Kashmir No Longer World’s Most Dangerous Place as Tourism Climbs

Hotel owner Wahid Malik drives his ball down the fairway at the Royal Springs Golf Course in Indian Kashmir, taking a break from hosting tourists flocking to the disputed region guarded by half a million soldiers and police.

Malik plans to build a new guest house to cash in on a tourism boom that has seen the number of visitors double to a record 2 million in the past year, to an area over which nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought two wars. With an anti-Indian insurgency causing the fewest deaths since it began in 1989, five-star hotels are full and the cost of flights to Kashmir’s summer capital of Srinagar is up 40 percent.