**International cricket may return to Kashmir, says Dalmiya **](http://uk.sports.yahoo.com/030901/323/e7aca.html)
NEW DELHI (AFP) - India’s cricket officials said they were planning to host international matches in insurgency-wrecked Kashmir despite continued violence in the disputed Himalayan valley.
“We are seriously considering it,” Jagmohan Dalmiya, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), told AFP on Monday.
“The state government has told me the time is ripe to bring back big cricket to the valley and we may decide to host a Test match or one-day international there in the near future.”
Dalmiya, however, declined to set a time-table for staging an international in the Valley, saying “all factors will be taken into account before that.”
No matches have been scheduled in Kashmir during the upcoming Test series against New Zealand and the limited-overs triangular also featuring world champions Australia.
Australia and South Africa are due to tour India next year for Tests and one-day internationals.
**Kashmir’s summer capital of Srinagar has hosted two one-day internationals so far: against Clive Lloyd’s West Indies in 1983 and Allan Border’s Australia in 1986.
The Indian team, faced with hostile crowds at the Sher-i-Kashmir stadium, lost both matches.
The full-throated support the West Indians received in 1983 prompted Lloyd to wonder if the match had been played in the Caribbean rather than in India.**
The last domestic first-class match played in Srinagar was in October 1989, just before insurgency began in the Valley against New Delhi’s rule in India’s sole Muslim-majority state.
Kashmir’s winter capital of Jammu has never hosted a one-day international nor a Test match and has also not held a first-class match since November, 2001.
The recently-elected state government has pushed for holding sporting events in the Valley and two golf tournaments featuring the country’s top stars were staged successfully in the last 12 months.
India accuses Pakistan of sending guerrillas across their de facto border in Kashmir, which has caused two of the three wars between the South Asian neighbours since independence from British rule in 1947.
Pakistan says it provides only moral and diplomatic support to an “indigenous” independence movement in the disputed region.
India and Pakistan have been working since April to ease tensions between them, restoring full diplomatic ties and resuming bus services.
More than 38,000 people have died in the Kashmir rebellion since 1989, according to Indian officials. Separatists and Pakistan put the death toll between 80,000 and 100,000.
In the most recent case of violence in Kashmir, 13 people were killed on Saturday, including three in a 10-hour gunbattle in Srinagar after Indian troops raided a building they believed housed a mastermind of the 2001 attack on India’s parliament.