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The blood stains get deeper in Kashmir
The recent, targeted assassinations in Kashmir bear an imprint of both the past as well as portents for the future. So far this year, 32 civilians, including 21 Kashmiri Muslims and 23 political workers, have been killed by militants.
The killings of the pharmacist, M.L. Bindroo, two school teachers, including a Sikh lady, and poor economic migrants from various states have set off a fear psychosis, particularly among minorities. Such killings of vulnerable civilians have taken place in the past. In 1990-91, along with political activists, several prominent persons, such as the vice-chancellor of Kashmir University, Mushir-ul-Haq, the general manager of HMT, H.L. Khera, public servants like the state Doordarshan director, Lassa Kaul, and information officer, P.N. Handoo, were assassinated. Respected Kashmiri Islamic figures of the stature of the 87-year-old Maulana Masoodi and Mirwaiz Maulvi Mohammad Farooq Shah were also killed.
Besides such targeted killings in the Valley, Jammu and Kashmir also saw large-scale massacres of religious and ethnic minorities between 1990 and 2007. Nearly 35 per cent of these took place in areas across the Pir Panjal in religiously and ethnically heterogenous Jammu. There were the massacres of 26 Kashmiri Pandits in Ganderbal’s Wandhama village on the intervening night of January 25 and 26, 1998, and on March 23, 2003, 24 Pandits were killed in Kulgam’s Nadimarg village as well.
This new spate of targeted assassinations marks a departure...