The hardliners in Kashmir Valley who are fuelling the protests there have not only ensured the closing of schools and colleges for more than three-and-half months now, but have also torched more than 20 educational institutions during this period.

These hardliners, and the terror groups they are closely linked to, subscribe to the toxic, puritanical and ultra-conservative Salafi Islam, which also inspires the fundamentalist Taliban that forced the closing of tens of thousands of schools across Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Kashmir Valley’s hardliners and terrorists are emulating the Taliban by not only closing schools and colleges, as this report in today's The Times of India states, but are also recruiting the students as foot soldiers of the protests they incite with funds provided by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. The Taliban, too, forcibly recruited students of the schools and colleges they wrecked as soldiers.

Not only have two million Kashmiri students been kept away from educational institutions since the killing of terrorist Burhan Wani on 8 July this year, they are also being radicalised by Salafi preachers in the mohallas of the valley. Apart from being egged on to pelt stones at security forces, the children in the valley are being taught the tenets of Salafi Islam, which advocates the killing of kafirs, destruction of temples, churches and dargahs, and beheadings, amputations and stoning to death as punishments.