SRINAGAR, India "If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this."

Legend says that is how the 17th-Century Mughal Emperor Jehangir described the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Few places have been called a paradise more often than Kashmir, but 11 years of a bloody separatist revolt have turned the idyllic corner of the Indian Subcontinent into a paradise lost.

With its towering snowcapped mountains, pine forests, verdant meadows and blue lakes dotted with houseboats, kashmir was once one of Asia's top tourist destinations, a haven for honeymooners, trekkers and film shoots.

But discontent against Indian rule boiled over into open revolt in 1989, and the flow of tourists has slowed since to a trickle. Now the only shooting there is from the barrel of a gun.

After years of unrelenting unrest, few Kashmiris dare hope that Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's invitation to General Pervez Musharraf to "walk the high road of peace" with him in India at this weekend's summit will yield a breakthrough.

"It is a paradise that has turned into hell. I remember charming and happy faces, no violence," says Abinah Nawaz, a psychiatrist in the Kashmir Valley. "Only sweet memories of these once peaceful times are with us. I only hope the summit brings some respite."

An average of 15 people are killed every day in the separatist violence raging across India's only Muslim-majority state where about a dozen groups are fighting for independence or merger with Pakistan.

Officials say more than 30,000 people have been killed since 1989 but the separatists put the toll at 80,000.

South Asia's nuclear-capable rivals, India and Pakistan, both claim Kashmir in its entirety, and have fought two of their three wars since 1947 over it. New Delhi calls Kashmir the Crown of India, and to Islamabad it is Pakistan's jugular vein.

Kashmiris effectively live in separate sectors ruled by India and Pakistan.

But Indian maps show the region as one and New Delhi insists it will never cede an inch, saying it would bolster the causes of other breakaway groups and trigger the unravelling of a country which is a patchwork of languages and ethnic groups.

The ill-will has been catastrophic for Kashir's economy.

"Nearly one million tourists would visit each year and now there's only a trickle," says travel agent Aijaz Ahmad.

"The hotels and lake houseboats have been empty for the last 11 years. People are poor now."

The mountainous territory covers 220,000sq km (85,000sq miles) and is 45 percent controlled by India, 33 percent by Pakistan and the rest by China.

Like many of South Asia's problems, the conflict is a legacy of the partition of India by departing British rulers in 1947.

The Hindu ruler of Kashmir, then an independent princely state, was given the choice of joining Pakistan or India.

Hari Singh vacillated and only ceded power to New Delhi after the Pakistan Army had crossed Kashmir's borders and seized control of what is now known as "Azad (free) Kashmir", which India now refers to as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Pakistan's ill-will toward India stems from what it calls India's illegal annexation of Kashmir along with India's refusal to implement UN Resolutions of 1948 calling for a referendum to let Kashmiris decide their fate.

India argues that under a 1972 pact the two countries agreed to negotiate a solution to the dispute.

Separatists insist that Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan, its cultural links with Islamic Pakistan being stronger than its ties with Hindu-dominated India.

"We belong to Pakistan geographically and culturally," said Syed Ali Shah Geelani, former chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, a grouping of separatist organizations in the region. "This is the unfinished part of the subcontinent's partition."

The rancor intensified in the early 1970s when Indian soldiers aided the break-up of Pakistan and helped found the nation of Bangladesh on India's eastern border.

Three years ago India tested five nuclear weapons and Pakistan replied with its own tests, turning South Asia into what former U.S. president Bill Clinton called perhaps "the most dangerous place in the world today".

Relations thawed briefly in February 1999 when Vajpayee made a historic bus journey to the Pakistani border and signed a pact with then Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif to work to resolve all bilateral issues, including Kashmir.

But the goodwill evaporated just three months later, when forces from Pakistan invaded the Kargil mountains in northern Kashmir, triggering a 10-week conflict with India.

Musharraf, Pakistan's army chief at the time and widely reviled in India as the "architect of Kargil", overthrew Sharif's government. Since then, tension between the two countries has run high and guerilla violence in Kashmir has raged unabated.

Last November, India announced a unilateral cease-fire in the region but hard-line groups spurned the truce as a ploy to win international support.

New Delhi abandoned the cease-fire in May, twinning its action with the invitation to Musharraf for talks to defuse tension between the two neighbors and help end the bloodshed, Reuters reported.