-ordinated.

“The situation is highly volatile,” a local spokesman for the BJP said. “This is a movement based on one issue: the land must be handed over.” The BJP, which is keen to mobilise its Hindu support base for general elections that must be held before May, said that it would organise protests across India next week if its demands were not met. The decision to send in army reinforcements followed emergency talks convened by Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, on Wednesday. Pranab Mukherjee, the External Affairs Minister, said that the four-hour meeting in Delhi produced a consensus among India’s biggest political parties on the need for dialogue but a solution did not emerge.

Tensions in Kashmir were raised further when three Indian policemen were injured as they attempted to defuse a bomb planted beside the road leading to the province’s airport.

The Amarnath issue is now drawing comparisons among Indian commentators with the events in Ayodhya, the site of a Muslim mosque that was also claimed to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 triggered the worst Muslim-Hindu violence in India since Partition.

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