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Assailants fatally shot a Hindu bank manager in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Thursday, said police, who blamed militants fighting against Indian rule for the attack.
Police described the shooting in southern Kulgam district as a “terror incident” and launched a search operation for the attackers. The bank manager, Vijay Kumar from India’s Rajasthan state, died at a hospital following the shooting.
CCTV footage circulating on social media shows a masked assailant walk into the bank and fire shots at Kumar with what appears to be a handgun.
The Muslim-majority region has witnessed a spate of targeted killings in recent months. They come as Indian troops have continued their counterinsurgency operations across the region amid a clampdown on dissent and press freedom, which critics have likened to a militaristic policy.
On Tuesday, suspected militants, also in Kulgam, shot and killed a Hindu schoolteacher, Rajini Bala.
After that killing, Hindu government employees staged protests in several areas, demanding the government relocate them from Kashmir to safer areas in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region.
They accused the government of making them “scapegoats” and “canon fodder” to showcase normalcy in the region and chanted slogans like “The only solution is relocation.”
Hundreds of Hindus who had returned to the region after 2010 as part of a government resettlement plan that provided them with jobs and housing fled the Kashmir Valley after the killing of Bala, according to Kashmiri Hindu activists.
Some 4,000 Kashmiri Hindus, who are locally known as Pandits, have been recruited for government jobs under the program.
Those employees have been on a strike since May 13 after a Hindu revenue clerk was killed inside an office complex in Chadoora town.
In the aftermath of the clerk’s killing, hundreds of Pandits — an estimated 200,000 of whom fled Kashmir after an anti-India rebellion erupted in 1989 — organized for the first time simultaneous street protests at several locations in the region demanding better security.
“We were tricked into thinking that the government is rehabilitating us under an employment package,” said Jyoti Bhat, a local Hindu teacher who joined the program seven years ago. “It’s turning out to be a death package.”
Last year, suspected rebels killed a minority Sikh and several Hindus, including immigrant workers from Indian states, in a wave of targeted shootings in the region.
The killings came after India enacted a slew of changes in 2019, such as issuing “domicile certificates” to Indians and non-residents, entitling them to residency rights and government jobs.
Many Kashmiris view such moves as aimed at engineering a demographic change in India’s only Muslim-majority region.
Many Muslim village councilors, police officers and civilians also have been killed in targeted shootings during the period.
“It’s a disastrous situation. It’s not just the (Hindu) employees who are in panic. We all are living in constant fear since 2019,” said Sanjay Tickoo, a local Kashmiri Pandit activist, who like some 800 other Pandit families did not migrate from Kashmir in the 1990s but chose to stay behind to live with their Muslim neighbors. He said that New Delhi’s 2019 changes in Kashmir brought “demons of hate and division” back to the fore.
“Killings in Kashmir happen as communalism is fast rising in India,” he said. “If there is another large-scale migration (of minorities) from Kashmir to other parts of the country, it will create more difficulties for Muslim minorities in India. Minorities are vulnerable everywhere.”
Assailants fatally shot a Hindu bank manager in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Thursday, said police, who blamed militants fighting against Indian rule for the attack.
Police described the shooting in southern Kulgam district as a “terror incident” and launched a search operation for the attackers. The bank manager, Vijay Kumar from India’s Rajasthan state, died at a hospital following the shooting.
CCTV footage circulating on social media shows a masked assailant walk into the bank and fire shots at Kumar with what appears to be a handgun.
The Muslim-majority region has witnessed a spate of targeted killings in recent months. They come as Indian troops have continued their counterinsurgency operations across the region amid a clampdown on dissent and press freedom, which critics have likened to a militaristic policy.
On Tuesday, suspected militants, also in Kulgam, shot and killed a Hindu schoolteacher, Rajini Bala.
After that killing, Hindu government employees staged protests in several areas, demanding the government relocate them from Kashmir to safer areas in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region.
They accused the government of making them “scapegoats” and “canon fodder” to showcase normalcy in the region and chanted slogans like “The only solution is relocation.”
Hundreds of Hindus who had returned to the region after 2010 as part of a government resettlement plan that provided them with jobs and housing fled the Kashmir Valley after the killing of Bala, according to Kashmiri Hindu activists.
Some 4,000 Kashmiri Hindus, who are locally known as Pandits, have been recruited for government jobs under the program.
Those employees have been on a strike since May 13 after a Hindu revenue clerk was killed inside an office complex in Chadoora town.
In the aftermath of the clerk’s killing, hundreds of Pandits — an estimated 200,000 of whom fled Kashmir after an anti-India rebellion erupted in 1989 — organized for the first time simultaneous street protests at several locations in the region demanding better security.
“We were tricked into thinking that the government is rehabilitating us under an employment package,” said Jyoti Bhat, a local Hindu teacher who joined the program seven years ago. “It’s turning out to be a death package.”
Last year, suspected rebels killed a minority Sikh and several Hindus, including immigrant workers from Indian states, in a wave of targeted shootings in the region.
The killings came after India enacted a slew of changes in 2019, such as issuing “domicile certificates” to Indians and non-residents, entitling them to residency rights and government jobs.
Many Kashmiris view such moves as aimed at engineering a demographic change in India’s only Muslim-majority region.
Many Muslim village councilors, police officers and civilians also have been killed in targeted shootings during the period.
“It’s a disastrous situation. It’s not just the (Hindu) employees who are in panic. We all are living in constant fear since 2019,” said Sanjay Tickoo, a local Kashmiri Pandit activist, who like some 800 other Pandit families did not migrate from Kashmir in the 1990s but chose to stay behind to live with their Muslim neighbors. He said that New Delhi’s 2019 changes in Kashmir brought “demons of hate and division” back to the fore.
“Killings in Kashmir happen as communalism is fast rising in India,” he said. “If there is another large-scale migration (of minorities) from Kashmir to other parts of the country, it will create more difficulties for Muslim minorities in India. Minorities are vulnerable everywhere.”
